Everyone is gone, both PVE and PVP. The official servers are down to 1-3 people at prime time.
In your quest for balance, in your quest for challenge, you’ve forgotten about fun. People don’t play games simply because they’re balanced. They don’t play games because that one crazy guy with 8,000 hours thinks the game got too easy.
They play games… for fun.
Stop nerfing the game! Seriously! Just off the top of my head these examples come to mind: (I’m sure there are others I can’t think of at the moment)
Dodging - speed & distance nerfed (making heavy armor the ONLY armor)
Food healing nerfed. Replaced with ‘Sated’
Passive healing nerfed. ‘Soothing’ buff removed
Purge Thralls no longer mean anything, destroying people’s efforts. (the workstation ones)
Fish traps nerf
Nerfing some attributes, while failing to fix others.
Revamping of the crafting system, making people redo everything and creating more clutter.
Flawless prefix removed from equipment, without a replacement identifier (can’t tell bonuses without equipping it)
Classic Thralls that don’t level, replaced with New Thralls that level. New Thralls more powerful, at first. New Thralls get nerfed back to Classic Thralls HPs. Now we have Classic Thralls that we have to level. (That’s just mean, Funcom)
Nemedian helmet and Godbreaker Boots will no longer repair (upcoming nerf)
All of these things have done more to drive people away than bring people in.
Even worse, people are looking at the future of Conan Exiles with less and less excitement, because people expect things to be nerfed or broken shortly after being implemented. It’s not the kind of reputation you want.
The nerf stick isn’t working. Stop busting that thing out.
(Unless you make money selling private servers. In which case, kudos on your brilliance business strategy)
Most of these issues have very common solutions that have been solved by players over the last few months. I can guarantee that they haven’t been chasing them away from servers. They’ve just moved off of Officials.
The reason for empty officials is they are unmoderated messes that run like junk. If exploiters or hackers don’t get your stuff, the server will just go into an unplayable state for hours on end. So people have moved to privately run servers to have moderation and better performance.
You might as well move too. The officials are sinking ships. Find a private server you like (and if you like the vanilla experience, they do have Official-Likes with the same base settings) and get started now before you’re left behind. With the emptying of Officials, their lifespan is in question (logic dictates that they would be shut down if not being used).
I agree with most of this actually. Ive recently had to suspend my no mods rule and move from ps4 to pc so that I can use mods that either undo or make the nerfs moot thru other mechanics. I’m pretty tired of nerfing in general (I think some of it is going to be changed like the food/sate stuff but I’m not sure why its necessary to remove all point of the food recipes while we wait…).
I like some of the changes like having more benches and I do think getting rid of Sonic roll was for the best, but in general, I think there is frustration when someone learns any game and just when they feel comfortable, the commissioner changes the rules…
The problem is not the nerf itself, but how it is done.
To balance something properly it is not enough for you to nerf, you have to see how it behaves and find the right measure.
I am not against nerfs, but the way in which funcom applies is very wrong … See examples like Riot games, when it sees that a champion or item is too strong, they nerf a minimum amount of the status in question and so on doing until you find a great point, also balancing other items and champions that may be affected by it.
Of course, not even the example I gave of Riot is perfect, balancing a game is an extremely difficult but important task for the user experience.
Nobody wants to level up to the highest level of the game, get the best equipment and end up being killed by a single hit from a knight’s lance … that’s completely wrong.
You spend months playing, acquiring your items, obtaining combat experience, raising thralls and then a knight (who may be naked, it makes no difference) comes towards you and kills you with 1 hit.
Funcom needed a good game designer to make this game take off, we always say that it has a lot of potential.
Just a sec, healing water skin? What? Please explain because 2 years now I never found souch a thing. Please more info, where do I farm it how etc etc.
And one last question, there is a f… g bear ghost on North, you follow it, at the end a chest rizes but it never opens, why? 2 years now I try everything but it never opens, why? What I have to do? Every possible answer here will be very much appreciated, thank you.
didn’t they say that the change was going to be delayed and revisited later? Not exactly a “we were wrong and won’t change this item” but rather a “we will find something else substitute the karmic effect later on”
Can’t really find that statement, so i might be tripping
Healing changes were announced, you could no longer eat food+tea and become Wolverine.
Along with that patch, they provided other ways of healing (potions, food provided regen), and the healing waterskin. This item was much better than anything else avaible at that moment, and it was kind of going against the main purpose of the patch, which was making healing a harder thing to pull off.
People immediately noticed the item and started using it, especially since a huge crowd was not happy about the healing overhaul to begin with. So for many, that item was their savior.
The item was removed shortly after, and now its one of the things that we will never forget that happened, like the Lifeblood spear and the momentum update.
The main problem I see with Funcom is if they have an item, or class (in other game, not this one obviously), or whatever you wish to pick and it needs to be adjusted because they made it too powerful they do not understand how to do that. Look at it as a scale of 1 to 100. They put out an item and it’s power level is 100. Well, 100 is just too much. So instead of tweaking it down to maybe 80 so that it’s not massively over powered but still useful they drop that **** right down to 30 and make it useless. I get that certain items such as the axe with crit was way the heck to strong in pvp. Ok, so make it’s crit only apply to npc’s. Still a useful, even powerful item for pvpers farming in dungeons for gear/whatever as well as pveers. Instead they made it useless except as a decoration item. I am ok with thralls dealing far less damage to players than npc’s but I know they will just nerf thralls into uselessness if they ever touch them. That is just the way Funcom has always worked.
on top of that, there is another lower rarity item that also has 30 power, so they become basically the same, the only difference is that the (previously 100) one is fancier looking
I interpreted that as “Okay, this change was both too hasty and too unpopular, we’ll need to think about it properly and decide what to do about it.”
The way I see it, there are three outcomes of that, in order from most likely to least likely:
They won’t have the bandwidth to come up with a proper solution. Because it’s not really a big deal, especially when compared to other problems Conan Exiles has, they’ll end up leaving it like that.
They’ll nerf it again later. Perhaps they won’t completely remove the karmic effect, but make it virtually useless. Perhaps the nerf will be overshadowed by even worse nerfs and problems, so people won’t make as much noise about it.
They’ll come up with a proper solution. They’ll either come up with an effect that keeps these items useful while mitigating whatever problem they thought the effect produced in the first place, or they’ll remove the effect but offer a better replacement (e.g. a better, less grindy source of repair kits on Siptah).
As far as I’m concerned, the proper solution is really simple. I never used the karmic effect in Exiled Lands, because I never needed to. The Unnamed City bosses provided all the kits I needed, and more. I considered Nemedian to be just another gimmicky item, added because someone asked “hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we […]”, but ultimately non-essential. Then I started playing on Siptah, and repairing legendary items became a serious problem. I was glad to see the Nemedian actually serve a purpose, and shocked to see it nerfed.
I heard about the healing skin from other players on the server. Everyone was grinding like crazy to get it. When people described what it did, I decided I wasn’t even going to try. There were only two things that could happen: either they would nerf it to uselessness before I managed to get it to drop, or I would get used to it and then get hit by the nerf. It was a lose-lose situation and the first time I realized I had become a fatalist when it comes to Funcom’s way of dealing with balance issues.
I don’t think I will ever “forgive” the nerfing of Lifeblood Spear. There’s no better illustration of what you’re talking about than that. There were so many ways they could’ve changed it into something that remains useful, but all of those ways required more effort, so they ended up making it useless.
And before some nuance-challenged chucklehead jumps in to tell me to look up the dictionary definition of “useless”, let’s not forget the context: there are other spears with much better combination of damage and armor pen and they drop more frequently (or can even be crafted). Given that, and the fact that the health regen effect of 1 hit point every 5 seconds is useless for all practical intents and purposes, there is never any reason to pick this weapon over its competitors.
I saw the ghost bear too. And an underwater chest that appears at the lake in the north-west (east from mounds). Same thing there, a ghost human is swimming and gets shot then slowly falls down to the ground of the lake where a chest appears that I could not open.
I sincerely do not understand all this balancing either. There are so many things that make this game fun, slowly but steady they removed the fun with slot machine.
For crying out loud we are supposed to be the Next Conan the Barbarian, things that he confronted/fight were all easy for someone like Conan and his famous sword.
I am freaking Conan and nothing is impossible for me!
Back on a more serious Note, maybe this all “behind the scene” changes/nerfing has a reason for the near Future but atm i see this as cheap/not thought changes that took Conan Exiles back into Early Access.
To be honest i have knowledge of this ghost too, but if i remember correct i might open this. Not 100%sure however. More than one year ago my pvp clan had a base close to this spot and i had all the fish traps in this lake. Thats how i know . Still when i go for serius farming i choose North because of the iron and the resin. So i must tried to open this chest more than 30 times, omg. There are 3 or 4 more ghost chests in the game, it is a couple of ghosts appear and the one is pointing on the chest, theese have 90% chance to open because you might delay . Ofcurse the loot is low level but if you just join the server, having steel pick is a good gift .
This! 
(10% - 20%, maybe more, needs testing)
. Still when i go for serius farming i choose North because of the iron and the resin. So i must tried to open this chest more than 30 times, omg. There are 3 or 4 more ghost chests in the game, it is a couple of ghosts appear and the one is pointing on the chest, theese have 90% chance to open because you might delay . Ofcurse the loot is low level but if you just join the server, having steel pick is a good gift