Hey everybody,
Please stop the forum PVP, including personal attacks and abusing the flagging system.
It’s disappointing to have to remind you all of this so, pretty please? 
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ALL HAIL THE MODMINS!
Ahem…sorry… couldn’t help myself… 
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Totally agree.
When CE went live, five of us from a PVE server that became good friends decided to rent a private server. We all split the cost and agreed to keep it vanilla.
At this time I had personal things going on and did not really play for awhile, but when I came back the other three ( one had already left ) had modded the server to death. So I quit and went back to Officials.
I mean how many different skimpy outfit mods do you need, lol.
I think the Officials are the real testive, and the majority of bug reports come from people that play them.
I am all for stopping land claim abuse, as I have seen it in its extreme over five years, but please do not “nerf it to death” Funcom.
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This thread and others like it simply shows that regulation is needed because we can’t seem to respect eachother when in conflict and we apparently can’t seem to get our act together to clean it up when warned as the # of people getting hidden didn’t go down. So can we please simply put it as this. Ask yourself if you are putting out there something of value to the discussion or just kneejerk defending your own views.
Now back to the land claim abuse issues. The examples of clear violations are great. And I agree would be made better by also providing the close calls…the ones that team gets together and discusses if its a violation or not. I also think posting it as well as the reasons you decided one way or the other would be helpful.
Also I think that FC and it’s flagship product deserve a more…defined customer complaint process so that the forums aren’t littered with these things. Maybe zendesk, maybe something else but should have some dropdowns that will help you metric the complaints be it technical issues, ToS enforcement issues, server side issues, official server player issues, forum issues, etc.
HOWEVER, this comes at a cost to the community. When FC provides this level of feedback we stop this…we stop acting like children . We stop continuously posting junk about how you disagree with thisor that call. We got the clarification…you don’t agree. Fill out your complaint and stop plaguing the forums with negativity. This forum should be a joint venture between players, CSR’s, and sometimes other parts of the company (my personal idea would be that FC opens up and gets a representative from someone in the company for a little Q and A about their department. What is Production like? How is QC done? What does Marketing do outside of social media? How does the CSR team get through the day seeing all the negativity from the player base? These help keep all of us engaged and understanding the company a bit more and hopefully opens peoples’ eyes to what is really going on is a business like FC as too many folks have their own assumptions that fuel negative assumptions over FC’s goals.
Just my take on this all as it’s just gotten out of hand it seems now.
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My random suggestions to help mitigate “land claim abuse on official servers” in PvE. I don’t play on PvP servers, so I don’t know if these would benefit that type of game play.
Funcom shoud limit the amount of certain building pieces.
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Temples - In character creation you are asked to declare your religion, so there should be some weight to this. Each player should be able to convert if they want to later on, but you should only have one temple to pray to. If you’re in a clan all must convert to the the leaders religion and have one temple per clan. This will stop the temple spam.
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Vaults - Limit one vault per user and increase the max capacity. This should prevent people spamming these as defences , instead of using them as a place to store things.
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Wheels of pain - One per user.
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Map rooms - One per user, gives more value to traveling by horse.
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Trading post - Allow users to sell their excess loot that can’t be recycled in Sepermeru, less stuff in horded in bases. The game has a list of items, have someone drop this info in excel and give a value to the in game items.
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Animal pens - one per user. Also, look into the code, the pens cause lag when you walk up to them. I’m not a game designer, so I have no clue why this thing can crash the game (on ps4).
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Trebuchets - one or two per player. This isn’t something valuable in PvE.
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Purge - Set a foundation limit when passed, triggers the purge meter to start to auto fill. Set that specific purge mob to be un-farmable, like the followers of Sobek purge, to prevent people from purposefully building big to trigger that specific purge type.
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Building Radius - increase the distance where a neighbor can build next to you. This prevents those people who want ro build satellite grief bases that are ment to trigger purges to attack you. Purges should be tethered to the clan that triggers it.
Just spitballing a few ideas, none that will benefit me because I’m gone when my server closes.
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I’m not a fan of your suggestions, mostly because they seem pretty strict, and not in a good way. This is, of course, my opinion on the matter, but I’ll do my best to break down my issues:
1- Temples: I’m totally cool with needing to choose 1 religion and sticking with it until you convert. Gives meaning to finding the religion teachers and makes your religious choice important. However, Crom’s faithful are left even more in the dust here than usual, and your suggestion towards clans strongly incentivizes not clanning up, but rather staying solo and being allies. A “clan” of 10 would now be 10 clans of 1, and that’s not healthy for the server dynamics, or the server’s health.
2- Again, I disagree with this suggestion. Limiting vaults doesn’t seem the way to go. Vaults are a symptom of a problem, not a cause, and that problem is that we can’t stack buildings in any way that matters and building health as a whole is too low to be viable for defense. Fix those core issues, and Vault spamming will mostly be a thing of the past.
3- I strongly disagree with this one. Thrall wheels are an essential component of the game, and having multiple thrall wheels is almost necessary. Archpriests, crafters, fighters, archers… all of them spawn in various places all around the map, and you need multiple wheels in order to get the thralls you need when you need them.
4-Another that I strongly disagree with. A network of map rooms is completely essential to a solo’s chances of survival, since every second of travel time is another second of potential death-by-gank.
5- I actually like this one. Gives me something to do with all of this useless chitin that currently goes into the grinder. Something for the “break the bracelet” items too, since your only reward for completing the games is…not having to play this game anymore.
6-I disagree. If someone can afford to build and maintain animal pens, they shouldn’t be restricted. I will add 1 caveat to this: Remove the large animal pens. Only small ones (of the same various tiers) just like stables.
7- I dislike building limits as a general rule of thumb, and trebs are no exception. If someone wants a bunch of trebs in their PVE base, let them! As you said, they’re not valuable in PVE. In PVP, counter-trebs are important, and if your base can be assaulted from multiple directions, then you’ll need multiple trebs to hold off enemies.
8- I think that the purge mechanics are fine as is, with an added suggestion of making the purge difficulty/size scale with building pieces. The larger the base, the larger the purge. It’s as simple as that.
9- I’m ok with this, although it does have echoing effects on PVP servers where you can scout with a foundation. A larger Land Claim radius means a larger footprint. If your PVP base built in a crack in a wall isn’t spotted right now because the edge of your claim is outside of sweeping range, then you’re good. If the claim radius is upgraded, then suddenly many viable PVP locations are no longer usable.
It may seem like I’m coming down on you (it’s hard to convey tone through text) but I’m not. I’m really grateful that you’re here contributing to the discussion ^^
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It shouldn’t be wise to do so. This game has a great percentage of its base on the building aspect. Nerf it to the ground would bring catastrophic results. We love to believe that external reasons applies economic functions to the company. Thow the game was released in the end of a global crisis, covid and the fear of a word war maybe reasons for companies to shrink their budget. Other than that, the last month, especially in Europe gazoline and electric bills are unbearable for too many homes. So seeing to where this might lead, it is a correct move from their side.
Back to the game, please forgive my reality problems coming here, I totally agree with no more nerf. I really like the ace on my sleeve that Zendesk gives when people react like they own their servers. Thow I never send just one ticket, I use it as an epilog in conversations with building abusers to make them think twice and so far it worked without Zendesk involve. Unfortunately to the ones I didn’t manage to communicate and warn them about their land claim abuse, someone else reported them and they got a wipe.
Believe me, I pity them, but the game has rules and admins to take care of these behaviors, so I just can’t blame someone who actually works 
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I will beg you to start another conversation of creating official building servers. I believe that pve, pvec and pvp, is not enough anymore
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The correct answer is zero.
I feel your pain though. The direction fc seems to be going with the tos does seem to be at odds with the way you like to build. That’s got to be a real bummer and I’d probably be in the same boat if I hadn’t switched to private servers a year and a half ago.
But, I also get where they’re coming from and I don’t personally have any issues with it as I assume they know why they’re enforcing the TOS the way they are and have good reasons for it.
OT, but you should not be able to run while you have a building piece or placeable “equipped.”
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There is no specific restriction on how many locations you can build. I can’t see this ever being a problem on a PvP server. The more locations you have, the harder it is to defend them all. An extreme situation on a PvE server could hypothetically call for intervention.
Clan size is not going to affect how we assess or address land claim abuse.
I do think that suspensions and bans are a necessary tool for Funcom Customer Support. That being said, there are aspects of the current process that we feel are lacking. Communication with players is something that we hope to make simpler in the future. It will just take time to get these changes implemented.
For anyone who doesn’t know, there is an existing process for requesting information about action and for appealing the decision. At this time, the process requires you to make a new Zendesk ticket that includes your Guild name and server number. You may not use an existing Zendesk ticket as a direct line to Customer Support.
Do you think it is more beneficial to have upfront warnings/clear rules and swift punishment or vague rules/subject judgment and less severe punishment?
There are arguments for both ends of this spectrum. The volume of reports we receive, the size of our staff, and a number of technical challenges are things we have to consider. To me, it would be ideal to have the clearest possible rules. There are a lot of good reasons why that probably won’t be 100% achievable, but it is probably in everyone’s best interest to try.
It might be better if I get a specific example from you about this. Land claim abuse on PvP servers will be viewed differently since players do have methods to remove buildings on their own. I think this was the spirit of your question, but you will have to let me know.
Edited for grammer 
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To be clear, several posters here claim they were admin wiped for tos violations and were told one of the reasons was that they had “too many buildings.”
They’ve interpreted this to mean that large clans are not allowed to have multiple bases.
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There are other reasons beyond the scope of land claim why a player may have been suspended. We hope to do something similar for those rules as well in the near future.
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Thanks for the update, @Umborls! It’s appreciated, as always ^^
Thank you @Umborls. Also thank you @Cattibria and the mod team for leaving this open. I apologize for the quality of discussion recently.
@Rekt provided a decent example earlier I think. If a player were to build on one of the stone pillar/fingers in the Exiled lands, there would likely be another stone pillar/finger nearby. If this player built an archer tower on this second pillar to deny an easy trebuchet location would it violate TOS?
I understand this question veers dangerously into territory that you likely want to leave vague, it might not be possible to give a mutually satisfactory answer even. It’s just that in PVP specifically “defense” is a viable function for a building/structure, I think. To me it seems to rub up against the rules on walls and decorative builds.
Just to clarify a little further. Do you expect the server footprint of a 10 man clan to be roughly the same as 10 individual players? I’d say this question is probably more in relation to rules on “massive” builds or server lag and might not be within the bounds of this thread and understand if it cannot be answered.
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One thing that might help a ton, is adjusting the build limits on Trebuchets so that they ignore landclaim. If someone can’t block trebs from being built around their bass with landclaim, they aren’t likely to use landclaim as a defense.
This reminds me of an old PVP server philosophy from the late 90s. That admins will not intervene in player issues if they have PVP solutions.
In this case, if the change is done to Trebs, admin intervention in this case wouldn’t be needed as much. Since landclaim wouldn’t be the go to, players would need to bomb the treb itself.
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Presumably you still couldn’t build on top of placed pieces though, so wouldn’t this just induce players to put down more foundations?
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Yes but the whole thing also needs context of what is going on. Just because it’s PVP doesn’t mean landclaim is ignored. The webbing is an example of build requiring admin action because it is not realistic for players to remove the extent of the land clan and therefore admin must get involved. I think the intent on this was the excessively large building (if not server or client system limiting) can be handled easier in PVP than admin action and should be seen as such…up until the build is just excessively land claiming to the point where the game isn’t fun to break foundation upon foundation just to get access to the game.
Now FC can correct me if I’m wrong but the simpliest specification is don’t use your build as a means to limit others from building. That is wrong and using it as the means to stop treb is wrong as well. Feedback the treb damage issue correctly and not focus on the land claiming issue as the solution because it can’t be.
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I’m not sure that’s a feature, but that probably needs removal. Especially so defenders can build their own.
You are correct there. If there’s a thousand foundation line, its not feasible to blow that up.
While I appreciate your involvement and trying to mitigate the big topic, I see a discrepancy between what you state here and what happens via Zendesk and that is a fact.
As you are a funcom employee, I am happy to share the Zendesk process I encountered with you.
I am not going to post this publicly, as it won’t help solving the situation at all, but I can’t help feeling mocked, tbh.
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How is closing a thread solving an issue?
Sometimes the mod needs to temporarily close the thread for a few reasons…
It does matter if it affect multiple players on clarification.
Wait? Are you still talking about the thread here or did you move to answering Zendesk inquiries?
No one owes us an explanation in any particular format (forums, FaceBook, Twitter, E-Mail, whatever). And while I think we kind of deserve an explanation somehow or another, they don’t even owe us that to be perfectly honest. It would be the right thing to do in most of our opinions as I read it, but people don’t always agree on what the right thing to do is - and FC be peoples. 