Purge Meter avoiding the purge

You are mistaken.

At least one person needs to be on the server, not one clan member.

Since I was a clan of 1 and was not on but the logs stated I was purged, pets were killed, blocks destroyed, I must conclude my experience trump’s your assertion.

@DaVice is not mistaken…
Neither you…
You were just experiencing bug…
I never ever ever had of line purge, but because it happened to some people, on 3728 years ago I asked @anon83039162 and Lordgangsta29 to go and check if I was going to have a purge. 3728 was American server and I had to accept it after 3 in the morning. So it was very difficult for me to stay awake another day from Saturday. Only Saturday I could stay awake at this hour and I accepted more than 30 purges in that server. My purge line after the purge was already in the middle and every Monday full :rofl::rofl::rofl:, but only Saturday I had purge because I stay awake, simple as that. Though @DaVice is very correct, I confirm the bug you experienced because it happened to players I knew and happen to play with. They were not lying, they had no reason to do so, neither you @Pugilist i believe you, but it was a bug. The funny thing is that this bug was “following” users and not servers… Go figure :person_facepalming:t3:.
Hexsing if you play on Playstation just name your server and I’ll drop by to give you a “fast” berserker and a “fast” taskmaster so you’ll farm a good army in no time. You don’t even have to put me in your clan, I’ll just deliver and go, cheers m8 :+1:t6:

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I have never had a real purge offline. I have had purges start on the log but they never landed on the ground to actually attack a base and I would have a spam of like 20+ purge starts before it stops and moved to the next clan in line.

Now I have had it where I logged off just when the horn was blown and therefore it was on…but never had it if I just left before purge time.

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These are all handy things to note. Thanks again :slight_smile:

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Yes, it does. I went on a vacation for 10 days and only logged in occasionally, just long enough to refresh. My purge meter went all the way down.

Contrary to what @TeleTesselator and @DaVice believe, it does. Their misconception is common because of the very unfortunate phrasing of the tooltip in the settings. I’ll come back to this after I’ve answered your other questions.

No. As others have already explained, you can build a convergence trap and use it to reset your purge meter. Or if you play solo, just leave your clan then re-create it.


Now, back to the topic of offline purges. The GUI tooltip says: “If set to zero, there needs to be at least one player online for a purge to start.”

So if that’s the case, what’s the difference between setting this to 1 and setting it to 0? If it’s set to 1, then a clan won’t be eligible for purge unless there’s at least 1 clan member online. If it’s set to 0, then a purge won’t happen unless there’s at least 1 player connected to the server, regardless of what clan they belong to.

I’ve not only seen offline purges happen, I’ve had one once when real life didn’t let me connect to the server.

EDIT: I just want to clarify that this is the way it used to be when I got purged offline, but that was a while ago, before Siptah. I remember testing my hypothesis back then. I don’t really care to test it again right now, so I can’t be 100% sure that this is still the case and Funcom hasn’t changed anything.

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I didn’t knew that, thanks m8 :+1:t6:.

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Maybe there is. I don’t know when that has changed, but I know for a fact that this


got Purged in my Single-Player game in October 2019 (so Wak’s video is more recent and may contain updated info).

Also another of my bases on an island in Noob River - or really a 2*2 hut I built when I started and forgot was still there until a Purge found it. This was probably around the same time as the one above.

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If that’s the case I think it must have changed. I’ve only been playing for about 18 months so I can’t speak to anytime before that but with 2,600 hours in 18 months that’s like 9 hours a day if I played 4 days a week the entire time - or 5 hours a day if I played every single day - for the entirety of the full 18 month period. :shushing_face: Just noticing that’s a lot of time to never have had an offline purge.

I dunno how it might have worked before I started playing but here’s another piece of logic which questions the possibility of offline purges: The purge meter progresses only when you or a clan member are on-line. It reaches a certain point and the the purge is triggered. AFAICT, the purge meter does not increase when all the clan members are off line. So how could it trigger? If it did that would be a bug and would need reporting. After you are offline for some number of minutes (or immediately?) the purge meter even begins to decrease.

There are two ways to envision the meter’s mechanics though. One is like the trigger on a gun where the trigger travels to a certain point and the gun (purge) goes off - boom - no stopping it if all the other conditions are also met. The other is that when the purge meter reaches a certain point it begins rolling the dice to see if it will start the purge… but the meter continues increasing between the dice rolls. So if the server rolls too many “no purge” results while continuing to increase, it leaves the meter needle past the point of “condition met”. One of the questions begged by the later are if the dice are being rolled while the member(s) are offline and another is if the chance percentages change with the online ← → offline condition, change. I don’t know the answer but those are some questions.

I think it the later but the dice do not roll when the member(s) are offline. Again, I dunno how it used to be a year ago. I can test this better on private servers which have a low event threshold value set - so the the meter can increase WAY past the trigger point. I can then log off and assuming the other people remain online (I’m assuming the 4 to 20 players who were online when I disconnected didn’t ALL also disconnect when I did) then just wait and see if a purge happens by using the repair hammer or checking how many (if any) arrows your archers spent.

Yet another consideration is proximity. If indeed the server setting is players per server and not players per clan (which I believe @CodeMage correctly pointed out) then do they need to be near or on the purge-ready property in order to trigger the event? If I’m wrong about everything else then this is likely the case and the reason why I have never experienced an offline purge.

In my tests an offline purge has never occurred. I log off and even though the purge meter remained WAY past the trigger point the entire time (5 to 30 hours in most tests) no purge occurred. But as soon as I log on then within 15 minutes or so I get the purge - if all other conditions are met. It’s much harder to test this on official servers because as soon as the trigger point is reached you get a purge almost immediately and the meter is difficult to drive much above it’s trigger point.

In conclusion with all that play time and testing I have never once had an offline purge - not on officials and not on privates either. So claims and opinions considered, if they are possible (which I personally refuse to believe) they are rarer than hen’s teeth - for sure - and not something to worry about. Or in the oddest case, only something to worry about if you live very near other players or in some location other players frequently travel through.


Yeah, I don’t know but I think @Wak4863 's video is wrong. I think maybe the number of pieces used are being factored as a multiplier. The evidence to me is that with an extremely small base it is much easier to drive the purge meter way past the trigger point but with a large base (many pieces and placeables) on officials the purge triggers almost immediately. [Talking about the time from the first purge meter tick mark to the horn sounding out]

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Of course, it has to be taken into account that Purges work with a different logic on Single-Player than on multiplayer servers. I neglected to mention that on my previous post, and that may indeed have a considerable effect on how Purges are triggered and what they trigger.

On Single-Player, a Purge is supposed to target the base closest to the player’s position, but in my experience that is not always the case. Three of my bases were never targeted by a Purge, no matter how hard I tried to provoke them - in some cases triggering in a matter of seconds after I teleported away from a particular base in order to strike at a base that was closest to the obelisk where I ended up. And in some cases targeting a base that was not even close to being the closest.

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It could be that the exact values are dependent upon location and some other settings we don’t have visibility to. For instance, I seem to recall that Base Score was increased more by T3 blocks than T1.

As for how recent this possible change is, I can tell you that when I was on officials, I was able to trigger purges with bases as small as an outhouse. BUT that was 2-3 years ago, and those bases were purposefully build next to other larger structures in the vicinity whose pieces may have gotten factored into the equation. (i.e. using the purge to break thru troll walls on PvE)

At any rate, on the server I’ve been playing most recently, the micro base built inside the waterfall in H5 was able to run up the purge meter to full and never trigger. It was all T3 blocks with T2 benches, with a few larger stations outside (4-man wheel, small animal pen, dyer & saddler benches). I had maybe 2 horses and 4 followers plus the workbench crafters.

Now one difference may be that this was the first base I built after joining that server, and I had nothing more than a bedroll anywhere else.

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Probably. A lot of things have changed since then, and I didn’t think of considering it until afterwards, when I added my edit.

Simple: the purge can only be triggered during the purge window. Get your purge meter over the line before the window and log off.

I think you’re conflating the logic for the purge meter and for the purge trigger a bit more than warranted. There’s one meter per clan, but the purge triggering is a server-wide thing. I base that latter claim on the fact that in all these years, I’ve never once heard a clan say “help, we’re getting purged” and another clan go “shіt, we’re getting purged too”, which would indicate that there’s only one purge happening at a time.

So when the purge window starts and the server decides that it would be a nice moment to have one happen, it then has to choose where and whom to purge. The exact details of these algorithm are not known, which is why we’re all guessing here how it works :wink:

My theory is that it works along the lines of querying the game database for all eligible purge candidate locations and then selects a random one. Maybe there’s some prioritization and weighting going on, who knows. I certainly don’t know :man_shrugging:

A small correction: what I pointed out is that the value 0 has a special meaning. The setting is players per clan, yes, but the value 0 means you need at least one player on the server, otherwise the server won’t even bother felling a tree in the forest when there’s no one to hear it fall :wink:

At least, that’s what my test showed back then. :man_shrugging:

The most likely explanations are that I either screwed up my tests back then somehow, or that the logic changed :wink:

However, there are other details we don’t know that might be at play here. For example, I don’t know whether the trigger algorithm prioritizes online candidates.

Another thing to consider is how many purges happened during your tests. The purge window on official PVE-C servers is only 4 hours long, and each purge will have a 10 minute “preparation” period before spawning the first wave and a 1 minute regroup period between the waves. Plus, there’s a 5 minute delay between two different purges. If you could beat each wave instantaneously, that would still come out to a theoretical maximum of 12 purges (6 wave purges, to be precise) per window.

Like I said, it’s more likely that the logic either changed or I screwed something up, but now I’m warming to this topic. I might even decide to test it again :stuck_out_tongue:

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A little over 80. I mean where I was actively testing things… yeah.


Another piece of logic to consider is that thralls and NPCs do not fight if players are not within render range. So triggering an “offline purge” would kind of seem meaningless if that were true for purges as well. It’s not tho - strangely. Just now tested in Dedicated Server - Solo play.

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I wanted to thank everyone who has explained more about the Purge. I now have a pretty decent defendable base and some thralls that are armored up and read in case it happens.

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Good to know, have fun m8 :+1:t6:

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