I want to address this a bit, so that people don’t get an idea of some fantasy and run with it. I mean… this is kind of already being done. But this topic gives a good spot to illustrate that.
There hasn’t been a real major PVP update in years. Everything relating to PVP (such as the stamina changes) has been with a PVE focus (and the stamina update itself had some… Minor considerations to PVP, spending an hour or so a day for a month or two is a minor consideration IMO).
When you see PVP changes such as building health adjustments, changes to how acid arrows work, or similar. Those are reactionary to how the community is taking certain things. Or at best a fix to a bug (such as the Lance hitting multiple times per strike).
But there hasn’t been a real ground up approach to balance and structure how PVP is supposed to go. For example effort to build versus effort to tear down. Incentives to raid. As well as a PVP game loop with all the new features and systems added to the game since the first major changes in 2018.
Is this laziness? Kinda. At its worst, its a misappropriation of time, effort, and resources. At best, its triage of the same. For the PVP player its the former. For the PVE player its the latter? Who’s right in this regard? Well neither, but also both. They can’t make both happy here. I’m not defending that decision, just pointing out the facts of it.
Now here comes the wild card. I see many times in this discussions that things are bad because of this or that, and the 4x harvest. See… now this is a problem on the players. Its not wrong to want the 4x multiplier on FC Provided servers to be reduced. But it is incorrect to assume that the 4x harvest goes hand in hand with any sort of development decision.
The developers and server admins do not speak to each other. They are frequently not even in the same room as one another. I don’t even believe they are even in the same Country or Hemisphere as one another. Suffice to say, those servers are not considered for much of the development decisions being made.
They do affect each other for the experience you get on those servers, but one issue doesn’t cause the other. Because I will point out that I have never had a 4x harvest modifier on any server I’ve played. I’ve never even had 3x. The highest I go is 2x and I much prefer 1x, especially for PVP. I’m just pointing out that Conan Exiles PVP doesn’t revolve around 4x harvesting rates. It doesn’t have to be that way. They can change their server settings, and players can choose to play elsewhere.
With all this said though, the major problem starts at the very foundation… and no pun intended. Basically how much effort should putting up something take, and how much effort should it take to tear it down. Funcom right now, to my knowledge does NOT have an idea of what that formula should be.
In 2017 when the game was in early access there MAY have been an idea (I don’t remember feeling like there was) but that is not 2023 and there has been no effort that I know of to have anything that resembles an idea of effort versus effort.
Where we are right now is that any ‘fix’ such as adjusting harvest rates, adjusting bomb damage, adjusting this or that is going to result in the major problem just shifting somewhere else. And @Octavian you brought up an interesting thing:
That’s an interesting question. Because it is related to a question Funcom needs to answer for themselves. How quickly do they want raiders to be able to raid? It sounds like a simple question to answer. But it is something that will take some heavy consideration.
If you want fights to happen quickly, then rebuilding must be quick. If you want it slow, then building can be slower. But they have to work in conjunction. Not this heavy time investment to build that gets washed away in a fraction of the time.
The fix means taking a look at all the recipes involved in PVP. Stone to Stonebrick, Stonebrick to Hardened Stonebrick, Wood to Shaped Wood, Dry Wood to Insulated Wood, both types of Reinforcements, Steelfire, Dragonpowder, Trebuchets, and everything else. Looking at the time it takes to make everything, what its used for, some vision of how buildings generally are made, what is made, and what it takes to breach them. Then looking at the resources and time it takes to make the objects that tear those defenses down, their ease of use, use cases, and how they can be carried on site.
This could very well change the system of building in a major way similar to what we saw in Age of Sorcery. But in reality, it would probably be a good thing even for those who don’t PVP to see a rebalance of the entire building system.
I was kind of hoping Age of War would have some of this in it. But I don’t think it will (Chapter 2 is supposedly the fixall update that meshes all the Chapter 1 stuff and even some pre-AoW concerns together). Though we’ll see what the devs have to say for their next livestream. But I think what I am proposing (and what I believe simply needs to happen) is going to be an Age level effort. Unfortunately I don’t see that being a priority anytime soon. Hopefully I’m wrong there.
I was surprised to see gunpowder in Conan Exiles.