It pretty much is. I’ve seen people suggest that they should be able to buy stuff rather than farm because they don’t have time because of work, wife, and kids. But what about those guys who have work, wife, and kids and don’t have the extra income to buy that stuff? Or those who have all the time in the world AND a disposable income? Pay for advantages doesn’t solve as many issues as it creates for players.
Many of us have pretty much made that point. I mean the OP said the numbers don’t lie. And he was right, it just worked against his initial argument there. These servers aren’t hurting the game directly.
Here’s where the game and the community in general DOES get hurt. When modders get their content sold without their permission and lose creative drive in the process. Not only do we potentially lose great content (at least for PC, I feel for you console folks, I really do on this). But players don’t like to see their favorite modders get disillusioned, just based on a empathetic standpoint.
Does losing modders hurt the game and drive the numbers down in a significant way? I don’t know that it does. I do know that FC commits a significant amount of time if not also resources to the modding community. They either believe its profitable to help modders, or at the very least its something they ought to do. You can see that effort in the modders discord and in the Lead Producer’s letter.
I have noticed a distinct lack of desire over the last decade of people wanting to actually fight it out in many games. This isn’t exactly an issue with Conan Exiles itself. It happens in any game where losing pixels is a possibility. Unfortunately when you take the chance of losing items out of the equation, it loses its edge.
The biggest issue with PVP in provided or private is drama. I’ve seen some really great fights, we’re talking full on sieges with dozens on either side. Enough explosions going off to make you think you were on Normandy Beach. Everyone seems to be having a great time, battle ends and everyone groups up to slap each other on the backs for how awesome it was, friend and enemy alike.
Only for grudges that happened and you didn’t see to spike up a day or two later. For reasons I cannot even begin to understand. Drama invariably crops up. Even amongst those who win.
What’s ironic about this… I’ve not actually seen admins abuse their abilities in PVP. I’m sure it happens. But the most egregious thing I’ve seen regarding a server owner is one playing on a server ran by someone else. They played straight on their own server just fine. Broke just about every rule when on someone else’s server.
As an admin myself, I use a separate account to admin on. For both practical purposes (so my admin builds aren’t tied to a playing character/guild), and to instill a bit of trust and transparency (all admin actions are logged by default by the server software).
Its not really a practical thing to require admins to play on other servers. They’re not being paid to admin. If mods are involved, then that requires them to swap out modlists everytime they swap to another server. If they are playing on other servers, that’s time spent out of the server they could be actively moderating. But the less money is involved, the more honest admins/owners tend to be. Greed is likely a bigger problem causing admin abuse then simple power.
