Lets rewrite somethings I agree on:
Conan Exiles is such a gem.
I buy almost everything in Bazaar, and I play this game a lot. My main Steam account is already over 3000 hours played. I still buy unlocks even if for sure the time I play would give me the unlocks fast enough.
But I also can use someone else’s words to convey what I already said about the “support team”:
QA is not the ones making the game. They are there to work WITH them, not BOSS them.
However another thing I have to say is:
The present whooping is useful to keep things on perspective to them, and we should speak our minds. But I was to speak I would say this has been blow waaaaaay out of proportion, and people are now blaming everything on them.
Oh, so I had a lights out in my home and game is crashing, the devs did it.
Oh, my XBox has all kinds of craps and jailbreaks and Conan seems to be “iffy”, the devs did it.
Oh, so I poured half a bottle of soda down my PC fans, and the game along with everything else is broken, the devs did it.
My thrall now looks like she has “boobonic plague”, the devs did it. Oh, wait, the devs did it indeed, strike that.
Anyway, there are things we really have to talk about “indefinitely”. But there are things we gotta let go, because it is pickle, guys need to focus on what is really bad first, and focus on that. A lot of things devs cant really foresee when making such changes.
One thing should be the foremost thing for everyone to start by:
- Devs should not cram such a large number of updates and changes into one patch knowing that it is this mess every single time.
They should get a “expansion” to use WoW terminology, and just make new UI, new commands, new basic systems, so people wont have to deal with “new thing to do” and “new stuff to make it happen” all at once.
I dont like WoW, and Shadowlands made me uninstall it, along with Starcraft I and II, and Overwatch, after playing Blizzard games since I was young (me being almost half a century old that is a lot). But there is one thing WoW and by extension Blizzard always at least “spoke true” about:
Rate of change
WoW devs had three “eras” in regards of that. The first part, in which the rate of change was slow due to their team, the whole gaming tech, and etc. Then they got large team due to the success of end TBC and nice WotLK hype, they got TV spots, investment, etc. They got jacked and went on a “upgrade spree”. The era of “pulling a Funcom” so to speak. They changed the game a lot in a short amount of time. Started getting to do stuff it wasnt meant to, systems it wasnt designed for, just because they thought having the money to pay work and to hire “muscle” would give them enough to pull it off.
In economics we call it diminishing returns when you add volume partially to a set of “factors of production”, at the exclusion of one or more of them. So they added the investment, and the work in doing it, but there is the thing that players are part of “factors of production” in the sense I said before: Players are the ones consuming the content at the pace that their expertise in the systems the game has affords them.
So it becomes increasingly bad to play the game a player mostly dont know how to, do a new content the player is not used to.
To reference a paper of none other than Steve Danuser, all around WoW destruction lead design, (paraphrasing) “you gotta have a strong support view of the game itself, creating the game in a pace and in a way the game itself help players achieve what they want before they required to achieve such task.”
Funcom, right now is not doing “it all wrong” and not “it all bad”, but the things they are doing bad are really damaging pillars in which the game stands.
So we gotta focus on the eroding foundations, and not asking to paint over the cracks on the wall.
…and it’s like that for years, nobody cares.
