I’m not here to complain, I’m here to simply understand. For some time now certain things have been decaying on PVE officials but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason. I have an ‘old’ main base which was sprawling. Last fall sometime half of it decayed even though the area I stayed mostly in was fine. For months/years, sticking to my side of the base and leaving my friends’ area alone was enough to keep it from decaying. Last fall, it decayed when I thought it was reset. No big deal, no one was using it, but found it strange that it decayed even though I was keeping up with resetting every few days when I wasn’t playing intensely. I missed not notification and lost hundreds of hours of work. Wasn’t my stuff, and I doubt my friends had any real interest left. So I’ve been notcing the decay timers aren’t in sync and have been acting odd lately.
This week, it seems only things of value decayed at my base, when i thought I had just refreshed it a couple of days ago:
- Main structures are intact, the buildings themselves were fine - except for doors
- Certain production benches decayed, and from what I can tell things not close to walls, except on the first floor of one of my towers
- Certain chests and large boxes decayed - I have an attic with large boxes for storage but only steel fire and steel reinforcement decayed - all the other boxes were still intact, so out of roughly 20+ boxes only two random ones decayed in the attic.
- All boxes on all other floors below what I described decayed (including around 700 feat points which is what I’m most salty about)
- Some ornamental stuff decayed while other things right next to each other didn’t - I had a racks of weapons on display across a wall, some of that stuff decayed while others did not
- My gold/silver rocknoses in animal pens and my wheels (which were all built on foundations which were still there) had decayed, while iceboxes right next to them were intact.
I could keep citing examples but wanted to paint a picture that it seems a lot of random things decayed for reasons™.
Here is my non-scientific and full conjecture analysis based on what I’ve witnessed in the past:
From the behavior, I think anything that has sandstone foundations underneath (or maybe a better framing is mixed tiers/set pieces) it is at risk for this disjointed decay timers. My t3 early bases have sandstone foundations underneath while my later bases are all solid t3.
Resetting decay timers don’t all happen all at once on each piece placed and are connected with each other, but I do believe certain pieces, like building pieces do update all at once if they are connected (and if they are of the same time type).
Patches cause some decay timers to erroneously speed up/change compared to other items. Patches are a big one for me. There are times after a patch download that my decay timers were ready to kick in when I had been playing the night before the patch. This is the one that scares me.
Has anybody run into this before? Are there known bugs as to decay timers and placement, or am I just an unlucky player here? I religiously refresh my bases before decay timers should be up if I’m not in full gaming mode with this game, and I’m in full mode quite often.
Loading range/reset decay timer range may not always work properly after a patch, or may be part of a silent patch change. Or the decay timers simply get disjointed after a patch.
Moral of the story - diversify where you store you stuff. Don’t group all your most valuable stuff in one box. Spread it around.
Also, no need to tell me to play on a private server. I had one, I enjoyed officials better. The temptation to spawn in everything is too great and felt like a dev sand box rather than a game. Also, after every patch, fixing/updating mods became a multiple hour/day chore. And this happens at such frequency, with mods never working right again, that it simply wasn’t fun. I could play on an unmodded server (which is close but not exact to official settings because some official settings aren’t exposed to the UI and can only be changed by mods), but then again I could play free on an official server. At least I know an official server I’m not paying for will be here as long as Funcom supports this game. So yeah, don’t tell me to play on a private server. It’s not a solution to decay timers, which is a fundamental part of the base game. I just want to know what the unwritten rules to decay timers actually are.