While the Break Bond option is a good start to adjusting to life with thrall limits, unfortunately it can only be utilized on thralls we can find and interact with. If we have pathers that have fallen down inside of walls, stragglers left over from a departed clan member’s base we didn’t know about, or other oddities, then those will still detract from our limited allotment.
The most fair and expedient way to deal with this would be to introduce two options for the duration of the grace period that’s been announced:
Allow legacy thralls to be returned to storage.
Add an option to the Clan tab in the menu that will allow the clan leader to break bonds with all of the clan’s thralls at once.
In this way, we can select the thralls we want to keep, to redeploy later with the new leveling system, and also ensure that we get to utilize our clan’s full quota and not be shorted by thralls that are stuck or forgotten. Props to @zerog for coming up with the basic idea of this.
Yup agreed. Posted an idea on zerog’s. Hopefully it gets enough attention for implementation.
Would love to return thralls to storage. You probably can with mods but that won’t help 90% of people. I also think it would be difficult for funcom to do without issues or reasons to worry about other things messing up.
Got my support though. Hopefully funcom can find a way to make the playerbase happy.
They’re giving us a the ability to dismiss individual thralls, so volcano trips are unnecessary. However, that is of no help with thralls that we can’t find if they are stuck floating in the clouds, trapped beneath a base, or stranded in no man’s land. This is why we need some way to dismiss thralls remotely.
No, it doesn’t work like that. Thralls don’t decay until 15 days after the last sign-in by a member of the owning clan. Even then they sometimes don’t decay. Furthermore, since the decay time for buildings on Officials is only 7 days, this means a clan would literally have to lose everything they’ve worked for if they waited for decay to eliminate missing thralls.
And yet here we are with thralls stuck under our bases, under the map, and floating in the air that have not died as they should have — that’s the whole problem!
Awesome idea! Thank you, @zerog and @Larathiel! Funcom, can we please, pretty please have this, even if it’s just a one-shot thing during the grace period?
Official servers are set up so the buildings decay in 7 days and thralls in 14. There is no way you can let thralls “expire of natural causes” without losing ALL your builds.
As for the responsibilities, give people a break, we all make mistakes. For example, at a certain point in past, I was busy with my real life and only logged on to refresh my stuff. During that time, some players from my clan stopped playing on the server. They weren’t close friends of mine, they were just people that ended up in my clan because we had similar play styles. I don’t know the exact location of all of their builds and those builds have decayed over time.
The end result? I’m not sure where my clan might have thralls that I don’t know about, so I’ll have to run all over the map with a thrall pot and a feed box, looking for them.
If I had the opportunity to kill all my followers in one fell swoop, just once and never again, I would be really, really happy and I would solemnly swear never to make that same mistake again
You do realize that some of us play on Official servers and literally don’t have the necessary access to do these things ourselves right? I’m trying really hard to give you the benefit of the doubt, but at this point it’s starting to feel like you’re intentionally trying to antagonize us.
Uh, okay, now you’re crossing a line between opinions and ad-hominems. And exaggerating to boot, on top of it. In this particular post, nobody is asking for the game to “play itself” or to “have everything taken care [of] for them”. All we asked for is a mechanism that would allow us to take care of an unforeseen problem, only once. And when I see unforeseen, I mean that quite literally: up to the day they announced the follower cap, nobody could have foreseen that having numerous thralls would become such a serious problem in the future.
So instead of “toning down our bases”, could we tone down the discussion just a bit and respect each other a bit more?
I’m done here. We’re clearly not speaking about the same issue, and I’m not going to derail this thread with an off-topic debate regarding the thrall cap.
I thought of an alternate way of implementing this that could potentially be easier to code with less system impact.
Allow the clan leader and officers to mark followers as favorites from the radial menu.
When a thrall or pet is set as a favorite, it is removed from the automatic culling lottery.
When a thrall is marked as a favorite, clan members will see a message in clan chat stating
“Anos Preyfinder (-100.02, 36.45, 11.87) marked as Favorite by Larathiel. 1 of 60 favorites used.”
If the clan has reached their cap, and another thrall is favorited, the oldest favorite is removed:
“Erii the Ravager (55.34, 22.13, 4.37) marked as Favorite by Thulsa Doom. 61 of 60 favorites used.
Anos Preyfinder (-100.02, 36.45, 11.87) has been demoted. 60 of 60 favorites used.”
A similar message would be displayed if a favorite follower is manually demoted, or if a favorite follower dies.
In the event of a new player being admitted into an established clan, the favorites from the established clan remain intact, whereas the favorites from the player being added are demoted until within the clan’s new cap. (Thus a player joining a clan should do some house-keeping before merging.)
In this way, clans are provided with both a heads-up as to what’s going on, and the location so that there is more transparency about what’s going on and where they stand. This also will take care of the thralls that are stuck under the map, up in the clouds, or hopeless trapped inside foundations without hitting the database with a call to delete 100s or 1000s of entries at once.
It feels like we’re speaking two different languages here…