One last time - Please

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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I’ll preface this with: I am not reporting an individual (already know how), discussing suspensions/bans, explaining cheats or expecting that the method in which cheats are addressed is revealed to give an advantage to cheaters. I hope Community considers this when reviewing as I know with controversial topics it tends to be delisted. For everyone else, this is a request and not a demand: please keep replies on topic and consider that flagging these topics only serves to silence players like me.

My presence here speaks to my preferred game mode and server choice, however to clarify, I play PVP Officials on PC. With that, comes an understanding of the vanilla experience and how playing on GPortal servers comes with some lack of performance acceptance.

I have not “played” for over a month. AoW Chapter 4 update came with many changes that have caused an array of difficulty as well as adjustment experienced by all players. Some of these changes tipped the scale for me in terms of dealing with other issues. I have to fight with the game to play via a large UI overhaul that made my method of play an exercise in futility - it wasn’t just an adjustment but clear bugs that are still present despite 2 hotfixes.

I was already at the end of my rope though. Why? Because I can’t play the game, in its intended vanilla PVP experience, due to cheaters.

There is anger, sadness and longing to enjoy my hobby again. It’s why I’ve still been present in the forums despite 2 uninstalls.

So 1 last time:

When will cheaters/hackers be addressed in a consistent manner for Officials on PC?

Or rather WILL it be addressed at all anymore?

I’ve asked the first question multiple times. I have created many topics on this very issue over the years even if less frequent an issue and every chance given have asked. I’ve participated in every discussion about it before being delisted. Whether it be announcements or live streams, I ask. Anyone who asks is always ignored.

But I don’t feel like we’re being ignored because it is a delicate matter that requires some protection of information any longer. Honestly, the developers of the cheats don’t need to be privy to secrets, now do they. I believe we would have seen action much sooner as before. I believe the lack of action and acknowledgement of the plight in this is a lot more dooming.

It used to be it would come in waves and get addressed through BattleEye or Steam bans, couple of weeks here, couple of weeks there, sometimes quicker.

We’re going on 5 months soon since the most frequent/numerous of players hacking has affected Official PVP. This is near to half a year. They’re everywhere, have presence on almost every server in every region to a degree, and tools at their disposal to watch players. We’re not talking a few either, there’s MANY. Entire clans worth razing servers.

But 4 months straight of this? It’s exhausting and has debilitated PVP Officials for PC. This is the #1 reason why I stopped playing, why I played less and less over time.

This is the reason why PC PVP Officials are almost dead. Any popular servers still hanging on are doing so by a thread. The players accept that they’ll be hacked and re-accumulate their loot, keep nothing, know those responsible or are just stubborn. Good on them I guess?

I’ve reviewed all options available to me and none offer the experience that is intended that I prefer.

What I am starting to see however is that it is not just PVP servers being affected; PVE and PVE-C are now also starting to feel the burn. If I am wrong about PVE please correct me. I’m not trying to be a doomsayer or worry anyone; but it is a growing problem.

Additionally that Private servers, while a reasonable means of avoiding this plague, still have to combat these cheaters frequently. Good, proactive admin? No sweat. But they’re not always available or even able to address it.

So it’s a problem for all of us who play on PC Official and potentially Private servers. Why is it not taken seriously anymore?

Why are discussions about this in spaces such as the Forums rife with indignation at the concept alone, and not at the least an acceptance of the impact? I have seen more empathy to a degree which is appreciated though, that’s a nicety of the community but not a solution to the problem. But perhaps our unified voices could make a difference?

I used to play another game. 3rd person shooter that was very unique and largely was a team based player vs. player environment. They stopped addressing cheaters then too and within less than a year the game closed down. I am not saying this will happen to Conan Exiles because there are many alternative methods of play. But it feels like the beginnings of the end of Official as an option on PC.

I would come back and play, even deal with the buggy update, if I could play normally. I want to come back.

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It could be that Funcom no longer has the staff required to properly deal with it as they’re working on other projects and the can has been constantly kicked down the road. Hopefully they’ll notice your post and fix it

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It certainly seems short staffing is the problem and for other things too :frowning:

I know my post is one of frustration; there’s usually at least 2 posts active regarding this per day. Definitely not alone in feeling this way. For those still trying to play they’re submitting reports to Zendesk. Funcom is fully aware :frowning:

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Thisbis exactly how i feel. I stop in with ky clan. And you thoughts on hackers moving towards pve and pvec make sense. The one thing all Hacckers want is attention and ego boost. So as official pvp pip lowers they will move to next most populated choices, pve and pvec. Hacking isnt about competition. It is a mental choice to gain some sort of validation. Which is why they are attracyed to populated servers. So once pvp is too low, they will go where the chance at that validation is.

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I think it was a month ago I started to see some complaints about PVE-C. 2 days ago it was implied by some comments by PVErs but no confirmation from my questions other than a thumbs up. I know, quick assumption but not really all that unwarranted of an assumption :confused:

They did exist on PVE and PVE-C but boredom is now setting in.

So ya, as PVP dries up by their own hands, they’re going to go for the rest.

When I’ve said that there’s been claims of making Official PVP dead I saw the writing on the wall with that full clan claiming so back in Jan.

They announced their intentions and I believed they would succeed. Didn’t realize how far they and others would go now with the other play modes.

100%

Then will it matter for us? I would have hoped it mattered all along -_-

Such garbage.

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Officials are filled with clans or zergs that have pocket cheaters that come “wipe” the entire server with a vacuum or mesh bombs inside bases during raid and hitbox pull wholes clans at once. Funcom does absolutely nothing against this due to the fact that nothing can be done. They ban one cheater and they just log in with another alt. Some sites sell conan accounts for $1. So even if all 30 alts get banned they just buy a handful more.

This is why i highly recommend private servers. Just the setting to allow clanmates only to access benches/storages puts a massive hold on cheaters being able to do damage. Ive seen the list and i can say only a handful of people have a cheat to bypass this setting.

Playing officials is an absolute waste of time. You will be vacuumed eventually. Hours and hours of farm all to be snatched away in less than 5 seconds.

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I don’t want to derail this thread, but I’m curious about something. Let me know if my curiosity is off-topic and I’ll delete my post if that’s the case.

Also, bear in mind that I don’t play on PVP servers, so all I know about them comes from what I’ve been reading here on the forums.

My question is: was it really better before? Were they addressing cheaters more and just stopped lately?

I’m asking, because it has been my impression that cheating has been a serious problem on PVP servers for years now, and it was largely up to the players to fend for themselves and find various ways of dealing – or at least coping – with the cheaters. I’ve only ever seen Funcom step in when it’s a glaring issue, like that time there were giant players wrecking everything. Other than that, I’ve only seen them fix the vulnerabilities as best they can and that’s it.

Please don’t take this as an attack on the players. Although it could possibly be misconstrued that way, I’m really not implying that the situation is the fault of the victims for continuing to play the game instead of voting with their wallets.

Instead, I’m trying to figure out whether something has worsened over time in this aspect. We can all see that other aspects have worsened over time too, such as communication and testing.

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Yes better before, not perfect, just better. We could see immediately when the cheat programs were patched out based on no signs. If you wiggled your way into the know, you’d get the info that it was a patch and the developers had to work quick to make it usable again. Sometimes this meant days, a week or even a month of barely anything. Rarely longer but at least some reprieve. It was also very targeted.

In the last 2 years there’s also been a switch in availability. Without getting into specifics, I know this doesn’t mean much. Also, price points matter.

Many used to use the cheaper options; which was easy to bypass in terms of dealing with.

Sorry, I’m using a lot of vague terminology here, just trying not to get into trouble.

4 going on 5 months ago there was a change and there’s been no pause, no lull. It has been a constant.

While it’s always been a problem it’s never been this bad. We already had problems as it is with offlining, exploits and system changes, so definitely some decline due to that. But players, especially vets, always came back, hard to stay away.

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No worries. I can read some of it between the lines. And it’s not that I care about specifics. I just wanted to know, as an outsider, what’s going on.

Thanks for answering. I would imagine there are more non-PVP players out there who now have a better idea about the situation you guys are in. FWIW, I’m sorry. At least I left the game because I lost interest in the stuff Funcom is pushing on us. You guys are being forced out by asshats. :frowning:

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It was never a competition from the perspective of the kernel, outward. I digress. :adhesive_bandage:

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I really empathise with you @Kikigirl. As I am not a PvP player, I am an Offline Singleplayer by default, I do not wish to comment too deeply on the intricacies of the issue. But I firmly agree with you, that resolving cheating and hacking needs to be a greater priority moving forward. Furthermore, I would make an inference that we we would be losing players as a result of these enduring hacks and cheats. This is important to our PvP community, and thst makes it important to me.

@Community please try to fix the cheats and hacks for the game we all love and are passionate about. I hope that this will help Kikigirl.

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Every bit of progress I see to that extent shows me such hacks are not here on the forum (unless you are into social engineering). Right now I see more cheats than hacks.
Thanks @ Community. Someone wanted code to look sexy, but that is just harassment.

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Thank you :pray:

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As you know @Kikigirl I do not play on official pvp servers. I do not play on official servers of any kind. :rofl: AoW chapter 3 has made my desire to play at all next to nil, and chapter 4 even less, to the point that I have not logged in more than twice in the last two months, and I have been playing since early access. That being said I do have some experience with pvp, though not the kind that you have had to suffer though.

I can say that from my experience with Age of Conan (the other Conan based game from Funcom), there is a trend to follow. They had very grand ideas for the game (and it was a lot of fun to be sure!) but from a PvP perspective they had the mentality that “pvp content is generated by the players, so let them be as brutal and savage as they want in this brutal and savage land set in the Hyborian Age”. This lead to every single PvP server being strife with toxic behavior, which in turn drove any new players straight away and even older players out due to the never ending toxicity and their numbers plummeted and every single one, which the PvE servers were also not high in numbers they were much higher. As Funcom continued to merge servers over and over and over they were down to just 1 single PvP server and even that was a baren wasteland that no one wanted to play on due to the toxic nature of it, and yet Funcom would never address this issue in any way shape or form. They would just let it fester, wither and die (well the whole game basically did though there are still people playing it there are not many very likely). I actually started off on that game on an RP-PvP server and I enjoyed the PvP, until on day out of no where Funcom decided to just abandon their RP rules (without any announcement or warning) and the toxicity took over within a 24 hour period. 75% or more of the RP players left the game within the week. Some went to the “unofficial” RP server which was PvE, eventually I migrated there as well.

But that is just how Funcom operates. They have no real “vision” for PvP other than “here is a map, now it’s lord of the flies time”. They have no real idea how to balance anything (not back in AoC and not in CE either. Since 2008 they have not yet learned HOW TO BALANCE ANYTHING!). They put rules into place, and then drop said rules without announcing them or anything. Why? Reasons! So I feel for you and @biggcane55 and @Barnes and the rest of the PvP community that is out there dealing with this garbage. You shouldn’t have to! But for the last 15 years of playing Funcom games I have seen nothing to indicate that anything will ever change, at least not for the better. Though I do not recall the cough issue that is currently plaguing exiles being this prevalent in AoC, but that could be for several factors.

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The eternal dispute people have with freedom. They want game publishers to act as if the game was a “country”, and complain when game publishers act as the government.

There would be a simple solution for this problem: Charge people.
To use official servers you need to pay up a monthly even symbolic fee. 3 bucks that it may be. That would be already something.

Even if “rich people can still do it”, “rich people doing crap” means a lesser problem than “anyone doing crap”.

Could be having tiers of servers, in which having played “nose clean” in an official server for X time grants you access to higher tier servers, which go to some length in which a given server can only be populated by people who have months of “no violations” on record. Sure people would start to complain that they are required to behave first and have good things later, as they always do.

Problem is: All that, or any other type of work that prevents abuse requires, well, work. And work from people requires payment, work from machines require energy, which require payment.

People on private servers pay for their server maintenance AND for official servers (Funcom pay for them, form the moneys players pay, ergo: Everyone pays for this crap, even those who dont use it). People on private servers will often have an interest in having it working better, for comfort, convenience and even the cost. Having backups, and other things cost money sometimes.

Cant have freedom unrestricted because people on average cant handle freedom. Abuse is inherent to free public access stuff.

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Already been discussed many, many, many times.

I’d be willing to fork over $10-20 a month to have properly moderated servers. Cool. With. Me.

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I would pay 10$/month for stable servers with a 30+ pop, free of insane bugs and cheaters.

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Should have been a thing from the start! Or rather, roll out EA for free to snag us and then have implemented sub after a few months.

It would be a hard sell now without much to back it up and better QA for updates :confused:

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I believe the spike is because many legit players grew tired of being ignored by FC. They decided instead pf leaving, they would become white knights for thier friends. So now hackers have groups that side with certain large zerg clans as the nuke option. Before it was solo types who did it to be “cool” (imo) and gain validation. Now the hackers are at war with each other, and take down servers to show thier power.

And with the price of the high level hacks, they will want to ge lt thier moneys worth. Hence the uptick of pvec and pve now seeing it.

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There’s a lot in this little statement. Everyone, please reread what Cane’s saying here, his entire quote.

Envision a white knight with dozens of Conan Friends who is sick of being hazard wiped by a legit clan and tired of being hacked by another? What if they sidle up to the hacking clan for protection, and to take down the legit opponents.

Like the General he is Cane has beautifully explained the battlefield.

@CodeMage it used to be cheats like meshy stuff, mostly. But as @Dzonatas has cleverly alluded, weaker netcode does not get better with age. Mature store-bought hacks and cracks are now on the market, and it is the reason why my own Friend List has few Conan players right now. And believe me, we miss each other, despite our sweaty knuckledraggingness.

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