At this point any change to official is better than no change. I hope the devs take your post into serious consideration. Clan size is something to discuss however. I do find clans of 6 have a good outcome when it comes to group fights (also have a lot of friends who play)
This wont help PVP at all. A day or two of leveling casually and your at 60.
What needs to be adjusted for new people to have the same gear is simplification of crafting end tier gear. Think of the long process to craft epic gear and weapons. That side is way more complex and time consuming then levelling up.
All official servers need is to boost the xp gain of thralls and pets . Servers are dead because funcom dont interact with there player base . Look at ark for example loads of events and contantly telling there player base whats coming next . Funcom keep us in the dark up until 1 day before something releases.
So you agree, offlining during a 5 hour raid window is already driving players already. So your solution is to go 24/7 offlining? Don’t follow your logic.
It is the lack and limiting of attacking time that allows there to be no reprisal (revenge) against offliners except during specific limited time periods. If you are no active at those times you get no opportunity to respond to the damage to your buildings with the same against an opponent raiding party (or solo it makes no difference.
The logic is sound, now the only thing left to do is to allow a few servers to implement this setting (open raid time 24/7) to see if players populate these servers and enjoy these settings. There is no harm in experimenting with this on a few servers as there are many empty active population servers to chose from.
The core thing was to improve server performance. Nothing kills a server faster than teleporting NPCs and PCs. Doubly so if it is PVP. But since the suggestion is a mass cull, a wipe is necessary. When half the servers were culled a while ago, it was a fair 50/50 Thanos approved shot of one keeping their stuff. If its 9 out 10 losing… well it doesn’t make sense to give 10% a privileged advantage.
While usually I agree that baby steps should be taken. This isn’t a case where its possible and yield the results you want. To get players to come back, the servers need to run adequately with a decent load. The hardware (they advertise as using) on a G-Portal server should be enough to make this happen with dedicated machines.
There is two major issues though.
The agreement between Funcom and G-Portal may require hundreds of servers as an advertising tool.
The servers still can’t handle even a single instance.
If any of those two are true, then official PVP is a lost cause. Mostly… there is one thing that could be done if it is case 1, but I’m not going to derail your thread on that tangent.
Correct me if I’m wrong… but I thought it’s against the rules to “exploit”…
I believe it’s also against the rules to “hack” / use 3rd party programs to gain an unfair advantage…
It’s also against the rules to needlessly landclaim…
Do you see what I’m getting at?.. To put it bluntly… we know it can be exploited… “So what?” report them to Zendesk for exploiting… job done.
Whenever the subject of DBD comes up… there’s like 5 people saying “it can be exploited” and apparently that was enough for Funcom to not even attempt it and see how it goes…
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of players will NOT exploit it… the same way the majority of players does not use hacks etc… the ones who do can be dealt with, or further solutions can be found to THAT problem if it happens to be such a large scale issue that it causes an actual problem.
I think at this point it’s enough of the theory… they should give it a try
If it has a chance to bring some new life to that side of the game, then I really don’t see an issue with trying it… it’s not like they can’t suddenly disable it if it happens to be counter-productive…
While it can be exploited, I don’t believe that is the only reason Funcom won’t use it. If they turned it on right now. You’d effectively have PVE-C servers. People could and would avoid the 5 hour timer. We already see this on PVE-C when they avoid the PVP-lite times. The fix is to turn on 24/7 raiding, but that has its own repercussions.
There is quite a few reasons FC may not wish to try this. Its a big switch from 5 years of status quo. It may even bring the servers to crash. In my experience with active raiding, even on decent dedicated hardware the servers get stressed when dozens of players are involved in base attack/defense. Or perhaps they eventually will once some other fixes or features are developed.
Its just weird they made this tool, that private servers don’t exactly need. But they do not use themselves. I know they don’t always have officials in mind when making new features… But who did they develop DBD for?
I’ve had personal experience with offline protection in a few games similar to Conan Exiles. I can say without a doubt people would exploit it. That pretty much goes without saying. They will wait till a single person logs in and then rush them with numbers. Or they will wait till the last member logs off and try to hit their stuff before the timer kicks in.
But with that said. Is that really that bad? There is methods people can use to deal with this and mitigate its effects. Right now getting offlined is not exploiting but causes far worse issues than any exploit of a offline protection system can cause. The mitigation measures for offline raiding is simply build more, and building more gets people banned. While the mitigation methods for offline protection exploits won’t get one banned and is manageable with a little coordination.
To put it shortly, the exploits with DBD are not bad enough to warrant keeping it out. They are not worse then the current situation, arguably far more tolerable. I would even argue it is minor enough that Zendesk reporting wouldn’t even be needed. Just play smart.
Because lets face it. Logging into a missing base is worse than logging into a damaged base. Or to a few people immediately trying to raid it upon logging in. In either case you have a base to login. Currently with offline raiding, you may not. People can do alot of damage in 5 hours compared to 30 minutes.
So I agree, they should probably try it. I don’t know why they don’t. Unless like I said there’s something in the works. Or something else seriously wrong.
Ironically all the exploit reasons dor not doing it happen now. Body vaults. So that is a wash in comparing. After that DbD 24/7 checks more boxes as pros thn current 5 hour windows does when looking at actual pvp.