Solving offline Raids

About a month ago, 4 of my friends wanted to get back to Conan. Summer vacations and all that.
Alright, let me just setup a server for us then. Nope, they wanted to try PVP. Now, I’ve done PVP in the past, and wanted to warn them. It’s not going to be glorious PVP sieges and combat. They play a lot of Bannerlord, think Conan is that with Monsters and Magic. I try my hardest, but they’re not budging. They want to build a big base and then challenge other clans. Alright, I’ll join anyway for the company, but I knew where this was going.

All I personally did was a small fishing shack. I didn’t want to get too invested. They started building a massive castle. Of course they took days to finish closing the walls, partially because the costs on Officials are so high (on my private server we played 0.1x costs to enable massive builds) and because every single day, they’d log in and find more than half the materials were stolen. And sometimes, someone broke a couple walls for the heck of it.
To their credit, they didn’t lose hope, endured and finished closing it with some T2 walls. We were 5 days in, everyone around lvl 45, and another clan on the server actually roleplayed a bit with us (mostly because I kept trying to sell fish to them).

And then, one week in, one of them sends everyone else a message. We need to login fast. Why? Are we being raided? Nope, raid’s pretty much over, we got offline’d. There was no glorious combat, nor epic siege with trebuchet. The poor guy logged in, saw the “Respawn at desert screen” and after a long trek to the base, saw half of it destroyed. About 30 dead thralls too.
And again: credit where credit is due, they still didn’t want to quit. They set up a small camp and wanted to raid the other guys back from there. Then they found two clans: one was protected by a bubble in the celing of a cave, the other was undermeshing. They wouldn’t even have their revenge raid which would also have failed, because 5 level 50 guys armed with steel would be anhilated by two players stacking 30 potion&food buffs and star metal weapons.

We didn’t even bother going back to our private server. It’s not that they got angry, they were extremely disapointed. But having tasted what playing on vannilla settings (long crafting times, long thrall conversion, high crafting costs) all of them realized WHY other players do this. Same thing I understood years ago.

Getting anything of worth (a base, a T4 thrall, Legendary Weapons) takes a crapload of time. Days even. And yet, it can be lost in mere seconds. NOONE uses legendaries to attack other clans, if you die, you’d lose them. Barely anyone uses Thralls to raid (and with recent patches, thralls aren’t good for much else) and building Big bases because you want a Dance Hall, or a large bar, or anything looking pretty instead of functional not only takes a truckton of time and resources, it will be destroyed in minuters because from the outside, the other players sees your boxe has a lootbox waiting to be popped.

I’ve thought about possible solutions to this, and I think the best one is to actually incorporate it into the game:

a) Destroyed foundations/walls/furniture changes into a “ruined” model that can be repaired with the repair hammer. Too much work making all those 3D meshes? Give them a ghostly outline, only visible when I equip the repair Hammer.
b) A new thrall station: Mason workbench. Put building materials in it and a thrall. After 1 hour or so after your base last was attacked, the thrall will slowly start re-building your base consuming these materials. essentially, he does the same you do with the repair hammer but slower.

This change would introduce two great things: people could build massive castles and forts that others could raid at will, but be easily reconstructible. Even if the owners no longer play, you essentially build a new mini-dungeon for siegers to have fun attacking that slowly resets overtime.
On the other hand, if the defenders see their base turned into a pile of rubble, they need to despair: instead of having to slowly, painstakingly place all those foundations, walls and decorations one by one again, they can let their mason thrall work or help themselves and they’ll be back to fighting shape in no time.

But whatt about thralls? Simple: when a thrall dies, he doesn’t get deleted. Your clan would have a list of “downed thralls”. When one “dies”, it goes into the list and it’s body disappears as normal.
But you add in a new type of station: Hospital Bed. Everytime a thrall is on the list, it will respawn back on the Hospital Bed. It would take time to recover (could take hours) but then be back.
Want to automate it? If the thrall recovers, he’ll instantly teleport to his previous post. There, now you have self-regening bases that repopulate with thralls after a raid. Want to make it more involved: have the players need to drag the thrall corpse (with a rope) back into their base and place them on the bed (otherwise, the thrall goes onto the “downed thralls” list, taking longer to respawn.

That’s pretty much it. With these two changes, people could offline eachother to their hearts content, never get upset that they essentially got reset to 0, and you get servers populated with bases for players to constantly attack and raid.
I know that the next season is probably gonna introduce NPC bases you can siege, but, comeon. Enemy NPC’s already have a hard time navigating flat terrain, start teleporting around like crazy when obstacles are involved and can’t even be knocked down high places. I’d much rather fight against a base someone else built.

If you want to see something like this, google “Meet your Maker” on steam.
PS: I do know some people would not like something like this. It’s not “realistic” nor “hardcore” enough for them. For that reason, I’d sugest throwing this as PVE Conflict content and leave PVP as it is.

I can appreciate your suggestions but Funcom can barely operate the very things they claim to have envisioned.

X1, DBD and regular wipes would solve most issues on PVP servers.

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