Sorry, something offtopic dear @Croms_Faithful, since I am struggling to understand: You surely had a reason for posting a placeholder saying: “answer incoming” and actually posting something 10 hours afterwards. What is the benefit of this strategy?
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Its a fairly unremarkable answer r4nd0mGamer. The hour was very late at the time in my country, and I had to retire for the evening. But if your question is ‘why even bother’ I will try to explain. Doing so reminds, or ‘prompts’ me (upon seeing it) that I had something specific I wanted to say in relation to the issue. And this will sound strange, but I find I have better recollection of what the statement was to be by seeing this short, seemingly inanane piece of text, and even more so within the topics location. I suspect for me that it is the same old principle as drawing an ‘X’ on ones hand or tying string to one finger. All I know is that it seems to work surprisingly well for me. But then I have always been a bit of a weirdo or an oddity. 
I can see why it would seem strange to other though. Perhaps I should try postettes. 
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I think this is a good post, and pretty spot on. Any of the points you make have complete common sense, and factually, if it wasn’t that way, you would stop people from playing the game, or the game would be played with the new meta.
Three points I’d like to address specifically, having played since D1 Early Access, with only three metals in the game:
There’s a setting in place. If you’re not able to be online during that time in a PVP server, you’re sorta asking for trouble. There’s no solving this; either join a server that supports your hours, go PVE, or handle it by renting your own server and setting it manually.
No kidding. Seriously, is this even a topic? Try going to Compton in the middle of the night wearing hate paraphernalia, even with military training. Guarantee you’re kissing dirt.
This really covers all the points from “multiple players” to “alpha clans”. I’m a solo player, and expecting anything different without some stupid “boost” mechanic is, even in my solo mentality, a stupid mindset. This is expecting a participation trophy. Play solo on a private server, or play with friends if you want to not have this be a factor.
There’s just no way to balance anything if multiple people going toward the same goal doesn’t give an advantage. If you want to avoid this, then play Skyrim or something. This is attempting to avoid basic math with stupid “bonuses” that even as a solo player, I don’t feel I should receive.
This part is the most ridiculous claim I’ve seen.
First of all, in standard combat, this is always true. Unless the horse-rider is a moron, he’s killing a footman. Even pikes, introduced to even the odds, only prevented charges by mass cavalry. Mounted bowmen would slaughter them. mounted swordsmen would circle them and attack the rear, there were no ways to avoid the fact that riding 50kph on a horse could outmaneuver and out damage a person on foot. I just don’t get this mentality. It just won’t be “fair” at all times.
Irrespective of that, I’ve actually witnessed skilled PVPers dueling 1v1 and 3v3 with horses and without. At the high skill level, even unmounted, a great player will take out a mounted player on foot. I’ve witnessed this in numerous, un-modded arena battles.
Cleverness will win, even over mobility and added damage. I personally think the system is working exactly as it should be.
First of all, thanks for your replies, everyone. I was expecting a much more heated firestorm with a topic that people feel passionate about.
I’d like to point out that some people seem to be focusing on the “nine-item list” more than they should. The list is not the point of this thread, and there are plenty of threads already discussing those items, so please, let’s not derail this thread with those discussions. I fully admit my responsibility in this; the OP is long-winded and has a much bigger focus on the “nine-item list” than it perhaps should but I felt it was necessary to elaborate why each of those points could be distilled to the main argument of the essay, ie. PvP is not fair.
So I would humbly request that we focus on future discussion on the philosophy of PvP, the “big picture” of people perceiving PvP as unfair, rather than the isolated features that are only reflections of that unfairness.
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But this is the whole point, really. That’s why, in my essay, I use the concept of “perceived problems”. That’s why I suggest the alternate solution of changing the perception. If these people meditated on their emotions a bit, and (perhaps with my help) figured out why they feel the way they feel, they could take the first step towards accepting that asking for changes won’t actually help because they’re not addressing the actual underlying problem, only its reflections.
That’s true, and it’s one additional reason why PvP cannot (and need not) be fixed. I would’ve loved to examine these alternate ways to play PvP, especially the private servers with some rules of conduct where people seem to be having a jolly good time murdering each other, but I had no material beyond some anecdotes so I didn’t feel qualified to touch upon that issue. It’s definitely an interesting topic I’d like to investigate further in the future.
We are in agreement, even though we use different words for the same idea. PvP in Conan Exiles is working as intended. It was never meant to be “fair and balanced”. However, that’s not what some people were expecting. It’s not what some people want.
It’s not wrong to want fair fights. It’s not wrong to want balance. My point was to point out why Conan Exiles is the wrong context to want those things.
Life isn’t fair. It’s never fair. That’s usually not a problem for us, because we, people in the civilized world with Internet, gaming devices and access to games such as Conan Exiles, are on the winning side of that unfairness. It’s easy to shrug off unfairness when we’re not homeless, living in poverty, suffering from debilitating mental disorders or physical disabilities or with no social safety net.
That’s why, when facing a perceived unfair disadvantage in something like a video game, many of us have no tools to deal with that unfairness. That’s why anger is a natural first reaction, and once angry, it’s easy to stay angry rather than change their mental approach to said perceived unfairness. Basically, I (believe I) understand why people are complaining about all these things, and I’m trying to make them understand the actual “why” too.
Sounds pretty conceited, huh?
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I remember a time when map rooms didn’t exist … don’t see a problem with op camping . If there are clan s that do that on your server , go through naked to check or just don’t use them 
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I don’t actually use a map room especially not since mounts. I made one and placed it for the journey step, then picked it up and put it in storage. They’re too big for my base and I can’t be bothered to make space 
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But the real reality is that this is a game and not reality. Let’s say a professional football player wouldnt be able to defeat 5-10 kids by his own cuz he is stronger, faster what so ever. It should be like that here aswell. If u wanna go 3v1 for example these 3 guys should be winning ofc, but if that 1 player is a experienced and really good PVPer he should be able to make it a challenge. The point with PVP is training and get good in both PVP and raiding. There is alot of people in this world that can beat a group of 5 players that new to the stuff that guy is experienced in. So put in reality is just silly tbh.
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- Not a real problem, the danger waiting for you on every corner is one of the funny (but also enraging) things of this game
- That’s true. Why I don’t wanna use the horse? Well, maybe I just don’t like it, why you have to force me in a specific game style if there are many others that I like?
- I guess they are just the same thing, this is not an issue, it’s just a fact, in every mmo if you have more players and time you’re just stronger, it’s obvious…
- Just report these guys
- same as 3
- same as 3
- This will be better with next update luckily
- Part of the game, only noobs complain about that, if you don’t have time it’s plenty of private servers with rule against offline raiding, official is a savage place
- Attacking and defending, imo, are in a decent balance, if someone has advantages, that’s the attacked not the defender anyway.
Personal comment: these are not the problems of pvp. The problem, IMO, is: some tactics are way too stronger than others. Too many weapons are useless, if you give me the choice between 10 weapons, but you win with just 1-2 of them, where’s the choice? Having no choice kills the variety and fortuity that are so funny in pvp. I know it’s not easy to make all the weapons balanced, probably impossible. Maybe a stone-scissor-paper method would be the best thing, but it needs hard work and a lot of time to change this system and make it better.
Moving while hitting could be a huge improvement as I stated in another post in the Suggestions part, it would help also in the fight against a horseman.
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Most of your post is, again, focusing on the wrong things (my apologies for not making it clearer in my original post what the actual point was, although I did use BIG letters), but the part quoted got me thinking about something I had originally thought about but didn’t include in the OP.
You know the old joke about Scissors contacting the game designer, complaining how Rock is overpowered and should be nerfed, but Paper is fine and should not be buffed. That’s the feweling I often get when reading PvPer comments about various game features. As long as the matchup is unfair and we’re on the winning side, all is well and nothing needs to be changed. It’s when the matchup is equally unfair but we’re on the losing side that the complaining starts.
So I’ll make an addition to my original statement: Some people don’t want the game to be fair. They want to win. The point remains: people dislike being on the losing side of an unfair matchup, and the game, by its nature, does not provide a fair environment for conflict between players.
That’s why this is specifically a PvP problem. Unfairness doesn’t come into play when fighting NPCs in PvE because those NPCs don’t come onto these forums to complain about “players being OP”. This further supports the notion that unfairness tends to be fine as long as we’re on the winning side. (Some players do indeed request for “more challenge”, but even then, they’re not usually asking for a fair fight between them and the AI. They still want the net effect of the feature to be beneficial to them.)
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In fact I totally agree with 90% of the points you wrote up as I said before, I mean, people will always complain about a lot of wrong things, for sure but… PVP actually REALLY has problems imo, and these are not the unfairness, but the lack of choices, that’s what I think. Also with a rock-paper-scissor system you can switch between weapons, that would make things reaaaly balanced.
Maybe that could seem a bit off-topic but it’s connected
I agree and disagree on that, I mean, yes if you’re not on the losing side you probably will not complain, but it depends on: why you’re on the losing side? Because you can’t play the way you want or because your enemy was just better than you? When it is that the “complain” becomes right and not just an emotional cry?
Of course, War and Peace are not fair… NEVER… but this is not the topic.
We have to keep in mind that if a Game is not fair to the newcomers (i.e. if these newcomers have the feeling to be used as “cannonfodder” by experienced guys who will laugh at them in the end, with only very few chances to win more and more fights) they will not keep on playing.
In War, you have to destroy your ennemy.
In PVP you have to train and improve him. You must keep him in game. This ennemy has to have pleasure to fight with you, he has to come and come again, every day… victories and defeats have to be shared…
If you win every day, you will be the best… … alone…
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That’s a fair question, and touches upon the concept of “perceived problem”. If I get my butt kicked, it’s only natural to feel like “wait what just happened? How did he do that? That can’t be right!” It’s a natural first reaction. The thing is, we shouldn’t get stuck with that first reaction, but analyze the situation further, to figure out what actually happened.
I get the feeling that often, people encounter a particular weapon or other tech for the first time, get trashed because they don’t know how to fight effectively against it, and decide that the new tech is “OP” because they were solidly beaten by it. New stuff has a tendency to surprise even experienced players.
That’s our ego speaking. Gamers tend to be competitive by nature, and part of being competitive is the desire to be better than others. Sometimes that desire turns into a mistaken impression of one’s skills, making it hard to accept that we were beaten by someone who was, in fact, better than us. or that we hadn’t yet properly learned how to counter the new tech. Our own prior perception of our experience and skill blinds us to the fact that the experience and skill doesn’t instantly translate into skill with (or against) new features.
But Cona Exiles also doesn’t have any rankings-based matchmaking system to ensure people of a similar skill level end up fighting each other. Sometimes you end up facing someone a lot more skilled than you, and that can feel unfair, too. In a sense, it is unfair.
But that kind of unfairness isn’t a bug in the system, it’s a feature.
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And your comment yet again is filled with nothing but ignorance. You are ASSUMING those 5 people are new. You do not KNOW those 5 people are new or unskilled. You just assume that everyone other than YOU are new and therefor unskilled. Guess what, that goes right back to the existence of REALITY. Chances are they are NOT NEW and actually ARE SKILLED and guess what, that single person WILL GET KILLED. Just about every bloody time. In real life, in video games or anywhere else aside from some ridiculous hollywood movie.
There are so many games with fair competitive PvP that they cannot all be named. From the old Street Fighter to For Honor going through LOL, Unreal Tournament, Country Strike and now Valorant. Open World sanboxes are not and cannot be fair. I do agree with you too
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I am with you for different reasons. I think OBs take away the only possible goal on CE from PVP, area control. Because in reality, i can be anywhere on the map in 2 minutes. Making one cross the map or having to build FOB’s would bring more strategy to PVP. But everyone wants to just naked port, bombs in tow, blow open a base, then scoop and teleport back to ob close to home. Imagine the drama of chasing a raidier that scooped your vault across the map because he needed to get back to thier base. Nope, i have maybe 1 minute to catch you once you port. then i have to go get bombs, and try to raid you. Again, how much melee is removed because one can jump the map so easy?
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Agreed. but resource decay is a need that could open the PVP servers to way more actual PVP.
If I were a business, I would prefer to have 100 two hour a day players over 20 ten hour a day players. Bot are equal to 200 hours of game play, but the 100 players are 5 x the traffic for possible DLC buys. Just never made sense for me that Funcom caters the entire PVP game play to players who just play the PVE part longer, and in effect, imbalance the competition part of PVP.
I would like to start off by saying @Kapoteeni that I really liked your essay. You make some really good points and in many areas I agree. However, with the statement above I would disagree, at least to a certain extent. And I hone on this point because I feel it is really at the heart of your thesis, though please correct me if I’m wrong.
To address this point I’m going to start off by stating the obvious. Fair does not mean equal. A sandbox game by its nature is absolutely not about equality of play. Some people will have more resources, time, better equipment etc. So most fights are guaranteed to be unequal in a Sandbox game with the exception of staged arena duels. However, that does not mean a fight isn’t truly fair. A more mature understanding of fairness I think involves equal access to opportunity. By this I mean, does each player have relatively equal access to the tools and skills needed to win. Personally, I feel that this is an objective every game (and the world at large for that matter) should strive to achieve. Now it’s complicated by the matter of choice and play style. Ideally, a game should attempt to make multiple play styles and weapons viable in given fight, therefore reducing the pigeon hole meta. This is where the balance discussion comes into to play. Now it is difficult, but I think certainly possible to achieve even in a sandbox game. Conan sadly I feel does not achieve this. For many of the reasons you just mentioned in your list, Conan does not have equal access to opportunity. PvP game Mechanics could exist, for example to limit the extreme advantage that large clans have from essentially limitless resources. Or to ensure a person cannot be damaged while they are in a loading screen. Or to allow a foot soldier a viable counter to mounted cavalry. But they don’t right now. There is no counter method to being offline raided, no opportunity to fight back (unless you count thrall guards which sadly aren’t a viable Solution due to other cheesy methods that can take them down with relative ease regardless of how op their heath or damage is). This I think, rightly so, strikes people as unfair.
Will Conan ever solve all these issues, probably not. As you mentioned yourself it would take a really revolutionary change to game mechanics to do this. However, is it possible to provide a fair, though certainly unequal, Playing field in a sandbox game like Conan? I definitely think it is. While no game or system can ever be perfectly “fair” we should always strive for this ideal. It is important for people to broaden their perception of fairness to understand this does not mean equality. This is absolutely true. But, I do feel it is still right for gamers to expect and demand a game does move towards an increased level of fairness for all. And there are actionable steps Conan could take to move in this direction as many have proposed.
Pvp in Conan is both unequal and unfair. The former cannot and should not be helped. The latter, however, can be improved with innovative and thoughtful approaches to the aspects of the game which limit players choice and opportunity.
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I don’t understand. Please explain.
I just wanted to comment on issue number 2, horses being op.
They should be!
…Unless the footman packs a spear.
However in my experience, spears aren’t doing anything more to a horseman than a swordsman.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Perhaps adding some from of anti-cavalry system for spears would be a good answer to this problem.