Hello Funcom
Before we start, Im aware of the history on this topic and the catastrophe that ensued during open server transfers. I would like to give you some feedback for overall game longevity and with the development of The Empire of Stygia Map want to highlight the flaws of the current system.
Currently the Isle of Siptah maps are completely dead. There is no activity for most of the pvp servers and it feels as though all your hard work developing this beautiful map became fruitless. Although you might have made money on release this expansion is a ghost town. Additionally I am plagued by accounts of old having advantages on the Exiled Lands map via armor and exploits that were only learnable on Siptah. Now that you cant transfer servers any longer those who were around during the golden era of Conan have a clear and unfair advantage over new pvp players like myself.
I believe you were correct to disable full access server transfers as a whole. However the execution wasn’t optimal for long term player health and to revisit this topic would bolster replayability and revitalize Siptah and any new future map inviting fresh adventures for everyone involved.
There are two solutions to this that would greatly revitalize the current dynamic of Conan Official Servers.
a. Allow character transfers under the pretense that characters cannot have any items on them during character data transfer. This would by far be the easiest solution because it would allow players to learn Siptah recipes and armor without compromising the work that local clans put in to secure a home on said server. You could delve further and make it so that a player has to beat the PvE tasks on the exiles/siptah maps in order to open up the option to transfer there character over to a new land. creating a bottle neck so that folks can not transfer endlessly to grief other servers.
B. This option would be slightly more tedious but would proves to be a healthier solution. The solution would require the dev teams to match up each Exiled Lands server with a singular Siptah server. This would effectively create a cluster of two maps that are transferable and allow new rivals to have the option of either building up on Exile or Siptah so that they can have an epic clash over duel map supremacy. These clusters could be expanded on with any new map that is released. Not to mention would force players to buy the new maps in order to get the best that conan has to offer. From a player health standpoint and shear marketing standpoint this is a win win win for Funcom and the players. The work is also straight forward and likely archived and easily deployable.
I really do appreciate your consideration on this and as an old Ark survival player turned Conan, I really hope you support these solutions. Conan is one of the best survival games out there and I would truly love to see this game revitalized to compete with its other survival counterparts. The source material and foundation laid for this game is apparent and with a few tweaks this game could provide epic adventures for its player base for years to come.
The last time they spoke on this subject was that they would make a comment when they had new information about its progress.
They never stopped the transfer because of the items from Siptah causing issues. The entire intent was to allow Isle of Siptah users to be able to enjoy their items in both maps within some restrictions.
The reason they stopped was due to characters being lost in the transfer process. These required tickets to be filed to get them restored, and there was chances they couldn’t be recovered depending on the circumstance.
Until that can be fixed, they won’t reenable the transfer system. Until they have made progress, they won’t make a comment on it.
Just assume that “No progress has been made” every week without an announcement. It is in the same state as it was when it was disabled, non-functional.
they dont say a word, and wont say a word either, they have consistently avoiding to reply to those on the forums, on strreams on social media and everywhere, that is a taboo topic they will never have the courage to say things as they are.
that got canceled, and they never wanted to face the people and say it upfront in more than 2 years, they will not start doing the right thing now either.
The time spent waiting is better spent rolling up a new character.
I waited 6 months and when it was clear they werent activating it, i went ahead and simply created more characters and now got 10 capped characters on 10 servers. 5 on each Siptah and EL.
Ironically i play on a private server system also and the person has 10 maps connected through a server hub and i hop from one to another with just one character on 9 of them.
A server “cluster” would be (or should be) as simple as employing another core on the same multicore server chip. (and those people aren’t that stupid, they typically have serious multicore CPUs). Of course something else would be required to be able to handle that situation. (simple or complex, I’m not sure).
I’ve run into that situation on one of their servers where for some oddly crazy and insane reason, the core that hosted my server on GPortal got mixed up with one of the other cores on the same CPU running the same Conan Exiles App … making my server (instance) show up with the other server’s name.
That took a few days to get sorted out. Even one day was too many days and there was more than one day; as well as it didn’t occur just once, but several times.
That’s one of the reasons I quit GPortal. For some crazy reason (probably programming), they just couldn’t manage server instances correctly on a single server multicore CPU.