Hello, me again. This time I’m here to complain about the new benches

And I am glad you did ask for them. I like these new workbench options. We do not have to use them as we can still use the other ones, but if you have a base that can adapt to use them, they look amazing, work well and show there is still new content being brought in.

Players that have been playing since the start - back in early Early Access - can remember how (relatively) little there was to choose from back then. This new stuff (for free mind you) doesn’t take anything away from the game. Players can still build very compact and survive perfectly well with a small base. PvP, PvE, RP - all are catered for with the new stuff.

Just on my servers I’ve seen some amazingly creative builds using/not using the new content. Occasionally we get a player complaining that it takes too long to get ‘A’ or too hard to get ‘B’, but players can just try Solo and Admin in everything - not so much fun that :wink:

I look forward to what else we may get to the game. I will likely scream a little, perhaps down a beverage-of-choice, scream invectives at the , but added content keeps the mix and challenges going and I personally welcome them!

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They do look nice. And they offer some variety. But…

It does. The new benches were introduced not only to create more options, but also to change the impact crafters have on crafting. For example, shaped wood now takes 10 wood to craft with the Carpenter’s Bench, 7 wood to craft with the Improved Carpenter’s Bench, 5 with the Precision Carpenter’s Bench, and 10 with the Trade Carpenter’s Bench. Before the change, this cost depended on the tier of your crafter.

So what does this change take away from the game? As other people mentioned, thralls were a more tradeable resource before the change than they are now. There are still reasons to hunt for certain crafters, but the incentive is much lower than before.

Incidentally, what I wrote above about the resource cost should be enough to prove that anyone who’s saying “you can still use old crafting stations” either hasn’t paid enough attention to all the changes or is missing the point. If you don’t want to spend more time farming materials than you used to before the change, then you have to switch to the new crafting stations. The tradeoff is now between the time you spend farming and the footprint of your base.

Personally, I don’t dislike that tradeoff at all. The only thing that bothers me is the impact the change had on the desirability of thralls. My personal theory is that the change was motivated, at least initially, by all the complaints about the Siptah thrall grind. If that’s the case, it was a weird way to compensate.

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Agreed, and not surprised.
The biggest disappointment of this game so far for me is the fact that I went thru 17 months of Early Access in CE, was then told its polishing time, and now it feels like due to Siptah, we are back in early access mode.
Personally I don’t mind the new workstations at all, but nerfing the T4 thralls was unacceptable.

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Yeah, I like the new workstations, too. And like you, I kind of wish the T4 thralls were still “special.” It made collecting them and setting up the base you wanted like a huge goal in the game that’s no longer there anymore. Like collecting specific armorers who “knew” a special recipe.

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Honestly, I never liked the concept of cultural armorers and blacksmiths, but it didn’t bother me that much, because I used DLC armors. That said, I’m sad to see them go like this. It’s a textbook case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

And yet, it’s par for the course. The usual progression seems to be: awesome idea → bad implementation → tons of player complaints → a change that completely ruins the original idea.

For example, the idea of getting special, unique thralls from purges is awesome. Sadly, purges have more bugs than Amazon rainforest. And it’s worse if you’re playing solo on a server, because you need to make Conan Exiles your second job to fill up the purge meter, and then it’s a roll of the dice to see if it bugs out and if it brings you anything useful.

One of the thralls I always wanted to get from a purge is the alchemist, for the black and white dyes. When enough people complained about the dyes for long enough, what we got is the Witch Doctor. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy it’s there, but it’s just another example of “Eh, screw it, we can’t make the original idea work properly, toss in something that makes it unnecessary”.

The entire update that introduced the new crafting system and benches was to “simplify the crafting system” it didnt. conan exiles devs are brainlets.

At least you guys are getting content updates console players can’t even get a update to fix the oom crashes but i guess funcom can’t make anyone happy these days lol

The squeaky wheel “Its not fair” salty tears seem to rule FC. Everything that was unique and hard to come by either was nerfed or watered down and made easy. It’s made the game boring.

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What I find ironic is some of you saying that you don’t like that the game was made easier, when the very mechanics you are talking about were never hard to begin with.

Getting rare thralls, was never hard. Just slaughter the camp every 15-20 minutes. Same thing with some unique items. Just kill ‘bosses’ (which are just large creatures) by right clicking them to death for a few minutes (or let a thrall do it).

The only change that really happened is they removed the need to rely on an annoying RNG to be competitive.

Let’s learn something today: RNG does not equal a challenge.

While I agree that losing Unique attributes on Thralls and Items is not a great thing. Such perks and rewards should have had suitable risk associated with them. If the risk isn’t there, the reward likewise shouldn’t.

In which case the discussion should be had on how to have suitable risks and challenges so we can have the rewards suitable to them.

Yes, but we tend to blame the wrong people for that. Sure, players complain a lot, but it’s not their fault. When you have a whole bunch of people complaining about something, there’s some kind of problem there. It’s Funcom’s job to determine what the problem is and how to solve it.

Going back to my example with black and white dyes, you can’t really blame people for complaining about not having access to a couple of dyes because the mechanic to get a purge alchemist is a buggy RNG-dominated mess. Yeah, I know it’s not a big deal, but I picked that example to avoid provoking a freaking flame war. You can substitute it for any other example of “WTF did they do this” and it’ll work just as well. It’s not the players’ complaints at fault, it’s Funcom’s solutions.

I’m having a hard time finding what you’re referring to. The last several posts here have been from people bіtching about game being made more boring, not easier. Personally, I didn’t mind the challenge of getting thralls on Siptah, I hated the RNG fustercluck that it entailed. My whole point was precisely that it wasn’t a bad idea, it was a bad implementation.

Yeah, I’ve been banging on that particular drum for so long now, I’m freaking tired of even thinking about it.

We gotta keep at it. People actually advocate for not having to put themselves at risk as a valid playstyle so a vigilance is needed.

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So yea, here’s the flame war comment.
In my opinion, MOST of the complaints come from PVPers who are outclassed by the veteran players who have been around and acquired the premium weapons. thralls, armor, etc. and cant compete so they cry about it and FC nerfs everything.
So tell me how dumbing a game down to the lowest common denominator makes it fun?
356n

I don’t believe he said it was fun. This is kinda looking for an argument where there is none. You two aren’t exactly in disagreement here.

Boring was the word. a word I concur with. And I am not arguing with CodeMage, just pointing out a difference in our philosophies about the player base.

When it comes to weapons imo a lot of the “cries” has been about making more/all weapon types valid. It’s not the players fault that FC’s choice was to nerf spears instead of making other weapons equally good.

When it comes to specific weapons, again it’s not the players fault that FC’s answer is to nerf them to uselessness or fx with the crit weapons just remove crit without ever making it work as intended (crit was confirmed bugged from the start, so it wasn’t a nerf though).

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RNG does not equal challenge that is true, but it incites uniqueness if the odds of drop are low.
Example: I know people who couldn’t get the damn [Grrr Legbiter] for weeks, because it used to be a very rare spawn and that single npc held a great trade potential in server. People were trading treasures for it, If you take everything of value from game, and make everything accessible to all base players, you literally shoot the player interaction from its leg.

As a modded server owner, I’m forced to create value by literally blocking stuff to suffocate supply, and increase demand with rarity because the base game has zero supply/demand ratio, everything is too easy and accessible.

All minerals are abundant in almost every region, all dungeons are accessible without prerequisite, and now by nerfing t4 thralls, funcom also nerfed the land values. So people don’t actually need to go north, live in " “harder” " conditions to get the good purges that yield better thralls. Now a south river bob have the same value of the person who lives in north.

If RNG is not equal to challenge why the hell BiS items drop from super easy sponge bosses with an RNG? Isn’t end game stuff needs to be rarer? So a player can get Sword of Crom at first try, or won’t be able to take it for 100th time, wouldn’t it make it a rarity? Isn’t keeping this rarity safe from other players or being lost a challenge?

On the other hand, this also means that this survival game neither have supply/demand balance but also a have no challenge? So is this a survival sandbox game at all? Do we actually survive here unless we mod the hell out of it and tweak the settings to max?

//The endgame sandstorm doesnt even deal more than 150damage, temperature is useless even at max with a few piece of cloth, you dont really get to die from thirst or hunger, there is no extreme conditions, you can basically solo “endgame” content with stone spear, or you can go take a steel trunch at level 30 ish, knock out berserker, farm swamps for 1 hour, get crappy cimmerian gear and watch your thrall solo bosses for you while you afk cooking dinner smth. //

What we lost by thrall/bench change:
-Trade opportunities
-Forced player interaction
-Supply/Demand of the only tradable commodity of end game
-Land/Region values and the reason to fight for it
-Gear values, having the better thrall was having a better gear.
-Literally the little bit of spark that was left in uniqueness in the game.
-Value of Purges. Now it doesn’t matter if you get attacked by kitchen crew or damn Cimmerian berserkers they yield the same value if you are not looking for min/maxing your fighter squad, which is unnecessary.
-Everyone forgot about that we had “Kiln” as best forge another mid-rarity commodity we used to have with RNG fragments of power, now we have basic forges, accessible from by just clicking on feat. Kinda one of the only feats you learn from cartographer room that used to hold value. So now… unless you want to get more feat points, as a currency fragments of power also diminished in value.

What’s left? Now I see FC’s full attention is spanning on Siptah and threw away exiled lands into a dark corner yet acting like the whole game is back on early access, this literally an early access trauma of indecisiveness and proper road mapping. The games future is becoming more boring, every single patch we get. At least we have glorious modders that wrap up the stuff. Now we will have a giant “siptah” patch, and I didn’t even see a update on mesh fixes that’s happening since 2.2.

Repeating:
I’m so, sick and tired, of telling new people, that some bugs they experience existed since the games first day or no eta of the bugs they experience, even they have numerous posts on official forums with “we are working on it” written under it.

Atleast fix Red Mother sinking thralls into ground, so we can truly go afk while our thrall is killing it.
Imagine a boss being harder than any other in game just because it bugs your thrall intro ground, and you are forced to fight it time to time. This is what it is.

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It doesn’t. It just makes you grind more.

In other words, you’re forcing your players to establish an economy through artificial scarcity. That’s your prerogative as an admin, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good solution for the base game.

You never really had to go live north if you wanted purges from that region. You can live comfortably in the south and establish a purge outpost in the north.

Because using RNG is the cheapest solution.

No, why? You keep propping up the rarity as some desirable trait, but I still don’t get why it has to be the solution. There are other ways to make the game challenging. There are other ways to make items and thralls valuable.

Forcing players to interact, as opposed to creating incentives for interaction, is bad game design.

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I agree with this statement 100%.
CE was supposed to get the “polish” and we end up getting pushed back into EA because of Siptah. Every Siptah bug ends up in CE and every old bug from CE is resurrected because of Siptah.

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I’m sorry, what is “the good solution for the base game”? Every single MMORPG or RPG or whatever game with obtainable weapon grades use same system that’s working over a decade, and it was literally one of the booming concepts, and still is. Legendary, Epic, Rare, Common. What makes legendary is that its super rare, you shouldn’t be finding Arthur’s Excalibur on every rock. The grind might be tedious, and the drop rate may be low, but if the reward covers it, people do it and it’s still an incentive for a longer play time. It’s almost obvious that funcom will never add a shred of content into Exiled Lands anymore, so where is the end game, unless we “Artificially” create one.

Good luck, people with 2 north base and 1 Main South base didn’t have one single purge up north for over month, because Purges are also proccing on RNG. People used to move up instead of having trigger bases and leave it to RNG. That also used to create land value because first, they want to cap better spots, second, they didn’t want to live next to each other.

And again, what is the expensive solution?

Again you are saying “no” but not elaborating subject, I cannot know this mystery if you do not elaborate on your thoughts. If I have shared mine fully, and if you are objecting to it, I deserve an elaborate response.

Then again, “What is?”

Games core is built on RNG, Thralls spawn in RNG, Purges Spawn location and content is in RNG, Items Drop in RNG, and most of the people I know, bought it for it. Now It’s going through an oversimplification process which nobody I know, is happy with it.

In successful mmorpg games with high player rates, people grind bosses for weeks/months to drop an ingot, just to collect 10-15 of it to make a legendary weapon, mostly not even to utilize, but to show off with it. It still drops on RNG, but it still holds value. People actually fight over it. The whole concept of mmorpg over all these years, and how it used to distribute wealth is totally RNG and was always a reliable system to create imbalance in community. Without imbalance, and all-accessibility, attention span of game actually goes lower. Do you even need legendary items to complete conan exiles endgame? Sure not, just have a stone spear, or basic drop items from enemies, and you can complete it with a bit of effort. There is no true progression. First, the game is not hard, second there is no scarcity, third there is no need to progress to reach a point.

Now you may cherry pick my mmorpg quotes like, hur dur, conan ain’t no mmo. But it’s a sandbox, and most of the people playing it have mmo past, and they generally appreciate same concept going around. Conan may not be intended to be a mmorpg, but it surely is not a survival game either. Best we can call it is a sandbox, because it’s still, a literally blank canvas after all these years, unless admins do something about it. And even with that, peoples attention span is so small that this game bleeds all of its players every passing day.

Let me give you a more reliable, even closer to subject example: Same genre, ARK. Most of the counter arguments against ARK is about crappy graphics over conan. Agreeable but why ARK is still more successful, and Conan is at its deathbed? A 13k (top) playerbase vs 90k. It’s the same genre. The Engine is the same, Possibilities are supposedly the same than why? Because ark already has an established endgame, already have struggling progressive system that pushes people forward, motivating, and rewarding. The game doesn’t break every patch, modded servers don’t go offline every patch. Ark has bosses, that are actually rewarding, worth killing. Everyboss they have is still relevant in endgame. Because its progressive. Game is in it’s base, challenging, dying is common, It has variety of creatures, feats and crafts, unlike our same rigged but skinned “bosses” (which are no bosses, just meat sponge/hard mobs). It’s world is alive, they don’t say yeah go to this side of map it spawns there for 50% chance. No, you gotta find what you are looking for by venturing across map, or obtaining the tech to track it down, the world is alive in that game, unlike our Static spawns. Does ark have RNG? Yes it does, kinda everything is RNG in ARK. From your item crafting BP, to the dino level, from level to its base stats almost everything is RNG in that game. You can get a 150 max lvl spawn dino with the stats of a turtle and wouldn’t worth a damn. With this RNG their servers naturally create economy, trade their RNG finds as a commodity to be traded. Weapons, Dinosaurs, even minerals of sorts, are open to trade. This is because that ARK has a scarcity of endgame content needs or RNG. And people fight/trade for it. And this issue creates a longer attention span, a chore, that is proven to keep people attached. It just works, if you say it doesn’t, do explain me, why ARK never left the top sellers even by being an older game than Conan. It works, funcom just couldn’t or didn’t want to make it work. It’s the most primal, and reliable system.

In any case, all I see is objection from you without any alternative, which undermines your argument behind this weird mystery you create.

That depends on what the base game really is. Right now, it’s not an MMO, it’s not a survival game, it’s just Minecraft with better graphics and a team that’s desperately trying to please MMO players, survival game players and Minecraft players.

I happen to be one of those Minecraft players and I’ve enjoyed Conan Exiles since its Early Access. I’ve sunk around 4k hours into it and I only stopped recently, because they’ve made Siptah into a giant slot machine. Even thought Conan Exiles has always had RNG elements in it, there used to be much better balance between RNG and the rest of the content. That balance started shifting around the time they revamped the Unnamed City, and it culminated with Siptah.

The overreliance on RNG might be fine for you, if you’re used to playing mostly MMOs. But not all of us are MMO players, or enjoy the excessive grind, or care that it’s been working for over a decade in such games.

I’ve had that luck often enough when I had my clanmates with me. That’s what RNG is like: your experience can be drastically different from mine because you get different dice rolls from mine. :man_shrugging:

Make the content more challenging. Take the Red Mother, for example. As she is now, all you need is a decent enough armor and some daggers. There’s no real challenge in defeating her. The legendaries she drops have such a low percentage, that people come to the forums to report a bug with her loot table. Does that seem like a working solution to you?

Again, the details of how you make the content more challenging would depend on which crowd you’re trying to please. For players like me, it would be a boss that you have to prepare for, with special gear that you have to farm up over time. I’m not an MMO player, but from what I’ve heard from MMO players, it sounds like they might enjoy a boss you have to team up with other players to defeat. Those are just two solutions that would be better than simply saying “lol make the loot super rare”, but you’ll notice that those two solutions go in drastically different directions.

And that’s the crux of the problem with Conan Exiles right now: the devs don’t want to commit to any specific direction and they keep trying to please everyone, so we end up with the lowest common denominator, i.e. “stick it behind the RNG”.

Funny you should mention that. I’ve suggested something like that several times before, because even that system is better from what we have right now.

Most of the RNG in Conan Exiles follows what I clumsily call “deterministic cost for random reward” system. In other words, you fight a boss, or clear a dungeon, or whatever, and that’s pretty deterministic, but the drop is random and you have to keep doing it over and over again, ad nauseam.

What you described there is what I call “random cost for deterministic reward”. You fight a boss, or clear a dungeon, or whatever, and what you get from it is a random drop of an ingredient you need to craft the reward you want.

Those two look interchangeable, but there’s a big difference in perception. It gives players like me a sense of working towards a goal, through my own effort, instead of gambling on whether I’ll get the item I want. And yeah, there’s still gambling involved, but the whole point is that it doesn’t feel like gambling anymore.

First, what does it mean to “complete” the Conan Exiles endgame? Second, should you need legendary items for that?

There’s nothing “hurr durr” about that. Conan really ain’t no MMO, so you can’t blindly follow MMO best practices and expect players to be happy with that. If they had advertised it as MMO, I wouldn’t have touched the game in the first place.

You wanna know why? Here, I’ll quote your own post:

What are the top complaints about Conan Exiles?

  • The game doesn’t start for a whole bunch of players.
  • Every patch breaks something big, be it a boss, a dungeon, missing textures, or whatever.
  • Cheaters keep cheating, despite all the promises of a solution.

Sure, the endgame in ARK might be more fun. I don’t really know about that, but it’s a moot point as long as the game is in this state. On top of the problems with bugs and cheating, nearly every big update introduces sweeping changes that aim to solve one thing and end up messing up something else. The new benches are one example, but I think my favorite so far was the fish trap change: instead of cutting down on fish trap spam, it just traded it for compost heap spam.

No, I’m not “creating a mystery” by challenging your preconceptions of what the game should be. I’m merely pointing out that you have a certain mindset, but not all of us share it. From your post, I’m tempted to assume that you’re someone who plays a lot of MMOs and that your expectations for Conan Exiles stem from that, but I’ve known many Conan Exiles players who don’t care for the same things you do.

I don’t like what the new benches did to the desirability of thralls, either. But you’re the one who chose to reply to Taemien’s assertion that “RNG does not equal a challenge” with a tirade about how RNG is The Way. It’s not. It’s just a tool in a game designer’s toolbox, but Funcom treats it as the golden hammer.

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