For several years now, I have been trying to explain to people on these forums that the official servers were never really meant to be the baseline of how to play Conan Exiles. Sure they can be a great starting point for a new player who doesn’t know exactly what kind of experience CE has to offer them. Or it can be a decent casual experience for someone looking for a simplified PVE or PVP experience.
But they were never going to offer the experience to a player seeking to spend more then just a few hours a week in game. As Umboris has stated, there is a server for everyone. If you’re looking to build big beautiful structures, there are servers for that. If you want to truly go crazy all over the map, singleplayer is even an option.
I think many of the issues that players have had in the past while playing on officials is due to growing pains. Some have been playing for months to years on the same server with the same character. And with the constraints being in place, they have been feeling it more and more.
Let’s be honest, officials are small and relatively cheap. They’re only 40 man servers. And despite the recent mergers, they don’t boast high player counts even adjusted for their capacity. They also don’t have mods. Which limits many of the features players have access to (and hopefully one day we can convince Microsoft and Sony to lessen restrictions on this for our console players).
I know many people in the past have said that mods don’t count towards the basic game. Well they do, they make up a significant portion of development. FC manages a devkit (two actually if you count the testlive devkit) for our modders. They take suggestions and even bug reports. There is even extensive documentation to help us get started. And of course you don’t have to go far after loading up the game to see the Mod option in the main menu, or the tab in the launcher before that.
There is nearly 12,000 servers on PC alone. There literally is as many servers as active players at a given time. That is no small statement to say there is a server for everyone. But even still if there isn’t, then the dedicated server software is a free download in Steam Tools. It doesn’t take much to run one with a little bit of research or experience.
So if you’re finding the experience on officials a bit too stifling, then you’ll be able to spread out onto other servers where you’ll be able to play in the way you are looking for. And I wouldn’t be too concerned about starting over, many of you have tons of experience. You’ll likely be back up to where you were and possibly further in under a week or so. It may feel like you’re losing months of work. But much of that time is wasted in stagnation. Of course I speak from experience. Whenever I make a new character, it doesn’t take very long to end up with all master stations, several copies of choice thralls, chests full of materials, and legendries.