It's Nerf or Nothing

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Nope, more balance posts have to do with PvP only.
The care bears just play and frolic about with out a care in the world.

i don’t know if funcom knows it, but there’s still overpowered weapons on some servers

when the buff oil came, there was a bug you might remind, that the buffs stacks every server restart.
they fixed this after more than a week.
so there are people overthere with 4x harvest rate tools, weapons with 100% armor penetration, weapons with more than 200 damage and things like this XD
the game looks like it’s still on early access

They are working on a Dune game
 Dune is an amazing setting, but the game will be full of flaws like Conan exiles. As you said, it’s Funcommed. It’s a joke for everyone who plays this.
When a new survival or hybrid game with a similar setting (old age, classic age, medieval
) comes, conan exiles will be doomed.

At least this god tokens issue they fixed. The old avatar summoning tokens turned into garbage.
They create new item ids for the tokens.
Bodyvaults and familyshare are still a problem.
I have at least 3 bodies on each server i’ve passed full of loot. My clan mates has too as well as other clans/players

I can’t simply say what is their problem in regards of patches or testing because i’m not an emplyee, but if i could really guess, its the testing methods. Some developers test their game by playing it, or rely too much on playtesters even. It might sound stupid to say it, but this can be a problem. When you add new mechanics, everything that has even the slightest connection with said overhaul needs to be tested. You can’t simply create a new character, pretend to be a player and test the changes through your average conan sitting, its not enough. If you do that, these massive oversights happen, because people play differently and no person uses everything the game has to offer. Perhaps no one gave a sh*it about this waterskin and during the playtest (as expected) no one thought about it because surprise, it never mattered for them.

Corrected some wrong info

Wrong wrong
 Only healing waterskin came with Siptah Beta. Where also the revamp of the healing came.

@Ceronesthes is 100% right
 Many people at Funcom really have no clue, what they are even doing. Or why they are doing xyz, because it contradicts many other things (heavy armor gets useful → add weapon which bypass ALL armor, etc).

No one there, plays the game NORMALY. Just look at the dev streams → godmode and admin spawn in everything.
They even run around in tuned up values
 Just look at some videos and for how long their torches live. Like when they presented the Khari dungeon


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Yupp, this is called “regression testing” in software development. And this is a tedious task. But developers can create automated unit tests to help with regression testing. If you write tests first before implementing a feature, it’s called test driven development. And this is a very good quality assurance method done by the developer.

I know that game development is harder than normal software development, but I am pretty sure Unreal Engine 4 offers some kind of unit test framework.

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Tried looking it up, seems like there was one other waterskin that simply had more storage capacity, its also legendary. This is probably what i had in mind

Yeah, I only use the Khari waterskin. There was another better waterskin at the southest cave (Deep drink Waterskin).

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Even when FC did test to find out f.e. the waterskin crap or the Annihlator and Worldbreaker nightmare, its a waste of MONEY!!!

The items dont drop from sky. Someone has to make graphics, texts, attribute values, etc. and then the item gets more or less rendered useless


So why even add such items in the game? Why all the work for such items? Its just wasting money and resources.

Yeah in the end you are correct. But the real question is though:
“Why did they fail to rebalance these items properly?”

Because they went the easy and cheap way: Just nerf it into uselessness. (saves them design time and coding time)

Instead of redesigning it
 Hence I say “rebalance”. It doesn’t necessarily just mean “nerf”.

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there is one op weapon that is uber counter to any healing, not gonna say it loud cause they gonna nerf it too lmao.

While I don’t think disparaging the devs is okay, I also never understood the logic behind Lifeblood Spear and the healing water skin. The best I can come up with is that the team still has occasional moments of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” And they go with it because they know they can change things later :man_shrugging:

I’m thinking that was a problem with how they organized the closed beta.

First, I’m not sure they selected the testers properly. I, for one, don’t like cheesing the AI. If you give me new mechanics to test and I’m frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining something through grinding, my solution would be to give you feedback that asks you to adjust the grind. I most likely wouldn’t think of solving it myself through cheesing. I wasn’t in the closed beta, but it’s no stretch to assume most of the players they selected shared this trait.

Second, they didn’t guide the beta test properly. I know who three of the testers were. Two said “nah, I didn’t care for the Maelstrom thing so I didn’t play with it a lot” and third never said anything on that topic. Maybe that’s “just 2 out of N” players, but the fact remains that they shouldn’t have had any players who failed to properly engage with one of the core game mechanics they were trying to test.

In short, if you’re going to do a closed beta, do at least one of the following, hopefully both:

  • Organize it properly by giving players testing goals (e.g. “this week we’re focusing on Maelstrom”).
  • Recruit players who think outside the box, like that trope about FBI hiring hackers they caught.

Yep. That also comes from poorly organized closed beta. If they gathered 20 players and said something like “this week everyone has to be doing vaults as much as they can”, they would’ve run into this real fast.

Nah. There’s quality assurance. I’ve seen posts from people who aren’t Funcom employees but have worked with Funcom closely enough to know what’s under the hood. They confirmed that Funcom does hire testers – beyond this closed beta they had – and they have them test their stuff.

The problem isn’t lack of quality assurance. It’s that the way they do it is even worse than the gaming industry average, which in itself is light years behind the software development industry average. Speaking of which:

Yeah, that’s a big problem in the industry, and a horrible problem when it comes to Conan Exiles. I’ve lost count of the times that a patch reintroduced an old bug.

The trouble with regression testing in game development is twofold. First, most testing is done by hand. Second, things change too much, so the repro steps for an old bug might not trigger it anymore when it gets reintroduced.

Looks like they introduced that in 4.17: Automation System in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation

Conan Exiles uses 4.15, if I remember correctly.

Amen! That’s also the reason they throw RNG at everything they can get away with.

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I have to disagree. If you had limited time with limited resources and multiple mechanics that you had to test while they were also in active development, would you allocate all of them in testing one mechanic and leaving everything else untested? I am also not being paid to beta test 12 hours a day.

Not every issue that has been reported can be solved easily. Many were fixed, many were completely reworked, some made it to live not in the state they should have been for a full release which is I guess the reason we are in Early Access.

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But we didn’t even have any deadlines announced until the trailers came out (at least as far as i remember), i don’t see how time was limited. If it was, its by their own decision o.O

Every project has a deadline.

Of course, but my point is, nothing seemed to be promised publicly, so they could (with the little information we, players had) wait a couple more months and no one would have minded.

I wish it was that simple.

Do you genuinely think that all of this we are going through, is/was the best possible option?

@Skillo No, I wish we have never had a single bug and everything we have reported would be fixed within 10 mins.

I wouldn’t want to leave anything untested, but that doesn’t necessarily follow from what I was saying.

Every testing program has limited time and limited resources, and I would be willing to bet the vast majority of them have multiple things to test. Depending on those limitations, it might or might not be possible to come up with a test plan that focuses on a single mechanic in one stage, then on a different mechanic in another, etc.

So yeah, they might not have been able to organize things that way due to limited time and resources. It’s certainly possible. It’s even possible that there was no better way they could have organized the closed beta, than the way they did.

Thing is, we’re never going to put that discussion to rest except by agreeing to disagree. Those of us who weren’t in the program have no information about how it worked. Those who did participate probably can’t share it, and even if they could, I wouldn’t ask them to put themselves in that situation.

Regardless of whether we agree on how they should have done things, the one indisputable fact is that they failed to catch some very serious problems. I believe that they should have done a better job.

Sure, but I was talking about a very specific issue here: the vault chests being empty. If that was one of the issues that couldn’t be solved easily and was intentionally punted into the Early Access, then all I can say is that Early Access doesn’t mean that they can’t communicate about known bugs.

EDIT: I want to make absolutely clear that this is not a personal attack or criticism of any of the players who participated in the closed beta.

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