How many players are actually on official servers?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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In the world of private servers you can have, depending on the hosting service you go with, up to 100 players on a server. I’ve played on a 70 player server rather extensively with up to 50 players online at a time. But many hosting companies for private servers recommend you not go over more than 40 players. I’m told this is because 40 players is all the game is optimized for and that official servers allow no more than 40 players. Having never touched an official server I need to ask if that’s true.

Secondarily, regardless of how many players an official server will accept, how many players are usually on at prime time?

Thirdly, what is performance generally like on those servers, especially at prime time?

And lastly, are there any kind of building limits imposed on official servers? How are abandoned builds treated?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

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Performance on official servers starts dropping slightly with around 15 online, it is still perfectly playable up to about 25 when it starts getting pretty bad. By 30, it is truly awful.

The number of players on at prime time varies significantly depending on the server. The most popular servers will hit the 40 cap every day, the smaller servers may rarely go over 20.

Not all server units are equal, and it seems the ones Gportal rents to Funcom for their official servers are basically the bottom of the barrel.

As far as building limits, the rules are posted on the forums, though they are quite vague and players occasionally get admin wiped and suspended without ever understanding what they did wrong.

Abandoned builds decay. If the owner logs in to refresh, then the build stays until they miss their refresh.

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Tephra has summarized it overall beautifully.

To add on to it, Officials are hosted on GPortal servers. Having hosted my own server in the past and discussions on servers in general, GPortal is not only a poor service provider but I would hazard as well that the package utilized by Funcom is a lower tier.

Region and platform is a factor of course; I’m in NA East and have played on all modes but PC PVP being most played and preferred. I should mention as an aside that I was a 5+ hour per day Official PVP Player for about 3 years straight. On weekends I would play 10+ hours per day.

Prior to the ages there were several active PC PVP Officials, often capping. The popularity of a server would be dependent on who, what, why. Migration always common to a degree. Population significantly dropped off over time due to a variety of issues.

Out of curiosity I logged in to see numbers. 1530 and 1540 being the most popular NA PVP servers for years and 1530 is capped with a queue of 6. This tells me there’s drama there; more than likely meme type brigades with a splash of cheating and puppets holding spots. 1540 lagging behind with 34, so probably those who don’t want to queue are going there. Fairly normal behaviour in the last 6 months or so.

But while PVE has a “primetime”, generally I find that it rarely caps in the past year. A west having the highest at 18 currently. So Tephra being right that once you hit about 15+, the server suffers greatly. This is in large due to unmitigated building - placeables that GPortal and the game in general not being able to handle.

In the past, again as a PVP player, it was common for a server to suffer at 20+ players but not to the point of being unplayable. This is in large part to the overzealous use of Zendesk removing builds. That still doesn’t stop the problems since Ages. Al-M being disturbed means that everyone feels it within about a 5 square radius. Simultaneous raiding in general, summoning gods, raiding thick builds, etc.,… is obvious to all. Anyone logging in to a resource intensive base in all modes, is felt as well.

I haven’t logged in since the BE fiasco started - seems to have been fixed? Prior to that I was on 3 PVE servers and generally they didn’t hit 10 ish players during primetime.

I didn’t really have much issue personally with resource intensive builds but I did stutter and die A LOT during purges initiated by other players across the map.

IMHO Funcom should upgrade or change the server service provider - however, as is alluded to based on advertisement and previous discussions, it would seem that there is a contract that can’t be broken. Barring that, doing server merges, inasmuch as that might negatively affect the very few playing on low pop servers and/or serial refreshers, it might be necessary.

So ya… mostly a PVP perspective.

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I play on Xbox Official PvE. For months the server has been quiet, this week there have been upwards of 25+. It’s hell in a handbasket. People are dying in their bases because of the floor glitch, the server stutters or has long arse lag spikes.

Oh, and bases aren’t currently decaying because anyone waltzing by can reset them. :upside_down_face:

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:face_with_raised_eyebrow: My experience the servers start to strain at 5 on and are unplayable by 15.

Even at peak times on the NA servers you’d be hard pressed to find one with more then 20 on because the public servers are pure crap by then.
Right now the most crowded server is 35 with a 344 ping, good luck even trying to play on that mess. One is at 34 and a ping of 266. Next is my server for some reason, at 21 and a ping of 177. The count drops off rapidly from there. I’d say the average on right now is 8.

I’m assuming some big hoarders bases are decaying.

Yup.

Can confirm.

Edit to confirm, ya, some big clan’s base has decade so another clan is on raiding it.

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from age of war update

1-4 in whole week Somedays my clan is only one online…

Each update breaks something up that never is fixed…

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Thank you all so much for the answers. Though gotta admit, it kinda blows my mind. With 30+ mods my server has hosted RP events where we had made large builds, peopled the area with both puppets and constantly dropped mobs of fighters as well as half a dozen staff members acting as adversaries and engaging in PVP and had close to 30 players participating. And this on a busy server that generally had 20+ players on it during peak times. And the game ran just fine. Like glass? No. But truly, nothing like the problems I’ve seen described here. We use serverblend as our host btw. So yeah I think mods and overbuilding might still be responsible for poor performance on private servers but apparently it may just as easily not be the case at all.

Honestly, I’m a little surprised to see how bad things really are on officials. But that would suggest that those of us paying for private servers may indeed be a larger contingent keeping this game alive than I previously believed.

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Our little clan is playing Conan Exiles for long time now, almost since release. The most part we used official servers, but until the AoW update, we switched from official to private entirely. Its the only way left for us, to play and have fun (we still love the game). Our play style is building and exploring (PVE/PVE-C).

Why we switched (incomplete list):

  • we want to do server transfer between Exiled Lands, Siptah and Savage Wilds
  • we want to build nice things without the fear, to lose them ever and ever again
  • we want to control who is joining the servers
  • we have a better chance to go around the bugs (disable decay for example)
  • if someone loses a precious item/stuff through bugs, we can respawn it
  • we can do backups/restores as we want
  • etc…

Under the line, in the current state of the game and with our play style, it makes no sense for us to use officials anymore. Honestly I have to add, that we can use decommissioned but still potent hardware to run the servers for free. Of course we are playing other games too, so from time to time our servers are empty, which is not a big thing (zero costs).

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You sum up nicely the reasons why private servers are, in my opinion, the only way to play this game.

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battlemetrics dot com

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neebs gaming had a Conan event on a private severer. 100 on, fighting 3skull bosses and end game bosses admin was dropping in. Crashed the server twice. Once the battle was over 100 still on, no idea how big the queue was, but no issues once the big bosses stopped dropping.

But not a heavily built server, was a copy of the server neebs gaming does their shows on.

So yes city state builds are bad enough put them on quite possible the worst bargain basement servers you can find and ya the game is going to get unplayable fast.

I’m glad you all enjoy private servers. My experience has been more down time then up because one of 50 mods needs to update. And been playing for a couple months doing good go to log in and…

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private servers have allways run better than the officieals servers

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I have been playing on and off since EA, a mix of official, private (c. 10-20 mods tops) and solo/co-op. This is my experience in the last 4-5 years playing official servers (4-5 diff. characters) about two thirds of my time (West Coast PVE mostly):

The issues such as Thrall odd behavior (pathing, AI befuddlement etc.), stuttering, rubber-banding or what I call freeze warping - your char seems to freeze in place and then suddenly skips ahead or similar phenomenon - seems to start somewhere between 8-10 concurrent players. Large to massive bases with loads of placeables plus effects can definitely be a pain once you look in their general direction.

After about 15 concurrent players you could really feel the impact server wide and after 20 it can become too irritating to continue any significant game play such as going into dungeons, purges etc., so it was best to just stay with resource gathering, building and such.

With AoS I felt it got a little better for a while, but not much, however new issues were introduced down the road which caused a shift in population - the two most significant issues I remember were the instant decay of anything on Nemedian foundations and then the great Thrall disappearance debacle - both of which caused a noticeable impact on players calling it quits for good.

AoW caused another number of issues and controversies and an even greater player drop, which resulted in the current state I noticed. There seem to be less players nowadays on official - Siptah has been hemorrhaging for a good while now, I rarely see more than 5 concurrent - incidentally the overall stability on servers seems to have improved with less concurrent players on and there only seem to be a few times when you get close to 10 to 15 players. Granted the floor drop issue is probably the most inhibiting factor in the last 6-9 month or so.

There is another oddity I have noticed in the last 6 month or so and that is a significant drop in socialization/community. Most players on official seem to be rather quiet, a few solo players or 2-3 ppl groups. This is a far cry from what it used to be. Before AoW it seemed there was more social interaction, people helping each other more, grouping up to do dungeon runs, purges etc. Not that I am a big socializer (very much introvert actually), but it is sometimes a bit eerie when there are 5-8 people on and it’s dead silent for hours.

Anyways - how many players are actually on official? My short answer would be less than half of what there used to be and it seems to me that there has been a shift in community and social interaction.

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How many? They bring in the alts (and body vaults).

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Here my playing style and feedback about this thread.
Playing the in officials since 2018.
PVE, EU zone

The highest peak I remember was after the first AoS part came, that was -for me- the really last big addition and content introduced to the game (the sorcery, the new ages system, the battle pass and the bazaar)
it caused a big hype and server population went up from 5-8 average to 10-15-20
Eveh though the performance went worse and started falling down as I expected I miss those days seeing the server crowded of new and veteran players :slight_smile:

Yesterday in the same official server we were 2-6 average

About officials performance? well as I always been playing in gportal official servers I’m already get used to the gportal servers performance we all know.
About private servers? well I always wanted playing according the officials settings & rules as the creators designed the game.

Off-topic:
All of us who have been standing here , surviving, building and dominating since 2018 are the true CE Heroes. No need the game gives us more heroes, just only recognizes us as such. It’d be something really appreciated.

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Yes and they have always been there, granted perhaps not as much as nowadays. I look more at the ones I see are on longer, not just the blip refreshers.

Not sure about alts, or how many people have several accounts. I have always only played one account for years, don’t really see the purpose to have additional accounts.

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Absolutely, PC private servers and SP are keeping the population afloat. In the past it has been oft repeated that PC PVP population is only about 200 players globally at any given time. I believe this has been reduced drastically in the past year.

It’s harder to determine what it is like on both the consoles though. It’s not like their privates can use mods which is one of the reasons why players opt for it.

Official servers are a cautionary tale on how not to handle game servers.

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I play on official servers. Primarily because 1) I like a little risk, 2) PvE spamalot just really doesn’t seem to do it for me, and 3) I like bombs.

Recently - I’ve been playing on very poorly attended official PvP servers. Primarily because as SOON as the population picks up, the bullies show up. The bullies being well-organized 10 man clans set on “wiping” the entire server just for the lols. OR - the bullies being hackers / cheaters / exploiters.

I recently watched Ceronesthes’s video compilation that very effectively sums up the entire Conan Exiles Official PvP Server experience. If you want to know what it’s like on official PvP servers - watch this video. I’m time setting it to where he uncovers all of the hackers. Ceronesthes researched extensively to select a server WITHOUT hackers. And the EU server he finds is RIFE with hackers. Hackers accusing other hackers of hacking.

And they are ALL hacking.

.

.

The conclusion of this is that reports were filed, and accounts banned. But hackers operate in a way where they have multiple accounts to throw away in order to get their cheating in. And - the cheaters ruin the experiences for everyone else around them in the time it takes to 1) gather evidence sufficient to report them, 2) reporting them, and then 3) awaiting the Zendesk response to the reports.

THIS is the environment that Funcom has abandoned us to on official servers:

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I’ve played before the “horses” on 80 players server. If you accidentally log out you were waiting hours to log back in.
Every precious node was farmed on spawn and back then alchemical base was both important and difficult. This server, although private was x1 to everything like officials. We left the server fast however because it was 80/80 all the time and we had a bit crashing after 2 days. Waiting too much time to log back in was the reason to stop playing there.
From back then, speaking for my console, the only time official servers were 40/40 was on Siptah release, no other time at least for me.

In my experience about 25/40 but it’s unplayable.

Unplayable.

No limits, just rules and… And!

I am an alien!!! Maybe i am the only player that hate decayed buildings looting on pve servers.
So i am an alien :woman_shrugging:t4:.

Always a pleasure :metal:.

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For the past weeks, on the official pvp server Im on, theres usually two people. Me and my clanmate. Past month saw a maximum of 5 people online at the same time.

The performance isn’t too great, the server has suffered from bad ping several times last days even though Im the only one online and my base isn’t even particularly big.

On a different server the performance was largely at the level “unplayable” with around 15 people online at the same time.

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