Many clans will resort to “body vaulting” when they are taking a break from a server, so that if they lose their buildings they will not lose the actual loot they have amassed. This is done using body vaults so, they will turn on family sharing & log into the same server with a level 1, hide them somewhere completely out of the way, a few days before the point where the body disappears from the map due to inactivity, they will “stuff” the body with loot, rinse and repeat.
This in turn allows clans to hoard immense amounts of loot at no risk, and the ability to destabilize servers completely whenever they return.
One of the other issues is that with all the duping problems in the past, a lot of items on these “body vaults” are duped items.
My suggestion is that after the 1 week or 2 weeks (I think it follows the decay timer on buildings), once their body disappears from the map, delete their inventory. The only reason people would be upset about this is if their actual character progress was deleted. Items should only remain if you log on to refresh your timer, in my opinion.
Given how many improvements have been made as of lately with regards to combat mechanics, I think this would help a great amount in making officials “legit” again.
this is mainly PVP. IF a clan is gone for over 2 weeks (as per the suggestion tie it to the decay timers) then the only reason is to hide said stuff, breaking and cheesing a mechanic not meant for that. IF i was taking an over 2 week (or 1 week normal) break on an official PVP server, i know that my stuff will either be off lined or decayed. If i was in a clan, then the chances the entire clan will be taking the extended break for anything other than hiding from a war is slim. So for PVP official, having stuff decay inside of logged off bodies once they dis-appear would not be all that bad, and could fix the body vault meta cheese. And we are talking about alt body vaults, not my actual body for the toon i play. I can mitigate by putting everything in a chest or giving to a friend if i wanted it when i got back.
What happens to the same soul’s buildings? If they don’t know about the decay, they’ll come back and find they lost everything. If they do know about the decay, they either make sure they can log in to refresh or they get a clanmate to cover for them. The same logic applies to this idea – if you’re going on a trip, put everything in a chest before logging out.
I agree wholeheartedly that the game should do a much better job at teaching new players about decay and stability and the Purge and other such aspects that might end making players rage-quit because they got shafted by something they didn’t know about. However, that doesn’t invalidate the original idea.
Is bodyvaulting in the sky out of render view still an issue? My server has had a big problem with toxic players who have been around a while, did all the duping and stuff. They leave for a while and server is nice again, suddenly they are back and within a day with their duped body vaults it is like they never left.
That’s probably still possible, but my suggestion is more at the root cause of the issue, if people can’t body vault heaps of loot on characters, there’s not as much server hopping from these clans as they would not be able to defend an unlimited amount of servers.
Well, that’s already happening to a ton of single players, they play single player not knowing decay is active by default on single player, they take a break for a week from the game and somehow the timer bugs out, when they load the game again after a week or two buildings start crumbling, you didn’t know that? this bug is as old as the decay implementation.
I really don’t see the problem with body vaulting per se, in fact it should probably be made into some sort of official (but limited) sorcery mechanic for players and clans who want to take a break for awhile. So long as all the loot was gained legitimately at one point It really hurts no one and can breath life back into a dead server.
Many players and clans do this because conditions on the server force them to quit for awhile anyways. Mega clans ganging up on smaller clans to wipe a whole server is probably the most common reason smaller clans body vault. On console the 100% pen arrow glitch (Colloquially known on PS4 as the era of “Stay strapped or get clapped”) is a major reason why a lot of clans have body vaulted recently in hopes of coming back later when there’s less game breaking exploits.
Imagine however an end level magical ghost chest you could throw down anywhere and hide whatever you wanted? Maybe throw in another sorcery skill that allows other players to detect these hidden treasure chests too? I think those ideas might make for interesting gameplay while allowing players to take a break. I really can’t blame regular people for body vaulting though. Server wiping hordes, exploits and real life issues come and go but some people prefer not to popcorn everything and take the alternative route.
I would hope that Funcom can find a good middle ground on this. I tend to build bases with hidden chests all over and would enjoy something else. I do like the idea of a magic chest that would be hard to detect, hidden doors or the like. Obviously if enough people are doing something I think that it should at least be looked at to incorporate into the game in some way as long as it doesn’t ruin the experience. Take away body vaults but give something else to fairly simulate what it does.
See, I come from the opposite end of the spectrum, seeking the same middle ground as you. Basically, I play PVE because I don’t want to engage in total war, but I really wish there was a server type with some real conflict – a kind of limited PVP. And by “limited”, I don’t mean time-boxed, I mean limited in the sense that you can have a decent base that you can keep safe.
From what I see in your comment, it sounds like there are PVP players who feel that way too
I keep hoping against hope that one day we might get a mechanism for limited PVP. I can think of two ways to do it, although I’m pretty sure neither will ever get implemented:
Safe geographical regions. Buildings in certain regions would be immune to player damage, but would still get purges. The more a clan builds in a safe region, the more likely they are to get a strong non-human purge attacking their buildings in that region. Outside these safe regions, buildings can be raided as per normal PVP.
Claim immunity flags. A flag (or a different placeable) that can be placed on your building, which uses fuel constantly to keep that building immune to PVP damage. It protects only those building pieces that are connected to the one you placed it on. The fuel cost rises sharply the more building pieces are connected and there’s some kind of a cap on these flags (e.g. 1 per player, or 1 within a certain radius).
Like I said, not gonna happen, but I keep hoping for something like it
Well the pvp game is usually always broken in some way or the other and even some of the most toxic hardcore pvp clans resort to body vaulting when things don’t go their way for whatever reason. Usually though I see body vaulting done when a clan is legitimately taking a break or feel they can’t win an unfair server war but don’t want to lose months of work and some of these server wars are so toxic (ddosing, exploits, doxxing/cyber stalking, threats etc) that the only rational thing to do is just leave the server or take a break anyways.
I played a lot of Ultima Online back when it first came out. Even then PVP on an mmo type game was toxic to the point that they made a new set of servers just for PVE. Ironically their solution was to allow travel between the PVP and PVE server in the same region so you had a safe place and a place full of jerks. I would be down for limited pvp per server but I also feel like better tools to deal with raiding would be appropriate too. Ultima Online has a crafting based magic system, not a stretch for conan either.
In reference to base protection, how about something that you put resources into that will automatically repair your base over time. Bigger bases have a slower repair speed and consumes resources like a repair hammer. I feel like if you give yet another way to make your base invincible you have to consider how a total jerk would use it.
Because nothing will repair it fast enough to stop it from being destroyed in a raid, especially an offline raid
That’s why I think the costs should be implemented in a way that takes that into account. That way you could still have a total jerk, but the total amount of griefing they could do would be capped.
I agree about keeping jerks too busy to grief people. It should be balanced between being a tool and a pain.
Player raids are one thing, the way the game is now if they want in they are getting in eventually. As far as purge raids my followers don’t seem to have too much trouble fending off npc raids. I seem to get the army of nordhiemers every other time on my game and they chewed up my outer wall the first time. It just made me place my guards better and now its not such an issue.
I suppose its up to what you want the system to do.
I have told in many posts and in a dedicated post we need a new system of claim, to avoid a-hole spamming foundations all around, like the toolcupboard from rust. And that could repair any unreachable but connected building block slowly over time, like 1hp every 20 minutes. But anything you might think of you need to think “how is it going to be used by big clans? and how is it going to be used by a solo player”
But to get back in topic, adding gravity to bodies would be the simplest fix.
