That was never in question. Not sure why you had to bring this point up.
This is also a complete side step around the point.
No, the development team and a support team typically wouldn’t be shared (but is probably more common then you think. Many businesses, specially small have to facilitate merged departments). But with it was separate teams or not, that isn’t at all what I was getting at.
I mean, active, constant administration across servers is a big job. Each of those people would need to be paid. They arn’t just going around wiping out blocks of bad players. Admins of the servers need to interact with the community. Provide support. Handle disputes.
Many games get away without administrating their servers because the problems they could resolve are a toss up (when it comes to product gain) when compared to where that ‘monetary’ resource can be spent elsewhere.
I never stated it couldn’t be done, in fact the opposite. However, adding a admin staff for a massive server collection is not a small choice. Think of it as an addition to the game (save that additions are paid for, done, and development moves on, a admin staff is a on going bill to the end of the game).
Would you rather them spend money on the development team, adding employees, getting to Thrall AI and other outstanding projects?
Or would you rather them add a admin team to resolve server issues, the development team doesn’t grow at all and just plugs away at what they can?
I wont pretend to know Funcom’s and specifically Conan’s development costs or the number it’d cost them to keep an admin staff. However, I know for a fact that it isn’t just a simple choice. Its about priorities.
Currently there is a solution (albeit, not a very good one) to your problem of ■■■■■■■ players. All those 0 pop servers? They don’t have ■■■■■■■■ building in bad spots…
When it came to the purge idea, I was just spit balling. I do recognize what you are arguing as a problem. I am not trying to dismiss it.
I just was chiming in that people calling for admins on official servers are probably not giving it the weight and significance its due.
This issue comes up a lot, and generally in regards to the Shattered Springs over any other place. Brimstone is a highly used and needed end game commodity, especially in PvP.
I rarely see anyone complaining because someone built over an iron spawn, wood spawn, even silver or gold spawns. Why is that?
There simply is not enough brimstone on the map. With a Black Blood pick covered in oil I usually pull 11-12k brimstone from my run (lakes + 3 caves). That’s not a lot of a resource you need in such high quantities. Wouldn’t the lake blocking issue be solved if they added more places to get brimstone?
It was the very first point you made? “active administration across the many servers is a major resource cost.”
It seems as though you see it as a this or that scenario and as a consumer I see it as a necessary cost for a great overall experience. You would expect the ability to talk to a support rep within a reasonable amount of time for any other industry, gaming shouldnt be any different.
Can you imagine attempting to return a shirt you recently bought only for the store to tell you sorry, we can process your inquiry because we are using that money on designers? Kinda the same deal here.
I think this is where we start to veer off course a bit. The development team is going to continue to develop these things. That doesnt stop. They are two different teams. If it is slated to take 6 months to fix Thrall AI, its going to take 6 months regardless if they have a better support department or not. Its not knowing about funcom specifically but these are principles you see with any business, small or large.
One thing we simply dont know is if funcom is able to fill the development spots they need and I wont pretend to know what they are experiencing in that department. Good developers are hard to find and keep.
All Im saying is if you try and use the “we offer 1000 free servers for you all, we cant manage them all” excuse then there needs to be a larger discussion around how we compromise a bit.
As an update, the griefer on 1590 logged back in last night to reset the timers and add some more foundation spaming in other locations. This, right before the decay timer extension. Keep in mind, the server has been brimstone starved for a month now. As a consumer and someone who has invested in the DLCs, the mismanagement of the servers is a pretty big turn off.
There are so many things funcom is doing right with Conan and its a shame that this specific issue overshadows a lot of that imo.
If we truly are in a situation where funcom simply does not have the funds to lightly manage these servers then that’s a larger issue then griefing and is pretty indicative of the future we can expect to have playing Conan.
I think you are applying a personal belief in business standards across a broad spectrum without recognizing that many gaming companies (especially smaller ones) are running things just as Funcom is right now.
I brought up cost, because resources, specifically money to pay people, is a limited factor. You stated in the post before ‘That money comes from somewhere else.’ Yes, its not the development money that gets spent, but its still from the same pool of money that Funcom spends and earns from this game.
It doesn’t just magically spring forth to enable them, yet they are pocketing the money anyhow.
You are pretending Funcom doesn’t have any customer support. They do, its just very limited. It seems obvious to me (although I certainly can’t claim as fact) that Funcom weighed the price of a more robust support team vs. where they could spend money elsewhere and they chose elsewhere in the idea it would be better for the game.
We keep veering off course here because you continue to ignore the cost of a robust support team.
You don’t need to argue something I never argued. I know they are separate teams. That just detracts from the point.
Funcom has multiple teams, more so then just Development. They all cost Funcom money.
What do you think is the cheaper solution, have a ongoing cost of multiple employees (to what degree, i have no idea) to constantly be monitoring and controlling servers? or renting a handful more servers and let players make their own home?
Once again. I am not stating your concern isn’t valid. Nor am I stating that administration of all their officials isn’t possible. In fact, I’d weigh in and say it’d be a pretty big positive in the fact that with a active administration, players may be able to give some input in on Official server settings.
However, a support staff can be just as expensive as a development team. You are asking Funcom to essentially create a new department (or at least expand on the current existing one that is hardly there) as if that can be done without taking from the game elsewhere.
Are you suggesting Funcom employees across the board take pay cuts to facilitate making this department? Or should Funcom start charging a subscription for Official server access?
Or is what you are stating is that Funcom does have the money, and the support department in place, and they are just 100% incompetent? I’d personally argue against this…
I’m far more of the mind set that they just haven’t supported a robust admin staff as they are spending their budget elsewhere.
All the same, I think we are both derailing because I saw your initial argument that ‘Funcom should just add admin staff’ and I replied with ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ and it was taken out of context.
As I think a paid admin staff is unlikely to come from Funcom…
(at least when it comes to support per individual server. I personally don’t believe they will think its worth the cost until more of the community claim this as ‘game breaking’ at which point, they wouldn’t hire a admin department, they would just use the simplest fix they can find: ‘No Build Zone’.)
…but what about ideas that could potentially have a chance?
Once again, spitballing because I haven’t given it to much thought, what Server elected admins? Veteran players that have shown support in the community, via forums and long time server history?
There’s certainly avenue for abuse, but if long term players could somehow be vetted?
That may open to many windows as well. I just personally hope they don’t start adding more ‘No Build Zones’ as I think thats a problem of its own.
If you disagree with all of it, and think the only good solution is Funcom dipping into their budget to facilitate a admin staff, thats fine and I agree, it would be a good thing for the game. I just don’t see Funcom spending the money and you holding on to that hope is a pipe dream.
At least until Funcom finds a way of drawing more revenue out of this game.
That’s a really good observation! I personally don’t use brimstone a lot, because I get most of my steel from NPCs that drop it, but I can see why brimstone would be important in PVP.
I’m pretty sure it would, but it wouldn’t really solve other kinds of griefing, like people walling up obelisks.
That said, I don’t think no-build zones would help, either. I would much rather prefer a solution that involved the Purge: if you build in certain areas, your Purge meter goes up much faster and you keep getting a non-human Purge in those areas.
Of course its a limiting factor. We both are assuming a lot here but the fact is that funcom isnt as small of a company that you are making it our to be. It sounds like you believe there are a handful of employees but funcom overall is 140+ person company with Tencent owning 29% of it. How much of that is actually working on conan is unknown.
The point im making here is they certainly have the resources. We know this because they are a midsize company and 140 people for a gaming/publishing company is sizeable. If they were struggling we would know about it. They just dont have a lot of that allocated to support which is what Id like to see changed. The narrative that they simply dont have the resources is not true.
Us being complacent with their server policing policy only helps funcom not the player base. These conversations are helpful because it brings visibility to the issue and it also arms employees like @Ignasi the direct player feedback that often goes a long way when communicating with those sitting in their ivory towers at funcom.
Ive never nor do I believe they should have an active server moderation team like a traditional MMO. I certainly am asking for an improved process to report these types of behavior so they can take action.
I submitted a support request (ticket number 1128596) and still have not gotten word back other than an automated message. Reporting these issues is absolutely a nightmare with no clear outline process. I had to make a seperate post just to get any idea on who I should be reaching out to and all I got following those directions was a link to the forum post I already read stating their enforcement policy.
We agree at the end of the day that its an issue that should be addressed. How we address these issues is where we split but this conversation is appreciated. Id love to talk about other topics on this forums but until @Ignasi and team is able to actually clean up these servers im going to continue to post my frustration and experience in the hopes that these experiences can at least change some things
Thats across multiple games, not just Conan, and I also never meant to suggest they are struggling. But making monetary decisions of where to invest are important. They arn’t a Indy company, but they arn’t huge either.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I mean it wasn’t long ago that Funcom based the release of further open world on the Conan Map on ‘How well they might do on DLC sales’.
Obviously they are juggling resources. That doesn’t mean the game/company is at risk, simply that the team is making a decision of whats worthwhile and will bring in the money.
Is individual server administration and individual problems like this (I can’t comment as to how prevalent is) worth enough to justify the cost? Will this addition bring in any further players? Will not making this a priority lose the game a significant amount of players?
I understand you certainly think they are.
I personally see the problem, however as money does have a limit, I see Funcom much more likely to implement a non-personnel related solution. I also wouldn’t want the addition of administration to ever be an excuse as to why they couldn’t afford to do other things.
I suppose we are talking in circles at this point and I certainly didn’t mean to talk you down or discourage, just detail what you were stating and weigh it against my own thoughts. I am sorry if it came across that way.
I do hope your problem is resolved as I don’t relish your position or whats happening on your server.
If they could wing a small team that could respond to reports coming in of fraudulent behavior, officials would benefit and there is no disagreement here.
I just see that request thread/request email/or however they’d do it, would fill up faster then the bug thread as to support the servers, the game needs to be more stable in the first place. If you can’t support all the problems, the other solution is to open enough servers that players could just move away from and avoid the problems (to the best of their ability) and it simply looks like Funcom decided on option number 2 here.
If Funcom isn’t likely to expand on their support department, other ideas might be more pliable and have a greater chance of being implemented then just repeated call for official server admins.
While not a perfect solution to the specific problem associated with building on shattered springs, one solution they could implement, and I kind of hope they are considering, is a ‘maintenance’ costs associated with how much one has built. I know this has been suggested many times before. This is a way to curb spam, or at least make it more expensive on the offending party. Granted, where there’s a will to troll, it will be done, but if they could at least find an in game mechanic to curb the cost of spamming, I would much rather go down that road than a no build zone. If you make it not worth while for a party to build all over the springs, sinners, galamans, death whisper, and the jungle sources, then another party has a fighting chance to get their hands on brim and deal with it.
Griefer builds are much, much cheaper than normal builds, so you would really be penalizing people who like to build, while griefers are laughing their arses off
I hear your point, but I’m not so sure it isn’t a viable solution. And not all griefer builds are cheaper. I’ve met many a griefer clan that build very very large t3 compounds for their normal bases. Which means all the spam is just additional cost on them to maintain over the regular folk.
I guess it would depend on issues such as T1, T2, T3, is the maintenance cost exponential, is it based on contiguous buildings or not, etc etc etc. I’m not a dev and really not going to get my brain sucked into the details on the mechanic. But I hope they have at least looked at it, or something like it. The decay system just isn’t enough. They gotta find a mechanic that gives the PvE and PvP communities a viable way to deal with the issue.
No, I agree, the decay system isn’t enough. Back when I was involved with New World, their way of claim management was to build a structure (sort of like the battle standard in Conan Exiles) that would make the buildings in a certain area around it invulnerable to attacks, as long as it was active. To keep it active, you had to feed it gold, which you would get from a market building where you would sell the stuff you could farm up and/or craft.
I always liked that system much better and would love to see it in Conan Exiles. First of all, it would allow people to engage in raids, while still having the option to keep some of their buildings safe. Second, in Conan Exiles it could be tweaked and adjusted, so that certain areas require much more upkeep than others. And of course, the more you want to protect, the higher the cost, to the point where it’s simply prohibitive to protect super-massive amounts of stuff.
Another idea that I like a lot, that has been cropping up on the forums, is to use the Purge to try to prevent the most egregious forms of griefing. For example, if you wanted to avoid having people build lots of crap in the Shattered Springs lake, any building inside that zone would make that clan’s Purge meter fill up much more quickly (with a cumulative effect, i.e. the more building pieces there, the faster it fills up) and then, when it’s the clan’s turn to get Purged, make sure that if they have buildings there, the Purge will spawn there and it’s a non-human purge.
Of course, it might just be cheaper to do something similar to that Purge idea, but instead of using the Purge, just slap the decay timer of the structure in those zones. The more you build in that area, the lower the maximum decay timer for those buildings.
Maybe other then the purge, certain zones when built in encourage the wrath of the gods.
Different locations around the map could be influenced by different gods, and rather then a ‘No Build Zone’ a hidden God meter goes up and then that offending area gets visited?
I imagine god attacks could be programmed to have the potential to hit under-mesh buildings as well.
I suppose in the end, if you can’t retaliate against the God, it’s essentially a no build zone anyhow, but at least the removal of enemy players would be in game controlled and a lot more amusing.
I have to admit, part of me wants to promote the idea on PvP that if you want to be an ■■■■■■■, it should still be an option for you… However, it should be extraordinarily difficult to maintain.
But, as I don’t think many people would agree with me, plus I really don’t have a horse in this race as I have gone to a server with no community, for all the very reasons (I have control over my environment from Player annoyances (which I actually never had in my PvE server. People were great and we all helped each other out) and Funcom changes… (what 'NO Build Zones? )
Though I think a solution that correctly resolves the problem and is themed within the game would be great.
Body vaults are alternate accounts that are logged off in a safe spot with everything on them from the main account. Think top of trees, somewhere like the UC where one can’t build in, etc. Finding a body is hard, as there is no land claim to search for.
So it doesn’t really prevent anything save taking resources from someone that isn’t logging on?
I’m not sure I see the issue still as I personally wouldn’t really care about raiding someone that isn’t around (or even more so, just a character with resources on it with no base to attack and I personally wouldn’t PvP to take stuff, more to just attack and destroy (not that I wouldn’t take stuff, it just wouldn’t be my end goal, more just a product of PvPin)).
Or is this a problem due to a more nefarious tactic of building up resources, go dark/under-ground till you are forgotten about, and then come back and ruin a person’s day with a stock pile of resources no one could do anything about?
I assume I am still missing an aspect of this problem, or just am not applying enough importance to the act of taking resources away from another player.
Thank you for the explanation all the same.
edit LOL, sorry, never mind, it just clicked. I wasn’t looking at it in the light of making characters for the singular purpose of being a disappearing chest/vault, regardless of their base and main account activity.
Sorry, its been a long day.
That seems like a lot of effort for the specific purpose, but I suppose the sting of losing a full base worth of resources would push people to cheat in that way. Certainly obnoxious. Would have never known this was a thing.
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