Stop dumping on your RP community with 'features' none of us want

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I know you guys realize every mod in the game breaks when you do updates, taking every server offline that uses them, but I want to make it clear I’m not saying ‘don’t do updates.’

I’m saying ‘do updates better’. Communicate with your mod community the in days leading up to this stuff. Release your Dev Kit updates sooner, and give your modders a test platform that contains an update’s changes so they can test their work before it goes live.

Beyond that, your tailoring of content for the PvP community regularly interferes with the play-style of your RP community. We often have to work with server-specific build limits that make large workshops problematic, as they take-away from how much space we can designate for RP purposes. The new crafting updates are going to ruin delicately-crafted economies and overall just make things harder for us.

I have to assume the RP community constitutes a significant portion of this game’s active population, but we seem to be offered very little consideration in the game’s production and planning. Please stop releasing updates that make us feel like we don’t exist to you.

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As a modder and an admin of an RP community. I couldn’t disagree more.

So here’s why mods broke:

Because they changed the way the blueprints work. Why? Because modders asked for it. For example, when you tried to Run Barbarian Barber, Akuba’s Salon, and a few others. They wouldn’t work together. You had to pick one mod or the other.

The only way to make it work was for the various mod authors to communicate with each other and add compatibility fixes. What does this do? Adds more work everytime someone makes a mod that edits hairstyles. And when modders don’t put in the work, or don’t know of every other mod that does this. You have conflicts that server admins have to work with. Does Mod A work with both B and C? If so, what happens when Mod D works with A and C but not B?

So Funcom did some legwork and added IDs and Tables for it. So all the modders have to do is choose unique IDs for their hairstyles (just like we do with Items, Feats, and Recipes). Wonderful change. now all hairstyle mods are compatible with all others. RPers can rejoice! We have access to dozens of hairstyles.

This applies to faces too and many other things. But the downside is it breaks all current stuff linked to the current system. Its an inconvenience for a net gain. A RP server before would be limited to like a dozen or so hairstyles before. Now we can have hundreds, or thousands potentially.

Didn’t give modders enough time… we got the devkit update for the upcoming changes on Friday. All leg work could have been done in that time. Multigun, a talented modder who was very ill was able to get most of his updates done in that time despite his health issues (congrats on the recovery is in order). And others such as the devs at Pippi, Warrior Mutator, Age of Calamitous, and many others were up and ready for today.

We got plenty of time. Some modders have alot of tedium they are sitll working on. But it makes no sense to release a devkit update over a week in advance as many modders have active patch cycles and need live updates on a day to day basis to get feedback and test in live environments. Patching the devkit too early means they can’t test on their own live servers.

As for changing server economies. Oh boy so sad. Well yes this one can be a pain in the butt. But here’s what changed. Instead of players needing 20 fish traps to reliably build a castle in a few days. They only need one fish trap, and can throw all their bugs in there to produce all the ichor (once that’s fixed) and oil they ever need.

You know what that means for servers? One player has one fish trap (or none, as you don’t really need it now), instead of dozens. That’s wonderful for server FPS.

RPs are going to love the new amount of content in hairstyle, faces, and the ability to make our armors and buildings with simpler recipes. So I wonder… do you actually help run a RP server or even play on one?

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From the modders I communicate with, it was my understanding that the devkit update that released today (5 hours before the patch went live) resulted in most of their prep work being for naught. In otherwords, they dutifully updated things per the Friday update only for the last minute change to send them scrambling back to the drawing board. :frowning:

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I thought the update was rather good actually (the concepts, not the execution). Once the bugs get hotfixed, it’ll be great for RP game play. While I can’t speak for every player in every situation, I’m excited for the update.

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Your perspective would have been just as valid without the snide remarks at the end, just FYI.

I’m glad to know about the changes to the back-end of the cosmetics system, in all honesty. I know non-modders probably don’t need to know about such technical tweaks, but that is clearly something done with the cosmetic-mod-heavy RP community in-mind.

I still think releasing a dev-kit sooner would be better. As you say. modders have a lot of tedium to deal with in their work, and that’s outside of whatever other responsibilities they have in their lives. A lot of them probably work on mods on their days-off from paying jobs, so having a full week to work with would, I assume, go a long way toward letting them have a working version ready for when these updates hit.

As it stands now, several mod-authors are posting updates regarding new compiling errors and other unexpected obstacles which could be preventing them from having a working version online for several days - And this is hardly the first time a Funcom update has caused servers to have to remain offline waiting for updates like this. I can’t see myself placing the blame exclusively on these authors.

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Your concern could have been just as valid without the snide remarks too. But we can let bygones be bygones.

In a perfect world, they would have had everything on Tables with IDs. And I mean everything (there’s still some things probably not done yet that some modders are tinkering with). And it would have been nice if Funcom had the forthought to do that back in 2017. Then the issues would have happened then, or not at all (since the game would have been built that way from the start).

But we don’t live in that world. We have things we want, and if we are to have them. We have to deal with mods breaking and servers being down for a day or so while modders get caught up.

So the question we have to ask is, do we want choices in the future, or live with what we have?

Those of us who are comfortable on the server we’ve been playing on for a few months will likely say the latter. They have the character they want, with the build they want, with the items they want to use, and looking the way they do. Ignorant to the fact there maybe something new they might like down the road.

Those of us with the forsight know that there is future mods that will add cool stuff and if they are compatible with all the other mods we’re using already, then a little downtime today will be worth the ache of having to choose one mod over another 3 months, 6 months, or years from now.

Eventually Funcom will stop devloping Conan Exiles. The devkit will cease getting updates and we will have what we have with modders never getting new options. There will be stability and we’ll see some really great mods come out of that phase (if Bethseda games are any indication), but before that day comes. We want as many additions, update, quality of life, and features added as possible.

You see on the day Funcom stops developing. The day they no longer run their official servers. And the day CE seems like its done. It will not be done. Non-official and modded servers will continue. Mods will be added, and the game will change in ways we never thought of.

Today isn’t that day obviously, but today will make that day better. Just like in the future when they do updates like this for the modders to help the modders (even if it causes issues for them right now to get their existing projects updated). Because its not even really about existing mods. Its about future mods working with existing mods and any mods to come after.

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