Purge "timer" to Replace Decay System

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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Replace the decay system with a version of the purge that is based on “decay” timers.

The more a player stays away from a structure the longer the “purge” timer will count. The bigger the number, the higher the chance a “timed” purge will happen at said location.

This is a more targeted, less blunt way to deal with “building spam”.

Specifically targeting old unused buildings.

Leave the current purge in place.

This new purge would grow in strength and frequency with time.

This new purge could even be a storm, such as localized tornado, or an earth tremor.

This additional system would spare players “active” bases from feeling harassed. But it would also target more aggressively under used or abandoned bases.

With this system in place (in addition to the current purge) I believe the decay timer (which is very unforgiving) could be extended in its duration. Affording casual gamers a respite.

By beginning these additional purges (which would be smaller and less destructive initially) at the 7 or 8 day mark, you could have a “softer” version of your decay system that does not feel as anti-casual player.

The lore of this concept could simply be that bandit scouts had noticed an exile seemed to be away from its homestead, and they sought to take advantage.

THE GOAL

I want exiles who have a lone, well defended base to be able to take some time off from this game. I don’t want them to lose months of work, or their ability to come back to what they were working on.

I want new exiles who have few resources and a low tier base, with very few thralls to be able to take their week off, or play their other games without stressing over their C.E homestead.

In both cases, after the classic 7 day decay timer passed, instead of losing ALL of their work, each of these bases would be periodically assaulted by a MICRO-PURGE.

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MICRO PURGE - Thoughts.

Thralls could defend against this.
OR
This could be a non-npc event that removes items automatically from the world.

Day 7 - (Instead of total destruction) Decay Timer Starts.

Day 8 - “Thief” shows up several times. Steals various stacks of random goods.

Day 9 - “Thief” returns with “Plunderers”. Some doors are damaged. Roof Tiles are also damaged. Looting occurs. Thralls with less than X armor or X HP are destroyed.

Day 10 - “Thief” returns with “Insert Boss Name”. Multiple doors and some walls are destroyed. More stacks are looted. Some chests are destroyed. Thralls with less than X HP or X Armor are destroyed.

Day 11 - All Roofs are destroyed. All Doors are destroyed. Some placeables are destroyed. Further looting occurs.

Day 12 - Several work benches are destroyed. More looting. Several walls are destroyed. Further thrall removal.

Day 13 - Foundations are damaged. Further looting and destruction of walls occurs. All thralls are destroyed.

Day 14 - All building pieces are destroyed.

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This could be a “Non NPC Event”. If that makes it easier and more controlled.
OR
Thralls could defend against it. I think it’s helpful either way.

All of these things can happen without spawning in NPC’s. No need for other bases to suffer adverse effects.

Unsure of the coding involved.

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I’m intrigued by this idea, but I’m not sure how this would help counter building spam since bases must already be visited to keep them refreshed under the current rules. Seems like this would only affect those players who genuinely play (just infrequently) while doing nothing to address the refresh griefers.

On another point, are you envisioning this as actual NPCs who show up at the base (like a normal purge) and thus require AI resources yet can be killed and looted, OR would the damage, etc. simply be applied “behind the scenes” during each servers’ boot-up process each morning?

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I am not certain which would be best. I feel it could be either. But perhaps a non-npc event that simply removes/damages targeted items according to the day/time would be the most efficient path forward.

The difference being a true veteran could defend against something like this for weeks without logging in (perhaps).

Either way, the hard decay time could be increased slightly from its current 1 week, to a more reasonable two week timer.

Regardless. This is just a nice thought I had, the community likely has ideas that can make it better, or prove it to be a bad idea.

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I like this idea, and really any idea to increase the decay timer that doesn’t benefit griefers. A simple other way would be that once passed the 7 days, random parts of the buildings and thralls would be destroyed, more and more everyday. Like a reeal world decay timer in a way hahaha

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I like the idea of a slow decay helping to break newer players into how the mechanics of the game work, but I’d still like to see something that helps to address the issue of griefers who can easily refresh their land spam.

What do you think about the “upkeep pot” that @CodeMage and a couple others have suggested in other threads? If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically like the original thrall pots but for keeping your decay timer up.

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I think that nothing can really be done against griefers. At least, nothing can be done without having an impact on other players, mostly casual players. I am personnaly not a fan of the “upkeep pot” but the idea is good, just restrictive for casuals. I say this cause that’s how Rust’s building is working and it’s part of the reasons i didn’t stay in the game. But let’s take for exemple my first time on officials servers. At some point, my friends stopped playing and I was stuck with a pretty large base. At the time I was playing 1 to 2 hours a day. Having an upkeep pot would mean that the little playtime I had would be dedicated to maintaining my home. However, I’d be very inclined to get an “Upkeep pot” if done properly, and this is what will be hard, cause there is no real way to f.ck griefers. One of the best solutions would be to buy extra days of decay with ressources, but grifers could abuse that as weel, as they could for anything. And getting a functionnal way to destroy griefers would be desastrous for various other players.

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You have a point, heck I know of a few CE players who quit the game when Thrall Pots originally came out because they felt it too burdensome. This would almost certainly entail more work.

What if the Upkeep Pot only got tapped if average play time fell beneath a certain threshold based upon how large a base is?

For instance, a base of only 10K pieces might never need to access its Upkeep Pot at all if the clan is online and playing at least 2 hours a week, whereas a base of 100K pieces might have a threshold of 20 hours a week before the Upkeep Pot gets tapped. This would then benefit those who have more practically-sized bases that they have upgraded rather than those who blanket the land in sandstone.

Also, it might be a solution to the problem you had (and that I’ve seen others have) where the rest of a clan moves on and a single player is left holding the bag on a vast empire. If a single player was left with more than they could manage, then they could simply not-fill the Upkeep Pots for the bases they no longer want and allow the revised decay system to remove them from the world. In this way, they could still freely travel the world without fear of refreshing bases (e.g. while looking for thralls or star metal), yet not have to give themselves tendonitis trying to manually dismantle huge bases.

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I’m really conflicted about this idea. On the one hand, I find the creativity in it very appealing. And I also like the motivation behind it – people whose life suddenly got complicated enough that they couldn’t refresh their stuff on time might end up losing everything, which really is sad.

Despite all that, I find myself unable to agree with the proposal. Let me try to explain why.

Before I start, let me explain that I don’t think the decay timer is a good mechanism. It can punish nice players unfairly and it rewards trolls, griefers and others who don’t fall into either of those two categories, but are still annoying in the way they treat shared spaces on the server :wink:

So please don’t take the criticism of your idea as a defense of the decay timer – except in some later parts of my reply where I explicitly defend certain aspects of the timer.

To start off, I find that this proposal is basically the same as extending the decay timer from 1 week to 2 weeks, except with some added RNG. And while I find RNG to be a useful tool in a game designer’s toolbox, this is one of those occasions where I wouldn’t even reach for it.

Think about it this way: if they extend the timer to 2 weeks, at least you know that your stuff is safe for 2 weeks. If they implement your idea, the people who value their stuff are still required to refresh it at least once a week. In other words, why would I go away for more than a week without arranging for someone to refresh my stuff?

Of course, there’s another argument there: what if you didn’t arrange for anyone to refresh your stuff and you didn’t manage to come back in time to refresh it yourself? That’s where things get a bit trickier and we have to weigh different factors against each other.

Consider the cost first: this requires development effort that’s far from trivial. Apart from the necessary coding and QA (yes, I’m salty about QA), there are all sorts of unresolved questions here. When does this event take place? On reboot? At the exact time when this new timer ticks to one of its milestones? Or is it the way decay timer is handled: when a player comes into rendering distance and “activates” these buildings and placeables on the server, so the server plays “catch up” and applies everything that has to be done? Will it affect the performance and by how much? And so on.

Now consider the benefit: a certain minority of players will not lose everything. They should be a minority, because – let’s face it – having someone who can cover for you and refresh your stuff is one of the most useful aspects of PVE clans. There are other reasons to form a clan on a PVE(-C) server, but those can be worked around: sure, clan chat is nice, but many people already prefer Discord; sure, the Purge meter fills agonizingly slowly when you’re a one-person clan, but you can still make a Purge happen. Having someone other than you refresh your stuff? There’s no other solution for it except forming a clan.

In my mind, the cost outweighs the benefits by a significant margin, and that’s without even considering any other factors, such as what little positive effects the current decay system has.

Here comes the part where I present a tiny defense of a tiny slice of the current decay system. Again, please don’t take it as a defense of decay timer in general.

Like I mentioned earlier in my reply, there are certain PVE players that just aren’t “nice neighbors”. They could be outright griefers and trolls. They could be people who block up passages that don’t restrict resources, but force you to take a wide detour around a certain part of the map. They could be people who built a bunch of fugly foundation spam around their base so that nobody could build close to them.

Right now, the only hope anyone has of dealing with them is that they’ll be late to refresh their crap at some point. It’s a very, very slim hope that rests on a very, very slim chance, but at least it’s a non-zero chance :wink:

Of course, I wish there was a better way. Which brings me to the reason why @Larathiel even mentioned me in this thread.

I’ll come out and say it plainly: I believe the PVE claim system is broken and needs to be fixed. I also believe it’s impossible to fix without introducing some kind of player-driven base destruction mechanic.

The problems I want to fix are:

  • PVE griefing and trolling (e.g. walling in resources or other people’s bases)
  • unreasonably massive builds (there was one forum post a while ago about a clan that controls 75% of the map)
  • inactive players who just log in to refresh their buildings and do so indefinitely

(I’ll allow myself a slight digression here to defend that last point, because I know at least one forum poster who considers it a non-problem and thinks we’re all whining. A server is a shared resource. An official server is a public, shared resource. Anyone who builds a bunch of stuff and then stops playing indefinitely, except to keep their builds alive, is selfishly wasting “real estate” and, more importantly, server resources. All those builds do have an impact on server performance, too.)

One idea to fix that problem is what I’ve proposed on several other threads: an upkeep flag or pot. Place it on a building piece and it will consume fuel to protect that building piece and all the connected building pieces, by making them invulnerable to building damage. Make the fuel cost an exponential function of number of connected building pieces. Make the base cost depend on where you built: if there’s at least certain number (or fraction) of building pieces within a certain radius of certain spots like obelisks or Shattered Springs brimstone, it starts out much costlier than a normal base and gets fed into the same exponential function. Make it so each player can place only one upkeep pot, just like it works with bedrolls. Make the upkeep pot have a maximum inventory size. And then fine-tune the hell out of it.

Another idea I’ve had for a while is a declaration of war. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never voiced this one before, because I haven’t sat down to think it through and I hate posting half-baked ideas. However, I’ll give it a try despite that. The idea is that a clan can unilaterally declare war on another clan. This would give the other clan a notification and a certain period of time to prepare (let’s say a day or two, this can all be discussed and tweaked). During the prep time, things are the same as without a war. Once the prep time expires, two things are suddenly in effect: 1) clan A can damage and destroy clan D’s buildings and followers, and 2) anyone can damage and destroy clan A’s buildings and followers. Additionally, this mechanism might be restricted to PVP hours. The war could either last indefinitely (until clan A ends it) or it can be capped by the server to a certain number of days (with or without an option for clan A to end it before that).

While neither of these ideas is designed specifically to help with your original goal of helping people take breaks without losing their stuff, I believe that fixing the PVE claim mechanism will still help them indirectly. The upkeep pot would allow them to pick a base they cherish the most and make sure it’s well taken care of. The clan war would make it so the decay timer can be bumped up to 14 or even 30 days without rewarding griefers and trolls.

I apologize for the huge wall of text and I hope it might be at least a tiny bit useful :slight_smile:

If there is any interest in discussing the upkeep pot or the clan war, I can always open a suggestion thread for them.

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Maybe this can be a Conan Army. I like the idea of progressive damage.

compared to current 7 day timer. (changes to match decay time if doubled, etc…)
Maybe after 5 days of decay, Conan destroys doors. (this would allow other players into the openings to loot anything not locked.)

After 6 decay days, he destroys crafting stations.
After 7 decay days he destroys chest/vaults
After 8 the structures lose 1/2 their health
After 9 the structures lose 1/4 of original health.
After 10 days they lose all health but 1 point
After 11 they decay.

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Having a system like the one you’re proposing seems very nice. And i really think that the way to punish griefers but not casual players would be a “recording” of the played hours. Your solution is the best i’ve seen so far my dear @Larathiel, count me in for your idea ! Nothing else to say, I’m buying it right now.

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Appreciate the vote of confidence, Gavin, though parts of the idea hail from several different posters, I just can’t recall everyone off the top of my head.

@CodeMage Thanks for joining the conversation. I’m hopeful that if the community can brainstorm and work thru the potential pitfalls of various remedies that we might help to lessen the heavy lifting for the devs and improve the situation.

My only hesitations with your proposal is that if clans are limited to a single Upkeep Pot, they’ll pretty much have to criss-cross the map with runners to keep outposts alive, and a lot of folks either don’t realize these can safely be removed afterwards, or can’t be bothered to because it’s such a PITA via the current mechanism.

Also, I’m not sure about escalating the cost of construction near obelisks. On my server, for example, all of the long-time players who have actually helped fostered a positive atmosphere have public maprooms and/or taverns by the obelisks for the benefit of all. Some of us have also helped to protect paths on the servers to prevent locales like New Asagath, Sinkhole, etc. from getting walled-off. Seems counter-productive to reward stewardship with a penalties, so I’m thinking a more nuanced approach would be preferable.

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No, not one per clan, one per player. So if you have a full clan, you get 10 pots. Another happy little incentive to clan up :wink:

I’m not quite sure if “runners” means what I think it means. If it means little foundation “roads” connecting one place with another, that will drive the upkeep cost up. That’s why it’s an exponential formula :slight_smile:

Oh, yeah. We build those on my server, too. What I’m proposing would merely ensure that if you wanted to wall in an obelisk, you would either have to build close enough to have a huge upkeep cost or far enough that the amount of pieces you would need to wall it in would result in huge upkeep :wink:

And I get that, but wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to protect them from being walled off? If instead, there was a game mechanism that did that for you? :wink:

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Ah interesting idea to get people to clan up by making it 1 pot per person, though with the proposed thrall limits, I’d say it would still be more beneficial to stay separated on pure PvE servers. Of course, given how a clan owns everything, they’d have to figure out how to keep ownership of Upkeep Pots separated in order to do such a thing, I’ll make no wagers as to the challenge of such an accounting change.

And yes, it would be nice if players didn’t have to protect in-game routes and resources. Frankly, I wish they’d start with world boss spawns…

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I made a thread to discuss it, so we can avoid derailing this thread with my idea:

EDIT: I also made another thread to discuss clan wars:

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I don’t disagree with much that has been said. My beef with the system as it stands is that it is a very blunt way to deal with a specific problem. As a game company, that absolutely has lost players who are unsatisfied with Conan Exiles after logging in to a decayed base… Funcom should recognize a need to address this on some level. I believe many people agree with this “generally”. The “how” is the big issue.

The old system IS broken, as @CodeMage said. And any new system should address it in a manner that tries to solve more than just one problem at a time.

Yes, the code work involved would be substantial, and it should be, because it should be a thoughtful, crafty system that takes a number of situations into account.

Here is where I stand.

Hit this with multiple additions to the decay system, that benefit casual players but don’t fully protect them.

Examples of ways to do this. (I am not saying do these ALL, but at the developers discretion.)

  • An Upkeep Pot (As was mentioned).
  • Decay based on structure Tier.
  • Decay based on play time of a bi-monthly basis. (More hours played = More Decay earned)
  • Zone specific decay. Noob river decay is faster than frost giant territory.
  • Dungeon Specific decay. If built extremely close to a point of interest (dungeon or obelisk) a decay timer could be shorter.
  • Player Level - Feat Point - Total Sever Played Time based decay. Reward longtime players and higher level characters (a day or two).
  • Red Lines. Bases with over (insert huge number) pieces will get a reduced timer.
  • Address the foundation spam refresh trick. (A foundation placed every so often can refresh a foundation near it.) This results in a awkward foundation+torch pathway from a base to another wall or structure allowing for easy refreshing of all structures.)

Bottom line. This game has amazing potential, but is has successfully shot itself in the foot by frustrating players who don’t want to sink weeks or months into a project that is fun, only to have it vanish completely.

Protect the casual player. Improve the player base. Earn more money from DLC’s. Hire more coders. Hire some admins. Save a lot of problems while making money.

(This is my opinion. I encourage others to post their own and address concerns. Perhaps developers will read this and like an idea enough to implement it.)

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Looks like way to much server load… There was a reason that the feeding system got removed :wink:

I also want a new/different decay system.

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The reason the feeding pot was removed was because it had to access the inventory of all thralls in its radius, periodically, with a short period. On top of that, people like me would place multiple feeding pots in order to cover the surface of the entire base.

It was an inefficient solution implemented on top of creaky tech, so it got “replaced” by an ineffective solution :confused:

That shouldn’t be the problem with any of the proposed solutions.

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