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:
-
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.
-
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.