I have been the target of a Purge twice (Official #1503), both times while I was offline. I know that this was not originally how the purge was suppose to function (that purges were supposed to be possible only when at least one clan member was online - I have no clan mates), but they have apparently decided to change that. I wouldn’t normally be bothered by this (I actually would prefer that purges be possible within a much larger window of time, or even 24/7), but I discovered that my thralls are doing absolutely nothing to defend my holdings and palisades are only so useful (they also seem to be having placement issues as of the time of this post.)
My thralls are all well-geared Cimmerians (Berserkers & T3 fighters/archers) from the MotD, and they are completely ignoring purge attackers. They are also apparently being completely ignored by the attackers (Forgotten Clan, from MotD). I have played around with this base design and location on my local game using offical server settings and the thralls absolutely decimate the purge attackers with little or no damage done to my base, but they don’t seem to be doing anything on official servers if the player or clan is offline.
I have witnessed this myself while defending another player’s base while they were being offline purged. They had a variety of thralls standing around their fortress, completely ignoring the dire wolves that were eating its foundations. In this case though, the wolves targeted the unresponsive thralls without retaliation.
I like the idea of purges. As I said above, I’d like to see purge hours expanded. But as things are now - purges should only occur while the player or clan is online, or thralls need to be reliably doing their jobs and defending against offline purges. Offline purges with useless thralls is not going to fly with a large part of the player base.