“It took me 2 months to level my Votaries thrall to max level and then one day he just jumped off the cliff / ran into lava / stuck between mammoth’s legs and got killed! WTF, Funcom?”
“My level 1 fighter is doing more damage with his bow, then maxed out t4 named Purge archer?? WTF, Funcom?”
“I have leveled my fighter to max level, but accidentally swaped his Croms Blade to throwing axe, and now all he does is runs around ignoring enemies and doing nothing! WTF, FUNCOM?”
So then no. Or at least, the good ones won’t die. If you’re losing a thrall to NPCs then either you’re using terrible thralls (or thrall armor/weapons) or you really have no idea what you are doing, unless NPCs in PVE are a few thousand times stronger than they are in PVP. A T4 volcano fighter in godbreaker with a battle spatula can solo any boss or group of NPCs in the game without taking hardly any damage, and if you have healing arrows then there is no danger at all.
Sorry for the double post, but I had another thought…
The thrall limit does nothing to remove the thralls from decayed bases. So my having more than 100 thralls causes server lag, but the 6 clans that don’t play anymore who have 100 thralls each is no problem?
But you said it, bugs are also here. One time, I went on the sunken city with my T4 bearer and when I entereed the dungeon, he went from 9900 HP to 3600 HPfor no reasons, so yes, you can get thralls to die even if you know what you’re doing.
Edit : As I was scared to loose him, I exited the dungeon and he went from 3600 HP to 940 HP, let me tell you that the run home was breathtaking.
Let’s wait and see what rolls out. Not much choice in the matter unless beating each other up over pve Pvc pvp _ps4 PC Xbox whose best or not is beneficial. Battles are on server.
Often thralls are used for decoration only. If we were able to switch between active and passive thralls, we could use them as decoration and at the same time reduce server load. A passive thrall could have its normal inventory, but would not interact with enemies. It just stays at its given place, performs its default animation. If in need the player could reactivate it and use it as normal thrall, as long as his total number of active thralls is below a certain limit.
I don’t think it would reduce server load in any meaningful manner if the thrall was still hanging around, even if it was less interactive. It would still, by necessity, have to be killable, or people could just protect their thralls from getting killed by turning them into “passive mode”.
Make dancers only passive and they cannot attack ANYONE at all. Not even NPCs or monster. So the only load would be the dancing animation. Nothing else… Also then it shouldnt count towards the limit.
Well it could be destroyable like a foundation for example. The thrall would be nothing more than a chest that can be decorated with armor and that performs a simple repetitive animation. The thrall would not have any AI at all, it would be just some kind of decoration that can be placed on the ground and can be destroyed.
This way it still makes sense to collect named thralls and build (DLC) armor and weapons.
There are two different performance problems Funcom is trying to solve with this change. One is the lag and the other is the server framerate and they are not the same thing.
Lag happens on the client and it’s caused by two different things. One is rendering and animation, another is network I/O. Having too many followers in one area is going to cause both, as your hardware struggles to render and animate all of them and as your network connection has to deal with continuous updates from the server for a large quantity of actors.
Server framerate is basically how fast the server can handle all that it has to simulate. The higher the server framerate, the smoother the game runs for everyone. It is not directly affected by the appearance of what it’s simulating, just the logic. Depending on how much of the simulation is server-authoritative, this might or might not include skeletal animations for NPCs and followers.
This is why it’s currently such a big problem when someone crams 400+ thralls in a single base. From the client’s point of view, it’s a nightmare, because you suddenly have 400+ actors to render and animate, and for which you have to keep receiving a ton of update traffic from the server. From the server’s point of view, it’s a different sort of nightmare. If you have 400+ actors in a single base without any players in the rendering distance, the server won’t bother simulating them at all. As soon as even one player enters the rendering distance, the server has to start simulating all of them – and there’s possibly a catch-up logic to execute which makes things even worse – which can cause the server framerate to drop sharply and adversely impact everyone on the server, not just the player in that area.
Depending on the exact implementation details of the game as it is now, your proposal has the potential to drastically reduce the server framerate problems, but it won’t do much for lag. See, if they do what you’re suggesting, the passive thralls become the same thing as placeables, which are not treated the same way as the building pieces (foundations, walls, etc). Building pieces are completely static: they get loaded in, rendered and there’s not much work to do with them after that. Maybe some LOD adjustments, but that’s it. Placeables are a whole different beast: you have to render the animations for anything that has them (wheel of pain, crafting stations, torches, banners, etc), you have to apply lighting and shadows, etc.
It is already possible to make things super laggy by having a boatload of torches, for example. Passive thralls would have the same effect, so lag would still be a massive problem.
Off topic, I think the best solution would be to limit the follower density. Let’s say you’re trying to place a thrall. The game counts all the followers within a fixed radius (for example) from that spot. If the number of followers is already at density cap, the game tells you “too many thralls in this area”, similar to the existing “too close to another thrall” message, but with different intent.
Having a cap on thrall density would definitely solve lag problems. The question is what impact it would have on server framerate. I don’t know the implementation details of Conan Exiles and the gamedev experience I have is with a completely different engine, but my theory is that it would improve the server framerate and, even more importantly, eliminate server load spikes and help the server framerate degrade gracefully.
This is some great thinking, instead of just hating the cap. I like the thought process of this. Not 100%, but like the problem solving idea skills at work here.
So if we have a problem rendering placeables on low end machines, why not add an option on the client side to change their drawing distance and/or their detail?
I think part of it is already implemented. If you approach a building you first see the building blocks, much later you see torches and other placeables. So I wonder if it would be already enough to convert thralls to placeables to raise client performance? Just because this would lower their render distance?
I know a lot of people are complaining. I sort of get the motive for pvp servers, but on pve/c my endgame is to build bases, big and lots. I have invested 2k hours on official 1036, building big bases and fleshed them out with followers everywhere, so they feel alive. I have 12 Bases on that server, all fully manned and even small villages for thralls next to the bases.
I know I am not alone and we have several dedicated builders on our server and each one has far more than 400 thralls.
I spent months capturing them, gathering resources, to dress them and that now all will be gone?
If that’S the case, i will spend the next weeks taking ingame pictures of the bases and then i am gone as well.
At least give me the chance to pick them up into my inventory and store them, that way i can make sure my favourite followers will not be deleted.
It is sad to see such a drastic change, especially for pve endgame, if building is your thing and staffing bases with placed pets and thralls, then funcom is taking that away
Again, let us bag those followers that are dear to us!!!
As Funcom already closed the official one, I would say otherwise… Maybe Funcom will recognize that thrall limit and non retroactive was not a good idea at ALL.
But then again its FC… “My way or the highway” mentality…
Battles are on server. 
