Feels a bit boring, doesn’t it. 
I dont say devs should ban explosives, but they could limit on how much one player can carry.
Realisticly a bomb like that would not realy damage reinforced stone wall on open space.
Outer walls would not be damaged by low tech bomb blast. Only indoor areas would suffer due to pressure.
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I’m sure some folks might enjoy your solution (PvP & PvE-C players maybe?), but to me that sounds even less enjoyable than the old feeding mechanic. Sorry, but I’d probably record some YouTube videos of my bases for memory’s sake and then walk away if that’s what became of PvE.
It isn’t. It’s essentially the exact same feature we have now, but provided so that it isn’t a burden to the system.
Edit:
Well, not exactly the same, coz it’s better. 
It’s the same car, but has a better engine system in place that’s a lot lighter and compact.
This type of a vase bomb should just take the whole space really; tweak the mass, that is. If one wants to move more than one at the same time, let’s build a cart and have one of those pets or thralls pull it. Maybe multiple ones.
If a vase is empty, could we carry items inside it? 
Having my pets and thralls turn on me when feeding isn’t even required anymore is most certainly NOT ‘essentially’ the same system we have now. Also, making the pets and thralls even more obnoxious and noisy than they already are would drive me up the wall.
Up to the point of similarity, diverging some degree from beyond it. While it essentially behaves the same, it does have added value on top of it. Read the italic line of the edited reply.
Current level in its intolerable intricacy is obnoxious at best (below the hood) based on feedback I’ve received. Simplifying the feature is anything, but obnoxious.
The added value is and would be modifiable from the server settings just like any key feature in this game is (or should be). This means that just like the sandstorm, decay, crafting and xp even, this feature as well could be tweaked for our liking. We could even deactivate specific parts from the gauge if we wanted to, not just the whole gauge.
Edit:
More info down below at:
I’m not defending it on the merit of deactivation. I’m merely stating that, if the opposition doesn’t understand what is offered, they can at least make their own private servers and test the features presented to their heart’s content. (This is how I test features.)
For example, I’d love to give the sandstorm another shot. However, I deactivated it for the moment coz it feels incomplete. The huge sandstorm is a majestic sight to behold and I would love to add it back soon. Does this mean that the feature is useless? No. I love it. I just don’t utilise it yet. Is that a reason to take the feature away from others? No. Some already like it in its current form and do utilise it.
Edit:
Even if some don’t truly like the feature, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a necessary one to keep.
Some individuals don’t like public transportation and yet they do utilise personal vehicles. We all know transportation is still important no matter how we differ in our personal tastes.
Everyone knows the importance of motion, but not everyone learns every sense of pace. This doesn’t make them ineffective. Merely focused. Fabric of the frame helps them, thorough others.
Maybe I’m not conveying the aspect that I find obnoxious well enough. To be clear, I’m not talking about what occurs under-the-hood. How the feeding mechanic is coded is invisible to me and I have no way of telling what’s lagging the server if that’s what you’re getting at.
What I find obnoxious is all the noise and racket my pets are making now because Funcom told us that we no longer needed to feed them and I took that at face value. It’s completely unnerving to be standing in my own base hearing a cacophony of grunts and roars from all sides where it was nice and peaceful before the change.
It’s like if the manufacturer of your car came out and said, “Oh yeah, we’ve redesigned the engine so it doesn’t need oil anymore,” but then fails to mention it will sound like it’s falling apart once the oil has run out. It’s like we’re being punished for not using a system they deprecated. I’d rank the constant starving animal noises as even worse than when the devs added the maddening, uninformative drumbeat event to every inventory slot mouse-over action.
The noise IS the problem.
Now, with that said, I’m not sure of the benefit of making an animal pen act like a feedbox if we’ll still need separate feedboxes. The pens already have a flat area in the center that’s big enough to place a feedbox, and so it seems to me this would just complicate the code for the animal pens. Additionally, if feedboxes were eliminated and we relied just on the animal pens, this would simply lead to people spamming gigantic animal pens around PvE servers like [I’m led to believe] folks spam vaults in PvP.
Perhaps one way around this would be to slot caretaker thralls into the pens to increase their feeding range, but given how difficult folks find it to figure out how close they can build to resources or where their landclaim ends, I’m dubious about any mechanical benefit that is distance-based. Maybe if there was a way to toggle an overlay or shading for such things, but that doesn’t seem to fit the aesthetic of the game’s design.
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They are going to patch out any of the features tied to hunger, but the first “fix” was to just kill what it did under the hood and damage wise. Noise will go away soon.
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That is a HUGE relief WMHB, thanks for the heads-up! Hopefully a reasonable compromise on the issue of orphaned pets/thralls will be forthcoming too.
I like the idea of just using the pots and boxes. But adding a slot for the cook. And it covers the same area it does now. But the difference is that it stops animal decay, and food doesn’t actually go to each animal. It is more of a fuel burn time, like a thrall wheel. And it only takes gruel (easier to allow for expanding decay when in the boxes, plus easier to farm and just fill to max for 1 week intervals. Plus adding a named cooked slows the burn rate as well of food, pushing ti 3 weeks for a full box. So if your base was to decay, then the pots/boxes would to. And with no attachment to a feede system, thralls/pets decay in 1 week after that.
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Yeah if the thralls and pets simply died off after a week of having no feeding station in-range then that would solve the issue as I see it. We PvEers would then no longer need to engage in “passive PvP” by kiting world bosses to kill off orphans — something that can quite easily have unintended consequences and lead to bad blood.
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I noticed, but I wasn’t absolutely sure. Thanks for the verification.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have past comparison data beyond Plus membership addition of CE. I’ve known thralls and pets doing their noises from the point I raised my controller for the game.
This is an incomplete move, not the full feature. It will be sorted out, I wager. Sounds too bad to be true.
I believe you. The system I mentioned would correct this.
We don’t need a separate feed box for pets.
Either armoured pens or food boxes. Such blocks that are much faster to be produced than armoured pens. This is only the beginning of storming, not the end of it.
I’m aware of the pens, boxes, pots and related issues. Instead of me pointing out every notion there is, I leave that to you and others. I’m merely giving you a plate to use for I’m not necessarily able to lift it.
Caretaker thrall could be a good tool. Further range would function to do what?
It is possible to make the overlay fit for aesthetics.
This statement doesn’t parse for me, I’m not sure what you mean here.
So I think I remember reading once that a thrall pot or feed box was supposed to have a 25-foundation radius. This would mean you would need to space additional feeding stations out over an area to keep everything fed. If the range was increased, this would expand that radius so you wouldn’t have to use quite so many feeding stations to cover the same area, thus reducing visual and computational clutter.
Oh I’m sure it is, I just don’t see Funcom wanting to go that route unfortunately.
First one is about taking the lesser evil instead of the greater one. Armoured Pen is a greater economic investment while a Food Box is way cheaper to produce. Takes longer to get the pen and therefore it takes significantly longer for players to achieve 1000 pets if the box is integrated to it. It is still possible, but the breakpoint is moved closer so other players have the time to raid them instead for example. Further modification can allow the breakpoint be drawn even closer in case needed.
Range variable is removed coz it’s not needed since the pot wouldn’t actually feed them. It merely has the gauge and it governs how smoothly your thralls work in their autonomous ways after assigning them to a post (cake is a lie). In case one is still wanted, the range variable could work as a territorial variable. Beyond it guarding thralls won’t venture unless they are prepared for it thorough the racket (to follow you).
Thrall Racket does the preparation part for thralls and thus negates the need for individual externally managed inventories. They use the racket like they would use a pot, except they get equipment from it for the posts they are assigned to by you (drop the equipment there and they will go register them to themselves). Unlike the food gauge of the Thrall Pot, equipment doesn’t decay in the Thrall Racket. Instead they receive a random damage value in case a thrall who wears them happens to die. When one does, the items registered to them drop to the ground where they died. Items stay in the racket as long as they stay alive (models just spawn the registered equipment on them whenever needed). Items marked as taken can’t be withdrawn from the racket because they are “in use” until the thrall in question is assigned to bring them back. Also for example if you leave 2 pants from the racket and there are 10 thralls who would use those pants, only 8 of those thralls would wear pants and so on.
Re: thrall rackets
Except how do we assign different outfits to individual thralls?
I dress my thralls carefully in particular outfits for different areas so how could you control what they wear with this system?
I get that they could code so we can assign a thrall type to wear particular items … although that would be complex to do I think.
But when you have Cimmerian Berserker (female) x 8 or Relic Hunter Archer (male) x 4 or Lian x 4 and want to give different outfits then how could the game do that?
And how would it work if you took the thrall out of range of the thrall racket?? Would they suddenly be naked? What happens if they died out of range of it? Or you relocate the thrall to another base?
You drop gear into the racket. When you assign a thrall to a post, they visit the racket first to prepare for their occupation.
Each racket has to register an unregistered pot when placed and thorough that the log info of the thralls registered there is shared. You may register thralls to pots and pots to rackets as you wish. Range variable would only concern the relationship between pots and rackets.
Correct. They could, but it is unnecessary.
Essentially one doesn’t need a range variable. When they go to the racket and register items as “taken”, their action is logged. This feature solely allows them to spawn racket-bound gear on them wherever they are. Racket, pot and pen are essentially just a log feature that enables us do the same we currently do - and more - with a lower price when it comes to software and hardware limitations.
When a prepared thrall dies, the registered items are erased from the respective racket and the respective corpses spawn copies of the same erased items into them. These items are essentially the same, but they receive a random damage value to give the illusion that they were utilised.
Relocation requires you to have thralls you want to follow you. You’ll assign their log info to your radial menu / quickbar the same way you do now except they begin to follow you instantly when you do this. No need to place them on the ground and then have them follow you.
When you want to assign them to other posts than the follower one, the thralls stand nearby the pot they are register to and you assign those you want to the stations you want by clicking them and then the stations.
So here we have essentially the same system, with different schematics under the hood, and the assignment process is turned the other way around; instead of guards / followers and crafters, we have followers and guards / crafters.
When a racket is destroyed, it leaves a carbon copy of its data afloat. In other words, the data it holds isn’t erased; only the model is. The data is afloat essentially as long as the linked thralls stay alive. When they are registered to a different racket, the part of the afloat data copy linked to them is assimilated. If they die, the part of the afloat data copy linked to them is erased (items themselves spawn to the corpse as mentioned above).
@Fable Just out of curiosity, why did you choose the word “racket” for this mechanic? I’ve checked both Dictionary.com and Urban Dictionary and neither of them has any usages that seem to fit. Closest usage seems to be “racket” in the context of a criminal enterprise.
As for the mechanic itself, I can see this being helpful for quickly distributing weapons to thralls immediately before a purge (i.e. swapping swords for truncheons). However where outfits are concerned, I’d want the level of control offered by something like the Fashionist mod (rather than having the game just dole out gear at random) and an OCD-override would also be a must.
That said, this feels like more of an RTS mechanic to me, or one that tries to sweep parts of the game under the rug so that we don’t have to be bothered by them. In that sense, I think it would only cause a greater proliferation of thralls at people’s bases since it seems like they could just tag them at a “racket” and then place them without actually having to pay any heed to their loadout.
Trying to curtail thrall/pet spam by way of a starvation or decay mechanic I understand, but the “racket” system feels more like a solution geared to a mass-combat focused game type. It also sounds far more complicated (interaction-wise) than any existing systems in the game, a distinction I’d say is currently attributed to the current animal pens or perhaps trebuchets.
A rack; a piece of furniture to drop an item to for it to hold.
It doesn’t. The rack or racket is simply a management hub for the player to dictate thrall loadouts without the need to code each thrall an individual externally managed inventories. It provides the exact same benefit (and more), but without unnecessary complexity.
Not under the rug, but merely a different approach to tackle both immersion and unnecessary complexity below the hood. You would essentially still have the exact same benefit, but only redistributed.
This is where you are almost correct. I didn’t gear it toward mass-combat games. I simply kept in mind the issue of mass-combat, i.e raiding, as well while I designed this. It solves the same advantage issue the individual externally managed inventory system (IEMI system for short) was designed to tackle, but without all the burden it brought code-wise.
Interaction-wise it’s the same point and click like we already have, but with redistributed divisions. Instead of followers / guards and crafters division, we have followers and guards / crafters division. This provides raiding the balance it needs and brings fluidity to base management.
We need to face the game as it is; a hybrid. It’s a mix of roleplay, military tactics, micromanagement, diplomacy, builder, sandbox and more.