Just like wild card used to do (in the end failed) then started there mod support again which works great, why not spare 2 8 hour shifts 3 days a week to a trusted member of the community or dev team, to oversee and check predetermined mesh locations and to ban the offending players it’s actually not that hard really give it to me I’ll do it £10 per hour in between my business hours, with comms and a spreadsheet of servers visited and offending players banned.
I’m trying to stay off this forum, it’s a waste of time. This is just a player pressure release valve. funcom is not here and is not listening to us foster kids in the basement.
Changing the present zendesk system is not going to happen. Not cost effective. Take your figures and multiply that by 750. Even if each handled 50 that would be hiring 15 more people, they might do that for Dune, but not Conan; you know the game that save the company so they all still have jobs.
The present on going historically bad issues on the public servers is not going to change. zendesk simply does not work. It’s either being exploited or ignored. Either way all it is doing is costing the game players.
funcom doesn’t care, their next money train is about to pull in to the station, and Conan will go in to maintenance mode and be forgotten about just like every previous funcom title.
We have been up and down this road, offered up great and crap solutions. funcom isn’t going to do anything because it will cost them money not make them money.
Sorry, just at the end of my fuse with funcom.
Sadly - if you want moderated servers, you will need to seek a private server community that suits you. There are a lot of really strong private servers, and private server admin teams out there. However - the private server gig comes with it’s own set of obstacles.
You have to understand what it is you’re trying to combat to see what resources you need.
For example, the method they use to deal with building issues is pretty adequate. They don’t even need to login to the server. They take a backup of the server at the time of the report and look to see if the offending building is there on a local machine. If they find its in violation, they issue the punishment to the owner which takes place on the next server restart.
Hackers is a bit different. The above method requires them to actually login and see the offense themselves. For example, I can provide evidence that shows you and several other members of the forum committing cheats and hacks on a server. Through modding and other shenanigans I can reproduce evidence showing all kinds of things as a fabrication. When I show a screenshot or a video, how do we know its on the server we say it is? Do we go by the good word of the person who submitted it? Or do we use the evidence as a justifiable reason to go looking around on the server?
And then there comes another issue. When do you go on the server to try and see them in the action? Now we’re threading a needle. We don’t know when those hackers and cheats are active, we don’t know exactly when they will be online and when they will be using their cheats and hacks. Remember a paid worker has a shift, they’re not on call (well they could be, but expect to pay a lot for that).
But lets say it works, and they ban the offending members. They do the deed, the server is saved, and they log off.
Then the hackers come back with new characters. Well new characters to you. They’re already leveled up. They have dozens of prerolled characters on accounts they purchased on the cheap. For the price of a AAA game, they have 10-12 accounts. Remember these people are paying $200-300 or more for the cheats themselves. What’s a few hundred dollars/pounds/euros for a few dozen accounts to throw away at a whim?
Now you’ve got to send in another report and wait for it to go through the queue before you get a response again.
You might be wondering how private servers deal with this? Well multiple admins in multiple time zones/shifts. They also get to know their communities and can quickly tell when multiple accounts are being used, who is who, and they can spot bad actors before they can cause damage. Small servers usually have 2-3 admins, where the larger ones can have 10-12 or more, for a single server.
That’s not financially possible for 700+ servers.
They will NEVER be able to build the admin/community relationship needed to really combat the issues plaguing their public servers. They can mitigate it by stopping with the sales of Conan Exiles across the retailers. Stop offering sales that make it only $5 an account. That won’t stop multiple accounts but it can mitigate the issue. Though it will take time for the accounts already purchased to get banned. It could take a year or two before you see any results of that.
There is only two things that can be done at this point if you want to see results, and both things are things you can do. One is to stop playing PVP. Just consider it a dead game type on FC servers. Empty PVP servers means the hackers have nothing to do, and their money spent on hacks and accounts is wasted. Instead you play PVE-C or PVE. There the hacks and cheats effect on the game are highly mitigated. If they start on a server the server can simply just play during non-hours till they leave and get bored. There’s no reason for them to do anything on PVE. The only issues they can cause is building spam, which is something that FC can handle with the setup they have. Or you can stay on PVP and do so on Private servers. It can be tricky finding the one that has a set of rules that you might like, but vanilla-like PVP servers do exist and are somewhat popular, and feature many refugees from hack/cheat ridden servers.
Be careful with what you wish for.