Suggestion as how Funcom can make more money

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

Funcom is rapidly approaching diminishing financial returns by just selling DLC as they have been. People are going to be less and less willing to buy more. However, it seems to me they can do two things that will bring in money on a continuous basis:

  1. Add appearance slots next to the armor slots and sell appearance items.
  2. Sell potions that will change avatar gender, change avatar appearance, and change avatar name.

These items can be sold either in an in-game store (as was done in Secret World), or online as other games have done.

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I’m curious, do you have somehow access to FCs financial books - Conan Exiles specific? Don’t mocking you but claiming to know their revenue is a tough one.
Anyway, I wouldn’t buy any of your suggested features and I do have all DLCs so far.

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I will say that some appearance-focused items would be nice. More flavor-type stuff. The RP community eats that crap up. (See also: Sims, The) If they released a DLC pack consisting of nothing but more rugs, flags, tapestries, and furniture, I would buy that with zero hesitation.

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More money?? I am waiting for what was advertised still or close to it. Or heck even a stable, bug free game! The lag sputter I can sort of deal with, “son of a
”. Hopefully things get better with the LOD/loading improvements on testlive.

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While more options are nice, a finite playerbase supported by hardcore/diehard fans won’t last long. Funcom needs to cater to the casual gamer, who will provide a much larger group of wallets to draw revenue from, while also being a steadier long term monthly check, since they come and go.

This basically means they need to reduce the punishment players experience from being away from the game for a (reasonable) duration of time.

I am specifically calling out the short decay timer, and how it is chasing away casual gamers (and even dedicated ones).

Here is an example, clear as day.

https://steamcharts.com/top

First number is number of players currently playing, followed by peak players, followed by hours played.

10. Rust 29,430 70,775 28,798,702
11. ATLAS 28,974 40,752 1,677,438
12. ARK: Survival Evolved 28,720 84,184 32,083,903

The Forest is ranked number 50 with 7k players.

Conan Exiles is ranked number 87. With 3.5k players.

Conan Exiles is a better game (mostly) than Ark/Rust/Atlas/Forest.

But Conan Exiles has chased away all of their casual player base (a HUGE pool of people).

Question is
 Why does nobody want to play a game that looks and plays as smooth as CE?




It’s cause of the self defeating decay timer, an underwhelming skill system, a feat system that literally blocks you from accessing half the games content unless you drink a potion and click 400 times. (Then your blocked from other half of the game).

In addition to this, there is no real purpose to this game. The leveling is finished at lvl 60, nothing else to do, except build shi* that’s gonna explode a week later. Thing’s like Paragon levels, a higher level cap, leveling of thralls and or crafting stations, additional gear upgrades, additional gear slots (necklace/ring/shoulder).

There are a lot of basics missing that could really swing the player stats in Conan’s direction, if they can just make it happen before they belly up.

ATLAS SUCKS ■■■, but it’s outperforming CE by leaps and bounds for the time being. And regardless, ARK, RUST, FOREST are all outperforming CE as well.

I love this game, but Funcom needs to step it up and focus on retaining/attracting players. Bad decesions (1 week decay timer) have to stop.

If Conan can keep casual players, their DLC will flood their coffers.

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I totales agree with you Abitur that. The DLCs five Thema a good revenue compared to the effort put in it. I support it since the stuff is nice and they still support/upgrade the game aside from that for free. But CE still lacks major endgame content. There are other factors like pending bugs, exploits, decay time, etc. but in my opinion there is no THE reason for CE lacking behind it’s competitors in terms of active players. Still, players would ignore most of said issues for at least a while, if they had something to aim for. But this something doesn’t exist for now. The game needs a vision, as common as it may sound or maybe it’s not as clear as intended. It’s about surviving but at 60 you have dominated other players (boring) are annihilated by others (rage quit) or life in peace and build/farm (boring after some time). The game holds no tasks for you at this point. They seek to tune it at this point in the current testlive build, but I doubt it’s enough at this point.

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I dont think that would work out fine.
If Conan Exiles was on the scale of Life is feudal, where the world is a lot bigger and character development a lot more painful, I could see a reason in that


But then there is one additional problem: How to link these items to a specific toon on a specific (possibly private or solo) server?

I do like the idea of “clothing” though.
Eighter another key to be bound to switch from casual clothing to armor or automated switches at the own base to clothing would be fun.
Btw. Yamatai could have used something similar to a Kimono. Seriously! (Kithan a Cheongsam? Aquilonia a greek/rome kinda robe/garb? Pictish is a hard one though.)

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The same way they link your character to an item you buy from a merchant in Sep. Except in this case, you buy with Funcom Points like you do in Secret World.

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And how to link that to the toon of that server?

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Speaking about decay system I would suggest some temporary thing that you could buy for real money like DLC (cheaper of course) and put it like Totem in your base. It would “slow down time” in some area, namely slow down decay timer twice/triple/quadruple (depending on it’s price) for buildings that are already built within it’s reach (and maybe food decay timer for feeding boxes too). It is just a question of finding such building pieces and feeding boxes at the moment Totem is erected and marking them in the sql base. New buildings shouldn’t be affected by Totem - it’s significant on PVP servers where someone could destroy such base for the benefits of such Totem. So when I go away for vacation I put off all my gear into the vault, give lots of food to my pets and thralls, buy such Totem and pray for no one raiding my base
 And if a friend of mine is in hospital I can buy such Totem and put it near his/her base too. Pets and thralls would starve to death of course but buildings would survive the decay.

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I have a deep seeded hatred for these types of transactions. Paying to slow down decays ot getting some advantage because you have money to blow is fine for people who want to play crap mobile games.

I don’t want locked content or an item for 5 bucks that gives me the ability to craft faster. ESO did that and it wrecked it.

Also seems odd that we would pay money for better survival options or an increased chance to survive in a survival game.

I refuse to pay for perks or QoL items.

What I would spend on:

Expantions.
DLCs - if they created a placeables and decorations pack i would slap down 20 for that bad boy.

Throw in a DLC with a barber npc, more RP clothes and a chance to change my hairstyle
and I’d slap down another 20.

Get me a DLC featuring cold accuracy armor and boom. More money.

Nothing is free. But I don’t want the core concept of the game to get slashed for money grab tactics.

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Well all funcom has to do is change the steam reviews from Mixed to Positive. But what they seem to be doing so far is letting griefers and exploiters mess the community up. they need to be ahead of the exploits every 3 months or so a game breaking bug is out. from dupes to the catapults etc etc


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I totally agree with your comments.

When developers do nothing to maintain a gaming experience, at least possible. I mean possible, by the fact that some PVE-C servers have key access to the game, completely blocked (obelisk and desert spawn). This sends a message to the players proving the indifference, incompetence, incapacity or worse, the three scenarios put together, from funcom for this product.

You must know has devlopper
 If you are not be able to maintain a minimum of accessibility for the game you maked, at least to let peoples even properly complete all the chapter of this. said ‘‘game’’ , please!! get out of this industry or, FOR GOD SAKE
 do your job in the respect of the art

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I kind of like the idea of buying extra decay time for officials. These are free. No one is promised their land area. But there are occasions where one would need exteneded time off (vacation, ilness, mental break, etc
) and offering a $9.99 one time use artifact that extends your timer to 1 month (31 days). Now the 1 month is static in that once activated, all clans current bases and future builds during that time do not refresh as normal, they just count down until the month is done, then reset to normal server decay rules. Example: if i bought and activated today (12-27-18) it would not start teh 2 week decay until 01-27-18. And if i get on during that time, it doesn’t refresh. it just keeps counting down until then. Unless i deactivate. Then decay timer resets back to normal server decay rules.

This is not really pay to play, as it only effects decay. If someone is willing to pay $120 a year to not have to worry about decay then great. I seriously doubt grievers would do that. If they did, well at least they are now paying for the trolling rights, and supporting Funcom to add more content :). Again, only limit it to the decay timer, and don’t make it an ingame item, just a override for the clan base timers.

ps:
On PVP, it doesn’t mean you can’t be raided. That is a chance one has to take playing on raid servers.

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i had an awesome time in CE overall its been some months since i left but i really did enjoy the game
 but that does not mean the game was perfect it had glaring issues that would frustrate me to no end. i played on Xbox and the crashing issues were rampant what made it even more frustrating is when you were in a PVP battle and you crashed and then lost your gear horrible feeling or when you were trying to defend your base from attacking clans and you crashed that was even more horrible. Bugs like these are huge repellent to incoming new players which need to be fixed so people can enjoy the content and then in turn invest money into some of these ideas listed here. that being said i see they have a new DLC out i will purchase it because i want to support this game and the Dev’s even though i havent played since October.

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Hm. You want to pay for some receipt that would give you advantage for money (accuracy + cold resist), but don’t want to pay for another advantage - to keep your base from decay when you have no access to the game because of the real life? But what is the difference then? DLCs must be cosmetic only if you are against spending money for survival: no new types of armor, no cheaper craft etc.

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All of the DLCs have come with armor. In my mind there is a difference from a 1 time purchase that gives everyone and I a chance to own new building peices and armor sets. The difference is that with regular micro transactions you can simply and always gain buffs or in this case go pay not to decay. I see a large difference.

Plus. Many of the things I want should already be in the game as is. I just dont mind a 1 time purchase to buy clothes, placeables and building pieces. Decorations etc that stay with your account. People can then pick and choose whar they want and it really does not affect the vanilla game in any way.

I built in Khitan and you build in black ice. Its the same.

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Again i cannot stress, that the payment is for decay timer pause only on officials (unless privates want to allow it). If you are an active player, then you may never need to purchase it. On PVE and PVE-C, this really doesn’t effect anyone else. It may extend someone 2 extra weeks for trolling purposes, but again, trollers aren’t gonna shell out money consistently just to troll. If they do, then
Funcom profits from a relatively easy code, and then can use it to pay devs to keep churning out new free stuff for the rest of us. PVP, it will not stop it from being raided. Depending on the official server and alphas there, if it is something serious, you may be able to have them “flex” there muscles if someone did raid you while you took the month off. Depends on what type of players they are and how dedicated to keeping a thriving server going.

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New types of armor do not mean survival. You can easily survive in vanilla without any of the new armor at all.

Sure I want cold accuracy armor. But I have managed this long without it. But every DLC has had armor types. But you own it.

Not like In ESO where you rent it. Or buy a temp advantage through crowns crystals or gems. I own this stuff.

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It is called supply and demand. The decay timer has very little to no effect on other players experiences. It is a way to let someone take some time off the game. If people aren’t buying it, then it will fade into the night as an idea that didn’t have merit or stop the shrinking player data base. But if a lot of people are using it, and server pops go up, then i am proven wrong on the decay being the main factor for players leaving game, and we are all the better with funcom having funds to add more in game content. And in game content will bring more gamers back as well.

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