Fair enough, we can agree to disagree and that’s ok.

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I knew when I was writting that someone would call me on that. I did not take the time to answer Deacon on that part, because his rhetorical question makes it sound like I am oblivious about how a company works. Even if I do not work in that specific field, of course I know there are different jobs to take into account, what is the point of even stating it? I am not a Funcom employee, nor am I the one who “desbribed” while involving jobs, so what is that "way’ I desbribe things you are talking of? What I wrote is just a sump up of what Funcom wrote regarding the spending of their time. As a matter of fact, I even copy-pasted exactly what they said for the sake of preventing these useless remarks about how a company works, that artists are not the ones fixing bugs, and so on. Again, I am NOT a Funcom employee, I do not know how much polyvalence is asked from them when they are recruited, nor do I know about the jobs it takes to run a gaming company. The only thing I can repeat, is what they wrote themselves: their time previously used for the BP will be redistributed for other things, and the fixing of bugs is part of that other things. To answer Deacon who started speaking of jobs, and to you now who seem to have views on how it works in their company, I can only say that in regard to what happens to the artists and non artists people who worked on the battle pass, I can only ASSUME they will not be short on work.

Talking with you guys drains me for real. :exploding_head:
Leaving the country in 15min, so long!

IMG_4161

Sorry had to do it I couldn’t resist :joy::joy: in joy your trip.:grin:

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as long as the new assets are just mesh variations of things that already exist, the code is trivial. if they do new things, then new blueprints need to be coded. i think most of battlepass is visual variations on master placeables and vanilla items, but i could be wrong, as i never have much use for the stuff, and it’s not available in the devkit for modders to look at.

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They usually come here to report a bug or complain.
But if people didn’t like the game they would just walk away and not be here to complain.

Never assume people know what you know. When you make a statement that sounds like you don’t know how something works how are we to assume you’re just being obtuse?

Yes we can see the smoke rolling over you head :rofl:

Referring to the emote.

Could be :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
What you are referring to as the coding for an item; how it acts in game, is generic. An ax is an ax is an ax. The look could be a simple change up of the skin, or an actual from scratch item.

Sorry people but I have made content from scratch and find the devaluing of the work aggravating.

I’m curious, just how much actual time do some of you think it takes to make something simple, say a shield?

Now what funcom got from this thread; despite the discord, is some great ideas for continuing the battle pass.

Indeed, could be as simple as the master. Even if that is the case someone still needs to do it.

Theorizing on all this feels like an exercise in futility though.

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Which is why I replied to you with some details about it. I apologize if that offended you, that was not my intent.

I have views on how it works in general. That’s because I’ve been writing and debugging code professionally for 25 years now. Some of that time was even spent inside the game development industry.

No, I don’t know how it works inside Funcom, but I know certain general limitations of how it can or cannot work.

Like I said, I wasn’t trying to insult you. I was simply offering some information that might help us all avoid repeating the mistake of setting our expectations too high.

Remember when they said they would add chapter 4 to the Age of War and we all assumed it was to fix bugs and polish things? And then everyone was disappointed to find out that wasn’t the case?

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Bottom line:

A) Fix bugs. Players that have left - some might return. Players that are currently playing might open their wallets back up and spend money. Players that are currently playing stay.

B) Don’t fix bugs. Players continue to leave. And no one opens up their wallets.

@AndyB - Please make sure that your team reads this. Investment into this game is REQUIRED for it’s survival.

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I would prefer them to continue…

But its like an if statement.

If they keep us disconnected from their ideas and decisions shoving terrible content down our throats then no.

If they listen to us players and let us choose between their options/ideas then yes.

I’m personally not even worried about bugs and half baked updates anymore, this became a feature for Conan Exiles.

However I find the “new” content and “removing”… excuse me I mean “re-balancing” the way Funcom does terrible in this Age.

New content, leave the old content as is. Nerf minor, not major.

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That’s true, but it’s also a red herring.

Neither the OP nor I were in any way talking about whether players have walked away or not. If you want to have a separate conversation about how the removal of the BP may or may not have affected player counts then by all means enjoy that thought experiment, but that’s not OP asked nor is it what I was talking about.

yah dude i have been working in the devkit modding this game for a year now. i know how it works. ‘an ax is an ax’ was exactly my point. the time and effort it takes to model a new visual ax is where the time is at. pulling the mesh into unreal, making an item in the itemtable, that shit is trivial. if you knew as much as you pretend to, you wouldnt be arguing with me or misrepresenting what i said.

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My bad. Used to dealing with people that think content is some how clip art, or something you make in MSpaint.

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now something like the new fireworks, that would have required making some new logic in a blueprint. weapons and armors, once the artist has done their thing, are pretty easily added to the game. i definately agree with you that making the actual art is a time consuming job, and it’s not like someone just types in 'make a khitan exiled hat" and out pops a new mesh.

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Ok so now that most members have had their say I will put my two-cents in. I had a feeling this would be a close race among the community. I can completely understand and acknowledge the points and sentiment put forward by other members such as @LostBrythunian and @Rekt, who feel that battle passes are either done to death or feel like another job. But with that said I would politely disagree.

I personally loved the battle pass, and I do sorely hope that we can retain it in some capacity. For me Conan Exiles was my very first experience with battle passes, and in fact prior to its inception I did not even understand what a battle pass was or how it functioned, and had to reach out to the community to explain it to me. For me the battle pass was another end game loop, and it gave players something to do on our play session if we did not know what to do on the day. It was optional, and in its final iteration members were unlocking items just by playing the game normally. Unlike the Bazaar, they were outstanding value for money. Not counting the 10 slots which refund our Crom Coins, each battle pass is giving us something in the vicinity of 50 in game items per battle pass. Now if people have been rolling over their funds from the previous battle passes then it has only cost them a one off payment of $15 for all of them, the same price as an old DLC in my country. Sooo…

50 (items) x 7 (battle passes to date) = 350 in game items for $15 outlay (if we roll the money over).

Which brings me to the where to from here. Look I understand that Funcom found 3 months Chapter deadlines unsustainable, and that the battle pass placed additional demands upon them. And I welcome and commend the move to 6 monthly Chapters, which leads to my next point is one battle pass every 6 months really too much to handle moving forward!? I do not like the idea of that content being redirected supposedly into free content or the Bazaar. Why? The answer is: tell me, what ratio of that content do you suppose will now become actual free content versus paid Bazaar content…? Yeah, exactly. I would like to see the battle pass continue in one form or another, even if it is downsized just a little, or we have a smaller number of them in each Age.

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This one will quibble over the cost of the pass, but that has been done before in other threads.

This one thinks the more substantial reasons for the pass being kebashed have to do with more than just development time and also to do with it’s fixed price while the Bazaar inflates.

Battle Passes hypothetically generate engagement.
But when a game is very buggy, is implementing unpopular and unpleasant changes, while leaving the bugs free roaming, and the company behind it has a new product launching… Engagement is bad. It can lead to bad press ahead of a big launch.

As far as the release schedule…
First they needed an extra chapter.
Now all the chapters need an extra 3 months (or doubled length if you prefer).
Dune is releasing soon, wonder how many staff got drawn off this project and thrown at the crunch time of the shiny new game?

So is it really too much for them to handle?
Based on the state of the game, the most recent updates, and the looming release of another product.
This one thinks that yes, it is too much for them, especially when it isn’t a revenue generator.

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I wouldn’t mind continuation of BP if:

  1. if it didn’t bug out and become unavailable randomly, when you’re not connected to some obscure Funcom site. There’s no issue like that with anything from the DLCs. It’s like we don’t fully own anything we buy on BP, which is unacceptable.
  2. Game had no bugs, glitches or exploits / the ones it has are being regularly hunted down and fixed.
  3. Active GMs on official servers who’d ban cheaters within minutes of a report.

Without the 3 points above, BP is a waste of developers’ time. Fix the game first, add cosmetics after. Or at least add option to buy previous BPs as DLC bundles that are fully, 100% owned and work even when I’m in singleplayer and offline.
Other than that, good riddance.

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Here is my opinion on the matter, and why I voted to stop the battle pass. It was a waste. Plain and simple. From a developers view point, the goal of the battle pass was NEVER to make money, which is why they GAVE YOU back the exact amount of Crom Coins which you initially spent on it upon completion (actually a few levels before completion). Thus you buy it once and you can just keep saving your CC’s and do the Battle Pass chapter after chapter after chapter. That was very much intentional from the developers stand point. They wanted you to pay one time and keep coming back every single chapter to keep engaging with the new content.

So why was it a waste you may ask? How many people actually did this vs. how many people admin spawned in what they needed to cheese through the Battle Pass and complete it in a day? Sure, not everyone did that but frankly, it was a much larger number than they had likely anticipated (if they had even thought about it prior to release that is). So here is this system that rewards you with “free” content (free is a relative term since you did pay for the initial battle pass, but each chapter your investment became far more in your favor) for a day’s worth of admin spawning every three months. Did this achieve the intended goal of the battle pass? Clearly not. So they reworked how the system is done, except that this can be cheese quite easily too with little to no actual engagement with the game (sure no longer in one day but still extremely little effort on your part). Thus they created two whole systems for their battle pass and both failed to do what it was designed to do, all while giving your more and more stuff for your one time $12 payment (or however much it even was, I really don’t remember).

So, from a financial standpoint, does this system make sense? The answer is no. It actually coast less for them to recycle old events, such as this bounty hunter event, and add new free items into the game that way which WILL require you to actually play the game. Or at least they hope that it will. It stands to reason that this will likely have more player engagement than the battle pass did and in that sense this will achieve what they were aiming for in the first place.

So I fail to see why Funcom would continue to use the battle pass system when it was frankly a waste or resources. From a player perspective, I am not sad to see it go either. Their “new and improved” battle pass system was horrid in my opinion. I would rather play the game how I want to play the game (it is a sandbox after all) than worry about some battle pass telling me I have to “do this” or “go there” or risk missing out on getting enough XP to “earn my money back”. That is not a fun way to play a game (although forcing players to “do this event” to earn X items in a sandbox game is also pretty much the antistasis to what a sandbox game is supposed to be about, but that has been Funcom’s focus ever since the introduction of the whole Age/Chapter system).

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Funcom could always rotate in all the old Battlepasses, allowing those players that missed them to do them and obtain the items. Could even add in in game currency (obolus, gold, silver) as rewards for those players that already completed it the first time around.

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Forgive me if this has been mentioned already. But I feel tricked. I put in my $15 or $20 or whatever for the BattlePass. Late, because I was returning to the game and missed the first one. Everyone told me that you get the difference back in Crom Coins, and can use those to pay for the next one. So - a sustaining sort of investment. If you can manage to not be lured to spend your Crom Coins by the Bazaar item. Which - lets be honest - are super dooper tempting.

But now I’m left with a Crom Coin total (~1300) that I am unsure what to do with. Since they are cancelling the BattlePass - should I just blow them in the Bazaar? Or - do I need to hold on to them for eternity in case Funcom decides to move the goalposts again (as they SO ROUTINELY DO)?

I don’t know. I am unsure. Abandoning the BattlePass feels like a loss. A failure. A tossing in of the towel.

What should I do with my Crom Coins, friends? I am certainly not opening my wallet again for Funcom until they get this flaming dumpster fire figured out. :frowning:

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Fix the major bugs. BP or no BP. Your on vacation soon and you still have a major bug that has been hanging around since the release of Chapter 4.

Fix it already.

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