Yeah, there’s a way to opt out of that and I was wondering if it still works.

Rather have a purge that kills newbies, but is fun when you learn how to defend. Than a purge that any newbie can beat, and as a result, is a boring joke to everyone.

1 Like

Agree, @tdshooter .

Both options are underwhelming.

What we should have is a purge that the newbies will be informed about, have time to prepare their defenses, and will be able to defeat if they prepare properly. This basic purge shouldn’t have any special rewards, but serve as training. Anyone who wants more challenge, should be able to opt into a tougher purge (e.g. via these treasure rooms) and face more danger in exchange for some enticing rewards (e.g. special loot or thralls).

That’s what I would like to see, rather than having to choose between two unsatisfying choices. And I’m still holding out hope that the devs will implement something like that in the upcoming Age.

6 Likes

On officials I could hardly get a purge to trigger because I didn’t play frequently enough. Did they increase the rate that you accumulate your bar?

1 Like

No idea. I know my purge meter galloped right along. But they haven’t got the mew mechanic in game yet so no clue. Probably be at least 2 months before it’s on test.

i remember the day when my noob river base got raided by the Disciples of Sobek.
Peeps asking if i needed help, and me saying ‘nah i’ll manage’ :sunglasses:

Needles to say my whole base got flattened in minutes.

1 Like

I didn’t play back when purges happened in Noob River but I find it an odd design decision that they don’t. I feel like that area should at least have a purge that, like you says, introduces what the purge is even if it scaled somewhat differently than “normal” purges.

1 Like

I find it a reasonable temporary measure.

The way the purge meter works, you can fill it up really quickly if you’re in a clan with a couple of friends and you focus on doing certain stuff. It turns out True Newbs (i.e. people who are actually new to the game rather than just creating a new character) happen to do those things a lot. It also turns out that the game used to do a less-than-stellar job of letting True Newbs know that there’s a thing called the Purge, much less explaining what it is and how to prepare.

Before they introduced the new journey system, the only mentions of the purge you could find were:

  • a journey step “survive the purge” (or something like along those lines), that didn’t even appear on your HUD until you were done with a whole bunch of other things
  • a couple of lore documents and/or dialog lines

So basically, if you were a True Newb, unless you saw this little bar in your inventory screen and thought to ask in chat “hey, what’s this ‘purge meter’ thingy?”, you had almost no chance of preparing for a purge and had a considerable chance of losing most of your T1 base to it.

Sure, you can usually count on other people on the server helping you out if you called out immediately after getting the purge notification, and you can usually count on them helping you rebuild if you get wiped out by the purge, and most newbs don’t really quit because their first purge steamrolled them and tea-bagged their corpses, but…

…but it doesn’t change the fact that the way things were back then wasn’t really good game design.

So I believe they implemented this exemption as a stopgap. But that’s just my theory.

Now that they’re revamping the purge, maybe they’ll change that. Maybe they won’t. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m hoping the new system will end up being good, after all the teething problems are sorted out.

1 Like

That makes a lot of sense.

When we set up our server, we read through all the settings (maybe a benefit of not playing on officials so you can change settings for yourself) and weren’t sure entirely about the purge but didn’t want to completely spoil it by watching youtube videos to prepare. We ended up not getting one until we were deep in the jungle (gorilla purge, wasn’t so bad) but that initial wait of “what is it, how bad will it be, etc” was a lot of finger-biting as our bar crept closer and closer up to the line.

2 Likes

When I played this game for the first time, I went in blind. No wiki, no youtube, nothing. When the purge warning popped, I didn’t even know what that was. :smile:
It looked dangerous. I had a nice base because it made sense building it and had a few leveled medium tier thralls. We survived with few casualities. Only a few blocks were destroyed by a giant croc (that I had been avoiding in the wild during the whole time).
Now, if my second ever purge had been the first, I would be toast. I got a cultists of sobek purge and I didn’t even know what hit me. But as I had overprepared after the 1st purge 'just in case", things went fairly well. I saw humans and my first thought was “this is gonna be easy”. Boy, how wrong I was.
I don’t know if I would have like to have my surprise spoiled. Info must be given, but not too explicitly.

2 Likes

I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think Funcom just needs to ensure the following:

  • The player should be guided towards the information we already have in the lore (i.e. journals, notes, and NPC dialogs). Ideally, they should be able to discover this information before filling up their purge meter.
  • The game should make it clear to the player that the purge will damage their buildings. On PVE and PVE-C servers, the expectation is that nothing can damage your buildings, and the purge breaks that expectation.

Unfortunately, neither the old journey system nor the new one accomplish this, in my opinion. However, the new journey system at least makes the player aware of the purge more easily, because the player quickly learns to pay attention to all the journeys and to actively seek more information about the journeys’ topics.

It’s not an easy problem to solve with the subtlety with expect, though. Like you said, it’s not fun to completely spoil everything and lead the player by the hand through it all.

There are two ways they could try to improve this:

  • Make the purge meter fill much more slowly until the player has talked to certain NPCs. Right now, if my memory serves, there’s only one, Gilzan the Treasure Hunter, but they could perhaps add one more, or give another one more dialog lines.
  • Add one or more journey step to talk to these NPCs.
1 Like

I have 2 tips how I manage purges in the north (on privates):

  • put fencefoundations (half hight) in front of your base.
  • do equip your thralls with truncheons instead of weapons

The fence foundations will stop the purge from destroying your buildings. If they are placed low hight you can still hop over them but the purge can not. They will start attacking the fence, but since its low they won´t do much to it. It also helps against animals and bosses in purges.

Secondly equip your thralls with good truncheons (with kit) and let them knock out the purge npc´s. The reason is that truncheons stun a npc when they hit and when 2 or 3 thralls of yours hit an npc with a truncheon they are mostly stuned. This way they go down very fast.

Also I also have 4 to 5 groups of 2 to 3 thralls positioned around my base that have weapons that are fenced in. I use those for boss mobs and animals.

2 Likes

And I envy you - for half a year of playing on the official and since the beginning of the game on the test = not a single cleaning, not even close (

It does not suprise me, CoS Purge is very brutal given the location it occurs in - tanky madmen with obsidian weapons can hit any player that settled here hard as hell, even if Purge difficulty is set low. Doesn’t help to me that its sphere of influence keeps in grasp my most favourite territories to settle in Exiled Lands.

1 Like

Once you get more experienced that purge becomes easy, @AfterlifeWeirdo . They don’t hold a candle against top tier thralls with decent gear. But at that time I sweat my arse to get rid of them. My best thralls were a Black Hand Captain and Sully. :smile:
I closed the front gate. They went up an adjacent cliff and jumped down to the roofs. I had my guys guarding the entrance. That made things worse. After a while it was chaos, but I managed and loved it! :smile:

1 Like

Yeah, the CoS are brutal. They were our first purge when starting a local dedicated server to try to convince friends to play. We were all around level 20-30 at the time. We’d built a small crafting tower on a platform in the tiny pond at J5. The only way in was either a hatch in the water that you had to climb up using a ladder or a horizontal elevator that traversed from one of the new player’s houses that he added to the crafting tower after the fact (this is not a pretty base, lol).

Did any of that stop the cultists? No. Somehow they’d wade down in the pond almost to the ladder and then just poof, teleport into the building. One of them teleported all the way up to the roof of this 4 story tower and was attacking a horse that had been placed there for safe-keeping. There’s so many of them and we only had one fighter thrall (who promptly died). Luckily we had our purge difficulty set low (2 or 3 I think) so we finally managed to repel them but, yeah…

Cultists definitely give me pause when considering a new build location. I usually avoid where they are now, even if I like some of those spots.

2 Likes

Even the area their Purge falls under is, in my opinion, inadequate - as you said, its not exactly endgame location, so players that have their main base here will either be low level or adapted for more modest stuff - even the hardened steel will be more difficult to acquire (either long trips to the north or through passsage with Reaper Queen Boss for required Black Ice), while Star Metal will be luxurious commodity for them. As for thralls, closest are Black Hand, Lemurians, Darfari or Exiles, so not exactly something that could equally compete against tanky and brutally deadly CoS.

Eheh it happened to me too, only thing I was coward and shouted for help (didn’t know they were THAT strong tho).

BTW, what I’d like to know is if this new purges are going to be a problem.
I mean, ok, they are meant to be difficult, but difficult are they ?

Does anybody else had problems with those ?

Wont know till chapter 2 hits test.