Living Settlements: Praise, Critique, and Concerns

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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If you happen to be someone from Funcom who has answers, please feel free to skip the first two parts of my post and go straight to the Concerns section, where I have questions that I think a lot of players will want answered. Thanks!

Living Settlements: Praise, Critique and Concerns

I have mixed feelings about the new “living settlements” feature. There are things that I like, but there are also things I find disappointing and things I’m worried about. Let’s start with the positive.

Praise

From the immersion perspective, I’m glad we’ll have the chance to create bases that will look more dynamic and lively. It’ll be a nice change from the theme park ghost towns we’ve been seeing plastered all over the unmodded PVE(-C) servers.

On top of that, being able to alter your crafter apparel has been one of the most requested features since… well, pretty much “forever” (i.e. since I joined the forums).

Even better, it’s not just an aesthetic change, it also has functional advantages. According to the explanations from the dev stream, it seems that we will be able to have one crafter thrall confer bonuses to multiple workstations within its area of influence. That’s a huge improvement.

When they announced that they were planning to convert crafters into placeable thralls, one of the things I worried about was the effect of having so many crafters suddenly run full AI on the server. Sharing a crafter between multiple benches is a very clever way of avoiding that.

Critique

Sadly, this is where my praise and enthusiasm ends, because I’m rather disappointed by the extent of what we’re getting.

Yes, our bases won’t be ghost town theme parks anymore, but they’ll remain just theme parks. Whenever I participated in discussions and suggestions for the settlement system, I always had the same focus: give the players new ways to create shared stories through interactions. And by “interactions”, I don’t mean “a new purge system that can be easily abused to wage war on a non-PVP server”.

Players on PVP servers have a way to create their own stories by waging war on each other. Yes, the current situation is extremely toxic, but I’m talking about the idea behind the PVP, not the execution of that idea.

Meanwhile, PVE and PVE-C players build theaters, shops, inns, taverns, brothels, castles, towers, livery stables, arenas, transportation hubs, jousting fields, and a myriad of other things. And out of all of those builds that I mentioned, the only ones that are functional are arenas, jousting fields, and transportation hubs (i.e. map rooms and/or transportory stones). Everything else is just decoration.

And yet, for the lack of a better thing to do, we build these things and we pretend they have a purpose and we try to derive enjoyment from other players stopping by and saying “nice build”, until someone gets pissed off and reports someone else and all this stuff we built in search of a shared story turns into a liability.

I can tell the devs are aware that we need more opportunities to create our own stories, but what they choose to give us is a canned, premade story – the companions – which we can’t influence much or share with others. Yes, a meal at a restaurant can be delicious, but a potluck is what brings the community together.

Concerns

Whether I like the upcoming system or not, it’s coming and won’t see any drastic changes at this point. Hell, if we’re lucky, this time they’ll actually do something about the bugs reported in beta.

Which brings me to the third part of this post: concerns.

There are questions that need answers, and here’s my list:

  • If I don’t explicitly assign a crafter to a workstation when I’m placing it, will it still confer bonuses?
    • If so, what does assigning it to the workstation actually do? What’s the difference between that and plopping it down on the ground?
  • Can we confirm that one crafter can confer bonuses on all compatible workstations in its reach? That’s what the stream sounded like, but it would be good if we could have someone who knows actually confirm this.
  • Certain workstations have recipes that require specific T4 thralls. For example, Tanner’s Table requires a T4 tanner to extract silk or weave, whereas a T4 armorer allows you to stitch hides into thick hides. How does the new UI deal with this?
  • Will wandering crafters go through doors? Will they open and close doors?
  • Will wandering crafters go up and down stairs? What about ramps? What about elevators?
  • Will fighters, archers, and dancers also wander around?
    • If so, can we issue a command that prevents them from doing so and makes them stay at their post?
  • Will the thrall cap setting on official servers change?
    • If so, will it go up or down?
  • Can we still knock out NPCs and drag them to a wheel of pain?
    • If so, what happens after they’re broken? Do they become inventory items in the wheel? Can we store them and trade them as before?

Well, that’s it. That’s my feedback on this feature. I hate to tag @Community, because I know it will ping a whole bunch of people, but I think it’s warranted in this case. Not for the praise or the critique, but the questions that needs answering. Fingers crossed they see it and post some answers. :slight_smile:

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Agree. I am delighted we will be receiving this feature.

Agree once more. Not having to swap several different crafters in and out of a bench constantly to derive a particular benefit is actually a nice QoL improvement.

A very valid concern. I guess we will have to see how the chips fall before we know for certain. Though I suspect (happy to stand corrected and consume my own words if proved otherwise) it will not be as bad as many are catastrophizing. A little different yes, bit do members recall when Armor Mannequins were announced and we had a chorus of chicken littles telling us that performance would tank!?. It didn’t.

This is one of my concerns. I would like there to be items and areas we can designate as ‘off limits’ to them. As I said in another thread earlier, after a long day adventuring I do not want my character to come home to a bunch of followers sitting in my throne, sleeping in my nice bed and among other things.

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I can answer a couple of those.

No, they said those thralls’ behavior is unchanged and they will just stand guard like they currently do. Only crafters will have the new wandering behavior.

They said the QA team is currently looking into performance to determine what cap would be a good performance. They said that they may tell us what the new limit will be before the new Age starts, but there is no guarantee, we may not hear it until the patch goes live.

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I missed that detail when I watched the recording. Thank you for pointing it out! :slight_smile:

That detail I did not miss, but I wanted to include the question anyway, on the off chance that there’s a slightly more informative answer available by the time someone from Funcom sees this, if they decide to reply at all.

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If Den pointed out in public that the thrall limit may change based on qa testing, the odds of the remaining the same is small.

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I remember how excited I was by the nifty tavern system. Then I saw it in action. Incredibly janky. And when we allowed players to have them on our modded private sever the lag was so bad so fast that I think we had them less than a month before we had to get rid of them all. Performance improved drastically. I don’t know if they’ve ever undergone any improvement. So while I love the IDEA of the wandering thralls… I dread their arrival.

As to the companions, since I don’t play on the Exiled Lands map because I far prefer the excellent Savage Wilds, I’ll never see them. But I’m okay with that because neither of them particularly appealed to me. My hope THERE is that they can be modded because I know modders will come up with far more interesting versions and may perhaps even make them customizable by players.

Or, you know, they may “forget” to give the updated dev kit to modders again, break a ton of modded servers… and bring a lot of players that much closer to walking away from the game.

I guess we’ll see.

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As always @CodeMage , a very well-composed assessment.

While I see that they are certainly trying to cater to a singular play style or dynamic, I feel that they are really a trakke i salaten with this planned system.

Yes. I am so frustrated with this company’s behavior that I had to go and look up Norwegian sayings in the hopes of getting my point across. Not only that - they have shown us time and time again that by the time they’ve unveiled their bad ideas - it’s already too late for us to lobby against it.

I play on PvP servers. PvP is a bitter, toxic environment. I simply do not see how Living Settlements is a good or positive change for PvP servers. It will only serve to make PvP servers MORE TOXIC. MORE inhospitable. It is important to note here - I often will read and consider PvE and PvE-C perspectives. When I do - I don’t take a myopic view, and crap all over PvE and PvE-C concerns. For Funcom to deliver this feature as billed will be the death stroke for PvP.

You cannot trade Living Settlement thralls. They are live, and in the world. And are no longer a bargaining chip to be leveraged against those bully clans who want to murder you.

You can kill Living Settlement thralls. Gassing thralls will become a new PvP pass time. I assure you. Funcom - you can take bets on the number of Zendesk tickets that will come in for people not understanding that the Living Settlement artisan thralls within their building walls will become terribly vulnerable. You might as well go ahead and create the ticket sub-class now for the sake of metrics capturing. If you care. I’m not convinced that you do.

Rare, necessary Shieldwright and Bladesmith artisans will become more rare. Why? Because those that do not have them, and cannot trade them, will now work to kill all of those rare artisans not in their employ. I guarantee it. The Living Settlement system will give rise to a new raiding technique which will exist ONLY to destroy artisan thralls. Keeping their Shieldwrights and Bladesmiths alive will be the new signal of the alpha clan. No one else will be permitted to do so.

This system once again highlights just how absolutely disconnected Funcom is from their players. They have no idea how we play and enjoy their game. And they are going to force this garbage down our throats whether we like it, or not.

Funcom? To move forward with the Living Settlement system will be to a drite seg ut.

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In the other game I play, you can build doors that your servants can’t open. The look identical to the doors they are based off of but with a red x over them.

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I don’t play PVP, so there’s nothing I can say that is based on personal experience. That said, after reading a lot of well thought-out posts by PVP players over the years, I’ve formed the impression that even though the motivation behind the PVP mode in Conan Exiles is sound, the gameplay simply doesn’t lend itself to non-toxic play.

This is not a game where you enter a match on a more-or-less level playing field and may the most skilled player win. This is a persistent-world game where “winning” is a positive feedback loop, a game with a significant barrier to entry due to all the grind before you’re “ready”, and a game whose very concept of “winning” is to make your opponent stop playing on the server.

That seems like a set of fundamental problems that no amount of balancing tweaks will solve. On top of that, from what I understand, the official servers are overrun with hackers because Funcom stopped dealing with them as well as they used to.

All in all, when offlining and blatant hacking are the prevalent ways to win, I don’t think that gassing thralls is going to be more than a drop of vinegar in an ocean of pіss.

But yeah, I get you. This feature is rubbing salt in an already gangrenous wound.

This is the one point in your post where I actually disagree strongly with you. Yeah, sure, once you place a thrall, it’s yours and cannot be traded. However, if Funcom ends up confirming my theory that you can still trade thralls you broke on the wheel before you place them, that’s still a bargaining chip.

And outside PVP, I like the idea that placed thralls are yours and cannot be traded. Now you’re not just collecting thralls out of boredom or because you “gotta catch 'em all”, but because trading crafters is slightly more interesting now that you can lose some of them to a (say) purge and you can’t just trade every single crafter you own.

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We on console are ALWAYS concerned about new content and how will effect the stability of the server, especially on PlayStation where we’re working with the lowest of the low ports. I like the idea of some of the stuff, but on official server, thrall caps and lag are what concern me the most.

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I think this discussion here is good. At the same time, I would like to emphasize one thing:

I have read again and again, not specifically in this thread, but in our official Conan Exiles forum here in general, that some guys do not want to play a barbaric Sims derivative. However, Joel Bylos announced at the Game Developers Conference 2017 in San Francisco that this was one of the main goals that they wanted to see realized in Conan Exiles:

I just wanted to put this out to perhaps somehow make it clear that the development of Conan Exiles is perhaps more coherent than some players might not want to admit.

:confused:

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When we were told about upcoming golems they offhandedly mentioned doing the same with thralls maybe.
When we were told about the bartender and how it worked they mention doing the same with other artisans. I joked about the bazaar filling with maid costumes. I still expect artisan/villager costumes to be a big thing in the bazaar with ch 1.
So it looks like we will be getting that plus other games wandering artisans.

My opinion, I don’t see this being anything but another disastrous update. Based on past updates, how well thrall pathing works now, and just how ambitious this is, I expect ch 2, 3, and 4 to be fixes and updates to what implemented in ch1.

End of line.

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That’s true, but I think the counterpoint to be made is that we’ve all read, again and again, for the entire lifespan of Conan, that lots of people want the settlements to look more dynamic and interesting.

Is one of those groups larger than the other? I don’t know for certain, and of course neither does anyone else since it’s not a topic that FC has asked players to weigh in on, but based on the total number of posts going back years asking for more life in their settlements compared to the complaints about barbaric sims, I believe that the “more dynamic settlements” group outweighs the “anti-barbaric sims” group.

No game developer can make all of their players happy, because players are composed of multiple factions with competing goals and desires, but if FC is going to add features I’d rather they be the features that people have been asking about for years (rather than some of the awful “features” that no one ever asked for in the recent updates cough dyers bench cough.

Games aren’t a democracy, but I’d rather see the devs add features that are liked by more players than they are disliked by.

Of course there are still concerns, a good idea that is implemented poorly is worse than doing nothing at all, so we all hope that FC does a better job with these upcoming features than they did in the last age. But if we’re going to discuss the people complaining about barbaric sims then we have to put them into context, juxtaposed against the larger group that’s been asking for more interesting bases for a long time now. Just because the “no sims” players are making more noise at the moment doesn’t mean they speak for the majority of players.

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I am in agreenent about no Game company can please everyone.

But rest assure that the vast majority of people dislikes a broken Game.

Dislikes removal ir limit their options

Messing with crafting thralls was totally unnecesary.

They only needed the abilituy to chance clothing. Few improvements on the enotes they do on bench would have been a welcoming change.

Based on what i SEE with taverns i can tell there is a World full of pain coming to you with the crafters…

Path blocking thralls… At Doors , thralls stuck , don’t forget about those thralls flying. Thralls standing on chairs instead of sitting etc. The issues we saw in your stream was introduced with the tavern, and it never got fixed.

They could have added life by adding variety of enotes and random movements to deployed thralls. Enotes, animation changes , Patrol system . Iddle animations. Etc.

Funcom seems to forget there are limits , and i rather keep My thralls on those benches than having them moving around punishing US by reducing the ammount of thralls we can have.

I don’t SEE a point of giving US more limits for keeping something that has no practícal value other than a cosmetic change that could have been accomplished using other options.

People has only been asking for ways to dress crafters . The rest is in general uncalled for.

I do welcome the newlly voiced thralls with quests.

I do welcome the new bench enotes

I do welcome the posility of allowing changes to crafters clothibg ( not by making them part of the World as this is going to be expensive on performance)

Funcom you are buying yourself a Lot of trouble and headaches.

If you feels that combat changes you had to ( kinda to go back) was painful just wait until this comes out.

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Generally I really like the idea of living settlements, but while I would not go so far as disastrous, I also expect it to be something that will arrive greatly flawed, knowing or unknowingly, and cause unforeseen or unintended issues that will probably remain unresolved until later chapters or perhaps might even persist quasi indefinitely or for a long time thereafter - even if those issues will have already been evident to the beta community and console players especially.

I do however remain cautiously optimistic and hopeful that it will be something we can all enjoy eventually. Here is to hoping that they will actually this time listen to the beta community and try to implement changes and fixes before going live with something that causes more problems than adding enjoyment.

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do they pretend to reduce the thrall cap? So they should consider creating a station for dancers , like a carpet, or pole, who knows…

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I’m going to reserve my expectations on live release until it comes out. I’ll hold them to their word that resources has been moved from battle pass items to better quality releases

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I think the concept of a living base and the settlement which was a vision many years ago is just fine. I think it’s progress in terms of game design development, meeting the requests of players and those expectations.

Like just above, I will reserve my final judgment on the update for when it launches - hoping that bug reports for beta will actually be considered prior to release. I can’t help but be very apprehensive and sad though.

I’ve said often I am adaptable; that’s because for me change IS inevitable.

What I would hope however is an explanation of what is truly intended. We have been hit with multiple unwanted changes over the years with vague explanations of it being a set up for future systems (animal rework anyone?). This whole cloak and daggers approach of “SURPRISE!” stuff in the future feels disingenuous. While I don’t have to know everything, at least I can manage my expectations and understand what is happening. I don’t have to like it and that’s ok too. It helps to understand WHY things happen the way they do though; especially being that these set ups happen months to a year ahead of the implementation of other systems.

Is the fear that if they reveal too much that will in turn make players leave? Keep them hanging on for as long as possible for potential revenue in the interim? So dishonest if so.

I’m really not so concerned about a Sims facsimile in Hyboria; people were already doing this with mods - and in some cases have completely changed the game. I don’t even mind that RP is a focus.

What I do mind is when the game has been crafted to multiple game modes, being a sandbox as well, now serving to alienate if not eliminate the various ways to play the game.

Those who have been discussing their discontent with being forced to play the game in a certain way is warranted especially with forced storylines and removed mechanics that have been in the game for years.

So PVP especially at this point seems to have been potentially discarded in the midden heap with this new update. Not only severely neglected as a whole in regard to balance and ease of exploits but on PC Officials being ravaged by hackers. No acknowledgement, no assurances, no consideration.

I realize that there’s no good way to make PVP truly balanced and viable in this game and never was. But it was once the most popular game mode. I appreciate that trying to balance all game modes can be tricky. But it’s felt like passive elimination for a long time. It really sucks.

If they cared about all then they would talk about it. By not talking about PVP in particular, it’s speaking with actions. If they don’t want PVP anymore then get rid of it. But oh wait! PVPers STILL buy; to some this might be a surprise but whales exist there too.

This speaks to the general discontent really… poor QA, lack of communication, predatory monetization, lack of player confidence, poor implementation of moderation, the bug saga.

We will see and I hope the unanswered questions get the attention it deserves.

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haha the guy spinninf the pork barbecue was the most

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i think its gonna be nice with all the new changes and allso the settlemnt is such a good idea same with the crafting we still dont know how its gonna work before we have test it on the beta test servers. do in mind they showed a test of what we was getting that means they gonna fix what need to be fixed buut the settlemnt its really awesome we finaly getting it. m so appy to see the sttlemnt to conan waiting it for so many years now and we finaly getting it :smiley: