I think I figured out why PVP servers are not really balanced

So after watching the last dev stream, and most of the ones before, i think I know why all the balances to PVP servers seems like they never address the raid mechanics, the unbalanced nature of OG 10 man clans vs ANY new clan/solo. They refer to PVP when they talk of combat between players (IE hand to hand). That is PVE-C in server terms. Sure PVP server have it 24/7 vs 6 hours on PVE-C, but there are 6 hours (25% of the play time) on PVP servers that control how the other 18 hours of PVE-C on those servers. And that 6 hours unbalances any resources (Followers, heal potions, weapons and gear) that effect those majority of hours. That is why I don’t believe we will ever see real change to get TRUE siege mechanics, because the devs do not realize that PVP to most forum posters is in reference to the officially named PVP servers (6 hour raid, 24/7 melee), not the the melee 6 hour PVE-C servers that one can easily avoid combat the other 18 hours on. You can balance the combat until you are blue in the face, but as long as 25% of a servers play time can easily be offline raided, then it is pointless to even put resources into balancing melee combat changes between players . Just make them 24/7 PVE-C servers, then it will matter.

First it is not PVP servers, but 25% PVP servers like you write.

  • We need real PVP servers 24/7, with upkeep and monthly wipe. You play here, you know what to expect :slight_smile:
  • Then PVE-C servers 24/7, no building damage, no upkeep and 3 months wipe.
  • No PVE only servers.

50% PVP servers, 50% PVE-C servers.

How about no? I mean, when it comes to official servers, I only play PVE-C and I agree they should be 24/7, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to say “no PVE servers because I don’t play them”.

Like what the hell, seriously? Why would the PVE servers bother you at all, if you don’t play them?

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Yeah, there is always the extremist lol. I agree, PVE servers serve a survival service. :slight_smile:

My thoughts are just pointing out that the raiding has not been truly addressed since launch. Everything is either NPC or melee adjustments for combat, and PVE (which again, I agree should get attention, as every server type has some sort of PVE involved).

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I appreciate the post, but I feel a simple setting of item decay could allow for the pve style, where resource difference doesn’t matter and no decay of items and yet raid focus where maintaining a constant slow decay to minimize the OP nature of more resources destroying any semblance if the cost of war. The ease at which one can avoid conflict on ironically PVE-Conflict servers actual devalues all the fforts of combat from Alex and his team. It only fundamentally changes PVP raid if clans didn’t gain a play more 9nly advantage. Opens those servers to a wider audience of casual gamers._

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When I started reading your comment, I wasn’t sure where you were going, but these final comments are exactly my feeling as well from the other direction. I have zero interest in PVP, but I would not sit quiet and accept it if the devs opted to remove PVP from the game having sold it as a part. If it had been a pure PVP game, sure, I wouldn’t have bought it, but it is a game that is sold as being playable in singleplayer, PVE, PVE-C and PVP. Balancing all of those is a monumental task, but it would not be acceptable to me for any of them to be removed at this stage :slight_smile:

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Seriously? Have you ever played PVE-C? Wipe? I dont think so. No PVE servers? Again…I dont think so. There is so much more to this game than running around trying to kill each other.

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Agreed, I’ve played a little PvP, enough to know that it is not for me. I enjoy the various aspects of the game from a PvE standpoint. To be fair, I also avoid the public servers. I find that a lot of issues (both technically and player attitude) are either not present or can be worked around effectively on a private server.

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< feel many are missing my point.
Development talk PVP, they are really talking PVE-C.
officials only here
PVP-Raid 6 hours, 24/7 Conflict (melee). So the draw of the server was raiding and wars. The raidingbis offline meta, so not really even worth tweaking or addressing update wise, because 18 hours of server cycle time is damage proof, and the mechanics for melee are easily avoidable if you know whT you are doing. PVE players with decent escape skills can play on these tbh.
PVE-C…Conflict 6 hours, but easily avoidable with current mechanics, and so really PVE players can play on them during non fight times… 75% of the server cycle time.
PVE is the only true to its name.

So again, they are addressing melee mechanics, but it fixes none of the PVP servers main issues (Raid and unbalanced resource economy). Sure when…and thats rare if you are an OG player…you actually engage it is very easy to bail 9n a fight. Or tbh just run around with a bearer and naked to farm. Just bail, get your Bearer lvl 20 to high ground and they can’t kill it (non bugwise of course). That or just vault up close to farm areas, run and give all. And then just scoop before next raid time.

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Basically we need dynamic damge fixed, the PVP 24/7 raid.
PVE-C 24/7 melee
PVE as is.
This way PVE players who want no damage or fighting stay on thier server type.
People who like melee but not losing bases play on PVE-C.
and people who want strategic raiding have a server dedicated to that play style.

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From someone who’s actually played on servers with 2-3 month wipe cycles. I can say that wipes will affect PVP balance in absolutely zero ways.

I get it, when you roll up on a server and see a clan with thousands of bombs, T3 structures, and other heinous stuff, it makes you think they got that over the course of months.

This is not true.

Even at 1x across the board, a clan of 10 people coordinating can do some crazy stuff within 48 hours of play. A 10 man clan turns a 1x server into a 10x server. Or even worse since each person can specialize in a task rather than having to multitask.

In my experience, whenever my group would go raid, we would raid with what we made in the last few days. And we would take about 100 or more explosive jars and such, enough to wipe out medium sized bases to the foundations.

I remember one one of our fresh starts, I found a named blacksmith. The server had wiped just 45 minutes prior. I was level 8, a buddy was level 9, and I told him to go level real quick and build a wheel while I kited the blacksmith.

When we broke the blacksmith, everything on his bench was halved in cost. Production ramped up as you can imagine. But you don’t need T4 Named thralls. T2’s in the Firebowl and Blacksmith means one tar per steelfire, one ingot per reinforcement… your production is doubled. Even a T2 carpenter provides 3 shaped wood for every 21 wood, instead of 30.

These are the things on my mind when I participate in fresh starts is getting those costs down, getting efficient. And PVPers live on this style of play. A wipe won’t really slow them down. If you want to be competitive, you have to be on their level, their wavelength. Because if not. You’ll fall behind.

Right now many of you are behind other clans. A wipe would give you 20 minutes tops before you fall behind right where you are now. Are wipes worth 20 minutes? That’s assuming you’re on the server at wipe. If you get home from work an hour after the server is up. You’re already 40 minutes behind.

That’s 20-40 explosive jars. Hardened Steel Tools and Weapons against your naked stone tool using self. Its very amazing what coordination can do. And it can even get you caught up to clans that have been around for months.

As for offline raiding protection via dynamic damage. If it ever works, it might be something that stirs up the pot. Its not going to do much for the solo player who logs in to watch people destroy their stuff though.

Those are privates. And I never said anything about wipe. The whole thread is about the raid mechanic is not strategic. it’s 2 things… play crap ton of hours and offline on offficials. The fact you say 10 man clan is part of the reason why official pvp servers are 90% PVe clans who just play all day. And nothing they have done changes the best meta for official pvp. Combat is so easy to avoid pve c is really pve choice not conflict. And again as a business model, nothing has been done that appeals to bringing in new players, much less keep players that burn out on play 10 hours a day or, be part of 10 man clan that makes the pve trivial or be wiped.

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No one said you did.

They did.

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Yes they did, but they are off subject on how the devs do not see pvp as the same thing as what officials are named. The whole idea is really an epiphany of sorts for me, and I wanted others to basically stop wasting thier breath on asking for funcom to "fixi"official pvp. The devs are obtuse to how combat melee and current economy structure (items never decay) are the main problem with pvp (raid) servers and will never address that. But again, I agree no wipes. And PVE/PVE-C should not be touched as far as decaying stored items. Just PVP needs to have resources and the fight for them, or it will continue with the troll nature of just have more time to play to “win”.

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I like this. This would be good. I play PvP because I like the option of fighting other players when I bump into them but for me, strategic raiding is soooo boooring. I have zero interest in raiding people’s bases and I don’t like having to build defensively. I have a job and kids and stuff I can’t commit to defending myself in raid times.

But PvE-C is, first of all not available in Oceania (see the whole other post I made a while ago, which was completely ignored), and second of all, has set times once again. Just make everything 24/7, and I personally would be happy.

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TBH Raiding bases kills servers. I am in a 10 person clan that raids often, and we’ve learned over time to just hold back more than we feed. Its very easy to jump onto a server, farm for 2 nights and raid.

A raid does two things to people:

  1. Makes them quit. Either the game or server as you have robbed them of their time. No matter who they are, they more often than none don’t bounce back. Some quit the game, others quit the server.

  2. Rebuild and try again. Less than most i’ve found rebuild and have another go at it. At this point if you really hate that person or clan, hitting them again and again from a 10 person caln is easy way to trigger point 1.

Why offline raid?
Raid mechancis in Conan are designed also to favour the zerg or the defender depending on the context. A Defender for example can blindly replace broken doors/blocks as the zerg hits them. In Siptah for example, there is a cave base we once hit where everytime we took out a foundation or door, the defender would spam more.

We also found it near impossibe to raid undermeshers this way s they just spam land claim as we raid. The abilty for people to just spam blocks without actually being near them makes base defense favour offline raids simply by this nature alone.

Clan Size matters.
I am yet to see a base where a 10 person clan couldn’t raid a solo/duo/trio online/offline. Contrary to the above points, 10 of us raiding a base with full focus and force is just going to end with a win. Unless that defender has a 5-10 person clan as well (who have thought about the “what if i get raided, how would i react” principles). 10 People vs 1-3 is just a slaughter.

So … making all servers feed off a 24/7 PVP cycle is going to end with a population reduction across servers. Limiting Creation of blocks with some new strategies would rehabilitate the issue slightly (land claim limits, raytracing rules for placements etc) …however, the problem is not a lot of players can get the 10 person clan thing going. Most are lucky to get above 3 … so when you combine a large clan on a server with lots of small clans, they just dominate or over feed.

PVE-C in this context limits that, in that if a 10 person zerg were to hit a server and they over feed on the player base, well the player base will either stay in doors until after conflict is over or reduce their armour/weapon usage during these times to account for minor losses. Either way, the Zerg would likely get bored and migrate to a server that feeds their appetitite.

I feel the server modes aren’t the issue, its down to how you balance the population you have in a capacity that feeds the zerg but protects the smaller subsets. Furthermore, with more and more official servers having huge population displacement issues (pop is spread out across multiple servers in low amounts) there becomes an issue with that as well. As until you can feed that intended “Lots of players fighting lots of other players” goal by actually having lots of players consolidated under one roof… it just means that a 5 person or more clan goes on a low pop server… the feeding just becomes a problem.

The Question really is… WHY do raids exist? PVP is whatever, i think we can all agree that there is a time and place for PVP combat…

Raids however… getting Dragon Powder in Siptah is easy. In fact just to prove a point, a couple of us went onto a server fresh to raid a particular clan. We hit level 60 in the first day, and by day 2 we wiped the said clan and left. It was that easy.

If investment in future PVP is to be had … focusing on the modes… thats fools errand. Focus on WHY raids are important to the end-game players, and how you also provide ways for defenders to fight back against a larger number of players… thats critical…

As if you have people wanting to build bases, raid a little and be slapped around by zergs… can that be a sustainable outcome for all players… regardless of your personal belief system.

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What population? Seriously, the PVP servers are the same groups jumping around mostly. Thus why 90% PVP servers are dead at any given time. I also agree, the whole 10 man clan should be revisited for PVP (Raid) servers. It is way to easy for 10 people to live out of a 6x6x2 nucleus inside of wall spammed areas. One person can be on, as is known, and repair, then wait for the other clan to cool off by taking a day off, call in the other 9 and offline wipe. By going dynamic, dropping clans to solos only on PVP raid servers, players would have to worry about cross fire when raiding as alliance, wath thier own event logs, and even some resource blocking would go away, since it would block everyone you allied with as well. If done, then one could argue increase damage by bombs because now you are dealing with actual players and not AI defenses. Again, one thing won’t fix it, and that goes towards my true argument, the devs do not care to even try or understand how broken it is. They seem to be okay with dead PVP servers, or PVP server populated by vaults of static loot by PVE skilled players who just play more and spam build to protect their bases, and stay online during raid just to repair as you attack. I would prefer to just make the PVP servers 24/7 conflict as they are now, remove damage all together as that is more of a griefing tool than actual gameplay that entices casual competitive gamers. More competitive gamers would play on those server knowing they would get to do melee at any given moment. Save building damage for privates, as they tend to have communities who can agree on raid rules for those servers.

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Wow, you get it. thanks. Great points. the people who would hate wipes on PVP servers (raid) are ones who really aren’t on there for the Conan Lore style of raiding. you know battles between armies. They are on their to build, and take out frustrations on offline bases. They like having 20 vaults of mats, and don’t care if the server is empty. I know. the reason my clan lost alpha is because we burned out and purposely let people build up so we could get at least the hope of some melee back and forth. But by doing that we opened the door for clans to power farm and wipe the lesser, and we just really lost interest in defending when we could play more tactical pvp type games.

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You didn’t, you were responding to thread that took it sort of off my original thought. But it is good to always state your opinion. And knowing we are in the same ballpark as far as official server types, means i am not too far out there in my thinking.

What do you gain by raiding right now that you can’t just farm faster. Just the idea you chased more players from the game? Seems like a bad business model as a dev that the goal of a server is to chase player base away.

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