Removal of PVP, PVE, and PVE-C

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

OK lets formalize the idea in it’s own feedback.

The idea is simple. Remove the PVP, PVE, and PVE-C segregated servers and dump everyone into one server type and the settings for player interaction are set by the player’s character and not the overall server setting. This means you set up your character as one of the three and opening yourself up to how much player interaction you want but everyone plays in the same sandbox.

Now some rules to this.

Clans can only consist of the same type of player interaction setting (no one PVE person housing all of the clan goods and therefore keeping it safe while the rest of the clan pillages the server)

Recreation of character does not trigger 24 hour decay but normal decay process of 168 hour count down. (No creating a character safe under the PVE protections building up and then switching to a PVP character with timed demolish before others on the server have a chance to figure out what is going on)

Now the benefits of such a change.

Players can enjoy the other types of play and help promote understanding and joint vision vs segregation and the ignorance that naturally comes from segregation (don’t take it personally…it’s the reason why segregation is a bad thing)

The servers get more diversified and get better overall performance due to it. Each play type has it’s own server issues it must deal with in terms of the over abundance of the type of play. Be it ornate and luxurous palaces of PVE or maxed out thralls of the PVP. By removing the segregation, the type of play issues get more spread out and you get a better mix.

Thoughts? And please be constructive. If it sucks, why does it suck and what tweak could be done to make it not suck.

“It is not the Critic who counts nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt

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I am open to the idea. On the surface I see the following issues:

  • PVE clans can serve as banks for PVP clans. It’s not totally uncommon on PVP servers to have groups of co-operating players in separate clans. Your PVE clan can absorb all the risk of holding goods, to kit out the PVP clan to reap all the rewards of PVP.

  • PVE clans can take and hold indefinitely key PVP locations. There are many ways this can be abused. Imagine I built a PVP pillar base then had an allied PVE clan build a wall around me. Even if you trebuchet my base you can’t get to the loot. My mind is racing with ways to exploit this.

I like the idea of getting more of the playerbase to play together, if it can be done reasonably. I just know how sweaty some of the PVP community can be and the idea of giving them actually unraidable bases is dangerous. I predict it would shift the meta in the way I suggested and we would all basically be playing PVE-C with some players (PVE) in safety mode.

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You make the idea’s of PvE, PvE-C and PvP way to complex.
Now its pretty simple and I’d like to keep it this way

It also separates different player bases from each other. They all think differently about the game.

I don’t like PvE and PvP mixed because they have way other idea’s about how to build a base.

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Does this mean that PvE playstyle allows your base to not be raided?

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5

I like the idea. It doesn’t suck, but I’m sure there are ways it could be abused, and those would have to be addressed properly to determine if it’s feasible. And that’s setting the technical feasibility aside, which is a separate can of worms.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways to abuse this, starting with what @Ulyssi already mentioned:

This was pretty much the first thing that came to my mind, too. However, I wonder if there’s anything actually wrong with this. It’s different from the way the game is played right now, but is it bad? Or would it actually make things more fun?

This is another good point, but I think it has a solution. Encircling someone’s base with a wall is against the TOS. I believe other building-related abuses could be handled the same way.

One thing your suggestion didn’t specify, which leaves it potentially open to yet another kind of abuse, is how the game handles containers. Right now, from what I understand about PVP servers, you can steal from (some of the) containers that don’t belong to you, without destroying them. If Funcom implemented your idea, they would have to make sure a PVE player can’t steal from a PVP player’s container, otherwise the asymmetry could be abused.

Also, how is the current concept of time windows handled? Can PVE-C and PVP players kill each other 24/7, or only during certain time windows? Are those time windows different for PVE-C and PVP characters?

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Thank you for saying this.

My only problem with the thread’s concept, @erjoh, is that PvP players are out to get people. On my last PvP home server, a lot of damage happened to my Frost Ob box that can’t be explained by meteorites. This is to be expected on PvP. I don’t know that PvE players should like to suffer from kiting, B&E and possible theft.

Again, I like the idea. I just don’t think PvP players are to be trusted wholesale.

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image

True.

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Oh, man, you really need to visit an official PVE-C server. We’re such a nice, peaceful crowd. We have some wonderful people who will react in truly astonishing ways if you:

  • attack them during PVP hours
  • loot a decayed base they were eyeing
  • say something they don’t like in global chat
  • accept into your clan someone they don’t like
  • build something in a spot where they don’t think you should build

And then those wonderful people will make it their life’s purpose to let you know how they feel, by dedicating all their spare time to one or more of the following:

  • encircling your base with a no-climb wall
  • building spam at the edge of your claims without encircling you
  • leaving baby turtles randomly around your bases so they’ll wander close to you and mess with your ability to place/build things
  • camping around your base during PVP hours, attacking you if you look like you want to do anything other than pay attention to them
  • camping around your base outside PVP hours, screaming into their microphones
  • following you around outside PVP hours to kill any NPCs you knock out
  • building sandstone buildings that spell out things about you or your clan
  • kiting bosses to any followers you might have left out in the open
  • building close to you in hopes of getting a purge and kiting it to your base

And many, many other lovely things. PVE-C is such a wonderful mode to play sometimes.

Anyway, my apologies to @erjoh for this off-topic rant, but I just wanted to put this notion to rest. People are people, and there are horrible douchebags in every cohort.

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Players will still gravitate to servers with like-minded people.

You’d just end up with voluntary segregation and have players unofficially declaring specific servers to be PvP/PvE focused, it’s happened with other games in the past.

Also, with server population caps, you’re effectively cutting the potential PvP playerbase in half on any given server, assuming an even distribution by player mindset.

The idea isn’t bad per se, but there’s many things to take into consideration.

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I feel like this a somewhat decent attempt at a shot in the dark scenario here of getting PvE players to understand PvP communities and playstyles better so they too can be interested and join in thus filling up the decaying if not dying community that is the pvp community. But the thing is at least in my own opinion most people in the PvE community just want to build amazing bases to show off and go out and explore the world while killing monsters.

As they enjoy the game they can do so without the fear of someone coming to kill them. So they don’t have to see their dead body being teabagged by “Gigachad3000xxx” as all their loot is taken and they start back in their base. Or doing something as their base gets demolished without warning and when they return to use / store their glorious rewards of their adventure only to find their base destroyed by some clan named “GetRektNoobz” as they start from scratch.

People in the PvE community just wants to chill and show off their efforts, not have it all destroyed by random people who think its fun to just sh** on the next unlucky victim cause “its fun displaying your superiority over others”. Thats why when PvP players offer feed back that would make their game more balanced or fair it gets a ton of push back from PvE players because to them its just something fun and cool they can do. Like “Oh god no not magic its gonna ruin pvp, now no one can have fun as people exploit this new content!” and then you got the PvE players like “OMG MAGICKS IMAGINE WHAT I CAN DO (as they rename themselves to GangstaGandalf)”.

From what differing communities enjoy to what they think is fun and fair is just too different. Putting them in the same melting pot is only going to breed more hate for the other group because some how and some way this group is ruining it for my group.

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11

It certainly could be. It seems to me to be a more complicated version of PVE-C, and there are plenty of players who enjoy that mode. PVP on a low pop server doesn’t seem incredibly dissimilar either.

That would likely solve that instance to be sure. Though I can imagine abuses, I think, not covered within the TOS. It could be as simple as having your PVE ally holding many meta PVP base locations to give you the advantage over other PVP groups. Whether or not those kinds of things as a new way of play are universally acceptable I am unsure of, but it is an interesting thought experiment.

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Its not terrible, but my idea is bigger… (pure PVP servers), you get 2 vault packed with gear, 1 with build material. (or all needed for a raid).

You have 3 hours to build defense and a base,

When the timer up an alarm goes off, and its raid time.

You have 2 hours to destroy your opponent.

After 3 hours the server is wiped, rinse and repeat.

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I appreciate the rant, but you’ll please note I said PvE.

PvE-C is not a good place. It’s not a nice place. And if what you’ve written is indicative of it, it should probably be ditched.

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14

This was my thought as well. A PvPer wouldn’t stay on a server with mostly PvE Characters, theres no fun to be had. They’d transfer to where the action is.

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15

OK.
Allow me to start by saying this first. If you feel that I am derailing something here, let me know so I will delete my post at once.
No.
It is a beautiful idea for a modder to start working on a mod for this idea, but in general no.
In my tour in pvp servers I met 3 kind of players the most.
1 leaders.
Players that fully know the content of the game, know exactly what to do, all the glitches, the exploits and do anything possible to alpha in their server. They teach almost nothing to others, only the necessary.
2 soldiers
From simple soldiers that don’t give a f… k about the pve content of the game and all they care is to do only the pvp content.
To spies that go around the map to locate all the builds a clan has.
3 Workers.
These pve freaks, mastermind builders (not all of them), farmers etc, that go most on their participation full encumbrance. These players deal more on defense, organization and tips how to break others.

One category of its own is the solo pvp players, but they belong to all the above categories or not because they still learn the game alone .

Most of the pvp community is targeting in gather info and keep it secret for their own advantage.

Beautiful pve players for some of them, and stunning builders again for some of them. However they know the game in a complete way, again some of them.

Pve.
3 categories again…
Builders.
I start from builders because in my personal experience the greatest amount of players in these servers is the builders. There are people who play this game for years now and they still farm with steel tools or wield steel weapons avoiding more challenge. These players deserve their own servers, just for builders.
Freaks (me).
Players that live to play the hardest content of the game, putting them selfs in challenges not necessary but their joy of accomplishing something really difficult, is high. They don’t like to build more than necessary and when they do, they leave everything to decay without second thoughts.
Future pvp players.
They arrive to pve servers just to play safe for a bit, learn the content of the game by gaining information from other players, since in pve communities sharing is a joy, a goal. Still their pvp attitude is obvious either in the way they play or the way they build.

The greatest goal of pve community is to build something beautiful for others to see, share information and help the most they can others.

So pvp players and pve players cannot co exist in a server unless this server is totally pvp or pve.

I cannot speak about pvec, maybe @CodeMage or JJ can tell us more about it. I participated less that 200 hours in this kind of servers so I cannot speak about this community.

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16

What if to play pvp with acharacter you had to level up to 30 as only pve. Then you graduate and can transfer that chatacter to pvec to level up to 60. Now that chacter is open to pvp servers.
This would make using alts on pvp a little harder, removing some body vaulting.
Would make the pve content open to more engaging patches.
PVP would be biome servers that wiped every 3 months, except level and feats.

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No thanks. Ugly buildings and toxic behavior can stay where they belong. On PvP servers.

Trying to bring that toxicity to a nicer server in hopes of having said niceties… will simply result in said server devolving into a PvP hell hole.

“PvP” in Conan Exiles is really just about killing someone and taking their stuff. It makes one person feel good (for having killed/stolen while making the other person feel anger/frustration) Vengeance is the next course of action. The cycle is a poisonous one that repeats endlessly and many people don’t handle it well. That’s why PvP servers suck.

Games like Call of Duty are One and Done. That is how PvP is best served. Conan Exiles is, just digital stealing. Weeks or months taken from players, the “action” is the anger/hate/rage that grows from that.

Many people can handle it just fine, but enough people can’t that the servers generally turn into miserable hellscapes.

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If you have a newsletter or podcast, please allow me to subscribe. I love this idea, and it’s not outlandish or unprecedented, as it is somewhat accomplished in Myth of Empires. :+1:t4:

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19

True. PVE is probably nicer than PVE-C, but I’m too cynical and jaded to believe it doesn’t have its own share of d-bags. :wink:

Indicative? I don’t know. The things I described happened over the course of the years, but they didn’t all happen at once, nor do they happen all the time.

I guess the real question is whether it’s true that PVE-C attracts more jerks than PVE and, by that logic, PVP more than PVE-C. But even if that’s true, I’m not sure it would be wrong to spread the misery more equitably, rather than concentrating it in certain hot spots. It might make Funcom notice and address those problems.

Most likely, though, Azazane and Tystin are right, and the servers would end up being functionally PVP, PVE-C, or PVE, based on the preferences of the players.

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Well one issue I would have is that FC would have to do some likely serious recoding of the game mechanics. It would move combat mode client side instead of server side and I imagine thats a ton of work for them. The second is, I’m not sure people would really gel all that well together when it comes to ingame chat. I can just imagine the taunting of “I’d blow up your build if I was allowed” and “Your build is an eyesore in our neighborhood”… just from the cynic in me. I understand the thought process but I think it may be giving a little too much credit to basic human behavior… maybe I’m wrong tho.

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