Land Claim Abuse on Official Servers: Feedback/Discussion

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
90

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.

91

the whole thing is short of blocking off resources, obelisks etc or making the game entirely unplayable, most complaints about lack of enforcement was from speedhackers, dupers, undermeshers.

I never had a problem with a giant castle I had to hammer down with a treb, I dont think PVE’rs and PVPers should turn on each other, I think PVE’rs have become particularly screwed by the rules as what else is there to do but build showcasing in endgame pve?

I think official servers have likely become viewed as a nuisance by funcom with good reason, it undoubtedly eats at costs, its given them a bad reputation for letting hackers run rampant for years, requires now constant moderation, and now they say the game wasn’t even developed for them in mind, so I really dont know where they are going from here, but officially supported conan does not seem like it has a bright future with overly restrictive rules, server costs and lack of performance, and perhaps we shouldn’t be looking at this as unintentional but by design to bridge over to a non official supported conan exiles.

7 Likes
93

I think I understand all of the reactions and comments in this thread so far - except for the reactions to this:

  • The Official Servers are a small part of Conan Exiles. The game was not developed with them in mind. We absolutely provide players with the building blocks to produce huge castles, foundation webs, stairs to the sky, and anything else you can imagine. So in a sense, we do advertise this kind of gameplay. The ruleset we use for the Official Servers is just the flavor of gameplay we want to provide to the community. I like to think there is server out there to please everyone.

I mean I really don’t get why people are acting shocked and appalled. Of the thousand or so threads with more than ten replies in them which touch on the topic of Official Server rules I guess about half have some forum user or player saying that the Official Servers are an additional free service and not part of what you purchased.

So, wasn’t this already well known? It was definitely my understanding - which doesn’t mean much but… Anyway, kinda feel sorry for @Umborls here. A buttload of folks asked FC to be direct and honest with us and when they actually begin to, people melt? Ummm, K…

@anon83039162, Wasn’t one of the official requests in that contest that we use SP or private servers because such builds weren’t cool on Officials? I thought it was anyway, pretty sure I read that… So, I guess that statement you highlighted should probably have read: "Some of them were even built on official servers anyway!”

1 Like
94

“derives from” not “is exactly the same as, in that in sandbox games everything is built out of sand and mainly little kids with plastic tools play them”.

You can’t just take the part of “sandbox” you feel validates your opinion on the subject and decide that’s now the real meaning of “sandbox game”.

3 Likes
96

I guess that statement you highlighted should probably have read: "Some of them were even built on official servers anyway!” so maybe, I guess, I mean if people weren’t paying attention to the contest rules and then read that without the added (and likely implied) word “anyway”…

98

Yes you would be wiped in 3 days if reported, this is how that story went. It’s sad, did FC change team I know some quit but really.

1 Like
99

Oh, my mistake… That’s the contest from 3 years ago. I was talking about the most recent one. When was that, like 4 or 6 months ago, something.

Considering your reference is three years old I’m not sure what to think now tho.

101

No, not ANYWAY. They were built on Official Servers with our hands and ingenuity. You know how long my contest entries took to scrounge and put up for?

9 Likes
102

This is landclaim abuse for sure lol :smiley: or must be since iv been suspended 2 times for 10x less than that :smiley:

103

Yeah, we already established it was a contest that happened three years ago and not the most recent one I was thinking of. So 3 years ago was before my time. It was also a time prior to Funcom’s “new direction” so in my opinion fairly irrelevant to this discussion. When did FC change direction anyway? What, about a year ago, maybe a tad more? And they got serious about that direction when, maybe 6 to 8 months ago? I can’t be off by more than a couple of months.

104

landclaim abuse :smiley: iv been suspended for 10x times less

105

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nicole still works at Funcom. She administered the last contest.

Shame you don’t know what you’re talking about either. You know, my winning entry was a Welsh Castle that will be impossible to build due to the fence foundation thing, and would be deleted due to the landclaim thing and sheer size thing. Also I had three temples close together for visuals.

8 Likes
107

I didn’t “just take” that meaning. Since the “sandbox game” has absolutely no reference to amount of time your creations last, I would say the implied concept of temporary sandbox creations is justified by the root of the phrase which defines this very clearly. So what justification do you have in your opinion that there is a requirement of permemence?

1 Like
108

Sandbox predates gaming, substantially. In Open Source, Sandbox was used predominantly in the financial sector as proving ground for software prior to hooking it up to actual banks and credit card processors. PayPal still runs the successor system to this.

Earlier still, sandbox (little S) was used in private military contracting, to create an enhanced software scenario for a given weapon. For instance, Target Drone and Stealth Bomber.

Even earlier, Sandbox was the scenario system for nuclear engineers. In particular it was used in the creation of several power plants. Three Mile Island was built from the Sandbox up, and the Sandbox existed even when the plant went hypercritical. Using multiple Sandboxes, many teams could deconstruct the problem. The Three-Mile Sandbox lives in the Smithsonian, in a great big room, and contains my dad’s signature among others.

Durable, resourceful and potentially timeless.

4 Likes
109

Please look at this build. A year of life on Official. Welcome @October to the Community.

2 Likes
110

honestly most people on pvp officials get wiped due to land claim spam.

no one would be nearly as annoyed at funcom if they just removed the spam instead of wiping the entire base + banning the players lmao.

This game is designed around land claiming honestly.

Default land claim size. A player not in your clan can build 12 foundation lengths away from your land claim. Thats so insanely close it boarders on stupidity.

Explosive jars do an insane amount of damage compared to building piece health. Let alone demon fire barrage from a treb. So of course players are going to land claim to protect them selves from trebs.

People are also going to land claim because they don’t want people building 12foundations away from them.

It’s clear funcom knows difference between a main base and foundation spam so just remove the spam instead of the entire base and stop banning people for building. Start banning the hackers that plague every region because your ping caps for officials dont work.

4 Likes
112

Because it’s normal for a game studio to have their official servers represent the dev team’s vision for the game. Explicitly saying that the game was not developed with official servers in mind goes contrary to widely adopted expectations.

Yes, we do say that a lot, and the context in which we say it matters, and the key word there is “free”. This is invariably brought up when someone complains about how “they have a right to XYZ on official servers because they paid for the game”. Saying that the official servers are not what you paid for is not the same as saying that the official servers are not what the devs design for.

It came as a shock to me, and – judging by the replies here – I wasn’t alone. So no, I wouldn’t consider it well known.

I’m not sure whether “melt” is referring to the level of surprise or trying to describe something specific about the tone. If you find that the reactions are insulting or offensive – I didn’t, but we all see these things differently – then it’s perfectly fine to flag those posts or maybe point out the specifics. Other than that, I don’t see anything wrong here, and I certainly wouldn’t want to think that the price of Funcom’s direct and honest communication should be that we have to stay silent in response. And I’m pretty sure they would agree with me on that.

7 Likes
113

While I did not mean to sound rude and abrupt, and I apologize, the fact is I have put most of my thrall workstations in these buildings, so I do not assess that they are just RP.
Yes, a few are. The church with the Crom altar is, the stable is, even though its weird that they actually made stable pieces, and now want to delete stables.
As I said earlier, the Inn was actually a working base at one time. Just a fancy one, lol. The whole area, as shown in my earlier thread takes up 1/20th of one grid square.

7 Likes
114

But not stable and certainly not consistent also I challenge the timeless aspect because the data from the sandbox is timeless, the sandbox itself wasn’t meant to be timeless but an R&D environment which by it’s very nature is mutable and never consistent. Saves done in these sandboxes were for data collection of the experiments performed and not a stance of the sandbox environment itself. The environmental enviroment of a sandbox is separate from the experimental design and the saving was not to capture the sandbox but to capture the data of the experiment.

All of this is completely different than gaming sandboxes which is more equivalent to the children’s sandy play area and therefore the analogy and logical conclusion still stands. Our creations in sandbox games should have the expectation of being lost after we are done playing when we are playing with other people. If it’s our own personal sandbox, then you can argue the expectations are changed and a level of permemence should be planned on. Communal sandbox? No not really and are at the whims of those that manage the sandbox if they are willing to protect what we build or not.

What FC has done is put rules on the communal sandbox and everyone is flipping out over it. These rules had to be put into place because apparently we couldn’t resolve things like children do (sure there are some spoiled kids out there but the majority of kids will share space and if they are done with it, they let the other kids just use it) and therefore FC had to step in. Yes I understand that I have just ticked off about 75% of all folks playing and probably closer to 95% of the PVE crowd but some perspective is needed because the company is doing EXACTLY what we asked them to do. They are regulating officials in a manner that is equitable for all gamers (both current and future) to enjoy. What did everyone think was going to happen? That FC would just target folks that we find offensive and not look at our own dirty laundry in the process? Yeah it doesn’t work that way. Arbitration and regulation typically means everyone suffers…some more than others but this idea that a person can just skate on by and not be affected…yeah that doesn’t exist. I’m sorry that folks assumed it would.

3 Likes
115

And I remember punching a lot of people who said things like this.

Personally I don’t feel betrayed. I’m a PvP scumbag who builds scummy PvP things. I’m used to things going kaflooey. It just really hurts to see a monolithic approach here, especially against people who aren’t used to this kind of wanton destruction.

6 Likes