First thing:
I have to say is the “not final” limits are kinda ridiculous, especially on a PVE server. You are proposing 100 limit (10 each) for 10 people to use including base defense. I can tell you that on a PVE server that is completely insufficient. PVE servers have a ton more structures in general. Ours has community map rooms at every obelisk. Each of those Map Rooms requires a minimum of 4 guards. Most large guilds have greater wheels at every major hub so one at Galleon, one at BB, one at UC, one at Sep, one at Mounds and one at NA. So 6 wheels X 5 guards each is 30. Now each clan member has their own base right? Well yes they do on PVE servers! Why the heck not? So say you don’t have particularly build centered clanmates and they build small bases. Call it 20 guards. So now with just wheels and individual bases you have 200 (bases) and 30 for wheels so that is 230. Now each clan member has their favorite 2-3 thralls. Mine are a Bearer 4, and two separate named fighters. So that is 3 each for a total of 30 more. Now we are at 260.
The question then becomes what the heck do you do for a clan hub or main base? Well, any castle, pyramid, rocket ship, keep or main base I’ve ever seen has at least a 25X25 footprint. To cover all entrances and corners for purge your talking at least 40, 50 if you want a few archers. So the new total is 310. I think a good medium here would be to half it after you join a guild. So you want to give 55 to single players, give them 30 per for guild. So that would be 55 base plus 30 per member.
Call it 325 for a full guild on a PVE server and half of that on a PVP server. So even a PVP server would have 55 for a guild of 1 but add 15 for each member totaling 190. Those are more realistic numbers. What you are currently proposing is completely preposterous.
PVE server dynamics are entirely different. People don’t log on and prepare for war until it comes. They log on and collect things or build things. The whole reason people log on to PVE servers after they have built all they want to build is to get a SOC or a Last Breath. They go to rare thrall spawns and hunt that elusive rare dancer from the volcano so they can make their shiny new bar PERFECT. They hunt more baby tigers so they can try again and again to get enough greater tigers to offset the greater panthers they have placed “just so” in their perfect build.
You are completely removing a major element to the PVE dynamic and replay-ability of this game on PVE servers. PVE servers are 80% about building and collecting. PVP servers are 80% about PVP and re-building. Don’t mix them up or you will loose a massive amount of the PVE player base with this patch.
Second issue: Legacy Thralls
Let me just say without trying to sound offensive or condescending towards FC that I absolutely DO NOT trust FC code or developers to be able to “prune” or “delete” a darn thing in their own game. They have already proven that they are unable or unwilling to write code of the necessary quality to delete thralls they specifically target. I can personally verify that fact because to this day I have two unmovable, 100hp performers who were formerly “The Watcher Above” and “The Captain Below” buried deep inside my base where I can’t do a darn thing with them and they have been there since the last time FC claimed it was going to mess with the thrall population and delete “unintended to be thrall-able” thralls.
So yeah, I don’t trust them to do it nor do I think they can safely do it without wrecking something in the process.
In addition to that why on earth would they take the easy way out and make all of the Legacy Thralls almost entirely useless? According to the OP the Legacy Thralls will not be as powerful as the new ones. So I spent days trying to spawn a “Enter Name Here” in the Volcano, collect all of the named bearers, kept all of my Captains, etc… Now what, FC erases that achievement on a whim? Not only that but they now discourage you from keeping the old ones at all because the new ones are much more powerful (remains to be seen) and the old obsolete ones are trash anyway? Yeah no. Rethink this one guys. This is just lazy programming. You absolutely CAN put the leveling system on retroactively and you SHOULD. Anything less makes this a B movie. You can’t erase hours and hours and in some cases days of camping and killing and checking and killing more and checking again over and over for all these people without an ounce of recognition.
My proposed solution. Since I’m sure all of these thralls have uniqueID in the database once they are placed here is what you do. Add a wheel button to the thrall menu that says “reset thrall.” PROBLEM SOLVED. You give the player (providing they have the inventory space) a brand new shiny exact match for their prized thrall under the new system so they can level it. How difficult can that possibly be?
Now there is an added benefit to this new feature. It allows people to reclaim their thralls. If you can reclaim them, you can box them. If you can box them you can save them for a rainy day or when your placed thralls die so all of your hard work isn’t gone to waste! That sounds like it would be a much better plan than just failing to delete them properly via some algorithm that doesn’t work or worse yet works poorly like the last one did.
Finally the lag:
Look if thralls are really what is causing your lag problems and not hardware as I suspect it is here is at least a partial solution suggestion for you. Implement REGIONAL THRALL LIMITS. Here lets take everyone down memory lane for a moment. Who played Anarchy Online? I did. I also had a massive guild there, we had 4 guilds with thousands of members on RK1 and controlled 40% of the land mass available when Notum Wars came out. You know what one of my favorite tactics was? Get 150 of my guildies to one side of a zone boarder and then RUSH an opposing base with all of them simultaneously. Even if the opposing base had 200 people guarding it they would loose every single time because before the lag ended they were all dead and 2/3 of their towers were destroyed. We broke the servers ability to keep up with the load. Clearly an old strategy and FC noticed it. Their solution was to implement zone limitations and after that guess what happened? You actually had to FIGHT to win. And we did and it was much more fun but the point is that they could do it in Anarchy Online 20 years ago so there is absolutely no reason why they can’t do it here.
Base the maximum number of thralls in a specific area on the mass of the land owners base. FC obviously have a system already in place to count the number of foundation blocks in a base so create a call or some sort of variable check in the system to allow players to put down thralls only if the base reaches the appropriate size. Call it “number of connected tiles” for the sake of this argument. So if a base has say 100 connected tiles the max thrall count inside the limits of the base are 10. If it has 1000 then the max is whatever, say 100.
Ok thats the end of my rant but I will add this last little bit. I don’t think thralls are as big a part of the lag as the structures themselves and the lack of commitment in terms of hardware and available processing power. The end.
