Opposing my arguments with counterarguments would be welcome. Opposing them through misinterpretation doesn’t help anyone. You’re free to try to read between the lines, but don’t be surprised if you’re wrong.
And in this particular case, you really are wrong. The largest of my builds is my main base, which can fit into a 45x45 footprint. The rest are either smaller outposts, small “vanity builds” or public infrastructure. The rest of my clan has several massive builds, but they’re not playing on the server anymore and don’t show any inclination to come back, so I could just as easily take their buildings down.
Just to be clear, when I say “public infrastructure”, what I mean is:
- Out of 9 public map rooms placed by obelisks, I maintain 8. Of those, 5 were built by myself and 3 by clanmates.
- I built a large arena permanently open to anyone who wants to engage in friendly, consensual PVP outside the PVP hours. It can accommodate any number of fighters and spectators and could even be used to organize a gladiatorial kind of event where you kite a boss into it and then fight it.
- There’s an elevator built at the lip of the Sinkhole to help people get in more easily and get out safely.
As for the “vanity builds”, they serve no purpose but to showcase a neat concept. I can accept the loss of them, because they have no real utility.
Why am I explaining all of this? Because you – and other people – keep trying to suppress valid criticisms of the change by resorting to what ends up being a falsehood.
The first falsehood is that I have multiple “excessively large builds”, “covering large areas of map”. I hope my explanation so far has addressed your claim to your satisfaction.
The second falsehood is that I have a “thrall army”. I don’t. The only thralls I use for defense are those around my main base. There’s 24 of them and I would dearly love to cut down on that number. But Funcom’s bugs and crappy AI are not my fault. That’s why 6 of those 24 are inside my base’s courtyard, because the Purge shouldn’t spawn inside but it sometime does. The remaining 18 are there to cover all 6 sides of my base, because the thrall AI sucks so much that you need 3 thralls per side to make sure at least one of them will engage the enemy. And none of them are there because I expect them to defeat the Purge by themselves, it’s just to keep one group busy while I deal with the other(s).
So much for defense thralls. Any other followers I have are either: a small personal retinue (1 “elite bodyguard” I take to dungeons and PVE “raids” and 1 bearer), part of the public infrastructure (dancers at map rooms to cleanse other players’ corruption) or for decoration (dancers and ceremonial guards in the throne room, pets in the menagerie, and so on). I don’t even have guards for the public infrastructure or small outposts. And just as I can accept the loss of my vanity builds, I can accept the loss of decorative followers.
The third – and most irritating – falsehood is that I’m criticizing the change because I’m unable and unwilling to adapt, and therefore I want things to stay the same. I have adapted to all of the unpleasant changes in the past and Funcom hasn’t yet implemented a change to drive me away. A cap on building pieces would be one, but other than that, I can’t think of much that would make me quit.
Even the size of the follower cap doesn’t really affect me as much as it would most other clans. I have 9 people in my clan, but only 2 of us are active. Between the two of us, we can comfortably split the follower cap and keep playing happily.
So why do I oppose the change, then? Because it actually has real problems that affect a great number of players. Some of them affect me, too, but others don’t. And those problems should be addressed, by Funcom.
For the record, here’s the summary of the problems I think the new change brings, quoted from the main feedback thread:
Since you all seem to be so convinced that I’m reacting entirely out of self interest, let’s go over these problems and see which ones affect me and in what degree:
- They only two builds I would have to “depopulate” is my menagerie, which currently has 9 pets, and Castle Black, which has 7 giants and 1 white yeti outside it. The white yet is called Snow White and the giants are called Dopey, Sneezy, Doc and, well, you get the joke. Considering that I can field 50-ish followers all by myself, I could even leave it like that. But if I had to get rid of them, I wouldn’t shed a tear. I don’t actually have a tavern or a brothel or a prison – those are some examples of builds that require thralls for decorative purposes.
- The only thing I am unprepared to lose to the Purge is my main base. I have concentrated my defense there and will keep doing so as long as I can. If I’m not there to defend one of my outposts, they can be rebuilt easily. If I can’t depend public infrastructure, well, it’s not my problem. Let other players chip in or go complain to Funcom.
- As I explained above, the cap formula doesn’t affect me, because I already have a large clan that remains largely inactive.
- This doesn’t affect me at all. I have no glitched thralls and I have found all my clanmates’ abandoned followers.
- This could affect me if I was at cap and someone left my clan. It affects everyone else, too. It’s sloppy design. Feel free to defend it, if you really think that’s okay.
- This bothers me more than it should, not so much because I’ll have to go grinding for Lianeele or hope that the buggy Purge deigns to bless me with humans instead of crappy beasts. No, it bothers me because there’s a handful of people on the forums whose response is “you can get 100 new followers in a matter of hours”. Not only is it factually incorrect hyperbole, it’s insultingly dismissive.
So much for all the falsehoods and misinterpretation of my own arguments. How about the rest of what you wrote?
Sounds like it is, for PVP servers, and that’s great. Meanwhile, people on PVE servers who cause real problems by walling in resources and obelisks, or by building roads that go from one end of the map to another because, unlike me, they don’t want to spend half an hour to refresh their stuff. You think my Citadel or my arena are somehow detrimental to the server? What would you say about the clan who used to play that walled off the whole area around Boundary Spillway and Shattered Basin for their base? The change won’t do anything to solve those problems at all.
And I know that you’re one of the people who will just shrug it off and say “it’s just PVE, it doesn’t matter”, but I hope you can eventually see that it’s really unfair, just as it was unfair from Funcom to drive so many PVP players away.
Speaking of which, the whole reason I’m spending my time engaging in these increasingly pointless discussions is that I believe people’s opinions can be changed through civil discussion. I know I’ve had mine changed, here, on these forums, by people who took the time and effort to actually explain and argue rationally.
For example, I had no idea just how bad PVP players had it until the people on the “lollypop bases are toxic” thread and the “is PVE as important as PVP” thread explained it. And now I know and I don’t go around claiming that Funcom doesn’t care about PVE and caters only to PVP players.
Another example is that I used to believe that Funcom’s business model was to get people interested in Conan and then drive them to private servers. Then Ignasis explained that Funcom does not profit from private server rentals in any way, at all. So now I point that out to other people who make the same mistake.
So if you’ve made it all the way through this wall of text and ended up here, let me ask you something: how much time do you think it took me to write all of this down, to engage with you in good faith? Do you think that maybe you, @Halk and @WhatMightHaveBeen – to name just a few – would be willing to actually look at some of the arguments? If not, that’s perfectly understandable, but do you think you could stop claiming that I’m upset because I don’t listen and just want things to be my way? If you want to know what I’m upset about, it’s that the efforts I go to in order to engage people in discussion are met with misinterpretation and mischaracterization.
Whatever the outcome of this discussion, I know one thing for sure: I’ve grown tired of spending my time this way. I’ve made my best effort to engage in civil, reasonable discussion. If it makes you feel better about yourself to believe I’m entitled, biased and reactionary, then I won’t keep trying to convince you otherwise.