Just make Thralls disappear when bases disappear. That would do wonders alone. Put them on decay timers like bases. You could put T4 on long timers and sliding curves down to shorter timers for lower tiers. That might be a slight to low levels though. The biggest lag causers on my PVE server isn’t thralls but it’s HUGE castles that are as tall as mountain sides. A sign by one says , “Welcome, Castle Loading…”. Seriously the thralls are only a problem when they are left behind by a former base. I am beginning to think they are tied into the pet system dynamic and that is why we are screwed. PvP servers already have an answer and its the ability to kill them.
I agree 100%, and it’s not like it would have to be “instead of the feeding system”, it could just as well be complimentary to it. However, according to Joel Bylos it “doesn’t work that way”.
At first I was like “psh, of course it could work!”, but then…
When one starts to think about it, it is (of course) not quite as simple as all that: Thralls can be placed on the ground, where there’s no obvious building decay to “link to”. Linking them to the nearest foundation piece seemed obvious - but what happens if you voluntarily destroy that foundation then? Rebind to the next nearest, I suppose, but still. The nearest piece could conceivably be VERY far away. There’s probably all sorts of technical reasons why that wouldn’t work. The best I can come up with in this rambling stream-of-consciousness-kinda-post is to have them bind to the nearest Feeding Pot (and not being able to place a thrall unless there was a pot in range), and if/when that decays, so do the Thralls. But that in turn makes Feeding Pots strategic high-value targets in PVP. Not necessarily a problem, but a clear example of the kind of knock-on issues you get when changing a part of a complicated system.
That’s just a couple of issues off the top of my head, and without much in the way of technical insight. I’m not saying a solution to all of that couldn’t be found, because I believe it could - but it’s probably not a small task, or even a medium-sized one.
TL/DR: As long as it’s possible to place thralls independently of building pieces - and it should remain so - then there’s more to it than “have them follow building decay”.
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Not sure yet what changes the community manager alluded to, but just from watching the livestream where they demo’d the feeding pots, one thing stuck out to me like a sore thumb. The dev put food in the pot, and on the next tick of time, a stack of food automatically transferred from the pot to the thrall’s inventory. That seemed unnecessarily complex. From a mechanics standpoint, why not just have a hungry thrall auto-consume food from the nearest stocked pot instead of bothering with some sort of “transfer to inventory” system?
This suggestion does not address the others’ concerns about not wanting to spend too much time on thrall maintenance, but I wanted to toss it up anyway.
Well that is if they are not stuffed inside a huge castle 