Instead of delete AKA “break bonds” as only way to diminish your followers pool it will be cool if one can set them free like to be a hostile NPC after short countdown again.
We could build a non-linear dungeons and simulate Purges this way, at least on PVE-C.
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I’m not sure this idea would translate well. Isn’t part of the reason for a thrall limit to reduce the cost on the server? To minimize lag and improve performance?
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If player makes a thrall into hostile NPC he (and anyone else) can kill this NPC. Or otherwise. Both results will affect server load positively, though with different duration. It’s a win/win!
What will affect server load more dramatically is counter-measure against DLC-showoff theme parks 3 times bigger than Sepermeru, but this is for other topic.
This has a tremendous, and endless possibility for griefing.
I’ll go train my fifty cimmerian berserkers, equip them with legendary items I found (just the random crappy ones which do 50 or so damage). Then get them in epic heavy armor, make sure to get them to level 10 so they get a perk.
Then, you just wait for the next free weekend, and just leave them all, one at a time, down by noob river. After that, it’s just watch the bloodbath as rank after rank of level 60 enemies in full legendaries repeatedly gang-bangs people in linen clothes, some wielding only a pick.
Like some sort of army of T-1000s, they’d methodically stalk and murder sub-level 3 players with such efficiency and ruthlessness, they wouldn’t even get a chance to run. One hit kill. I mean, some of them with the 50-thrall-induced lag wouldn’t even know they were dead before the death screen popped.
It would be glorious.
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Exactly. It bears potential to mis-use, but not so dangerous as building another DLC
show-off theme park 3 times bigger than Sepermeru, and much bigger potential to fun (to others, unlike theme parks owners).
50 berserkers are still hard to do, much harder than build a theme park. If you train them and Set free one by one they will hardly be menace, because there will be no 50 berserkers at one time and one place. And if you train them all and set free altogether - it will limit your thrall pool and capability to defend from Purge (thees things still happen from time to time)
But who would bother taking such pains, when he just build Great Chinese Wall around Asgard, which will be there forever (or at least until next summer vacations)?
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This is a lot less difficult than you think. Having done so on an RP-PVP server. It takes a greater wheel, some free time, and a decent thrall master and you can have this done in ~22 hours of playtime.
If you start getting into efficiency, I’d say 30 a day would be pretty simple if you were dedicated to the cause.
No, they won’t and it isn’t.
First of all, your idea is too easy to abuse: capture a bunch of thralls, keep them in a chest, and when you need to create a server lag spike, just keep placing them and breaking their bonds remotely.
Second, NPCs come with the map. Their state isn’t saved in the game database. If you kill or knock out an NPC just before the reboot, it won’t be there after the reboot. So either your liberated thralls will be ephemeral or they’ll have to be saved in the game database, which increases the resource usage on the server.
Third, what would the freed thrall be like? NPCs don’t have the same stats as thralls. So is your freed thrall supposed to revert to its NPC archetype or does it retain all the stats it got from leveling? Same question applies to their inventory, etc.
As @Lanessar explained, not that much harder, and they can have much worse impact on the server. You’re confusing the server load with the client lag. High server load will affect everyone on the server. It will degrade the AI of all thralls and followers and NPCs and monsters, it will cause lag for everyone, it’s much more catastrophic.
It won’t, because that’s against the rules.
Look, we get it. I’ve seen you in another thread complaining about “DLC show-off theme parks”. It sucks to play a game on the hardware that doesn’t make it easy. But like I said there, building is one of the most popular aspects of the PVE(-C) endgame. If you don’t like building, that’s fine for you, but a lot of us do. Fortunately, Conan Exiles offers a pretty wide range of options and experiences, so perhaps you might want to explore them a bit, instead of clinging to the one you seem to detest and complaining about it everywhere.
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Making those thralls forget all they learned while leveling will defeat the purpose. Let them retain all stuff and stats, but make them short-living, like 3 days. Keeping an army in chest will not be equally effective and therefore will be easy to be killed.
Building a Great Chinese Wall around 25 replicas of Taj-Mahal could be against rules, but it scares nobody to break those rules.
And I never complained about my hardware. And I like building. It is game mechanics, what I concentrate on, and replayability, graphics are tertiary. Designing and redesigning a functional castle with adequate security staff supposed to be goal in PVE survival game with environment capable of retaliation (like it is in “Dwarf Fortress”). But de facto this environment is not capable of destroying a single unguarded shop from arabian nights bazar (stretched from Sinkhole to Summoning place).
That’s what I talk about - compare 30 days of efforts to create something others can kill (with effort I suppose) and building may be beautiful, but useless and inert DLC show off theme park, which is in fact immune to Purge and will be there until great builder will forget to log in.
I still think you misunderstand my example. It took me 22 days to farm more than 50 thralls, and I was a “casual”. One location, maybe 2-3 hours on a weekend.
The people who would exploit this would probably have three stacked greater wheels running, and be pumping out hundreds of t-1000s a day.
I understand your hatred of the huge, lifeless buildings covering a map. I do. This isn’t going to fix that problem. It will make other problems, and make it infinitely worse.
I’d be all for an experiment run of this on Testlive, just to laugh at roving Berserkers and Volcano named thralls murdering people in the starting area en masse, though…
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You’re glossing over most of what I said.
Again, official servers are rebooted every day, so keeping them for 3 days is already going to be a problem, for reasons I already explained and can’t be arsed to repeat. As for army-from-chests scenario, it’s effectiveness has nothing to do with how easy it would be to kill these freed thralls. As long as you can deploy it reasonably quickly – within an hour or so – you have a way to degrade the whole server’s performance on a short notice.
Whether we like it or not, Conan Exiles is built on tech that has some unfortunate limitations. Nobody but the devs knows the precise ins and outs of those limitations, but it’s possible to get a relatively good idea from what the devs have been saying and what the mod authors know. Just as an example, not very related to this thread, I’ll point you in the direction of the thread about mannequins and armors stands, where you can see that the devs don’t want to add them because displaying armors would be a potential source of client lag.
From all I’ve seen and heard so far, AI seems to be a significant source of server load. And like I’ve said, server lag – unlike client lag – degrades the experience for everyone connected to the same server. Considering that the devs don’t want to add mannequins or armor stands or cosmetic thralls just because they might cause client lag, there’s no way in hell they’ll implement something that can be easily abused to cause server lag.
That’s not what you said and not what I replied to. Building the Great Wall around New Asagarth, which is what you said initially, is definitely against the rules.
Yes, PVE could use a lot more challenge. It would be fun to have something else to play for than just “I have a new idea for a cool castle” or “they dropped a new patch with a bunch of new gear to collect from new bosses, which will be rendered obsolete and useless 3 patches hence, so I better go play with it now”. But I’m not holding my breath anymore.
PVE and PVE-C are basically Conan Minecraft and I don’t think that’s going to change. I enjoyed that thoroughly for a long time and then – just like with Minecraft – I got bored and now I don’t spend much time in the game. Thing is, that’s just me. Most people are perfectly fine with the way things are and I don’t think Funcom’s going to rock that boat a lot. 
This is probably best explained reason, thank you.
I lost my precise track on that things. Sometimes they decay and I gladly exile them from my memories.
If building a huge anything, that makes wilderness into inert showcase and serves no other purpose could be expensive for upkeep and protection. But attaching an upkeep cost like food for thralls is not fun either and sheer amount of resources is never problem for builders of Chinese walls and or primitive sandstone spam.
Making them hard to protect by spawning recalculated amount of mobs to Purge will probably overload the server.
Then joining the plead for fixed limit of building blocks is only way.
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I would really, really hate it if they implemented a flat, fixed cap on building blocks. I’m already spending very little time playing, and that would just kill my interest completely. I believe there are better solutions. For example:
I think that “not fun” is precisely the whole point, but it needs to be implemented and fine-tuned. Give it a threshold size under which you don’t have to do any upkeep. Anything over the threshold would require upkeep and Funcom would have to find a function that works well – not too expensive at first, but grows steeper and steeper the larger you build.
Providing a game mechanic that acts as a dynamically scaled counterbalance to building is much better than a flat cap. And the upkeep mechanic isn’t the only one that can do that.
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I can support that- sure.
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Upkeep cost is resources. So, if anyone wants to build a useless spawn-killing monstrocity from Volcano to broken aqueduct (and this is also real example) they would simply need more resources. The solution (cheaper in terms of server capacity) is not being able to build at all, after reaching insane amount of blocks built and/or square occupied.
Yes, upkeep cost is resources, but it’s resources over time. You wanna build 25 replicas of Taj Mahal? You might need 10,000* hardened bricks, but then it’s all built and it stands there forever. If you had to spend 2000* hardened bricks and 1000* steel reinforcements a day to keep it standing, that’s a whole different story.
* None of these figures are actual estimates or suggestions.
Is calculating the special decay timer and upkeep cost easier for server than occupied area? Because absolute cap on area, occupied by player (and for clan it should not be soft limit like with thralls), is once set in rules is a constant. Recalculation will be needed if player quits or something new built.
That’s an interesting question. There are various ways to do this and some of them are more computationally expensive than others.
For example, calculating a cap on surface area is going to be expensive, regardless of whether you use it for a flat cap or to calculate upkeep costs. On the other hand, if you simply use the number of foundations or number of building pieces, it’s cheap regardless of whether you use it for upkeep cost or as a flat cap.
So the question really comes down to how you would implement the upkeep itself. And again, there are several ways to do that, but I can’t reason about them as well, because I don’t know enough about what’s “under the hood” of Conan Exiles. 
That said, even though the upkeep cost would be somewhat costlier than a flat cap, it’s much, much better for players. If you have to choose between implementing a flat cap or upkeep mechanics, the flat cap is guaranteed to drive more players away from the game. 
To be more precise, it is area of killed spawn dimensions should be limited. If anyone builds closed circuit wall or U-chape wall with ghostfence as in 4th wall and isolates a huge area with relatively lesser amount of building block (in comparison with city or castle of same size) it should be calculated for same upkeep as a castle. This way it will be hard to build something like wall around Asgarth. Same time, a reasonably big castle of clan, with “road” to obelisk will not trigger this “upkeep tax” same way, because a road from castle to obelisk should not occupy same are as a walls circuit.
Choice of number of foundations won’t be good - with pillars it is possible to build a house (or spam around) without a single foundation.
If occupied area will be limited, those who can’t live without their bazars and dance schools still can build them on top of each other in a fashion of Tower of Babel.
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