Funcom, what are you doing?!?!
This has to be one of the most poorly thought through ideas I have ever seen. I will start by saying that I love the game and really want it to go from strength to strength. It is in that spirit that I am making this post.
This update is anti PvP, anti-intelligent base design and is intentionally destroying hundreds of hours of play time, with zero intention of trying to compensate players or recognise the ways in which this game will be destroyed (in PvP terms at least).
Anti-clan – Benefits existing large clans, prevents new clans from challenging. Let’s say two solo players who have created two small but well defended bases each having 55 thralls have a problem with a clan of 10 people raiding them constantly and they want to band together to try and survive on the server, in order to gain any benefit at all from forming a clan, these two people would have to reduce their total thrall numbers by 40%. Clearly then, this means that if you are an established clan that wants to bully smaller clans or solo players, you will be really happy with this move, if you are a solo player, there will soon be little point playing on PvP servers as you simply wont be able to defend against a larger clan now.
Base design – if you have a well defended base (this does not mean a massive base), then your base, by definition will be well-designed. A smart player has designed their base around the use of thralls, which they have spent hours, or hundreds of hours acquiring, let along farming mats to make the armour/weapons. This will mean that bases which were previously secure, or at least defendable, will now be impossible to defend in PvP servers as, if every person in a 10 person clan wants to have a bit of fun and use all the build pieces that they have PAID FOR through expansions. They will now not be able to have separate bases on PvP servers.
If a clan of 10 people has 5 bases (two players per base, which I do not think is unreasonable), roughly one per biome. They may well have 100 Thralls per base, that’s 500 thralls across the map. Are you seriously saying, that we should either have totally open bases – just spam building materials as a form of base defence (which will become a massive cause of lag) – that a clan of ten would need to leave the majority of their bases totally defenceless on PvP servers. Lets be honest, people will just quit the game.
Raiding – A clan of ten people can raid the base of a solo player and will face a total of 56 combatants (55 thralls + 1 player), a ratio of 1 : 5.6. If a Solo player wants to attack a larger clan, with more resources and a greater ability to recover, the Single person will be facing 110 total combatants, a ratio of 1 : 110 which means they will have to deal with nearly 20 times the number of combatants. It just wont be possible.
Funcom – there are multiple solutions for this:
1 – Leave the system as it is….
2 – If you do implement it, allow people to ‘repack’ thralls rather than randomly killing them
3 – Create different classes of thralls and only make this apply to fighters rather than the animals and archers too. If you don’t do this, archers become a totally redundant class of thrall and animals become even more useless than they are now.
4 – ASK THE COMMUNITY WHAT THEY WANT, FIX THE THINGS THAT ARE BROKEN.