SO since the uproar is out there to not change thralls, or limit not exist, then i never want temp effects changed on armors. I have crafted all my armor based on the current mechanic. so have others. So if we are not making changes because it will “delete” others hard work then this can’t be changed. Do not limit my ability to store tokens a certain way. Not all tokens were duped. some people farmed those tokens, even if the found creative ways to hide them. to hell with the good of the game. Some people put in real hours for those tokens and haven’t been able to use them because they were turned off. Not their fault the mechanics allowed the perma-storage.
I am sure over the last year plus, that many a people lost some type of their hard work for a mechanic change that expanded and move the game forward. I know within the first 2 months, my clan lost 1 vault of demon orbs. We didn’t dupe, but some people did, and Funcom zapped them all with a patch when they fixed the dupe. We were disappointed, but also understood why and actually just re-farmed it, until they removed the stack effect. Where i am going with this, is at some point hard decision have to be made for the good of all, not just the most vocal.
Are we discussing follower cap here or updates in general? Because if you made this just as an argument for the follower cap, there’s a perfectly serviceable thread already in progress and this whole topic will just be a bit of extra work for the mods, who will have to merge it into the feedback thread.
On the other hand, if we’re discussing updates in general, then there’s a bit more nuance to be had than “either we don’t have any major updates or the most vocal should shut up and accept what they’re given without discussion”
Thing is, making this whole process better for players would take a lot of work. For example, they could proactively toss out an idea, before implementing so much of it, and see how the players react. Sure, people would be just as loud and outraged as they are now, but they would also come up with interesting ideas, suggestions, feedback and insights – just as now, but with an important difference: that feedback wouldn’t have to be disregarded just because so much effort has already been sunk into implementing the new thing in a particular way.
Hell, just letting people know about an upcoming major change in direction with even more time to prepare would have been better than this.
Then there’s the whole topic of quality and bugfixes. Would I be happy if Funcom stopped implementing new things for a while – even if they were working on things I really wanted and would appreciate – just to focus on polishing the game and eradicating bugs? Damn right I would.
So yeah, “major updates” is not really a trump card
My flying houses all disappeared!!! I spent countless hours designing them and decorating the interiors. I didn’t get any warning they wanted the flying tree bases to be gone!
Actaully i was createing a thread to vent the changes that shart on a players efforts.
And secondly, you use to be a gamedev or something. Then you know with tech and programming, there has to be months of planning the path and coding to get something right. Waiting for a forum to hash out what is best for business is not a great practice. In this case, Funcom Dev team are the artist. Creating something they have a passion for. We are the consumer. We vote with our wallets. Somewhere in there is a business team at Funcom that analyze industry, the game we play, and what can be done and sets forth a path that is in the best interest of the game. If they listened only to the consumer, we would have another battle arena game, since that is the most popular casual game style atm. This is where passion comes in from the dev team. They don’t listen just to public popularity, they share an internal vision that makes 12 hour coding sessions worth it. Without that passion, we would have 9 to 5 cookie cutter ideas.
Yeah, it would be a terrible practice, but that’s not what I was proposing. Apart from having been a gamedev for 2 years, I’ve been a software developer for 20 years in general. And I know that getting input from your users is often the difference between success and failure. How often and in what way you get back to your users can vary drastically, but you should do it if you want your product to “stay alive”.
I wasn’t saying that Funcom should ask the players what to do and then wait for players to decide. As the old adage goes, they would have asked for “a better horse”. I’m not even saying that Funcom should come up with an idea and then have players vet it and agree. I’m fully aware of how bad Design By Committee is and how much bikeshedding happens every time people talk about abstract ideas.
What I’m saying is that, every now and then, Funcom might want to come out and float an idea by their community, before sinking effort in it, just to gauge the reactions and see if there’s any useful feedback.
In short, there’s a whole spectrum between the extremes of “democracy by acclamation” and “dictatorship”, and I’m arguing for nudging the slider a little bit in a particular direction
In that case, they have been listening to the forums. People want less lag. It is a topic that creeps into pretty much every thread, whether it fits there or not. The problem is when they find the best solution is something the forum doesn’t like or want to hear, or feels is somehow purposely disrespecting the time they put into the game, we get a wave of anti change…
The problem is when they find the best solution is something the forum doesn’t like or want to hear, or feels is somehow purposely disrespecting the time they put into the game, we get a wave of anti change…
Just that! I personally can’t believe anyone is happy with the lagg. You can tell by many private server settings already that reduction of building spam, light sources and followers are keyfactors in creating an enjoyable experience for everyone. It should be number one priority to do something finally.
The only thing that I would criticize on Funcoms decisions against players who sunk 1000 hours or more into their thrall and pet rich bases is, that these things should have been addressed a long time ago during EA. It should never have been allowed in the first place to cover whole quadrants or hord a thousand followers.
Of course there’s a wave of anti-change. Every change will have a boatload of people complaining about it. People will disagree with everything and anything, no matter how good or bad, no matter if it’s a net positive or not. That’s not the point.
You assume that they will always find the “best solution”. I’m too much of a realist to believe that. There’s a reason why I keep using the phrases such as “useful feedback” and “interesting insights”. The whole point is that somewhere inside the veritable sea of “I hate this change and I’ll quit playing and then you’ll be sorry”, there might be a thing or two that would make the devs go “Hmmm, I didn’t think of that, would that work?”
Me neither. But you can’t oversimplify and reduce things to a false dichotomy. Saying “the follower cap shouldn’t exist because I don’t like it” is just as useful as saying “anyone who criticizes the follower cap is arguing that we should have lag”.
It’s certainly not that simple but as a long time player on official servers I am hinting that a good chunk of naivety is involved in defending huge amounts of followers.
When they didn’t have these tanks HP amounts I used to clean archers ect only because it would reduce the lagg around the bases speckled with thralls. It has always been a big thing.
Exactly for that reason I found it very disturbing that Thralls were suddenly given humongous HPs and were excluded from raid hours. This allowed many clans to start hoarding tons of Thralls that were never removed. So many months later, I am very happy that things go back into balance a bit again.
As a long-time player on official servers, I agree that the perf can take a nosedive for various reasons and that anything with AI is the most expensive culprit.
As a long-time player on official servers, I also recognize that there are certain problems with this solution that could have been avoided or addressed differently or mitigated.
I’m sure that I’m not the only person on the forums whose attitude isn’t “NO!!!” but rather “okay, but…” That’s what I’m talking about. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Look, despite how exhausting it is, I won’t stop trying to make people understand that you can’t just silence all criticism through fallacies. Like I said, not all criticism is simple, mindless resistance. Conflating all criticism like that is just a straw man argument. Saying that Funcom are the experts and they know everything and have chosen the best feasible solution is appeal to authority, and it’s also not supported by their track record.
I get it, performance problems suck. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be addressed. I’m not saying that the follower cap shouldn’t be implemented. There are really two things I keep saying. One is: “Look, these are some of the real, important problems caused by the follower cap. Funcom should do something about them.” The other is the one I verbalized in my first reply to this thread and it boils down to: “Maybe these problems could have been reduced, mitigated or even avoided if Funcom occasionally tried to get some feedback before doing a bunch of work.”
What I honestly don’t understand is why I have to keep explaining what I’m not arguing for or against. I try to put some effort in expressing myself clearly, yet it seems like people choose to ignore all nuance and just reply to the most simplified interpretation of what I wrote. Frankly, it gets frustrating after a while.
Because most of your responses come across as you know more than the people who are driving the business and actually building the game. A person can be right (in this case no more about UE4 and other programming tricks), but at the same time wrong in that they are not in meetings, not scratching the raw data, not doing all of that. Your knowledge comes from being in the industry, not in the war room. From what i have gotten from all the attempted patches with optimization, is that they have tried multiple ways, and it has come done to the one thing they don’t like, a limit on something in the sandbox. So for all the great ideas out there on other band aids, i feel someone in the room at Funcom finally said, pull the band-aid and lets just close the damn wound (performance issues), no matter how painful, so we (Funcom) can move forward and progress the game where we think it can go.
I don’t know. When I look at my replies in my thread, the only thing I keep saying is “hey, maybe they don’t actually know everything and might benefit from seeking earlier feedback”, whereas you keep saying “no, they know everything best”. If that ain’t appeal to authority, I don’t know what is.
I certainly haven’t claimed I know more than they do. Not in this thread and not in others. As a matter of fact, on the few occasions that people involved me specifically in their discussions about technical matters, I kept repeating the same disclaimer every time: I don’t work for Funcom, they know better, I haven’t even had direct experience with this particular engine or modding this particular game.
Instead of claiming that I know more than they do, I’m claiming that nobody knows everything, that we could all sometimes benefit from hearing what other people have to say, and that sometimes listening to other people’s feedback is better done earlier than later.
I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, but that seems like a really unfair characterization. CM routinely prefaces their comments with disclaimers that they are speaking generally from personal experience and even defends Funcom, explaining how coding is more complicated than a lot of us seem to think.
If anyone is drawing the conclusion that CM thinks they know more about how the code in this game works than Funcom does, then we must have very different understandings of written English.
I hear ya OP. When they put in Climbing I pretty much wrote this game off.
Those were simpler days when all we had was desert, raid was 24/7 and sometimes, just as you lay your head onto the soft threads of the pillowcase, drifting off … you shock into full wakefulness! You forgot to demolish the stairs.
The reason I am so strongly opposing your arguments is because if I read between the lines (or at least this is what I think is meant), you want to keep your thrall army in order to defend multiple bases, with each of them covering large areas of the map.
If you want to keep the thralls to sustain excessively large builds, I want exactly the opposite. I want these vast areas covered with grief builds or farming outposts to disappear, as they propose a big problem towards new players, resource gathering and server performance.
The follower mass is only one part of the problem. If people can’t have unlimited followers anymore they will have to draw their resources more to one main base. So what you consider an unthoughtful side effect, is exactly the intended direction of this change.
I kind of agree that I would prefer a trend towards more consolidated and shared effort bases rather than big clans that spam map square sized forts all over the map. Not that I have a problem with people fully expressing their creativity and being able to bring their visions to reality. However I feel that should be something more for the single player/co-op feature of the game.
In terms of multiplay, restrictions on players can be a good thing, it’s very similar to why one would implement regulation and restrictions even in a free market system, without such measures you will always have those that try to take advantage and succumb to the greed of more, even when it is negatively affecting others.
Well I personally hoped for a free market approach, where it would be just harder to build, farm and capture Thralls. This way there is no hard limit you can feel but the effect should be similar.
This, this right here. The players who “side” with Funcom n the cap actually listened and read what they said. A majority not wanting the cap, or a larger one are the one who are not “listening”. The very reason you are upset is the very reason they feel they have to do this to better optimize the game. I am not saying it is 100% going to work. But being I can admit when someone knows more than me on something, and then try to learn and understand them, and that knowledge follows a string of logic, i can accept what they are doing. It just so happens what they are doing now aligns with what i perceive as the issues when i am on a server when it comes to lag and other tech issues.
Yes/no… Many are happy with ANYTHING that Funcom says… Probably want to be the next Chosen of Asura.
And thats wrong.
Funcom said 650 ACTIVE thralls will be a problem to the server.
If you have 20 players who have 55 thralls on their own, they have 1100 thralls… How does this cap limit prevent 650 active thralls? Oh, right. It doesnt…
If Funcom would have added this cap in the game-prime-time, it would be even lower…
My guess: they probably looked at average player count on servers and threw some numbers around, until they had this 55-100 cap.
How many thralls/pets can Ark handle? Its also using UE4…
