No to thrall feeding and fix the existing bugs before releasing new content

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Conan Exiles is the only Funcom game I’ve purchased since the launch of The Secret World. I really like/love CE in many ways, I want the game to improve, I want more players to come back and I’d like for FC to get more sales from this title. Basically I want to enjoy this game more than I do now and I want it to be a continued success for the players and for FC.

I’ve been one of the few that have continued playing this game for what it is and for what I hope it will become, but I’m currently trying to decide if I’m going to continue playing or if I’m going to put this game on a shelf and not returning or purchasing anything else CE related for several months to see if things improve enough to make it worth my time.

Yes … time. Adding more grind to the game is a terrible idea except for a few no life ■■■■■■■■■ that will be happy. Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to be able to stay home all day and play video games, but I, like most people, have other responsibilities that take up time as well. So the recent change to what appears to be a 1% chance for most named artisan thralls and less than 5% chance for tiers 3’s is a bit back breaking. I’ll be done making my base before I can get decent thralls to assist me so the point is rather moot.

Adding feed the thralls before they die on a daily basis or near daily basis is even worse. It’s enough that we have a decay timer on our structures, but now we also need to log in everyday or every other day to farm food just to keep our fighters and archers alive. For the no life ■■■■■■■■■ maybe this is their wet dream come true so they wont get bored, but for the masses this is just unnecessary baby sitting and adding grind to a game that is already grindy.

The list of major bugs currently/still in the game is too long for me to want to research and list, but I’m sure you have at least one person at your company reading through all the social media platforms to get a feel for the biggest pain points for your players … right? Right?!?!? I’ll just name a few for fun.

Are purges working correctly yet? Are fighting thralls working correctly yet or is there still a pretty good chance they will stand there doing nothing with derp face? Is not being able to overlay foundation walls (or was it fences) to foundation blocks anymore a new feature or is this just another bug that was recently created? With this company it’s so hard to know.

The population has dropped a lot for this game since launch and I suppose that is pretty common. Unfortunately I’m concerned that has become an excuse for companies to not improve the game or better yet launch it in better shape to begin with. Perhaps games wouldn’t lose their populations so quickly if there were less bugs. We may never find out.

NEway … my two cents, nickel or dime is that FC should fix the bugs that already exist in the game before releasing more buggy content; it’s just ■■■■■■■ off the remaining player base even more.

Someone recently at work asked me what game or games I was playing and I mentioned that CE was one of the main games that I had been currently playing. However I cautioned them on buying it unless it was on sale, if they thought they’d really like it and even then I’d wait several months, because the game is full of bugs and problems.

Sales. More sales, continuing sales, more DLC sales. Kinda hard to get more sales if no one is playing the game to hype it to their friends. Kinda hard to get more DLC sales if no one is playing the game anymore. Kinda hard to get someone to buy your next title if they feel like you dropped this one on it’s head because you were either too lazy, incompetent or greedy to fix it.

Yeah I know … first world problems right? Don’t let the door hit me in the @$$ on my way out right? Once again I really like this game in a lot of ways, but waiting for some of these major bugs to get fixed is taking too long; especially when cash grab mostly cosmetic DLC keeps coming out instead.

For every person willing to take the time to complain there will be another 100 or 1000 that wont bother. They just wont play anymore, promote the game to their friends anymore, wont buy DLC anymore (because they aren’t playing) and they will be reluctant to buy another FC title in the near future.

There is a lot this game has to offer and it could potentially be great one day, but right now it has too many problems for that to be possible. It’s kind of like a hooker with a chastity belt and you don’t have the key.

Here’s to hoping you surprise us and actually get the game working well (all major bugs gone) by Christmas.

Cheers

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I normally do not add “my two cents” These complaints are valid, however those players that are as you say “edited words here” have no life… this game is by far better then the other survival games out there. this is not EA or the like. these men and women are trying to make everyone they can happy and if people can not see that they are a passionate of their game and did not make for just those who complain the most or loudest to get their way… I feel bad for them. compare it to 7 days or ARK. I own all three however I was burned out on 7 days within a week :wink: and ark about a month after each new map. Conan Exiles has provided a survival game that primitive plus failed at… I feel your pain, however ultimatums and drawing lines in the sand produce no results. how but employed programmers that complain, write code for the game and then they spend time and energy to make it work while the whole time some basement baby cries that it isn’t fair. once again these people at Fun Com are not EA or the other big dogs… also this game isn’t star citizen… compared to the other options out there they are diligent in their efforts. productive criticism does not mock other players however I have been known to be abrasive in my opinions. No offence I hope.

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Fair enough. I realize my post is a little spicy and wont be appreciated by many. Most people wont bother to complain, but that doesn’t mean the impact of their missing continued sales wont be felt. I imagine low continual income usually means less fixing of bugs and general support for the game. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I still think they should focus on fixing bugs more than introducing more content which will most likely come with it’s own set of bugs. We all love more content, but I don’t think at the expense of some of the bugs that still exist.

I suspect a reasonable portion of the player base left because they are tired of all the wipes if they play on unofficial servers, alpha tribes, foundation spamming, etc. on official servers and bugs. New content will get people to come back and take a look, but if the game is still borked they will leave again. People don’t usually continue investing money in a game they aren’t continually playing. NEway …

Maybe they are all heart, doing the best they can and maybe one day all the major bugs will get worked out. Here’s to hope.

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I fully agree, they are not EA, but the game surely is.

Passionate of their game? -> I do not believe they are, their actions proof the contrary. When you are passionate about your game you do not rush-release it uncompleted but you take the time needed to deliver a finished product. Just my opinion, passionate also means that you do not spew out cash grabbing DLC on a game that is in a dire state(not my opinion, simply facts -> see player evolution).
did not make for just those who complain the most or loudest to get their way…-> Did they make it for the 1.4 Million people who bought the game and have already left it behind?

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Mate I share your frustration and I can agree with a lot you are writing here even though I do not agree about the use of curse words :slight_smile:

I myself am on the verge to decide to just give this game a break (again) and see what comes next but it is so hard to let go of a game with that much of potential so I decided to come here and provide my opinion, I am sure it is not appreciated by everyone the same :stuck_out_tongue:

I understand the need for a company to earn money so that was also the reason I bought the DLC’s, that and the hope it will give me new things to do in PVE and let me tell you they exceeded my expectations.

After the first DLC I was wondering about certain things, like production queues reseting and other stuff so I came here and found answers (Bugs which still exist)
With the second DLC I wanted to upgrade my palace from Khitan to Aquilonian and found out this upgrade does not work so I spent about 3 hours demolishing my palace, grinding materials and rebuild it again from scratch (that was fun, it was partially but psssst…)
Also they managed to break the first DLC with the second so my armor did not have stats, before it had, which let me spend quite some time to walk back after harvesting starmetal (after they fixed it)

So as you can see the bugs somewhat add to the gameplay, or at least the game-time. :sunglasses:

Some do not even spawn and while I think it is good there is somewhat of a low chance after grinding through the same camp about 100 times it would be nice to find some T4 at least, but that is my opinion.

It is a great survival game I give you that and you are right it is full release and I get different ideas about what this entails in terms of how well a game works.

Recently, because my friend did not find a lot of time to come play CE with me, I stumbled upon another game. To avoid being flagged for advertisement I will refrain from posting the name but let’s say as much as it has about 98% positive reviews on steam and it is about planning.
I bought it this time (was thinking long time about it but was quite hesitant) and got immediately hooked, as I was hooked by Conan Exiles.

Thing is, this game has so many features and despite my long playtime now I did not run into one bug (to be fair, I did not reach endgame yet). It is so impressive that I tought “well that is how a release should be” and just later found out, as I saw the version number per accident, that it is still frigging EA, this game is Early Access I was truely shocked.

In their news, which are weekly and relevant to the game as well as informative, they wrote the play that game THEMSELVES, do LAN-parties to test new features and balancing issues together and from what it seems the team is a bit smaller than FUNCOM.

I am a gamer since decades now but there were just very few experiences which blew me out of the water like that.

I give you that and I like to believe so myself.
Thing is they have a poor way of communicating their ideas and inform about dates, for example:

  1. There was a announcement that the next 3 weeks they will all be on holidays (they deserved that). This announcement was on Monday (I think) of the week they planned to release the MOAP. In the same announcement they did vaguely mention start of August as planned MOAP release (just when they come back from holiday)

  2. They announce a patch for TestLive but never updated the info. In the meantime they tell us some of them will be at GamesCom.

It is not the end of the world for me if they do so, I am an impatient person and I am aware of that fact.
My point is they do not really show (in my opinion) how dedicated they are about their game at least I cannot feel it so clearly

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Here’s the thing, this idea of no new content until existing bugs are fixed is not how any software company operates. There are multiple factors at play, but the reality is your coding resources don’t work that way.

And I don’t mean this in a sense that Bob the graphic artist shouldn’t work on the AI code. That’s a given, each person has a skill set geared to their area of expertise.

However, it goes further. Say you have 10 core programmers. Their job is just to code, they all have the same skill set. You can’t throw them all at the same piece of code and fix it. They would be tripping over each other’s updated code. And they can’t all be working on parallel paths with each trying their own solution or you run into testing resource limitations. So you spread your programmers out. Each worksin their own set of bugs. They may collaborate, but in the end they all have their own bug list.

Then many companies also have a division of groups between New Product Development and Sustaining Engineering. These are jobs people apply for and want, and switching then can drive people away. Force your NPD guys into only legacy support and they may find new jobs. Force those while like supporting existing products and they too may walk. And even these people have skillsets geared toward their jobs. NPD guys may love creating new code but hate reviewing someone else’s code. Support programmers may struggle to create code, but boy can they run through existing code and spot every missed parenthesis or semi-colon.

So please, I get the frustration. I feel it too. However, please try to understand that in a software company, it’s not fix bugs or new content. Rather it will always be a dynamic blend of the two because thst is how resources are hired.

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Well said, thank you.

The following will be my personal opinion, and to get this right I am no programmer but I manage a team of dev’s myself.

If we (talking about software making our machines run) release new software and charge for it we have to make absolutely sure it runs to at least 99% (there will always be bugs in code).
I know my situation is different from a game studio but the concept should be the same when trying to achieve customer satisfaction.

We have several new features ready for our software but we cannot push them out because the foundation on which those features depend on is not ready as of yet.
So while we still work on new content (to speak in game terms) we first have to make sure the existing system is able to run those features because our customer would be quite displeased to pay for new features (here it is DLC) and get new bugs which hinder them in their daily operation of our machines (we playing the game)

So why push pets (aka reskinned Thralls) when Thralls (base system) is not ironed out itself?
They can still work on it, design doing concepts, talk balancing and all that stuff without saying a word and fix the core first.

I think many are somewhat confused about them pushing an addition to content which is not working as intended yet, and so am I.

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Right. I get that only so many people can be working on bug fixes at the same time. Our problem is; Are they using the most recent bug fixed code when designing this new content? It’s just strange how some of the old bugs came back during bug fix patches, like timers skipping 5 seconds at a time, wells not refilling, etc. To further exacerbate this problem, is that the new content has new bugs to add to the list of old ones, making the list longer for the coders fixing it.

I have told friends recently to not bother with this game in its current state. It’s a blast to build in and the combat is far better than other survival games, but it’s buggy as hell. There’s new systems that add further grind with the next patch, and it limits how much you can do in a “Sandbox” game. That’s a few sales lost right there, and more from them not suggesting it to more family and friends.

Getting the bugs fixed without adding more content would be enough for most people to suggest purchasing it to friends, and that has a snowball effect. When the core game runs good, people get immersed and love the game and pass on a good word. I doubt people are telling friends “Hey, don’t buy it, there’s not enough content”. I know I tell them, “It’s buggy.”

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I completely agree with Skinny and largely with Spyritwind. I’m sure that if Funcom had released this game in “acceptable conditions” on its official launch date on different platforms the current situation would be much more stable and promising. Even Funcom could be prioritizing their attentions in actually improving or expanding the game without having to perform a full-time “maintenance” of it. But the story is quite different… and the consequences of that decision have hurt and / or put away a significant segment of consumers.

As Spyritwind narrated in his first post, he could not recommend that his friend buy this game at his current stage. And this is a natural and sensible reaction; I do not think anyone would recommend a potentially frustrating purchase to someone close to you. On the other hand, if the game was stable and satisfactory, it would be much simpler and spontaneous to observe that the game has merits to attract a larger audience WITHOUT “side effects”.

In the same way, I believe that it is much more interesting - for everyone - that you first “arrange” your own “home” before you want to bring in new attractions… or worse, more dlcs. I find it convenient for Funcom to say officially that they are investigating and taking care of the problems as time goes by. Each one knows his own limit and believes in what he can. Remember: things have come to this point because of Funcom’s priorities and decisions. No one has “sabotaged” the result of their work. As players (as a whole) were directly harmed in this regrettable “transaction”, it is good to consider the weight of the company’s personal responsibility in this whole story. Ah, yes… money is important and necessary, but knowing how to earn it in a “proper” way is vital.

In practice, I imagine no one is reporting any news here. And it’s true that I do not have a generous or moving opinion about Funcom, but there are solid arguments and reasons behind this stance. I understand that part of the public can feed expectations, hopes and the dream of seeing this game to be an incredible landmark in the gaming industry, but it is important to evaluate the present reality in a more rational and judicious way. I do not say this to the detriment of Funcom, but rather to the benefit of players hoping to get the game they bought “one day”. And that is in everybody’s interest.

I am no longer playing CE because I wanted to save myself from new problems and be a “frequent” participant in the “PS4 Updates and Bugs” category with an emphasis on “bugs”. As I said in other posts, this was a personal decision, but I think it was wise to look for other entertainment options in that case. Success or failure depends essentially on the game itself; and if it has to fail for concrete reasons, I will not be sorry for that. That goes for any game on the market. I think I will cry more for a bad investment.

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The fact that you’re not playing, yet still here on the forums, shows that you truly like the game and see its potential. We all want this title to do well, and that is the reason we express our opinions here. We’re all trying to be helpful in our own way. :grin:

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Here is the real thing… In a real software company you have coding standards, cross dev code checks, etc to avoid the situation you are describing where developers cannot switch to another developer’s code, this situation is the most unhealthy situation you can find yourself in as a software company. Imagine a world where a company cannot replace a developer or switch a developer who is working on ‘new’ code to the ‘old’ code to fix things that are broken… As I have stated before, you are right up to a certain point, a point where you act as a company and not ‘the art team’, the ‘dev team’, ‘the new product development’ or the ‘sustaining engineering’… It is the most cheap and lousy excuse. I’m even ok with a dynamic blend of fixing and new content, but we do not even get that. It is hardly a blend, even worse, it is adding new stuff by reusing broken stuff.

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Not even a restart, people have been asking for a restart in several topics including screenshot with very clear reasons as to why a restart is long overdue. Maybe the ‘server restart’ team is working on something new and there is no one with that particular skill set in the ‘art team’ or the ‘dev team’… sigh

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Or they might be literally in a very focused mode right now. As to me it would make sense as they do want this update to work out.

As well as they might literally be taking what people say to heart and playing their game on their dev build. I also remember people asking them to fix some things before releasing new content so that could be another possibility as well.

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One thing that I really wanted to understand about FC, do they care about their reputation?

Seriously, I know they’re a small company and all, and Im very thankful for their nice ideas and got in this project of doing a survival Conan game but…

It seems they do stuff, throw at us thinking “What about that? Like it the way it is? Noooo? Ohhhh bugs, right, ok, wait some months til we come with a fix that maybe won’t fix, oops I mean, maybe it will fix… (maybe)”

I mean, where is the quality concern? Why they simply cannot fix old and small bugs ? It seems they’ not working in CE but in another project, no way a team of developers in a first world country would take so much time to polish a product of their own!!! Even a small team! They seem to do the minimum required fot that task, spend the minimum possible, and nothing more, G-Portal servers shows it, they are the cheapest ones seeing the way they behave on stability and performance. Lets throw rocks for the poor players telling them are apples.

Where are their pride? Because a serious creator would never deliver something half-done, non polished, unchecked in a “release to market” state.

I wish someone would convince FC Ceo or the one behind it, to hire or take the game to the people who can make things done, because finally we would have what we want, the game being a game.

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I think I have said it before, your optimism is world class. :slight_smile:

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Thanks as me I plan on being a game developer one day and make my own survival game one day and I want to learn as much as I can. As well as I usually think about what would be the most likely reason for things by taking in what I have seen and read so far on the forms. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Some good response’s that were less emo and more eloquent than mine :stuck_out_tongue: At least some people understand the issue’s I was expressing. Oh … btw m a s o c h I s t was the word in reference to those that are able to live on the game. I’m not sure why that was blocked out. The other blocked out word was in reference to FC p I s s I n g off it’s customers. I suppose that’s a curse word …

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