Official Servers - What do you think?

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
62

2 things already suggested would need to occur for this to be successful: reduce the amount of Official Servers and implement a subscription service.

780 servers is a lot, each with their own histories, current events and player behaviours. It waxes and wanes too. Some servers are notorious for past wars. Home servers are a big thing as well. That’s just touching the surface.

To expect 1 person to be hired to do this would be insane. They’d also need several for different timezones, regional languages, plus covering day and evening/night.

In order to justify their salaries (and definitely NOT at minimum wage) they’d need to have revenue for that. We have no data to understand the impact of the BLB on their revenue. As it is understood, it was to support development. How much of that is profit and how much of it would they even be willing to allocate to an additional and costly department such as proper Official Administration?

I’d like to reiterate as above, I would be willing to spare my hard earned $ on a monthly subscription to play on maintained Officials.

On that tangent it would have many beneficial shifts in behaviour: addressing alts, creation of clans for exploitative alt actions, alts for hacks, etc.,… an extra $15 per month would go a long way in weeding out a lot of undesirable behaviour. Giving up that money in order to play means more risk. Not just a $2 account. So you watch your p’s and q’s a helluva lot more.

As for contests, yes and they’ve announced that there’s some in the works. It appears contests have a 6 month interval with the most recent being an art contest which had less than 1 month between the announcement and deadline. That wasn’t ok in my books. Not to mention 1 of the winners having commented that they still hadn’t received the prize by almost a month (can’t find the comment about that anymore).

63

Well no wonder I didn’t clue the frik in lmao What a name… ty

64

Bingo dude.

A bug with a specific weapon is one thing. Daggers, when they were used by everyone, were only really a problem with Feroxic daggers. And because everyone and their grandma was going back and forth on Siptah, it reigned supreme.

Begs the question about exploit vs. intended mechanic for sure… and there’s plenty of argument on balance there.

So Private Servers have the ability to address a bug in excluding it but most often go way too far because the problem itself is not understood.

Like the whole fiasco with horses. It wasn’t the HORSE that was the issue and never was. But no, let’s make a rule for no horses instead of no Goblinoid helm.

This is a tough one. I don’t need an alt to go wipe sandstone or spam kill a noob.

You have veteran players with 12K+ hours. They did their dues, they lost and came back, learned and did better. They can analyze a build and tell you where you farted wrong.

This shouldn’t preclude them from participating. If you’re to compare it to battle hardened warriors that’s what they’d be. You need to be David vs. Goliath. Goliath will probably win, but you don’t learn unless you lose. You HAVE to… to appreciate what it means and to do better so you can be David and then a better Goliath.

The difference perhaps is in honour. Don’t bomb the sandstone noobs. Let them build up. Let them amass that delicious loot and then when the time is right, take it from them. Or not. Or give it back lol

But how can you be sure they are in fact noobs? Despite what many PVPers might claim a lot of them RP - most often the noob chick with a boyfriend that is not fair to them UwU, ya Braaaaad, I see you there!

65

What’s the reverse called?

When I was playing Planetside 2 and starting on a new faction, I used to love wrecking on high BR peeps with my new character with no unlocks. Its a bit harder to do in CE though, there’s a significant TTK gap between 60 and sub 10.

66

Yes, when horses were a thing for example the cavalry lance, spears,daggers or banning horses entirely.
or like you mention “mitra justice” because “it removes buff”
like… we are at war… if i hit you to be debuffed is because i want to kill you… so i can have an advantage and be able to win the fight and then the war.
We are not honorable knights trying to fight in equal grounds, we are trying to win here.
Don’t want to be debuffed? Don’t get hit, or use the same weapon, fire vs fire.

“lets ban horses because they are OP”

is like going to ww1 and saying “lets ban TANKS and only use infantry so we can kill the enemy soldiers and they don’t have protection”.

if something is OP is the game fault the ones who should nerf it are the devs.
unless of course there is something extremely unfair like the bugged siptah mace that one shots you, then yeah, i can see why the ban is deserved ban.
but to me, horses for example weren’t as bad as people said, fighting on horses only worked in open field, good luck trying to use a horse inside a base or a poor environment.

67

Considering the origin of that term, every activity can, and should, be called “smurfing”.

If you don’t smurf with me, then you can go smurf your smurfs.

68

Oduda, you are seriously messed up
I play on all of the different servers
And have my own sever not once have i noticed admin abuse . I have other players on these servers and they enjoy the game

69

The reverse doesn’t exist.
You seem to be mistaking in-game advantage with skill level.

Smurfing is basically a master player destroying babies that are just bad at playing, not because of an in-game advantage like a lvl 60 character with top gear, but because of game knowledge or skill.

For instance, even if you picked the best character in Smash Bros, the top competitive players would consistently destroy you with the worst character.

There is no low-rank low-skill player that wins against high-rank high-skill players, unless a massive amount of RNG is involved (like some card games for instance).

Smurfing: Master Rank going into Bronze Rank just to destroy them without any challenge due to the skill disparity.

The opposite: Bronze Rank going into Master Rank (if the matchmaking is decent, this already doesn’t happen) and winning against Master Players :eyes:

Of course, I’m mostly speaking about games with a competitive ladder, with defined ranks that are supposed to represent one’s skill level.

One of the games I’ve played a lot is that way, I am Master Rank over there; it’s 5v5 and with some other people we grouped up in casual mode (not the competitive ladder) and were matched against people of questionable skill (which is ok since it’s casual mode)… We had a taste of what smurfing would look like, because we were 5 Master/Diamond players against 5 Bronze/Silver players, and saying they didn’t stand a chance would be a huge understatement.

TLDR:

Smurfing: Top chess player going in a beginner tournament (in disguise) and destroying everyone.

Opposite of Smurfing: Beginner going to chess world championship and winning overwhelmingly (doesn’t exist)

In-Game Advantage: Chess player starting with rooks instead of pawns :upside_down_face:

In-Game Handicap: Chess player staring without rooks/queen etc. (this can overlap with smurfing)

→ Smurfing is not when matchmaking is bad and you end up playing against low-skill low-rank players as a high-skill high-rank one.
→ Smurfing is deliberately going into low-rank games one way or another as a high-skill player.

As @Kikigirl said, in Conan PvP there isn’t much “smurfing” going on simply because there is no way to rank players by skill even approximately.

You don’t join a low-rank server as a high-rank player to trample over them, which would be smurfing.

The closest issue, which I find to be toxic, but which still isn’t smurfing:
You have in-game advantage because you are established, lvl 60, with top gear etc, and you spam kill lvl 0 characters with nothing. This is abuse of in-game advantage, but it is not smurfing.

70

Oduda was actually defending private servers.

I was the one pointing out reasons why people choose Officials over Privates.

That means I would be the messed up one.

71

Thak you for letting me know and to Oduda my sincere apologies i know better than to just run my mouth with out having all the facts

72

Private server with a group of friends that you trust would be great.

Private servers without that trust, how do you assure it?

The only way I can think of is that the admin/owner doesn’t play in it but only manage it like a TT DM. But you get into the situation where you have paid money for it and so you want to play.

If I don’t know who you are or trust you and you have access to being a god, do you really think that I will always trust that you didn’t cheat? Without that trust, there is no point in playing.

73

If you ever went to a battle reenactment, where the red coats lined up and the blue coats kinda formed up, haven’t you ever wondered “how in the world did anybody conform to that?” Rule of war, law of war is such an odd concept.

In my book you hit them with everything, and cavalry is as close to everything without pulling out a God.

74

We now only go onto our sever in order to make sure people are not abusing each other. In the past six months two players from same wrre kicked

75

If you can trust waitstaff taking your credit card to pay for your meal, or any other business transaction then trusting someone to play by rules is pretty easy. Humankind has been playing games with the possibility of cheating for thousands of years. In many cases with much higher stakes than simply a bit of time on a server. Sometimes people cheat, sometimes they don’t. The type of server you play on doesn’t change that.

I have found that paranoia can cause some interesting interactions. When you go looking for cheaters, you will find them, no matter where you are. Either because they are always there, or because your mind will fabricate them. If they idea is to play cheat free, then a private server with hand picked friends is the most effective way (nowhere near 100%). Otherwise there is going to be a cheater on every server you play on, FC rented or not.

76

I personally believe in play on official servers earning every the hard way build up be nice and yes it is different for people who have only played private but me I love official servers however I have to say Thay banned me for 5000k building prices well so many clans I know on official servers it needs to be fixed build limit needs to be enforced and if you wanna build big rent a server. I’ll share a live stream with you on some of the B’s that goes on my office server

77

A lot of really great discussions happening here, thanks everyone.

I’ve read all comments fully. While this is a very small sampling of players we come with the expertise to speak on this well. Although I would never deign to believe that our few voices hold the true opinions of all to reach a consensus of yes or no.

But, based on the discussion here I think it is safe to say:

Official servers are required as long as the game is marketed as a Service (not to mention the console factor).

As such, they need work. Active and demonstrable action is required to see that work realized.

But how do we get Funcom to listen?

78

Best way? Ask for monetization of official server linked items. Not P2W but stuff for officials that make officials also a direct vehicle of the revenue stream called crom coin.

For instance, have specific randomized location ‘recipes’ within officials only that provide a discount or perhaps additional crom coin amounts that 1) gets people more motivated in playing officials and 2) increases activity on purchases of crom coin.

What does it cost FC? A bit of coding in the game that only generates these items when a specific condition is met by the server (to maintain the appeal of officials) and some extra fake money so that these folks that find them on officials get a discount on the items the purchase.

With that change officials are a more active vehicle of marketing and therefore more attention is warranted than just a place where noobs can play.

79

Because they don’t answer, that doesn’t mean they don’t listen.
The problem when a dev appears in topics is that eventually we’ll make him regret it. Speaking for my mistakes on this issue, long ago @Ulyssi will start a topic about the new building rules on official servers.
@Umborls (apologies i tagged you) was really active in this topic and i tagged him in this topic to ask barbaric mode official servers as a solution to many problems :confused:.
Stick to your goal Kikigirl and try not to allow derails in this topic and above all not to go around the same bush and hit it.
They listen, believe me! I know they do, it’s all i see these years in here, it’s obvious that they do. But they don’t take feedback just from this forum, yet they do.

80

We don’t :upside_down_face:
As long as Funcom makes profit somewhere, they don’t need to listen in any way to the community.
They have demonstrated that they don’t give a damn… Re-read the Age of War first developer letter about stamina changes: “We know nobody asked for these changes.” was repeated several times throughout this thing :man_facepalming:

81

I can think of a few instances of the devs “listening” to players, though how much of that is them responding to feedback or us echoing talking points that already exist in their circle I do not know.

I would point to the health bar change as an example. There was a time that they implemented always on heath bars that rendered in at long range. It completely eliminated your ability to hide from players in PvP. After a bunch of posts decrying and poking fun at the absurdity of the change, Dennis himself made a post giving a mea culpa and promising a rework. Months later the rework came restoring stealth.

Even if I have grievances about how the thread @stelagel mentioned ended up, it was clear to me that @Umborls had a genuine interest in integrating player feedback into the at that time evolving TOS.

While the forum seems to be to have less interaction from the team compared to other community outlets, like the discord, it does seem to me opinions here do at times reach and resonate with those making decisions for the game. Hopefully this thread is one of those.