Plenty of things that have never been improved even though players asked for it

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

I’ve been playing Conan Exiles for a couple of years and i allways come back. I gotta say that you did a very good job with the lates patches, especially i give you props for the building system but… there is still tons of things that were not fixed since … the game release.

Sorry if i sound a bit rude.

  1. You didn’t increase a slot number in the item bar. What was your excuse? “This will not work for consoles”. Allright, then make it for the PC only, there is no crossplay anyway. 12 slots on the bar can be fitted easily.

  2. You did not make npcs and monsters to be less “sticky to the target”, how hard can that be, really? Just some simple alogorithm could do the job in which the NPC/Monster change it’s target in random periods of time based on the proximity, the closer the target the more prabable it will be it will be targeted. Make the AI feel just a bit more real. Why have you not done it allready. I’m just some random guy and you are the game designers. These are not rocket even science.

  3. If i have weapon or tool in my hand i can’t replace it on the bar from the inventory. Why is it impossible? “7 days to die” was designed by some poor-a** indie designers and they were able to do this. This is just a small thing but annoying until now. Fix that allready. Similiar thing is about the healing items, I’m bandaging myself, the bandage is allready used, i can’t do anything about it’s slot untill the action is done. These are small things, but small things sum up to the big picture. This is the only way that game can become better. No developer ever regreted it.

  4. There is no crafting queue for forges, that one is another one a bit annoying, but not painfull. To fix it just by a slight bit, can you just make forging hardened steel and star metal to use separate resources? Perhaps just ordinary ice to improve steel to hardened steel?

  5. Taking fall damage while riding horse downhill. Another inconvenience that i consider to be fixed IMO easily. Make momentum to be decreasing the overall net “fall distance”? And for god’s sake, make auto movement to work properly on horseback, it just disable itself all the time whenever you open menu, map, or even change direction. Auto movement works properly for footwalk and sprint so it can be done the same way. Please.

  6. More custom tags types to place on the map. This is not unimportant.

  7. Compass. I’m not talking about the item that you would find and actively use. You can just add a tiny icon near the temperature icon that would show you directions, trust me. We want to know where do north is without double/triple/quadruple checking the map to know if we keep our direction. This was mentioned allready, your reaction was like you did not ever noticed it.

  8. Make the armors’ temperature resistances to really give any viable information. No excuses. Do it. Make us know how much temperature resistances does armor grants. We also want to know what what bonuses does armor grants, before we craft it or even before we even get the feat for it.

  9. Server lists are lagging, lagging very hard. I don’t know how to fix it but you should know.

  10. Dedicated servers’ settings are still highly malfuncional, and unclear especially when it comes to different languages. Texts displays bad and are not clear, some of them were never even translated.

  11. Do some real changes around purges. Players are very likely to get plenty of them on mid-game and little to none at early-game and end-game. This should be rebuild entirely. Perhaps some system that would count the total numbers and tiers of building elements would be “killing two birds with one stone”. More buildings = more purges = more building destruction = unclogging laggy servers.

  12. Thrown weapons are still hard to see and disappear after a very short period of time. Come on, we don’t want to loose our “Riptides” (legendary javelins) on a funny crocodile encounters. This one is rather not hard to solve.

  13. All special arrows ammo still look pretty much the same. Wanna solution? Add some tiny icons so these can be distinguished? This should have been implemented like one year ago. It seems to be like 20 minutes of work. Add PNG icon to the file. Done. Dot. What is an excuse for not doing 20 minutes of work for more than a year? (-Allright, let’s say that I don’t even wanna know the answer to that.)

  14. Thralls cannot be placed closer to one another (but they should). afaik you just need to replace just a few numbers and I know it because I found it in a dedicated server files. So this can potentially take whole 5 minutes of work.

With whole respect to the work that you put into AoS, things that i mostly liked about the latest patches were ALL about QoL and fixing currently existing inconveniences. I didn’t even need sorcery to enjoy the game more, but i need a pet/thrall settings and construction hammer.

And one more extra thing, make a knockback from a kick to your own pets/thralls, to be honest - combined with point 14 you can get stuck heavily by your rhino or something, and the kick is the only way to get out (at least - as i remember - it worked on pvp server).

Some of those can be literally done in one hour. And no no, don’t give us excuses on livestreams that you didn’t fix those simple things “because you have different people to do different things”. These are not so hard things to be done, especially that you allready do have most of the code at your disposal that is necessary for those. We want those done.

13 Likes
2

I agree to almost the entire list. Most of these things had to be taken over by modders. Reallyshows how poor Funcom handles this game to this day. There are so many old bugs in this game still and now 3.0 added a huge amount of new issues to the game which will take them months to resolve if ever.

3 Likes
3

Good list. 3 & 7 annoy me ona daily basis.

1 Like
4

I’m not one for usually bringing up stuff like this because I think constructive criticism is imperative. Yes, indeed, many of these things have been discussed and asked for but I think you need to rethink how you’re presenting it. Right now all you look like is some random guy shaking his finger.

Here’s the unfortunate reality: they don’t have to do anything we say or want.

What we can do is ask of course, we can petition, hell we can beg. What you’re doing is demanding and insulting.

This is coming from someone who has been royally pissed at the company for months.

5 Likes
5

My experiences regarding to your points:

  • 1: don’t need. 8 is plenty.
  • 2: AI has a LOT of improvements to do, I agree. Sometimes they switch target, most notably when they finish their attack/combo, so they are in a brief period of idle before starting the next attack - that is the time window when you hit 'em they switch to you.
  • 3: YES! My idea is this: make animations for weapon/tool repairs like bandaging. So you can repair them while in your hands, don’t put it away, and you can interrupt the repairing process by the action key, but the repair process won’t be fully finished (obviously).
  • 7: for me it is not a big deal, on the Exiled lands where the volcano is, there is north :laughing: . Maybe a learnable feat and with a craftable compass that you have to carry (just like the Gravedigger, to dig up graves).
  • 12: the only thing I am not satisfied with is the quantity of them. Probably personal preference, but the 4 orb, the Riptide and some throwing axes with no specials (heck, they even remove the special effects when dual-wielded with axes or maces) is not a whole lot of variety. Plus you need A LOT to be a good tactic, and they are more expensive than arrows which do better work at killing stuff.
    13: Not just ammo, but a lot of weapons, armor is the copypaste of each other. Why? 2-3-4 legendaries with the same skin? Legendaries with a skin of a non-unique, craftable gear? I hate reskins, I hate the transmog, but looking, and not knowing exactly what unique (funnily, this fact removes the uniqueness of the majority of uniques) am I looking is …weird.

Servers are not my table of interest, and probably Funcom can not do anything with them either, it’s not their servers (only solution from them would be switching server providers, but it’s easier said than done).
And I highly doubt any of these will change, they main focus is the profit - of course, that is the main driver in every industry. So more addons is way more profitable than “small” bugfixes.

6

Pretty good list. Few of your suggestions are oddly new to me (or I have not read them before on these forums). Such as #2, 3, 5, 13.

#1. I am fine with 8. Plus they do not want different game versions from PC to consoles so doubtful they will do that. With the construction hammer, there are way less things needed to place on the hotkey bar these days.

#9 Working with databases for a living, pulling tons of data (20k+ servers and their info) does take time unfortunately, especially all the servers are located all over the world. This I would say is a low priority item to improve if they even could.

#14 While I agree with this concept. There must be some reason behind this why they did not allow followers be closer. Perhaps lag issues if you have a ton of followers clustered together, since for example, they will all react to whatever agros the group. (Too many computations if everyone did the same would potentially bog the servers down periodically).

1 Like
7

7: Learnable feat would do the job.

I absolutely agree, but well. More satisfied customers = more money. Satisfied customers invite their friends to play with them, more satisfied players buys more DLCs. Unfortunately there is no DLC that would solve some issues. I would like to pay more for the game that is better taken care of (am i picky?). I would prefer to pay 20$ for game that is well taken care of than 10$ for a game that is bad.

Actually it isn’t, because we are also reviewers of the game and it’s advertisement. If a game does not have at least 90% positive reviews I would never buy it. And currently it’s 78% of positive reviews which is bit of a mediocre result.

I may be wrong about this, but I think I remember that they put the blame on Steam and Epic Games about it, which seems to be a bit poor excuse imo. Do they really need to use steam and epic games assistance for it? Not sure about this one, but that one is a minor issue that I agree could pushed aside for a while. It’s not the one of the most burning issues.

1: You would use twelve if you had twelve on your hotbar, right? I’m sure everyone would do, so why not. There is no crossplay anyway. My point is that funcom actually gives us excuses like this one instead of really getting into solving problems in some creative and resourceful ways. Where other companies solve problems, funcom just explains to us why this, and this, and this is not possible. There is literally nothing impossible to do in the IT industry.

14: No no no, I’ve never experienced any server cluttering due to that. There was literally a 3 digit number indicating the minimum space between the pets/thralls that could be tweaked. What clutters the servers is actually the total numbers of thralls and pets on the server, and so the main reason for server clogging are solo players with a massive numbers of thralls and pets, and the distance betweet pets is irrelevant. :grinning:

1 Like
8

I’m fine with there only being 8. Its what the game was designed around. If you want more, and ok with it being PC only, I believe there is 2-3 mods that increase this. You using a mod is way way less work than FC trying to maintain two separate branches.

I don’t know what you mean by this. It seems my follower whom I use as a mule is quite adept at randomly pulling threat off me, despite me not having any points in Authority, and their behavior set to Attack Nothing. I’m not exactly sure why this happens. I have heard of others not able to get agro to their followers with them attacking. So if you want random, its pretty random without perks.

This is now possible in 3.0, there is a bug with it sometimes. It seems to always work if you drag the equipped weapon/tool over the one you wish to swap it. Not the other way around. We’re getting there, this was a peeve of mine for a while.

I could maybe agree with this. I have some ideas of my own about metal tiers, but without that. I wouldn’t mind Hardened Steel being a tad easier than Star Metal. Right now (and since Siptah was available) if you play on Siptah for example, Star Metal is easier to get than Steel.

I think horses should have a slight more distance they fall before taking damage. This would solve alot of the issue you mentioned.

I’d actually like to see the map removed or rather replaced with a physical object. And maybe even remove the marker unless a compass is also present. Maps always seemed a bit gimmicky, especially to this old EQ player.

I do think the pip system needs to go or be revamped. One bar on one piece of armor maybe 2-3x more protection than another with one pip. Armor bonuses being shown in the recipe window would be a welcome change.

I don’t know how possible this would be, but right now they only show 500 servers. All at once. That’s a bit laggy especially when they get information still about the other 14k servers. I feel like there should be some way of dividing these out by pages. But determining which server goes to which page might lag you up more. Unless they do it on their end. But they may not have the system that can take so many queries. I do wish there was an option to filter out officials. They tend to clog up the listings and get priority.

That’s unfortunate. I think the issue here is a lack of native speakers on hand. They may simply be throwing the text through a mobile app translator and hoping for the best.

Purges do need a bit of a revamp. They had some interesting ideas with them in Siptah, but I do believe they need a ground up redo of what these things are. We may see this with the event system as it matures. Hopefully.

I think how thrown weapons should work is they don’t have stack sizes. They are a single weapon. Their quantity is actually their durability and when they ‘run out’ its like a damaged weapon. This would let us use kits too.

Time spent on one icon is time spent not on another. Its all about priorities. But yeah they do need something to differentiate them from one another.

This is a game balance issue. You could make a really crazy kill pit if you stacked a ton of thralls in a really small area. There’s other reasons too tied to server performances. There is mods that mitigate or eliminate this however if those concerns aren’t a bother for you.

As someone who has worked in the devkit. I can honestly say that 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there or an hour there is NOT all it takes. Last night I had to edit the values on about a dozen weapons. They weren’t receiving bonuses from strength or agility. I had to Identify which table they were in, which column in the table the value needed to be changed, I had to identify where the stats were derived from so I knew which value to enter, and then I had to test in the devkit, test in singleplayer, cook and then deploy to server, for a live test.

For something that was a ‘simple’ edit in a datatable (one of the easiest things you can do), took about an hour and a half. Granted if I knew exactly what needed to be done. It would have taken less than 20 minutes (well more because of cooking/compiling). But that’s the problem. You don’t just ASSUME you know what the problem is. You look, you verify, you test. Once its routine then yes, you can maybe skip a few steps.

But they have a policy on NOT skipping steps. Since you can seriously break something if you don’t follow procedures. And being that is their job, they may have to spent much of their time commenting their code and logging everything they do. I know that is something I had to do in my last job whenever I made a setting change to the systems were were running.

All those little data table edits, icon changes, and other ‘little’ changes all have overhead attached to them. What -I- can get away with in a mod as being ‘good enough’ for a procedure likely doesn’t fly if someone is paying a salary to do similar stuff.

3 Likes
9

First of all, thank you for a meaningful and insightful reply.

1: It does not have to be mod thing if it’s made to be a default feature. About the separate branches i would say that this thing will probably not ever again be an object of any future changes. If anyone makes a two-platform game, he should be aware that things will not work the same way. The easy way to do is to write a code that distinguish the platform and run one extra script on PC version.

2: It is not, as NPC’s needs to get a few consecutive hits to change agro, and so AI raraley attack another AI if they focused player. It would be more immersive and fun to take advantage of getting AI to fight with one another AI.

3: I hope for the best.

On Isle of Siptah no resource is rare, but this is a whole story for another topic.

5: I think this would be not the most effective solution possible to be implement, but it’s easy and it would do what it is suppose to do :+1: :+1:

What do you mean by physical object? That sounds very interesting. There are games that do not have maps at all, like “the forest” in which maps meaningfulness is partitive and only helps you a bit to find where you are. I personally liked it.

9: I agree.

10: Probably their native speakers hired are not gamers at all so they have no idea about the context of the words, sentences and universe. This makes translations poor. FC can hire me as native speaker for poland. I would do this better, cheaper, and in almost no time. I really mean it.

13: This one was boggling my mind since the very beginning. In FC they seem to prefer to work on more risky changes above the changes that are pure win-win that comes with literally no risks at all. They may spent those 20 minutes doing something that players “will or maybe will not enjoy”, and so hesitate with working on changes that nobody will never ever dislike. Why not choose the second possibility? I don’t get it. Risk, win or loose vs no risk, just win. Devs win, players win.

I fully agree about this one, because i’ve experienced that testing things takes huge chunk of time. I’ve done detailed throughout testing of about 50+ mods and more than half of them were malfunctional in one or more matter. I guess that good testers are gold for the companies.
However, changing graphics of items’ miniatures is most probably one of the routine stuff.

Are their scrum masters or UX designers bad? I don’t know :man_shrugging:

Anyway, making a “no-possible-harm” changes should be a priority for a company imo (and very satisfying for players), as it directly affects positive reviews on steam and percentage of friend invites. (That is mediocre as i mentioned before)

I know that they “can’t afford” some changes, they’ve put it straight but Funcom’s monetisation system is still poor (should be focused on margin/provision gained from crowd-funded private servers imo), but that is a story for a whole another discussion - and they should have made a lot of improvements to servers’ menagement - that discussion I will start if I’m in a mood. (if i come up with the most effective solution they should grant me a tiny bit share from it) :rofl:. However I am willing to pay more money for playing the game that is perfected.

1 Like
10

I agree with everything in the list except compass. Not that it wouldnt be useful, but because fantasy world like conan for sure wouldnt have invented a portable version.

1 Like
11

Well, the world map is basically a GPS, and according to this logics of yours world map should be entirely removed from the game as the technology did not achieve google maps, right? If you were a man that lives in the wild you could extremely easily tell the difference between the west, east and south and north based on the sun location, time of the year, and current time of the day. There are more factors to designate the north but there is no need to tear them apart.

1 Like
12

Some times ago someone suggested in the forums that we should start with a blank map, and as we progress, more and more will be revealed on the map. Kind of like fog of war. Every POI should have its own territory to be revealed when it is discovered.

3 Likes
13

Opening the world map and seeing the player pointer icon on it takes a second, and it’s as good as any compass. I don’t know why it would be a huge deal either way. Personally, I don’t need a compass needle on my HUD, but my immersion wouldn’t be broken by it either as long as we have free access to the world map.

1 Like
15

Actually it is QoL thing, once you enjoy using a Compass you will allways want to use it. Another reason for implementig the compass is that you can use num lock key to trigger auto movement on horesback, but whenever you open the map the horse stops running. It’s different to how auto-running works. You can actually press num lock and then Shift + M to trigger auto-sprint. I hope that you knew about this. This is very handy, saves effort travelling. If you have the Compass in your hud to addition, and you have some topography knowledge you almost don’t need to use the map at all, and that actually increases the immersion because you look at the environment (while taking a few glimps at the compass meanwhile) and enjoy the travel and get to memorise the places without a need to look at the map once every one or two hundred meters. You do get my point, right? And especially when in the northern jungle or savannah. Actually i believe that the compass is better for experiencing the game than the map. Pehaps the map should be altered, like: if you press M you could see a big minimap on the right half of the screen that is centered on your character so you can use the map and keep travelling simultaneuosly. There definitely are some possible solutions at hand. Compass is not the one and only and mandatory, but it’s is a tiny thing that is IMO cool, or at least “nice-to-have”, and it would just be there not harming anyone. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
16

No, actually. Google didn’t invent GPS, let alone the longitude and latitude geographical coordinate system. In fact a quick look at wikipedia says the system was first proposed in the third century BCE.

And just in case anyone was curious, the compass was invented sometime between the second century BC and first century AD. But apparently wasn’t used for land navigation until over a thousand years later.

17

I was gonna ask if you considered the possibility that their excuse is that they simply do not want to make these changes despite the community asking and that’s why they haven’t done them?

But… then you got me on points 4 and 5… :smiley:

As for number 14, I know that one is definitely on purpose to avoid people hoarding even more thralls on even less surface area… you would get these “murderpit” 4x4 rooms with 80 berserkers inside… - that’s also why it’s entirely configurable for solo / private servers.

1 Like
18

Probably cuz of all the cell towers interfering with their electromagnetic fields :stuck_out_tongue:

19

4 gas arrows or a couple of oil + explosive bombs is all what it takes to kill all of them. With the settings of thralls that are available you can already make an insane murder room. I’m just saying. Not judging. :man_shrugging: Well, but anyway let’s not go the extreme like do “something like multiboxing” slaves where you could place 12 of them in the same spot, just like decrease the distance by about 50%. Or maybe even it should be a non-pvp default?

20

You got me back to the thought that they try to keep everything consistent in the PvE and PvE-c and PVP, and additionally to the Single and multi-player, and to the consoles and PCs but that is simply not possible. These all are like a separate games.

1 Like
21

Actually the facts that may change your percieving of time are that the Aztecs’ country existed in about XII to XVI century and that the Chinesse were “that absolutely tiny close” to starting an industrial age in XI age, as they knew the steam engines builds and have extracted natural gases, and that’s about 800 years before the industrial age actually happened, and another one is that some ancient greek philosopher suggested an evidences about the earth being round, and he even esteemed it’s equator lenght (i can’t remember his name), it was few ages BC. But it’s not a matter of the discussion. Is it? :sweat_smile: