I don’t disagree. But players generally have weak stomachs. They’ll take much more offense to watching their base get dismantled before their eyes and feeling helpless about it than they do now which is simply logging into nothing. The connotations are different and more personal.
My personal experience with this is to simply chase away the raiders as usually in such experiences they bit off more than they can chew. As they go after honeypots and get wrecked by preplanned sally points.
But on the flip side, when I’ve done this to someone, they usually log out and then I’ve got 15-30 minutes to blow open stuff and take what I want. To get the rest its waiting till decay takes over as they’re likely not coming back.
This is actually more of a problem for officials. On private PVP, you can simply build enough structure to withstand the logout period for your more valuable stuff. But on a five year old database servicing 300-400 players who serial refresh, they don’t like you building sufficient defenses for that.
I don’t blame Funcom for that. They like for their servers to eventually boot up on a restart.
But they are kinda ■■■■■■■■ up the PVP experience that way. I looked at some numbers today and on PC there were around 12,000 people who play daily. Empyrion, another building survival game has around 1,200. Or 1/10th the population. It has official servers too (all technically PVP), but only 3 (4 if you count the test server). Now their officials hold 80 for two of them and 43 for another (weird number).
I believe there are simply too many servers. I think what they should do for PVP is take the 196 servers they do have and condense that to like… 20 servers total. If their agreement with G-portal will allow it of course. There could be something stupid like they need to maintain hundreds to allow the deal to make G-portal look more grandiose than it is or something. I dunno. I hope not.
But at 20 PVP servers, there could be more hands on moderation, there could be less partitioning which could allow the servers to run better. And with those servers they could throw on the DBD system and just tell people if they get raiding while offline or whatever exploit, then its what they signed up for.
The great thing about 20 servers as opposed to ~200 is you’d have more of a moderation presence but wouldn’t need as much moderation. Basically they would be there to ban the racists, bigots, cheaters, and other trash of the internet, and be able to police up attempts to wall off the noob area.
But outside that, you’d have PVP populations that could police themselves. It’d make for a grittier, more crowded experience where PVP is gonna happen. I mean with that many people, you’re going to go out for resources, see its been mined up, and then see some dude with a bearer thrall and then instead of gathering resources, you’re gonna PVP the guy for them.
I believe this is the PVP experience people are looking for, yes?
Delete the current servers.
Put new ones on each individual stack
Turn on DBD
Set Harvest rate up
Put a moderator on those 20 servers specifically for each 8 hour shift (one person for 20 servers will be more than enough for this purpose)
Let the players go ham.
I think you all would see some of the best PVP experiences Conan Exiles has to offer outside a private server. Nothing compares to a 25+ vs 25+ siege that lasts for over 6 hours. But you ain’t seeing that on a G-portal hosted server. But beggars can’t be choosers.
