Hey there! Couldn’t find any info or threads on that matter.
As many of you know you can kill other players thralls with bleed damage by placing the palisade near them. My question is - is it allowed? Let’s say you wanna clear a spot to build from the thralls of the clan that has decayed.
Is it considered an exploit? A banable offence? or is it all fair?
Thank you!
I’m PVP, not PVE-c
But I don’t think it’s hurting anything to get rid of thralls that are abandoned.
I’ve done it many times.
The key word is “abandoned” getting rid of thralls no one cares about, is doing the server a service.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense! But on the other hand, the clan might return after couple of weeks and say something like “ah, we weren’t gonna quit playing” - and if you kill their thralls by that time - what does that make you? and Community rules aren’t clear at all about that.
So obviously I don’t wanna do anything that violates it, but it is never stated clearly if it’s allowed or not.
They would need to return right away, the Event log isn’t infinite.
It’s a good bet if their buildings are gone, killing the thralls isn’t going to cause problems.
I’ve done this even on my current server, and I’ve never had a problem.
I think even if they’re not abandoned… if the thrall is in a buildable area it’s fair game.
21 days is a long time to live in fear of a capricious ban due to a misunderstanding. Sadly, the only ones who could actually answer this question are people who work for Funcom, and good luck getting anything useful about the ToS from them.
Are we sure it’s against the tos? I know I wouldnt ban anyone for that… regardless of the clan is still playing or not. C stands for combat. Don’t leave valuable stuff out.
No, we’re not. That’s the problem.
Personally, I think it’s ludicrous to even think that’s bannable, but that’s beside the point.
The point is that the definitive answer to that question can only come from Funcom. We can only speculate, and we’ve all seen what happens when we speculate about rules, even when that speculation is based on posts by Funcom employees. Case in point: we were all confident that stacking wasn’t an exploit, until it turned out that it was.
If you consider the lack of clarity and consistency that we’ve seen in cases like that, and in light of Funcom’s stubborn refusal to even acknowledge the questions about ToS, would you feel comfortable answering another player’s questions about rules?
I sure as hell don’t want to open my mouth and make a fool and a liar of myself again.
I have actually done it on a official pve server a year ago q whole beach littered with thralls and pets only works on the thralls not sure if event log would say who killed it. Maybe test in offline game
Agree.
But if they are going to cover everything that is and isn’t bannable then they’re going to have to spend the next several man-years writing it all up. And for who, the one in a thousand players who worry themselves about such trivia? If that’s the case we can forget about any bug fixes, feature additions, and we can just throw 3.0 completely out - it ain’t happening!
Yep, and that’s what I normally used as an argument myself. They can’t and shouldn’t have to cover every single thing, “just use your common sense”. And then I was presented with evidence that common sense isn’t enough, and Funcom still stubbornly refuses to even approach the whole dumpster fire, let alone put it out.
The sensible thing would be for Funcom to step in and clarify the important things, communicate better and more frequently, and build trust.
I’m not holding my breath, though. Most likely, they’ll let things go like this until 3.0 hits and distracts everyone, at least temporarily.
Yeah… but in my experience that’s only a tiny tiny minority of players and they ALL are here on these forums! I have never seen it elsewhere… not in videos, not in the servers, not in discord… just here. I think you sometimes call it lawyering, right? People are so lonely, burned out on the game, butthurt, or just bored they have nothing better to do but pick things apart - common sense be damned. In those other venues people are actually playing the game, not burnt, not butthurt over a ban, in with others so not lonely, and so, they are guided by their common sense still.
Yup, they exacerbate it in this way… hehehe, they’re exacerbators! 
(sorry, couldn’t resist).
Agree.
Yup.
Agree.
Of course they’re on the forums. The forums are Funcom’s official forums, what other place would be better for them to go?
If it was the same handful of voices repeating themselves over and over – like you and I do – then I could agree with you. But we keep seeing new users creating “what the hell why was I banned” topics. Or a new variant: “my stuff was all destroyed what happened” topics, followed by “wait a day to see if you were banned” by one of us regulars, followed by “you’re right, I was banned, what the hell”.
Even so, they could still be a tiny minority. But that’s also information that Funcom has and we don’t. It shouldn’t be hard for them to determine how many active Funcom IDs they have (for any definition of “active” they settle upon) and see what percentage of them are getting banned. If it’s really a tiny minority and the system is working, then the solution to these endless discussions is also simple: forbid all discussions about bans on the forums. Put that in the forum rules and then, when discussions pop up, flag them, tag them, and bag them, ruthlessly, until people get the message and we can finally move on.
I really don’t think it’s too hard to get the admin to screenshot offenders they are banning and put that in the Zendesk ticket. When the question of banning comes up in a zendesk request, the CSR would have that evidence to show the person.
The CSR’s should be demanding this change as I’m sure they are also getting tired of this uncertainty.
Wherever the other 20,000 players currently are.
Of course there will be churn… FC is actively banning people. And they’ve made changes which people set in their ways don’t like.
Anyway, it was just an observation. And mostly prodded by your change of mind. As more of these pile up I’ll be more inclined to agree with you I’m afraid - I’m just not quite there yet. I still think 90% of the people coming here creating those threads know exactly. I did.
Pretty much before any of these complaints came rolling in I had a secondary base wiped. I knew in an instant that it was because it was too close to the Siptah Fiend Vault (reported or not). I just said to myself opps, OK, I see. And didn’t repeat it. But about 20 or 30% of the people creating these threads are in the same condition (except they were additionally banned) - and I ask myself, reeeeely, they had no clue? Reeeeely, I have that much more intuition and common sense than they? Sure, in one or two cases I have to answer both those; yes. But I’m like, nah, not buying it (yet) in most.
And I can tell you, if I were banned for that base I would likely be one of the people saying it’s not fair, it’s unclear and I still have no idea what I did wrong. I would probably even make myself believe it after awhile.
It seems to me they are actively trying to accomplish that. It’s only when the banned person also seems to have other reasonable questions in the same thread that they allow it to be answered before they lock and unlist it.
I wanna additionally quote and agree again however, that FC doesn’t even attempt to further clarify anything and that AT THIS POINT, is a real problem, The @community should clarify some of the more common points that people are claiming are unclear or “misunderstood”. I believe you called it a dumpster-fire and that’s not far off at all!
Greetings,
Thank you for tagging us @TeleTesselator. First, we need to clarify that in PvE players shouldn’t be able to kill other players’ thralls/pets/mounts. Any means to accomplish that are considered exploits.
The same goes for PvE-C outside of the conditions this rulest allows to.
As for the guidelines, we have been working on ways to make them more visual and better explained.
That’s AWESOME news!!!
And I thank you for the clarification as I’m sure the OP will as well!
I’m sorry, either I didn’t express myself clearly or I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. You said that those who are complaining about bans are all here on these forums. I said that this is the best place for them – i.e. those who are banned – to come discuss that. So either I didn’t express clearly that the “they” in “what other place would place would be better for them to go” refers to “banned people”, or you’re saying something I don’t understand.
Aaaaaand there you have a perfectly valid reason why I keep saying people who ask these questions need to ask Funcom, rather than other players.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about Mayra’s answer. On the contrary, I’m very grateful for it, because that’s the kind of thing that’s been missing around here.
See, I keep harping on about the concept of emergent gameplay and how Funcom staff are literally the only ones who can draw the line between exploits and unintentional-but-allowed emergent gameplay, by definition of these terms.
Here’s another fun question players could ask: suppose you don’t use palisades, but rather kite a boss or a purge. Is it still an exploit or is it unintentional-but-allowed emergent gameplay?
And no, I’m not actually asking for that clarification, because sooner or later questions like that cross into the “rules lawyering” territory, where people knowingly break the spirit of the rule and then use the letter of the rule to defend their actions.
Which only brings us back to the observation that the two key success factors for this system are:
The former is what they say they’re working on, and the latter is improved each time they communicate with us, like they did now 
This used to be fun but not so much anymore since the boss transports back to fast now. I know you are looking for an official answer but my unofficial opinion is that this is using the map offensively as much as using terrain defensively plus it can’t be abused to limit the game’s performance like fence stacking can (geometry is not an exploit but due to excessive abuse, has to be be regulated) . I say let it stand and in fact loosen it back up again so that you can lead that 3 skull to weed out thralls easier.
I’m not, actually
I’m trying to point out that it’s too easy to see a question and think “duh, well it’s common sense this shouldn’t be a bannable offense”, only to find out that it’s indeed classified as an “exploit”.
I’m also trying to point out that the players shouldn’t feel the need to seek these answers. Instead, Funcom should make sure that they don’t people without a good reason and that most players trust them to act like that.
Communication from Funcom helps. Improving that communication would help as well. For example, your suggestion about how they could stand to be clearer when explaining the reasons for the ban was right on point.