Well, that would be one deduction, but that’s not what he’s telling you. He’s telling you they are not going to consider clan size. Clan of one, clan of 20, or a clan of none: If the base under that name/clan-name is in violation - it’s getting wiped - and if they don’t change their policy (as most believe they should) then the clan is getting banned to0…
“Punishments” notwithstanding, there is a way to view his stance on that which makes sense.
As players we choose how to play. There is no rule or guideline that dictates each clan-member should build their own base. If you all decide to play together in a clan then this is one of the things @Umborls is telling you - that in order to do that you are also limiting yourselves to the sharing of a common base. If you do otherwise and it gets reported - you’re gone. See the perspective change? Continued:
Now if you don’t agree that being in a clan should have such restrictions or be a tight communal group sharing a domicile and resources, then you should not join a clan.
BTW, That’s not my idea… That’s the implications of what he said - likely viewed from his POV.
You can see each other on the map.
You can have private chats (clan-chat).
You can share crafting resources.
You can share mounts, thralls, weapons, armor, etc.
You can share Experience Points (I’m really tired right now and I stopped watching EP months ago so I might be thinking of a different game)
As a group you can employ the concept of “division of labor”
An there’s probably a few things I’m missing.
The one thing you can not do is build multiple bases - according to @Umborls.
Personally I dunno… I Guess I’m fine with it. It seems a little odd or inconsistent. It’s nothing at all compared to banning people for 1st and 2nd offence building violations and minor infractions - IMO.
I’ll tell you right now having that many thralls in one base will get you banned as well due to “lag and then think about the size of the base with that many thralls. It’s a broken system.
Maybe @Umborls can explain how Zendesk works as a third party contract CS agency, because people actually think they are doing the deleting, and I do not believe this is the case.
I am pretty sure there is a chain of logic involved, and Zendesk is just taking information.
Correct me if I am wrong.
My understanding is that @Umborls means that regardless of clan size, any land claim abuse (regardless of its size or scope) is a violation of TOS. Meaning a 10 man clan with 1 infraction is in violation just like 1 solo with 10 infractions.
I do not believe they are saying clans have to share a singular building. Especially given their position that satellite building is okay so long as all structures are TOS safe.
I am confident they will clarify on that at some point.
You are correct. If people wish to see this, they can go to Zendesk’s site to see the services they offer. A private server could even use Zendesk if they wished. I’ve even seen Hello Games use it for bug reports for No Man’s Sky. Its simply a way to organize reports in a web interface and some other features depending on the package. At the end of the day, its a Funcom employee who handles reports. Zendesk is just a messenger.
Sorry, could not resist. . . .
I don’t understand the point that is trying to be made here, but the implication seems to be that you could get away with something a 10 man guild would be suspended for if you just all did it individually as ten solo players. The only difference in that scenario would be that you’d be abusing the claim spam system without the benefit of being in a clan.
You don’t get any leniency for land claim abuse because your clan is bigger or smaller.
I think the gist of what he is saying is, why punish nine other people for what one person did. The problem is, the CLAN is responsible not the individual, it states it right in the TOS.
So if you have a clan of ten, and each build a base, and player one violates the TOS, but the other nine do not, it is still going to be a clan wipe.
This is simple logistics, as trying to identify who the offending builder in a ten man clan was would be like trying to find a needle in a database haystack.
So basically it discourages clanning up and encourages solo play.
In @Palm522 case, they all built bases in close proximity to each other but were wiped because of excess land claiming by one clan, Whereas if they had all been solo, they would not have been wiped.
I still don’t think everyone is getting it. You can have 10 buildings and not get banned. What you can’t do is building gigantic monoliths that are built without regard to the others playing. I would imagine even if you didn’t formally clan up and just did individual efforts right next to each other…it would still be reported with each individual character reported and you would still get enforced on when the builds are clearly aligned with eachother. There is still a human element in determination if enforcement is necessary.
What is a bit frustrating here is that on this very thread, admins warned folks about going outside the boundaries of the forum guidelines. There wasn’t a huge amount of pushback about vagueness of what on topic means or demanding a list of specific words that are violations…it is known and accepted. Yet you put the same type of rules in a game, there is suddenly a complete loss of understanding what the intent and meaning of the basically same rules are about…maybe it’s me and my generation x attitude that getting in the way of me understanding the difference here.
The scenario @Palm522 is trying to ask about it when you have multiple people in the same clan who built their structures clustered together.
Since the game tracks the building ownership by clan and not by player, if 5 players build 5 bases near each other, they will look like 5 separate claims if they’re not in a clan together, whereas they will look like one excessively large claim if they are all in the same clan.
While it seems like a far-fetched edge case, it’s based on @Palm522’s own experience with his ban.
Sure, but you’re still looking at this as some kind of a gotcha-seeking exercise. We’re not talking about people intentionally “aligning” their builds with each other, whatever that’s supposed to mean. We’re talking about people who were in the clan together, who built a variety of their own separate builds, and who then got banned for “multiple buildings around a bigger one covering a large area extending the land claim, including solely decorative ones that were impacting on server performance and blocking the land for others to build”.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack there, and it’s fair to say that “you built too big” is an oversimplification of the given reasons, but I can also understand what @Palm522 is trying to ask and how his question can be generalized.
Or maybe it’s that you – just like me – haven’t been targeted by admin actions and can’t figure out what the big deal is. All you have to work with are cases like the one presented earlier in this thread where it’s crystal clear that rules were broken. Before @Palm522 shared his experience in private, that’s all I had to work with, too. That, and conjecture.
There are no thousands of cheaters in this game, there are thousands of abusers. This is a hugh difference.
You simply throw things in the pot and stir vigorously without looking at any facts.
Do you even know the difference between abusing something and real cheating? You do not need to download any cheat software to undermesh or to dupe. Most people abuse the system one way or another, often times aren´t even aware of it, and this already starts if you extend the timer of your chests or giving teleports to people that do not own that obelisks yet.
More often then not, its the abuse that gets reported, not the cheating. Is it stacking, is it entering and then looting workbenches in buildings performed on a very laggy server, is it hitting people while turning invisible (a bug where you do not even know that you are temporarly invisible to others), is it killing thralls with spikes, is it hitting people out of reach and so on. This are all abuses, no cheats.
In all those years in Conan I have rarely seen real cheater in the game. Yes, every game gets them occassionally. But honestly speaking, there is no need for cheats in this game. Conan is so full of bugs thats it is easy for people to abuse the hell out of it. New update and Funcom rings the dinner bell. Things get introduced, not patched, then later worked around with new things that once again can easily abused. Its a neverending cycle that Funcom apparently doesn´t want to fix and because of that people give a s… about anything. Most of the reports are fake, because everybody who wants to find something to report can do so. Its not hard to find a claim. This game is bug and report heaven.
Resend me that PM you promised please, I had to change my PM settings a bit, did not realize I had them customized to certain people, sorry.
The last PM I received from a non admin was from Codemage two years ago, lol.
Sort of semantics there…if the game designers say it’s wrong to do this in their game, then it’s cheating if you do it…not abusing. Abusing is doing a legit move excessively. Cheating is going against the rules dictated by the game regardless if it’s engineered that way or not. Lets take it back to a game called Monopoly. The rules flat out say the banker can’t just take money for themselves but there isn’t anything engineered to prevent this. Does the banker cheat if he/she/they take two $500 bills vs $200 when they pass go or would you consider that abuse? The point here is that even if it’s not engineered to prevent you from doing something, if the game designers flat out say that it’s wrong to do in the game and you do it, you are cheating.
The negative connotation that you are taking with the word “cheat” vs “abuse” is irrelevant here. I fail to see any moral difference between a cheater and abuser. Both are folks I typically don’t associate with when playing games.
More off topic, but let us just say that the word abuse is not the same as the word cheat and leave it please.
Again, this thread is
Land Claim Abuse on Official Servers: Feedback/Discussion
Not sure how arguing over semantics helps.
To torture your analogy: there are and have been notable and devastating Dupe Glitches in Conan Exiles. Let’s pretend you friend Sal always comes with an extra $300 of Monopoly money in his pocket. Isn’t it fair to let the other players balance the system if they desire? Shouldn’t you tip off Marie, and Stu that they should dive into their own moneybags? Maybe they don’t want to, because of ethics. That’s their choice.
We had a dupe glitch that let people multiply their Avatar Coins. Couple that with being able to be hidden and “decay proof,” people who wished to stay on the server had little choice. Were they wrong to occasionally use the “Permabubble” Glitch at the time? Was a YouTuber wrong to tell people about it? Would a player have been wrong to have propagated the bubble glitch to an ally?
ETA: In other words, at various times there’s acceptability of what’s right and wrong. Using the Landclaim System to one’s benefit should not be equated to exploitative behavior.
This is the root issue because this isn’t a black and white statement. I believe everyone can say that a webbing of foundations spanning 3+map squares are definitely a no go but there is some amount of land claim that has to be accepted. The issue here is where is that line in the sand and what precisely is the metrics used in this determination and there isn’t one or two but probably hundreds of variables that is being used to determine if someone or clan is abusing the land claim system.
However there is the same basic rule that can be applied that provides the north star. Keep all players in mind when building on officials. If you need to be assured that you aren’t going to be removed for ToS violation in your build, then your building should be obvious in that you are taking into consideration the other players. Now i know that can conflict with how some folks build because they only know offensive building techniques or can’t scale down their artistic vision enough…but to demand all variables defined and quantified…yeah there is no way I would personally do that if I was in FC shoes.
As I pointed out earlier…we all seem to understand ToS in the rules of the forum without getting clear black and white determinations on why moderators lock down posts or ban users. Why does the game ToS create such tizzy when the forum ToS doesn’t? Is it just because the history and defending the builds that we already have established? If that’s the case, then I have to excuse myself from the discussion because I don’t have historic builds…or at least won’t after the trimming is done (and I only have one base left there)
This is a huge deal when it comes to the rules about building.
I agree with you 100% that the devs are the only ones that can draw the line between cheating and abusing, but people often fail to take into account the dynamics of how this distinction happens and the ramifications of its consequences.
When you’re talking about combat, if the devs decide on the day X that doing Y is not a legit move, but an exploit, everyone can just stop doing Y from the day X going forward and they’re safe from admin action.
When it comes to building, there’s permanence involved. If the devs decide on the day X that any building that involves Y is now against the rules, people have to find a way to restructure their builds to get rid of Y.
Of course, this is “easily solved” by giving people time to adapt before starting the enforcement. To be fair to Funcom, they tried to do that by giving people 2 weeks’ notice before starting the enforcement of the “new rules”, but they didn’t do a very good job of it.
I mean, for starters, people kept talking about the “new rules” for much longer than 2 weeks, despite the insistence that the rules weren’t new at all and that the only thing that changed was the enforcement of the existing rules. Despite all the hubbub on the forums about that, Funcom mostly treated this as a tempest in a teapot and didn’t step up to try to clarify things until now.
But it goes beyond that. If you’re going to say “don’t do X anymore”, you have to make a reasonable effort to help your players reason about X, so they can understand how to avoid doing X. Which brings us back to the dreaded and much-maligned bit about “massive constructions or over-use of memory intensive items leading to loss of performance both on client and server-side”.
First, the wording is ambiguous. Are we talking about two sufficient conditions, i.e. “massive constructions” or “over-use of memory intensive items leading to loss of performance both on client and server-side”? Or are we talking about two conditions and a necessary condition, i.e. “massive constructions” or “over-use of memory intensive items” either of which would need to lead to “loss of performance both on client and server-side” for the rules to be broken?
Second, how do the players reason about which items are memory intensive, or what the impact of their build is on client or server performance? I mean, the vast majority of players don’t understand the difference between client and server performance, and many of them keep making the same mistakes in reasoning even if you explain the difference to them. There are no in-game tools to measure the impact of your build. I’ve played this game since early access, and I happen to be a software developer with a small amount of game dev experience, and even I don’t feel confident in my ability to determine the impact of my build.
Third, the game doesn’t track the players’ ownership of buildings and placeables, which means that even though the cumulative performance impact of individual players’ builds remains the same regardless of their clan affiliation, the cumulative performance impact of a clan might get you banned.
These are some real problems with the rules and their enforcement, problems that are not shared with other aspects of the game. It’s tempting to say “just trust Funcom that they’ll only enforce the malicious builds or the extremes”, and that’s what I did for a while, but guess what? I am now at the point where I have to choose what I’ll believe: on the one hand, I can decide that people who don’t have a track record of looking for loopholes suddenly changed their personality; on the other hand, I can decide that a company that has a track record of not communicating well with their player community is, well, not communicating well with their player community.
Two reasons. One is that the game ToS has some unique problems that I described above.
The other is the difference in how invested people are in the forums vs. how invested they are in the game. Apart from some outliers like yours truly, most people would not have a hard time quitting forums, whereas losing everything they’ve worked for over thousands of hours in a virtual world tends to hit them harder.
That brings another question too. Since when land claim abuse, meaning spam foundation pieces (or vaults) to determine huge land claim , became equal with great or huge builds? Especially on pvp, I believe that the greatest issue is the stacking method not the foundation number. On pve a huge build will probably have too many decorative pieces, so the server performance in these places is low. But on pvp there are not so many decorations even if the building is 1 map square big. The greatest issue I noticed on crushes from my pvp days was the build back the destroyed at once, bombs were breaking and I was building back at once. This was causing massive lags, even server crashing. In some servers this action through raids is not allowed.
Yet again, because I lost my self again, even great buildings are land claim abuse now?