Have annoying neighbours spamming golems set to harvest? A simple, elegant solution

Conan Exiles General Discussion
41

Unfortunately, people do care about something.
Player A finds a nice spot to build and builds.
Player B wanted to build there, but Player A happened to find that spot first and has built there instead.
No apparent restrictions on how close anyone can build to someone else’s structure.
So, player B decides .. (I’m going to make player A regret they took “my spot”) without so much as an attempt for civil discourse and builds their own base next door as close as possible to Player A’s base.
Player B can’t attack Player A because it’s PVE. (So, I’ll just build an army of golems to harvest everything in sight and try to make their life miserable as possible).
possibly knowing full well what it will do to the performance of Player A’s game,
Lo and behold… a bit later Player A finds themselves getting lag bogged down by numerous golems made by player B that just became active the second Player A logged into their own base. Player B is completely unaffected for the simple fact Player B is offline while their golems do all the dirty work.
What is Player A’s options?

  1. Abandon their base to let it decay so Player B can lay their claim to the spot now?
  2. Submit a report to the help desk in the hope some kind of action will be taken?
  3. Take matters into their own hands?

Who threw the first stone and was in intentionally willful in following the standing logo theme of this game … “Survive, Build, Dominate”. Well, I don’t see any question marks following that.

Nevermind Civility.
Nevermind Courtesy.
Nevermind just trying to talk.
Nevermind just accepting things the way they are and move on.
Let’s just make everybody else’s life miserable.
“It’s my game, I paid for it and I’ll play it the way I feel like playing it”
Screw the TOC. (Does that seem familiar to anyone?)

Nevermind others also paid for the game.
First come, first served. Right? Stomp on anyone who gets in your way.

I know it happens enough in real life.
It’s a damned shame that this mind set is carried over into a damned game.

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People care about a lot of things, but that doesn’t make them relevant. For example, who built first on an official server is completely irrelevant, since official servers offer no guarantees regarding the seniority of your land claim. If that’s something you care about deeply, you should play on a server that addresses that concern for you.

Only for those who don’t read the ToC or pretend they don’t understand it. The rules against deliberately preventing players from expanding or harassing them in any form are there.

Absence of rules and lack of enforcement are two different things.

So, player B hasn’t been communicating, but somehow we know their motivations and their attitude? Or did I miss something?

But no one else is affected? Just player A? Because that sounds like client lag, not server lag. Mind, the source of performance issues doesn’t really matter if you can otherwise establish that this is land claim abuse on player B’s part. The performance only matters for one certain part of the rules and that part talks about loss of performance on both client and server.

If player B is “completely unaffected” by lag, it means it’s not server lag. Otherwise, player B will be affected when they’re around their own base, just like every other player on the server, because that’s how server lag works.

Option 2 is how things are supposed to work. My previous reply was alluding to the fact that if things consistently don’t work that way and you’re forced to resort to outright griefing in what you consider self defense, then maybe it’s time to stop and think about whether you’re okay playing this game on these servers.

And sure, maybe the answer you’ll land on is “I don’t give a damn, I’m fine playing that way.” Good for you. Enjoy the game.

But my reply wasn’t just for you specifically. In general, people should ask themselves the question that I posed: If Funcom doesn’t care enough to either provide decent servers, or moderate them properly, or patch out exploits used for griefing, do you really want to play that way?

People can always find excuse for their behavior. The problem with taking things in your hands is that it might work out for you now, when you’re the one griefing someone else for reasons you consider justified, but sooner or later you’ll be the one being griefed by someone who considers their reasons justified.

And make no mistake: you can use any excuse you want, but you’re still using exploits to grief someone else. If that’s okay with you, fine. But anyone who isn’t fine with the never-ending cycle of griefing might benefit from realizing that maybe it’s time to move on – either to private servers or to a game that isn’t as abandoned.

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43

I run my own server.
Options can be various but in the end, who ends up paying the price?
For months I’ve been watching this forum explode.
But, what will you do if someone decides they want to start living in the same room you sleep in?

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44

That is only one possible scenario.
Seriously, I am not as narrowminded as you might be assuming.

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Then it should be even clearer that when I say “you”, I’m not necessarily talking about you specifically.

I don’t know. Is it my bedroom? Then there are laws about that. I can call the cops on them.

And if there are no laws about it or those laws aren’t being enforced, then I’m probably not going to be happy living there and being in charge of enforcing rules that I believe in.

Seriously, there is literally no way you can paint this situation as analogous to real without making the same argument I’m making: if you don’t live in a civilized place and you have the option to move to a civilized place, then maybe you should think about exercising that option.

It’s not about being narrow-minded. It’s about assumptions.

Yeah, I’ve seen entitled prіcks get pіssy because someone “stole” “their spot”. I’ve also seen people assume bad intentions without even talking to someone. Guess which one I’ve seen more often?

And if that wasn’t enough, people make all sorts of assumptions about the rules. “There are no rules about how close you can build to someone” is one example. Another is “if your building is bigger than I like it, then it is (or should be) against the rules”.

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46

Bingo.

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Interestingly enough I’m seeing a lot of completely new players on the PC public servers in the last week. Apparently Dune’s visibility/popularity has created some curiosity about CE.

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48

Depends…
I believe that in some cases i wouldn’t mind :laughing:

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50

Let me clarify what I’m talking about, and maybe someone will understand. I am not condoning running around and just killing some poor Joe’s golems.

Examples of some things going on on my server:

  1. Random cyrillic guy spams huge sandstone platforms around Mounds of the Dead, quickly claiming a large space right up to the edge of 2-3 other players’ bases, preventing their ability to expand or any other players from placing even a bedroll. The base is just literally large flat sandstone platforms, scattered with a random Tier1 bench here and there.
    One night 15-20 golems appear around the base. All of them are set to auto-harvest everything: as soon as any player moves into range they spring into action, literally sprinting towards the nearest tree/rock/bush. They clearcut all territory in a humongous swathe around not just that players’ base, but every player around them - denying them resources. The golems and their movement/pathing as well as the animations of trees falling all around does cause a palpable performance hit to anyone in rendering range and the player that placed them is not even online.
    Randon cyrillic guy hardly ever plays the game, and is still stuck (literally) in the stone age, but has giant land claims at Mounds, Sepermeru entrance, Sinkhole, etc. Golems start appearing at these bases as well.

  2. Another random clan of players starts madly claiming land in every popular build zone. They keep huge networks of building decay timers connected with everything from torches to just random strings of stables. They have a massive base literally right up to and surrounding two of the mounds at Mounds of the Dead.
    They place a tavern with four bar counters, four bartenders, and at least 80+ benches, stools and chairs. This caused a virtual lag black hole around one of the most popular mounds.
    The entire clan stops playing the game (around the Dune launch), and thankfully the taverns become inactive as their bartenders disappear. Their base, however, is still there and will be for many more months because there are huge areas of it within the star metal meteorite zone, and every time a star metal meteor hits any part of their base it refreshes the decay timer on the entire thing to 480 hours.

  3. One guy has the entire mountain around Sepermeru - the one by the “main” entrance near Brimestone Lake - claimed for over 5 years now. Literally a base the size of 10 football fields, mostly sandstone, filled with rows of Tier1 furnaces. And here’s the rub: in 5 years hardly anyone has ever seen the guy. He logs at some ungodly hour for a split second just to refresh, and then logs off. His base has not changed in at least 5 years.

If I had to choose three of the most important build areas, travel or farming hubs in the game they would be Mounds of the Dead, Sepermeru/Klael’s and Sinkhole. All three always have someone continuously trying to claim ridiculous amounts of land for themselves, even when inactive.

Funcom does nothing. I’m not even sure that their reporting system is even functional right now, I believe they just stopped paying Zendesk, then briefly turned off the reporting system entirely, and now they just turned it back on for appearance/legal reasons but aren’t actually responding to anything.

Some of these problems could be easily addressable if anyone at Funcom actually played the game on an Official Server in the last 7+ years, rather than whatever utopian test server a handful may have tried on their company intranet.

  • A per-player foundation limit is long overdue - perhaps a placeables one as well.
  • Certain areas should never have been build zones
  • A player should not be able to have more than 1-2 barkeeps, and/or bars should have an exclusive build radius like teleporters and a hard limit as to how many extra chairs NPCs react to
  • Refreshing decay timers should be dependent on time played. A 5x5 sandstone shack refreshes instantly, but refreshing a base with thousands of foundations should take hour(s) of playtime.
  • Golems should have a limit, or only function when the player that placed them is actually online (not necessarily in rendering range).
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51

Everything you said is correct, but you wouldn’t even had to explain why you kill someone else’s golems, thralls or whatever. You play on a conflict server!
People who play on conflict or pvp servers should expect to be attacked from other players and having fun to do the same which is absolutely why these servers exist :woman_shrugging:t4:.
You did nothing wrong although the other player gave you a good reason to attack too. Yet i believe that you could take a star metal weapon and clear the golems on pvp hours your self too.
If a player plays on pve-c or pvp and cries for being attacked then he should go pve in my opinion!

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These issues could be solved simply by funcom DOING THEIR FORNICATING JOB of administration on the public servers.

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53

Maybe it’s not that no one understood. Maybe there are different ways to approach the subject and different opinions to have.

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There are rules for how conflict servers work. I’m not referring to TOC, I’m referring to the mechanics of the game. One of those mechanics is that your followers cannot be harmed by other players, unless it’s PVP time and those followers are following you.

Circumventing that is an exploit.

Now, is using exploits wrong? That’s a topic for a separate debate.

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This tbh i have forgotten. Although very recently i played with @LostBrythunian in a pve-c server, i didn’t had any conflict like it, so in my mind i believed that pve-c and pvp are similar when it comes to thralls, thanks for clarifying brother.
Funny to mention that dally we were loosing thralls, crafters mostly from living settlements, so even if another player would do the job, the loss was daily that we grow “anosia” to this subject :laughing:.

Personally i hate any kind of exploit, it’s always game breaking, even if building exploits can create architectural wonders in this game.
But i cannot blame at the same time players for using them, yet they cannot “cry” later on if someone is using more power to hurt them, a hack for example, but allow me to say of course that with this statement i don’t try to hit under the belt the op.
Yet if you create mess with others expect the answer as well. Bottom line, there’s always someone better than you and not necessarily speaking for pure game mechanics.

Online experience is like a box of chocolates Forest Gump would say, you never know what you’re going to get, but for sure if you use exploits to hurt others then the chocolate box can easily become Pandoras box.

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Internet = Pandora’s box of chocolates.

I always thought the way to deal with golems was to erase the first E in their name but what do I know.

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