100 foundations is way too small. I am skipping the clan suggestion.
My round tower uses approximately 100 foundations alone due to wedge foundations and uneven floor needed some spots 2 foundations to even the floor out.
6 + 12 + 24 + 30 = 72 foundations just for the base floor of circle type structure (tower) which is smaller than 8 x 8 box structure of 64 foundations. (Approximately the size of a 48 square foundation floor)
100 foundations is absolutely nothing, even if you build on level ground and dont have to adjust for uneven surfaces.
Animal pens alone cover at the very least an 8x8 area.
I don’t even know why I’m responding to this. There should never be hard limits on building pieces, period.
After some revision I just crested 7700 pieces today, that’s with 3 clan members. One Public Service Project, one extant Map Room, three Big-Ass Player Bases, one Work Room, and one Noob Detection System/Doomsday Cache.
It’s a 10x10 if you use foundations for every surface of the ground floor. Which is not at all necessary in PvE and a waste of resources besides.
There seems to be something of a lack of finesse with the stability system at play with some users.
If a floor is just a floor, it does not need to be entirely, or even majority, foundations. It needs foundations (or a support pillar) every 3 or 4 pieces, but a standing surface or surface to place decorations or even workstations on can be composed of ceiling tiles. Foundations are only needed for places one intends to build up load bearing walls from.
The other concern would be purges. Which would inform where one wants to concentrate their foundation pieces for maximum durability facing the most vulnerable areas.
Also, and point of clarification because this strawman comes out every time this is mentioned, I am explicitly referring to foundations, not total building pieces.
The only build that actually suffers from foundation limits are massive curtail walls, the utility of which I must question in PvE…
This is also only viable for PvE. The entire principle of PvP construction is the honeycomb which collapses as soon as there is any sort of quantified build limit.
You can build your “foundation” out of pillars and ceilings and simply send walls to the ground. So this brilliant solution is not only incredibly easy to work around, but will result in many more building pieces to accomplish the same goal.
We don’t need hard limits, and some of you need to seriously take 5 seconds to trouble shoot ideas before you start tossing them around.
It’s not a straw man. Even if you space out the foundations and use ceilings and wedges in between, it’s still a pretty small base. Not to mention that it’s gonna look like shіt with most building materials, because a foundation and a ceiling/wedge don’t look the same.
All in all, you just provided us with an excellent example of why building limits would be useless, and it’s not only because not everyone builds the same way you do, thank you very much, but also because you seem to think that limiting foundations will automagically prevent performance problems. It won’t.
With your chosen foundation limit of 100, I could still build a perfectly reasonable and innocent base that would totally screw with the server performance. And when I say “innocent”, I mean that there’s nothing intentionally malicious about the way I would build it.
Wow that is a lot of pieces. 600k… I think equals (most likely exceeds) all 3 of my servers all the player builds combined. I think that is overkill. I hope this is not one clan but overall the server builds, which is more reasonable.
100 foundations will kill practically all the official pve servers. Only people it might not effect is people who build towers or hate building.
I know it wasn’t you but was curious if you meant one person/clan or meant all the builds on the server. That is insane number.
I am very aware that people enjoy building in this game. I enjoy building in this game. I’m consistently nonplussed by how the support beams block placement of fences and the lack of an inside corner awning, and the removal of the ability to stack regular awnings to create the appearance of an inside corner. But that’s not the point.
People also enjoy killing their enemies, seeing them driven bef-
Er, winning. Slaying Giants and Dragons, flying, digitally cosplaying as Death Dealer, turning someone who jumped you for no reason into your prisoner with a job. Or just collecting lots of prisoners with jobs.
None of these are invalid.
But there are limits. Sometimes resource limits, sometimes more apparently arbitrary limits (I remember the contention over thrall limits), somethings you only get to do in admin mode so they are limited to solo play or private servers.
But the thread was a question about how to reduce official PvE server clutter and obstruction. There is a stop gap in place. If a build reduces server and player performance it’s an offense. But that’s not terribly helpful, is it?
It measures the effect. Not the cause.
At what point does a build cause this effect?
Perhaps 100 foundations is far too few.
Perhaps 10,000 is more reasonable.
However, players deserve both specific rules that can be followed as well as a play environment that hasn’t been reduced to urban blight and trolls hiding behind a game being PvE so they are basically in a consequence free environ.
10k sounds more reasonable (building pieces I am guessing) for a player.
It is a Strawman if I suggest a specific piece limitation and then someone counters with an argument regarding total pieces regardless of whether any of them are the specific piece mentioned. It was also mentioned as a head off rather than a call out.
Mea Culpa: I will most certainly agree that (especially) the tier 3 base game build material ceilings make poor (and sharp looking) floors. Mea Culpa on that one, I’m used to DLC pieces like Arena, Stable, ect, and that is wrong of me to assume access on that front.
The servers I have played on that rendered most smoothly we’re ones that either limited foundations or removed the requirement for build pieces to snap to foundations. This was also what the admins of those servers told me kept their houses in order. That’s anecdote. Not universal. But when spitballing for solutions, sometimes that’s all we have to work with. I saw something that had worked, and shared.
I have two questions, and they are not intended to be trollish or baiting. I am curious.
Thrall limit. To be honest, not sure, since never noticed an issue with it either way, but on my private servers, I put the limit at 300 for clan. I think 300 is a reasonable number. 50 + 25 (so 75 for a solo player). So far no one raised an issue on the amount. I have this amount since they implemented the feature, I think late 2019 or early 2020. Official servers only gotten the amount implement recently.
I will let CodeMage answer that one, since I am not too familiar with laggy builds beyond the old 1941 official server build I raised on a thread from 2019. I can run the game fine and another player could say its laggy - so this is a tough subject to answer on performance since your computer/video card/internet connection also has a play in this.
Ask 10 different people and you’ll get 12 different opinions. Mine is that it’s useful, but not as useful as everyone expected.
It’s useful, because before they activated it, there were clans that had countless bases all over the map and would stuff 400 followers (not an exaggeration) in one base alone. I could name at least one of those clans on a specific server, but you know, it’s not nice and it’s against forum rules 
When you take that kind of behavior into account, it’s definitely useful. However, it didn’t really solve most of the server performance problems. And it’s understandable why: if you’ve got two neighbors who play loud music all night, and one gets evicted but the other doesn’t, you’ll still suffer from sleep deprivation 
Yeah, sure. Just take it with a grain of salt, because I’ve never actually been a server admin myself, so I’m basing my ideas on the effects I’ve managed to observe on official servers.
Basically, whenever you have a crapton of placeables in a small volume, the server will temporarily shіt the bed when someone goes in and out of the rendering range, because it has to send all of that stuff over the wire. That’s why excessive fence foundation stacking can be so bad for server performance, because it makes your base insanely dense. Bonus points for containers, which you can fill with the stuff that you gather during your normal playthroughs.
Speaking of placeables, if they’re on the ground level around your base, that’s going to add another layer of computational complexity during purges, especially if they’re “swarm” purges, e.g. Cimmerian Berserkers. Each placeable is an obstacle that the pathfinding algorithm needs to take into account, so when you get a swarm of zerkers trying to calculate the best way to go medieval on your walls, that can be very intense.
Those are, basically, the things that I’ve seen have an effect on the server performance. Client performance, well, some of the stuff I mentioned above will affect it similarly – anything that involves loading and unloading a whole bunch of stuff at the same time. And then there are things with lots of details, and with animations, and particle effects. I’m pretty sure you can make a lot of clients struggle just by building a nice armory with plenty of weapon racks and lots of torches and banners.
I’m pretty sure there are better ways to screw up performance, but I’ve seen the effect of the stuff I described, and if you have enough of that on the server, it adds up.
That’s the million dollar question. If you’re sure you’ll kill server performance and you do it anyway, then no, it’s not innocent, it’s actually malicious. But it’s very hard to be sure, for several reasons. For starters, everything I’ve said so far is basically an educated guess. Sure, it’s based on experience and technical knowledge, and I feel pretty confident about, but it’s still not guaranteed to be true and someone who knows more might prove I’m just full of shіt 
Second, we don’t have any way to measure this stuff properly. The best I’ve been able to do as a player is to toggle the debug HUD on and pay attention to the server FPS. If it consistently tanks whenever I or someone else goes near a specific build, then I can point my finger at that build. As a yardstick, this method sucks.
Third, Funcom keeps changing stuff. Today’s problem might be optimized away tomorrow, and a new thing they added might make everything worse.
As far as I can tell, there are very few builds that are sure to cause problems – e.g. placing 500 standing torches in the smallest space you can squeeze them in – and those are usually easy to recognize as malicious.
All in all, I don’t have a good answer for you. I know that you can build innocently and have a noticeable impact on performance, but that doesn’t mean it will be a server-crippling build. That’s another reason why I think Funcom’s change in the rules is not as bad as people make it out to be: I don’t think they’ve set out to completely eliminate all overbuilding problems, but just to take care of the truly egregious crap.
I think a problem with actually naming a number of foundations, or builds pieces in general, and saying anything under it is ok comes down to the way different pieces use a different amount of game resources when being rendered.
I personally feel no one would really benefit from a hard number cap on building pieces and creating it still wouldn’t eliminate the grey area of the rules
This is more complex as I first thought and here are people who have really knowledge posting. I am more a noob. I really appreciate that this discussion is present, giving surely not only me the feeling of being a point of Interest.
To the thrall limits: Even if they alone weren’t the problem it IS much better with the limits as the annoying vehicle parks everywhere stopped. If you come along a vehicle park of 100 animals every 50 meters you really loose it. This stopped and this is great.
The building is a really complex problem, normally only a human admin could solve. I see that maybe there is no automatic solution.
People are very creative being annoying and don’t care of others. 
Seems it can’t be totally solved without admin intervention,
but maybe at least a limit of pieces could stop the one thing that someone builds his palace(s) over multiple sectors. The rest… seems a troll is a troll is a troll and trolls troll…
Maybe some clear rules made by Funcom with a good tutorial which form of building is seen as offensive,
how you should build, where building is bad (on resource fields), aso,
and the warning of measures being taken is the only way.
If someone wants to build his own way he can evers set up a single server or rent a private server.
I think more people are happy if official servers are playable then people who ragequit cause of this.
Well, at least now I see why it isn’t easy, and my former naive opinion “why can’t Funcom just quick make some limitations” changed to “wow, this is a complex one”.
What is a big base? As the game lock to day what take space when building is the altars when they can be build that colse and its alot off them (spec when they have made so you can do all the religions at ones) and litle bit depens on the terain to wher we can plase them. Or are we not supose to have acces to al altars?
What do you think?
But first implent an land clame restriction and extend the none build zones and link them together so they cant wall stuff in. But an option to remove it on solo and privat server.
a) This would be a nice thing. Also extend the nonbuilding zobe near villages/npc places. People tend to build nearest as possible and if big Fortresses and/or many wheels of pain are built near for example New Asagarth everything lags there and it is nearly impossible to fight inside. Also people tend to build in the Savannah at the small lake, at the cimmerian village (it is often nearly surrounded by structures very near to it), aso. It would be nice to have a bigger distance to such central points.
b) Maybe at least a maximum of 10 fundaments above each other could be implemented, so the 20-30 fundament high fortresses on PvE Servers are gone. PvP i can understand, but in PvE it is more than senseless.
Sorry to again revive this thread. And some people are really angry as it seems. I have a feeling that PvP clans which are not active “park” on PvE until again active and use the same structures they are used to.
Never is someone online of the holders of those big structures, noone plays, but everywhere you find them. Big quadratic blocks> 20 fundaments high, >40x40 fundaments l x b, full with stuff and dead.
It is like a walk through old Egypt structures with epic monuments and mummys everywhere. But no sign of life. And filling complete sector(s) with structures, walls, lanes, senseless towers, crawl complete rivers up with 100 towers, place on every beach fundaments as piers…
Well, this is this “dominate” character. But “dominating” by claiming sectors on PVE servers where no fight is and nothing could be done against it is odd. People tend to reserve at least 1-2 sectors and secure that noone builds near them. 3 or 4 of them in the starter sectors and the beginning zone is not playable anymore and people leave again instantly…
Well I see that the subject and once again actuality …
and many did not want to vote
and many have shown an unfavorable opinion regarding the idea of a building limit …
I will keep a very relevant reflection from I no longer know who … the limit of trall has not changed anything
moreover I am of the opinion that it is for the admin to be able to decide same if the rules seem too vagueness for certain players and I think that there is once again a little (a lot?) of hypocrisy.
it’s also good not to know, it gives you the opportunity to discover and experiment and learn, and make mistakes
For a 40/40 server you’re going to want no more than 2000 building pieces per person in a clan (solo 2000, clan of two 4000, etc). Probably want to be a bit less. Here’s why:
The people who are online, the more regions are loaded to the players. When you move around the map on a server, regions are somewhat active if you’re not close to them, but the server isn’t sending you info on them. Not until you get close to them.
When there is 40 players online, all 40 players are getting information from the regions they are close to, and they are more likely to be spread out. Loading more regions. (Bunching them all in one location doesn’t actually help, but for reasons outside this topic)
When a region is loaded, the information on the structures is loaded. So when you have 40/40 players online. You’ve got 40 players loading different regions, and all the builds in those regions. If those builds are 5,000-12,000 pieces each its not 40x that, because remember some builds are from offline players. Its much much more.
This is why you see <10 server FPS and it feels clunky when more than 20-30 players are online. For a relatively smooth experience you want 20-30 FPS (ideally 60, but officials cap at 30), you start seeing issues at 15, and it feels bad under 10. Under 5 is almost unplayable.
This would be alleviated by quite a bit with the restrictions I mentioned above. And this is from my experience on 70/70 servers with building restrictions. Even with 70 players online, the game is still playable. With no restrictions it isn’t, which is why officials are 40 capped.
Might be able to push it to 2500, since officials are unmodded. But they have some really old databases.