What happened is the safeties kicked in and prevented an entire server wipe for the server.

Every 5 minutes a server saves a backup. Depending on the setting, the server will keep these back ups to a certain number. Depending on the provider of the server (G-Portal, ServerBlend, GTX Gaming, etc.) they may also keep some of these backups in another location.

When a server crashes, you try reloading the server. If it won’t come online, you load 5 minutes back from the crash. If it still doesn’t come up, you go back another 5 minutes. Keep doing this till you get a backup save that will come on. Whatever caused the crash happened 6 hours before the crash happened and prevented loading the save.

To put it shortly, the game is working as intended. Otherwise you’d be looking at a wipe of everything, not just six hours.

Is this acceptable? Well… that’s an interesting question. The type of game that Conan Exiles is, this is the standard. You have a 3rd party server host, and one file that holds all the map and characters. It makes the game incredibly easy to deploy for people running their own servers.

Its not an MMORPG that has a few dozen files, and programs that have to run and talk to each other and dozens of failsafes. A player wouldn’t be able to easily run their own server either by themselves on their own machine, or by a 3rd party host. That’s the tradeoff.