I’m not going to disagree with you on your point. It’s a legit problem for servers. And you’re right, dealing with server cap becomes a problem when trying to solve this on an in-game level. I just do not want to see no-build zones as a hammer solution to this on pvp servers. It’s too much of a slippery slope. I’d like to see FC give us a better solution, like maybe allow Mitra to walk across the land and destroy such nonsense (XD). And of course that last comment was facetious, but in reality, there has to be a better way to deal with it then a ‘no-build’ zone. Those just ruin things for those who want to be creative, or just plain villainous, on a variety of public servers.
Play PvP and be happy. 
No matter where you build you are blocking the spawn of something, be it mobs or resources. If you are on a pvp server talk to other clans on the server and gang up vs the offending clan.
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There’s a difference between blocking a few spawns because you built an outpost near them and blocking all the spawns because you spammed foundations everywhere specifically for that purpose. One is normal gameplay. The other is griefing.
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There is a difference between building a base in a highly value resource area and placing giant fountains everywhere. One is an intended experience that can be countered the other is someone taking advantage of the limitations of a system to grief.
I posted a picture of what I’m talking about in the thread. Feel free to calculate how much resources you would need to even start removing those foundations and wells. Now do that with a server whos population is already being taken up by half of the offending clan and then couple that with new players who haven’t even made it past the starting spawn. To sit there and suggest you just need to get the server to band together to remove it is an oversimplification of the issue.
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Sorry but you are wrong. Scorched earth policy and restricting your enemy access to needed resources is viable game play on a PvP server. While I don’t use that kind of tactic, I see no issues with it and neither does FunCom.
Besides, there are other places to get brimestone, couple caves and the swamp. Or is your whole argument just boil down to the fact you are too lazy to goto other sources of brimstone?
There are many servers with salt lakes brimstone spawn blocked. Personally on PvP server I don’t like going to the salt lakes because it’s gank central. You beter off with a breathing mask and getting brimstone in the swamp, it’s safer imo
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You are missing a lot of the point here. PVP is indeed player vs player. No one is disputing that. Scorched earth is indeed a military tactic. It does not however translate as a valid pvp tactic in Conan as its completely devoid of player altercation. Its not one clan ■■■■■■■■ over another. Its just someone salting a field outside of raid hours, ruining it for everyone else sharing the server and then logging off.
There isnt anything pvp about griefing a server of its resources outside of raid hours.
The suggestion to just group up and wipe them off the server is void when these people use body vaults and undermesh to avoid a server from doing just that. The only solution is to attempt to undermesh as well but then you are simply encouraging your player base to cheat.
Its far too convenient for a clan to join a server, farm up quietly and indiscreetly and leave a server at a standstill by salting resource mines.
Ive been farming the caves along with buccaneers bay as an alternative. There is no comparison in yield and its even more compounded by the fact that everyone is farming the same areas now. The server is starved of this specific resource which is used in almost all higher tiered production.
The solution is simply to have funcom remove the offending clan and investigate the situation on their own. The claim that they offer thousands of pvp servers is again watered down when your player base is only 13k at peak times. Sounds like there are too many servers to choose from and if limited the number of servers allows for an opportunity for these servers to actually be managed then im all for it and that should actively be discussed on their forums.
To sit there and say funcom doesnt find anything wrong with that playstlye is simply untrue. They have an official response to the query stating they understand it causes frustration but do not have a valid way of combating it or managing it with their current resources. Thats a far cry from your statement that they dont see anything wrong.
With that being said, if you truly believe this behavior is conducive to sustaining a healthy pvp player base then feel free to disregard all that im saying. We can at least agree to disagree.
We all here enjoy the game enough to care about its future health. Im just simply stating my experience thus far as a new player who was excited for a game to finally scratch that itch ive been looking for. Sadly, this griefing situation is a hard one to accept imo.
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I’m going to regret wading into this thread, but it seems like the problem in PVP are cheaters. I have no idea what “body vaults” are, but undermeshing is cheating and punishable by ban. If you can’t gang up on them because they’re cheating, get them banned.
Body vaults are when your abs are rock hard and you run around in yoga pants…
Funny because I didnt know what that was either until our server was invaded by a specific hacker clan recently. body vaults are people who buy an account and load the body up with loot on a server. They then log off and if they stay logged off for a week then the body disappears and the loot is hidden with the body until the next time they log in.
These clans do this on all official servers. They rotate clearing out one popular server until it dies and then they move on to the next. Many of these players will argue they are doing nothing wrong and that this is the pvp meta they were given.
One could make the point that staying logged off in a base for a whole week is a risk in and of itself but they will log out under the map meshing ensuring no one finds them and continuing the cycle.
As a new player to Conan who has payed his fair share of survival pvp games, this is absolutely mind blowing how this was able to stay in the game as long as it has. In my opinion, Its gone on for as long as it has because Funcom has taken an hands off approach to moderating the server due to a mix of valid reasons from their pov.
At the end of the day, you are right. It seems like the best way to handle this situation is to remove the buildings from the server and ban the players involved. It does not seem like that is anywhere on funcoms radar so the choice is to either deal with it, which it appears many have accepted as the solution, or continue to post on discussions much like this one.
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I actually agree with this. No-Build zones seem like to much of a simple and blunt answer that causes further issues, similar to the momentum issue.
Now, given, Funcom could be careful and selective, but I am with Biggins on not blocking off more sections of the map. I usually tend to lean against solutions that are limitations for everyone, even those not causing problems.
However, I also don’t see this as a problem with a easy solution. Sure its easy to brain storm solutions, but to actually program them in is another thing.
For example, first thing that comes to my mind in combating this type of behavior:
If there was a way for the game to interpret certain building styles (as in, a real base vs. spamming foundations and an excess amount of high HP buildings) and then react to it appropriately.
If a player builds a normal base (not counting size, I am fine with big) but the game recognizes a reasonable ratio of connected blocks, reasonable amount of benches vs. fire pits vs. etc… The game behaves normally.
If a player builds like an a-hole, spread out foundations without the common base necessities, over population of Vaults and large wells, the game starts pushing much faster purge meters cranked up to insanity difficulty.
The offending players can try to defend, but even with the help of an alpha clan, the purge could just boil over the top of their BS buildings and naturally wipe them out.
Or hell, I guess a more simplistic approach is avoid the base type recognition, rather then have ‘No-Build’ zones. Make the zones 'high stakes/high priority zones" If you build in one of these zones, you are brutalized by purges on a insanity setting.
If you can some how survive (and of course, I mean legitimately, not taking advantage of the system in some way. Obviously code needs to be cleaned up for a purge to be a real threat) you essentially earn the right to continue to be a dick.
If you can’t survive, problem solved (for the most part. Obviously other things like undermeshing and such should be fixed too. (I personally don’t see why any block built under the world without at least a fraction showing doesn’t have some super fast decay time. Sure there’s some side of the issue I am ignorant to).
But yah, to re-iterate what Biggins is stating, I’d be far more in favor of a in-game, sort of natural solution rather then just Funcom roping off more areas and restricting game play further.
This is supposed to be a Sandbox game. Solutions shouldn’t ever come as restrictions (I know you can’t always avoid this, but when you can, you should).
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt. I play on a private PvE now. My opinion on the matter isn’t terribly well vested. I just think the concept I listed in my last paragraph is important.
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To give them credit in this regard, active administration across the many servers is a major resource cost. If Funcom invests in people to admin their servers (actively, as currently they do admin their servers, its just usually reactionary to player reports, not actively searching out people breaking the rules) then that means potential additions and slower development then we have now.
If Funcom can skate by without active moderating, I think its actually a preferable situation. However, I do understand that is a sticky situation because it relies on players not going out of their way to be jerks, and a system that automatically monitors and deals with the cheaters on its’ own (like my suggestion above) and I am not sure if the game is in a state that it could do that.
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The cost of doing business is certainly expensive. I think we all agree on that.
The budget money that goes towards support is not the same as what goes into development. No business would remove development resources to manage support. That money comes from somewhere else.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a business whos development team answered support requests directly. Worked with support sure but to have developers actually being the moderators on servers, that doesn’t seem realistic nor is that what im suggesting. I dont think it does anyone but funcom any good to accept the idea that they just cant clean up their servers due to resource constraints.
Checking the official servers there are so many servers with 0 pop. Why are these still operating? Is funcom hoping a reassurance to the player base with their dlc content? I cant imagine that happening with the current state of the game. Were going on three weeks now where two major farming spots for the player base on 1590 has been ruined and it doesnt seem like thats going to end soon.
The purge idea while cool doesnt seem feasible with the current network and server restrictions. The game seems to already have trouble with thralls hense the thrall limit and large bases often lag when moving around them. Can you imagine the system bugging out and sending the super purge to an actual base?
The realistic option outside of actual development resources to have someone at funcom log in and remove these structures so all can be right in the world. If its a major enough thorn then hopefully they have reason to bad these players to discourage this type of behavior but as it stands, this stuff continues to happen because these players have little to no fear of recourse.
Sorry CodeMage, I love ya more than my luggage, but that statement was so naive it bout made me p*** myself.
Recently had some trolls attacking everyone on our server, using every cheat imaginable. I contacted the proper channels, and sent multiple videos showing their undermesh base, since that is one of the few exploits that can be captured on video. What was done about it? Nothing.
I will say that several cheats they were using (such as the 50 blah blah glitch) were fixed by the mounts patch, so they eventually slunk back into the sludge from which they came, but we spent a few days of hell defending our base with pretty much everything we had in order to combat them. We even absorbed another tribe, who lost a lot of good stuff when the trolls raided them, that we couldn’t recover since it was in an undermesh base.
Maybe banning is something that happens on private servers, but on official it’s about like saying if someone was harming you in real life that you should pray to a god to have them smithed.
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Sorry, I had no idea. Everyone keeps saying that there are certain things that actually get players banned, so I kinda … believed … what people wrote on the Internet … you know, when I put it that way, it sure sounds stupid 
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It happens on Officials, but it is in extreme cases, very rare, and requires a crap ton of evidence. In other words, it’s almost not worth the time. Sadly.
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It is a shame, well more than a shame. Think i said this in another post, it’s worrying a private server is more secure than a official one.
Imho saying “we don’t have the resources” is a horrid reason not to do anything when servers are potentially dying due to players exploiting to high hell and pushing others out.
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Don’t feel bad, I have plenty of friends that believed that illegally downloading music and movies would actually get you in trouble too. 
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The reason this can’t be viewed as a valid PvP tactic is simply the fact that it can be used to grief. People will say “oh go get brimstone from another location” Well someone can go ahead and block those as well, (just to clarify you may not be able to build inside some caves but you can still wall it to the point where you have to invest the same amount of clearing as you would for clearing brimstone lake foundation spam) The potential exists that someone can go overboard and block all brimstone caves and the lake. Leave the jungle vents as the only spawn, then maybe they go ahead and try block that too. Maybe it’s not even someone intending on playing on that server, perhaps a guy got raided by and alpha and does it to spite the server. You see what I am getting at, sure there are situations that it could be maybe understood, maybe 2 big clans at war and one blocks the others supply to buy time or whatever have you, but the problem is there is another side to that sword and it can also be used to just straight up grief with no understandable reason at all.
This is why I believe any kind of active resource blocking (and just to be more specific by block I mean prevent from spawning, not just block access while still having access yourself) should be not allowed and dealt with a ban and an admin wipe of the blocking structures. When players block like that they are also denying themselves of that resource, cutting off their nose to spite their face as they say. It’s a pathetically short sighted and arrogant action that people try to pass off as “strategy” and even though in some case I could agree with it having a tactical potential, the possibility for it to be used as a pure grieifing tool is too great and that far outweighs any “tactical” potential of blocking brim spawns.
It’s similiar to making the argument that being as toxic as possible in an attempt to get a group to leave is also “tactical” you remove competition and yay more for you, but the negatives of that “tactic” outweigh the perceived gain that the player may have. This is what those who defend this action either can’t or just havent grasped yet.
I agree that creating no build zones just adds more restriction to the game and the first place solution which would just be to moderate and act on this kind of behavior is off the cards for Funcom. So leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. Perhaps a solution could be that structure which block specific resource spawns get an insane decay timer multiplier. Something that would force the blockers to essentially have to spend majority of their time standing there to prevent the structure decaying. Make it become such a waste of time that they would have to sacrifice playing the game at all just to block the priority spawns. I’m talking about the structures decaying after 1 hour of no structure owner being around.
I think the decay system can be a useful tool in purging this lazy and low level kind of play from the game. What I am curious about it just how much would players who do this kind of thing pushback if funcom actually put a measure in place, like that above, to curb this kind of behavior. Would they employ the same “deal with it” attitude that they so religiously tell others to do when encountering blocked resource, or would they get upset and angry about it like how they often make so many others feel. I think I’m going to make this a suggestion, it is such an easy fix for them to patch, simply use the decay system, areas within a proximity just have insane decay rates for structure pieces within it’s range and boom problem solved. Then players have a choice, either sit spitefully and don’t ever play the game so their structures don’t decay, or move on and find other more creative ways to play the game.
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This thread is pretty much “I don’t like it, it’s toxic” written in 20 different ways…
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