Not exactly. Hackers come from everywhere and have always been around but not this bad. There’s also been no period in this 8 months where the currently available hacks have been addressed in the game.
Without going in to specifics the hack developers are making decent money.
I’d like to mention too that whales exist everywhere, in SP, private and Officials in all modes.
But I have warned in the past that it is only a matter of time before PVE starts seeing the effects of this plague.
Oh hackers go to popular private servers too but it is heavily dependant on the who. Then if there are proactive admins they get booted quick. I’ve watched the popular PVP privates closely over the years; the admins have to treat it like a job.
Good question. I’ve often asked myself this in general. But for Officials, an industry standard expectation, it’s been so heavily mismanaged. I think it’s a symptom of the larger general problem and one you’re touching on. The game being so incredibly diverse in its available modes, sandbox element, ability to mod, player expectations, etc.,… I can just imagine the laundry list of things they have to tackle. I don’t envy them… but they also created it so shrugs
Yeah see, that is one of the biggest reasons that Official Servers are in such a horrid state full of hackers and abusive exploiters and massive over builders. So you are framing this as a “positive”, but in reality this is the biggest negative that Official Servers have against them.
No matter how much you pollish a turn it’s still just a pile of 
Sorry but that’s just how official servers are. 
But to each their own opinion. So I am glad that they give us all of these options, and I truly wish that Funcom would actually clean up these official servers so they were in the horrendous state that they are.
And here Kiki points out exactly why admins are vital, and why Official Servers are in the state they are. No active admin presense.
I can only guess as to why they chose to go this route with Conan Exiles, and I suspect that it has to do with the financial state that Funcom was in at the time the game was being released and the shear number of servers they launched with. As an example look at Age of Conan. When the game launched it had active admins and the rules were enforced pretty well. But after time they scaled back their admins and relied more and more on “volunteer” mods and then even scaled that back until that pretty much went away. Then everything became “submit a tickit and we will get back to you”. Guess what the results were? Cheating skyrocketed and the pvp servers (at that point I think it was down to one actually) became so toxic that a lot of the pvp players migrated to the PvE server.
So yeah, without an active admit team to moderate the servers you ultimately have the inmates running the asylum and well, you see the results. But Funcom was in a financial crisis when Conan Exiles was in development and they could not afford to hire active admins (most likely) so we got what we got.
Gosh this topic pains me greatly. So much potential for betterment of the game as a whole.
I’ve given private servers a chance so many times and they just don’t fit the bill of my expectations, you know them. I’ve had my own server with friends but to open it up to others meant way more effort than I was willing to sacrifice. I’ve considered in the past 6 months opening one but hell, I have a demanding day job and personal responsibilities, plus the cost is way too much for me to bear to provide the best - that is a topic on its own and the reason we see things like package tiers on PVP servers. Having talked with my extended community, no one is willing to volunteer their time for, as quoted “a dead game” (not my words).
I think that Funcom would have been smart to offer access to Official servers with a cost from the beginning to help support and in turn provide salaries for active administration. It’s too late for this, way too late. That and the way that they detect hacks and cheats (mainly ping abuse) has been insufficient all along.
I believe you might be right about the cost from the beginning and opted for after the fact administration.
There’s also the element of consoles. They don’t have the benefit of mods and those who want to play multiplayer are heavily reliant on Official server existence.
I’m curious to see how this plays out with their new game.
Yeah in all honesty Conan Exiles is ultimately a product of Funcom’s financial state while they were developing the game. At least, this is my personal opinion. They were not in a financial state to be able to secure good solid stable server services and they basically had to take whatever they could get. Which mean bottom of the barrel servers that could not hold more than 40 players, which also meant they would need to provide a heck of a lot more servers to hold the numbers of players they had just for Early Access let alone the numbers they would be projecting to purchase the game upon release on PC / PS / XBOX. So to have active administration on three platforms across that massive amount of servers frankly would not have been feasible.
Now, as we all know the sales of Early Access did in fact save Funcom from going under but that does not mean that it magically made them lucrative with a wealth of money to toss around at hiring an army of admins to police their servers. And the sales of the game on release also likely did not provide the revenue to do so either. The DLC’s brought in more revenue but they also have to keep working on updating the game, creating content for it and working on patching out bugs and the like so a lot of that money was already being spoken for, not to mention paying for their offices and salaries and the servers themselves. They also had other projects which they were working on because no game company can afford to remain stagnant. Some of these games they were the publishing studio and not the developing studio which did allow them some freedom of resources but still, I am certain that they did have to make some investment into these titles. Since Conan Exiles was released there has been: Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, Conan Unconquered, Moons of Madness, Conan Chop Chop, Metal: Hellsinger, Dune: Spice Wars, and the one game they are actually developing Dune: Awakening (not yet released but we all know how much they are putting into the development of this game).
So to look at it from this perspective there has been a wealth of potential for Conan Exiles. At the beginning there was a restriction over how much of said potential they could meet due to their financial situation. However that all changed when Tencent purchased Funcom. That excuse no longer holds water. Now there simply is a whole different direction that the company has taken in regards to this game, and fulfilling it’s potential does not seem to be it, nor does cleansing the official servers of the hackers using their paid hacks. I cannot fathom why they would not want to stamp this out. Heck they do not seemingly want to even stamp out the griefers on PvE-C or PvE who exploit things like the purge or other things to grief other players. They simply do not seem to care. 
But landclaim? LET THE HAMMER OF JUSTICE REIGN DOWN AND SMITE THEE! Even though no one can quite figure out exactly what their ambiguous definition of landclaim is (seemingly this includes them as well). 
So to be honest, no all private servers will be my cup of tea. But absolutely ZERO official servers will ever be good enough to serve my gaming needs. And it is not due to the players of this game, it is due to Funcom and no one else.
Indeed, over 1000 servers before the merges happened, that’s after EA then 2 increases. Now it’s 740 Officials across all platforms. Astronomical in terms of active administration, it least in the way that the average player would expect. I have maintained for quite some time now that server merges should happen again.
Agreed.
Hiring staff would require 24/7 coverage. Not a forte of Funcom’s MO. I’ve thought about this a lot and I would not expect an admin to sit there in godmode invisible watching over us in the clouds. I would expect that the team would get a division of clusters and a report system would be in place which is quite similar to what is happening with Zendesk. However, triaged with quicker turn around. Create a report template that has something like “is this a 3rd party injection program issue”? Or, “is this a problem with an exploit”? And have it auto sort into the correct bin which is prioritized. Although, you bet your ass that there’s superfluous reports as it is, knowing when to throw those out as quickly as possible for better workflow, etc etc.,… (Like seriously, reporting someone for raiding you is ridiculous and people DO THIS).
So for instance, if a hacker makes it through and is speed hacking, put in a report and see admin action. Or “hey guys, there’s someone kiting an Arena Champion killing my thralls” and the boss deleted and player banned immediately.
Or maybe, if this isn’t feasible then roll backs when warranted. YES it affects everything that happened afterwards but I see absolutely no justification for a vacuumed server to be left in ruins. When it happens, and it happens a lot, it only encourages players to decide not to return. “Due to 3rd party usage a roll back will occur on this server to X date in X minutes” message. At the same time, this does have potential to be unsustainable which is why other methods to address the problem should be in practice to begin with!
Ding ding ding. WHYYYYYY. Christ man it’s just so frustrating.
You know I’m all for actively moderate official servers, even if I have to pay a bit to sub. I was actually hoping the battle pass would go that way.
i agree with you… but… massive or large is subject to interpretation for one a building might be small, mediun for other could be large or huge.
as long as there are no clear rules…
i got a documented case where a huge base was deemed ok for one funcom admin , and bad for the next…
i do believe that onbly in extreme cases supensions should apply. having someone loose all of their builds is by itself a big punishement. suspensions should not happen specially when rules are vague
Allow me to believe that the quality of each server lays to the quality of the players above all. G portal is equally responsible for the bad performance of a server no matter if it’s private or official.
Right now i am on a private server of @UNfun with multiple members of this forum. Me and @Croms_Faithful suffer from a unique inventory bug that no one else is suffering in this server and at the same time me and Croms do not suffer this bug on any other session we play.
However we stay and play.
Why?
For the people of course not for the game!
Yet there’s no polish on truth, people who play on official servers just don’t like to be “admined” from random owners. And many others (favoritism, game corruption, etc…) that’s been discussed a million times the past years in this forum.
No private server will ever be official and that’s a fact.
You do know that private servers are not beholden to G-Portal right? I am just pointing out that there are several server providers out there that private server owners can select from, where are all “official servers” are G-Portal servers.
And yes, there are a portion of people who do not like to be “admined”, and those people quite literally have to deal with hackers with paid hacks on a constant basis. That is a simple fact. Where as on private server those mean evil admins ban those hackers pretty damned fast. 
Still not seeing your point here.
Having hosted an RP community for this game since well before EA… I know a lot of server owners, a lot of players… and man I could tell you stories. Yeah there are some incredibly awful admins, server owners and, it must be said, players out there. But the beauty of private servers is that you can shop servers. It costs nothing to play and if it turns out you don’t like something about a server… you can just leave and choose another one until, like Goldilocks, you can find the one that’s “just right” for you. And, taking the bad with the good, there is just a bewildering array of creativity out there. There are not enough hours in the day for me to play on all the RP private servers I’d like to. Mods are to the point where server owners can make pretty much anything they want of this game. There are D&D servers, Elder Scrolls servers, Witcher servers, game of Thrones servers, World of Darkness servers, you name it. Hell, there’s even a Cyberpunk server. There are servers using strictly dice systems for combat and admin GMed adventures, strictly mechanical PVP, and a lot with a mixture of both. Given all of that, and taken with the responses I’ve seen here… I still can’t see a reason to play on an official server.
On PlayStation, they all are!
95% of the people who complain in this forum, since most of the complaints are for official gaming 
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Oh i know, i know worry not.
It’s not my story Alexandria, my story is exactly in the middle.
All these years this forum have some small wars, one of these wars is “private servers vs official servers”.
I will never understand why people disagree on obvious, or make rules on exceptions.
But it is what it is.
For the record i have participate in more than 200 different private servers my dear @Alexandria and all i own to these administrators is gratitude, nothing else.
My experience for the best online server lays in these lines i already said above, it’s the quality of the people you play with or against that makes the server good or bad, nothing else.
Not so much hackers, but exploits do abound.
Undermesh and flying base options are quite present. As are any of the vanilla clipping bugs and render distance/order shenanigans.
Then there is some of the jank that seems to be PStato exclusive that can be leveraged.
~end short answer, the rest is easily skippable ramble~
For whatever reason, the game is not exactly pristinely optimized for PlayStation, even the most recent iterations (PS5, clean of anything other than Conan Exiles) can struggle with things such as the gather resources spell or Musashi’s Black Blade and Explosives depot at Al Merayah.
This opens the gate to different, possibly platform unique exploits that rely on hostile architecture or exploitation of system limitations that aren’t present on the PC versions, or rather, that a within spec PC won’t deal with.
As far as other forms of “cheating” there are, in significantly smaller numbers than this one has seen on PC, still mercenaries available.
People who will take a little out of game currency to professionally violate the ToS for the benefit of the paying party and detriment of their enemy.
Assuming a report is filed, the source villains are not connected to the violation, and the merc has already been paid and if there is punishment, it can fall on their account. Which is figured in to the cost of the service. The transactions happening on third party platforms, it’s basically impossible to prove.
As activity on PlayStation PvP servers has (anecdotally only, this one has not had the time or inclination to make a deep study of this metric, so take with exactly one Utah of salt) significantly depreciated over the past year, there are fewer job opportunities and thus a drop off of the hired sin eater issue.
You poor poor people. 
Which is pretty meaningless. If you look at the PC numbers, pretty much all of the populated servers are… you guessed it. Private servers. So yeah, it is a “portion of people”, no a majority of people by any stretch. This may very well be different on PS and XBOX but since I don’t own the game on either console I will not attempt to speak for them.
I can definitely agree with you here!
Oh worry not, i agree to everything you say, i just love to have conversations with people i highly respect 
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Damn true… Damn true!!!
Not really, people use it as an excuse to overbuild. Now if you were asked to pick if a base is medium or large most people may have issues, but I like to believe most player; most players, have a good sense of scale.
But too many people use the vagueness of the rules to break them. We have proposed 1 warning with clear explanation what the violation is.
Then a simple 3 day time out to think about it. Then 10days, yes so your builds decay. Then ban from the public servers.
But yes we as players need a warning and a clear explanation as to what rules we violated, how. We can’t learn what we did wrong with out a clear explanation.
Of coarse most people know I’m for automating it. Land claim flags. The only way you are going to stop people form violating the rules is to simply not give them the option to.
Now I learned quite a few valuable lessons in my time. One of the first I learned was to follow the rules and regulations. Another I learned was how to share. These lessons seem to have been missed by quit a few.
That would be the public servers. I don’t like stacked mods, the server being down as often as up, waiting for days after an update for the mods to update, or going to log in to find
I like vanilla.
They don’t let things decay . They wipe everything not just the offending structure…
Wiping everything is enough pubishment. Why the ban ? Donyou know people are using zendesk as pvp ?
What do we do with it.
The only way to stop it is to have build límit in the game.
About rules being vague thats funcom to Fix , not for US to try understand something without clear rules.
Again funcom should put límits.
They did it with thralls . Why not with build pieces ?
Because building pieces really aren’t the issue. Storage is an issue, lots of active thralls is an issue, animated ornaments; candles, torches, fountains, bushes, are an issue.
It’s not the size it’s the activity. I’m certainly glade they wont be adding anything to make peoples builds even more active… oh wait
The ban belongs to the player that broke the rules.
The wipe belongs to the players that reported the others just to loot them. They understand that people were reporting others just to loot them so this way they break the moral of the “griffon vultures” of each server!
Oh they do and the total wipe action is in the right direction!
That’s dictatorship, i disagree!
It’s a lazy way to do things and people will grief and break rules again nonetheless. I believe that @Tephra so far has made the best suggestion, a tool that will allow to each player to understand how his-her building affects the performance of the server.
People however, must understand that it’s not a single parameter that will get them banned.
A building can do multiple “violations” against the “spirit” devs wish their servers must have. I often stumble in buildings that get me “upset” because of many reasons not only because it’s big. So numbers will change nothing!
Yet having a tool like it would help people to learn how to build not only in official servers but in private servers too. A fast - rough suggestion here could be…
The building hammer could paint red-yellow - green the building pieces we build…
The repair hammer could do the same on placeables that the building hammer don’t place. We could even check our chests this way and report correctly here if something curiously creates performance issues.
But anyways, i derailed a lot and i will ask @Alexandria to accept my apologies.
Just to stay on topic, people must understand that a massive amount of players are console players.
We play without mods, without tools and the game is already heavy even in the simplest mode of it. We have to choose between quality and performance and even in performance mode it still underperform.
The game needs optimization… Yesterday if possible!!!
I see that this thread has attracted everyone who bears a gripe against official servers and Funcom in general. @Alexandria, you should be careful not to assume that everything you read here is being said in good faith.
Official servers definitely have worse performance than private, and I really could never recommend official PvP, but I have been playing on the same official PvE server for over six years and have zero incentive to move to private.
Private servers have their own host of issues that do not exist on official, like biased admins, mod implementation that you may not agree with, financial needs, or even owners who stop caring and decide to shut down. You might be lucky and find a good private server that suffers none of these, but official provides the exact same thing every time - for better or worse.
One of a few of my own topics that I stopped following due to the toxicity in the replies.
There seemed to be disagreement whether it was possible or not, but this is the suggestion being referenced here.