[SUGGESTION] Maintaining bench, claim flag

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

add Claiming flag - have starting radius ( for example) 10 fundations and can be upgraded up to “???” times, raising its radius by “” meters each upgrade? each upgrade are more and more pricy. need to pay weekly resources based on amout of blocs and tiers (for example full t3 base with top tier benches will cost mostly black ice/bricks some insulated wood and steel reinforcements (top tier benches counts as t3)) if base contains only t2 structures then taxes will contain t2 bulding mats BUT if you build atleast 1 t3 structure - all your tax will remain in numbers but will count as t3 mats. When taxing period is expired ANYONE can destroy, dismantle and pick up your buildings.

Maintaining bench - cant be used during Raid Times - allows you to repair ALL structures within your claimed zone of CURRENT flag (can cost alittle greater than repairing by hands).

Sorry for not clear english ^^

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I like the idea of a claim flag that needs to be upgraded, its been mentioned before in many different ways and forms.

But the upkeep is something I don’t like, I don’t want to deal with with maintaining my base via resources, its just as bad as the thrall feeding system we had in the past, a extra complexity the majority here doesn’t want to return :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’d rather not have to grind mats for a “land tax” of sorts. I’d much rather have my base tied to hours plays on the server. The decay timer is already tied to a 7 day week, and if I am playing for 10 hours a week- I want to spend that 10 hours doing things I want to do.

I understand the desire for land claim flag, or benches with a radius is to help to control the over-building that can occur on official servers or in some cases - the serial refreshers. However, if at least 1 clan member is consistently playing the game, the bases should stay active.

If base maintenance was tied to hours played, a 15mins kickout could be implemented to keep people from standing in their bedrooms in order to rack up the required time to maintain their base. As it stands right now, logging in only to refresh your builds - whether you have bases on 1 server or multiple- is not against Funcom’s TOS. Although, ghost town builds do not make for a healthy server and neither does a clan with their builds totaling 67k pieces.

I think there’s a healthy middle ground the player base can reach to determine what would be acceptable and what would be overkill or grindy. Right now, I think grinding for mats in order to keep my main base and outposts (All totaling under 4,800 pieces) from not decaying is a huge turn-off. I play consistently and would rather my hours actually be what counts.

5

I think a single placeable item to claim an area would be a good thing, I would go farther and say the ability to take over abandoned claims after an amount of time has passed.

But for up keep, I think the time system is better than a grind system.
Maybe some middle ground?

Play time whatever the activity could accumulate more time on the decay timer, instead of just logging in to refresh.

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Land claim is already established by building a base. How would adding a peaceable item work better?

I agree with you here. Like @prologue1337 said, an upkeep system using mats falls into the time-consuming realm of the thrall feeding system from back in the day.

I like this solution. If time is required to keep your spot on the server, then the serial refreshers need to decide if they want to maintain a presence on the server or not. But what OP and others have suggested about the upkeep system using mats only punishes active players, and does not solve the core issues often brought up by suggesting a method of control; overbuilding and serial refreshing.

By far the worst suggestion is a building piece cap, and I don’t think we want that.

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7

I think he is refering to an idea that I had a while ago. Foundations/ ceilings and wall pieces don’t land claim but conduit land claim. Placeables would landclaim. This means that if you remove the placeables, you can claim someone’s base as your own by placing something in it once you cleared ownership. You could even adapt the timers so that the placeables decay 1 day earlier than the base. This would give time for vultures to come in a seize the hard work of someone else.

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Interesting idea however this means you could have tons of litter around a server as you just keep moving and builing in a new locaiton. I would adapt it to a timer recharge effect vs refresh effect. You stay in the landclaim zone and the timer gains time at a rate of like 1 minute/sec there. This means that if you were near decay time you would have to stay on around the base for 168 minutes to refresh fully for the week. If its an active base, not an issue since that is 2-3 hours. If it’s an afterthought, it becomes more of a pain point for the people trying to save the base.

9

I’m not opposed to someone being able to claim a decayed base, if that feature were implemented. I don’t see myself using it but that doesn’t mean other players won’t find it useful.

Requiring playtime affecting the decay of a building would not directly affect the number of builds a player/clan will make. Players and clans already either build conservatively or act like the official server is their own private server.

10

Very easily exploitable. Just leave your computer connected to the server overnight and rack up some hours while keeping the server slot occupied. I wouldn’t be surprised to see 40/40 servers with nobody playing.

A good way around that would be to use an “upkeep fuel” that you can obtain from a special crafting station that works like a dismantling bench, but instead gives you different amounts of “upkeep fuel” depending on what you put inside. That way you can get your upkeep covered with any play style, as long as you actually play the damn game :slight_smile:

At least, that’s how I tried to propose it in my suggestion for upkeep system.

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11

A 15min inactivity kick out would solve that issue

12

Actually I was thinking “movement” keyboard or controller, not just being logged in. I guess I should have specified. But with the old exploit of just staying logged in to level, I assumed just staying “logged in” would be accounted for in the implementation.

I’ll try to be clearer next time.
edit: I’m also aware of macros, so something would need to be in place to counter that method of exploiting. I just don’t see adding to the grind a viable method either.

I was thinking this would be implemented in conjunction with the placeable or “flag” land claim system.
this would prevent excessive building.

13

And I can write an AutoHotkey script in 5 minutes to take care of that, too, by sending a keypress or jiggling the mouse at random intervals :slight_smile:

People are really inventive that way. I didn’t even come up on my own with the idea of leaving the computer connected overnight, I simply adapted the advice I was given on how to easily fill my purge meter as a solo player. :man_shrugging:

It’s not something I do, because getting a Conan Exiles purge at the cost of an increased electricity bill (and decreased lifespan of my hardware) isn’t worth it. But there are people who do it for purges, so imagine how much higher the incentive is for the serial refreshers. I’m sure a non-negligible portion of them would do it.

Which, in turn, would probably force Funcom to implement a better way of detecting idle players. Since they don’t have admins babysitting individual servers to detect crap like that, it would turn into an arms race between the code that detects idleness and the scripts that get increasingly more convincing. In the end, what are they supposed to do, start banning people they suspect are using those scripts? More screaming on the forums about unfair bans (and probably with better reasons to scream, too).

See above. The only way to be sure someone is playing is to make them play, everything else can be faked.

Of course, you could go the same way they did for the purge meter and define a small subset of activities that increase some counter, but then you run the risk of having some play styles being a better fit than others and the people who play like that would come here to (rightly) complain about how they’re now second-class citizens.

In general, any sort of upkeep system will marginalize (or at least inconvenience) some players. Even my proposal would marginalize serial refreshers (on purpose) and inconvenience people who like to log in to just chat without much gameplay involved (as an unfortunate consequence). Personally, I’m in favor of an upkeep system, but I don’t think that “time spent on a server” is a good solution.

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How? Is this something the average person would have to do themselves and be tech-savvy enough to figure out? I’m not being cheeky, I genuinely know nothing about coding.

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Really anyone who can use google can learn to write a keyboard macro.
Basically you can DL a program that records keystrokes and replays them on per single keystroke or on a loop.

When I played MMO’s I use to macro keystrokes to combine different actions eg pet attack - cast shot 1 - shot 2 - heal pet. etc all by pressing 1 key.

Mentioned this would need to be addressed, in an edit above.

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AutoHotkey is a cute little tool with a horrifyingly ugly scripting language, that people use to define their own “keyboard macros”. For example, I use it to assign the windows on my desktop a number from 0 to 9 and bring them up easily: Win+Alt+1 “remembers” the currently focused window as 1, and then whenever I press Win+1 it activates and focuses that windo. That way I can switch easily between Spotify, different browser windows, my text editor, and such, without fooling around with repeated Alt+Tab (and swearing when I overshoot the window I wanted).

AutoHotkey scripts can be as simple as substituting one keypress with another, but they can also get devilishly complicated. The script I’m talking about is relatively simple: you activate it and deactivate it with a key combination and all it does is wait for a random amount of time and simulates a randomly selected keypress among those you would like (for example left, right, forward, back, crouch, and sheathe/unsheathe) for a short amount of time; it keeps doing that until you deactivate it.

I’m honestly not sure anymore how tech-savvy an average gamer is, so I’m not sure how easy it would be for them. I know my mom couldn’t do it, but my son would probably figure it out after a while.

Thing is, even a non-tech-savvy person would have a recourse of getting that script from someone else. It’s really easy to install AutoHotkey and make it load a script someone else gave you. I’ve seen this happen a lot in other games and with a variety of tools, not just AutoHotkey.

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17

AutoHotKey is a script based language that requires no coding experience. It is very easy to write (or google how to write) simple 1-5 line scripts that act the same is a typical keyboard macro. It is often used by ‘people who know nothing about coding’ when they want an ‘autofire’ function in a game that doesn’t offer that capability.

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18

Thank you for explaining, now I see how my suggestion of a 15min idle timer isn’t viable.

Is it possible to tie " in game activity" to the bases’ upkeep? For example, I believe the Purge meter does not only increase by time alone, but also by a certain amount of points gained from things like killing mobs etc.

Would an upkeep points system based on in game activities be any better?

19

Just wanted to offer one last clarification on my part before I leave it be. I’m aware that we probably have different opinions on upkeep and that we won’t change each other’s minds, and that’s perfectly fine, but I wanted to make it clear what my idea is really about.

You ever had to toss away a bunch of leather because you were making tar and you just don’t want to place yet another chest to store leather you don’t even know if you’ll use before you need more tar? Or maybe you got another Brittle Bastard out of a skeleton key chest or another Horned Helmet while trying to get that elusive Final Breath of the Red Mother? Or you just don’t need a bunch of bowls you got off dead NPCs?

I could go on for a while, but basically what I’m trying to point out is that every player I know ends up with some surplus/waste as part of their normal play style. If you could convert that surplus into upkeep fuel, would that really be that much of a grind?

It would be less exploitable, but it would inevitably discriminate against certain play styles. Take a look at how the purge meter works:

https://conanexiles.fandom.com/wiki/Purge_Meter

It’s heavily biased towards killing humans (whether AI or other players) and building. You could run dungeons all day long and your purge meter would only slowly inch upwards because you’re staying logged in.

Of course, you could have a system that would assign points to more than just those activities, including harvesting resources from a resource node and killing all kinds of NPCs (not just humans). And maybe you could even find a good mix of point values for activities that would make everyone reasonably happy, but it would still be a really unintuitive solution.

Even the current system can be confusing for newcomers. Sure, refreshing is easy: just stick around for a while until you see your decay timer go up. But how is decay timer calculated? Newcomers don’t know that, which is why they sometimes plop down a wheel of pain on bare ground, log out, log back in two days later, and get really, really sad.

Now imagine if the decay timer depended on some mechanism that resembles the purge meter. You have to go to the wiki to see how it works, and even the wiki was wrong for a long time, because it used to say “kill human” and “kill NPC”, instead of “kill another player” and “kill human NPC”. So you keep doing stuff in-game hoping to see your decay timer go up, but you’re never quite sure if you’re doing it alright and there are all sorts of “folksy” theories floating around, kinda like we have now with players telling each other what food to give thralls to avoid getting such-and-suck perk (spoiler alert: you can’t control follower perks with food or with anything).

That’s why I tried to propose an upkeep system that would, hopefully, be inclusive and intuitive. Inclusive, because you don’t have to tailor your play style to it. Just use your normal surplus. Intuitive, because you put the fuel into the claim station and you see the timer change.

Again, I understand there are people that are against upkeep systems no matter what. I won’t change their minds, but I do hope that those who are on the fence might be swayed if my ideas are clearer :slight_smile:

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20

I think I finally get where you’re coming from now. Perhaps the upkeep system you’re proposing is not as bad as I had thought before. If I had to use a flag or station, I would hope that it was small in size or not ugly lol. I would hate to have one or more large placeables around my build that are required to be there for upkeep, but ruin my thoughtful design.

21

Lol, I get you.

But I’m probably an exception, I don’t make or I make very little steel, so I don’t have surplus leather.
I farm steel instead, just by making rounds in the northern EL I can gather 100-200 steel bars in less than an hour.

Bowls and such I dismantle for the raw mats. The janky legionaries and random limbs? those I could see feeding to an up keep system.

If we agree to disagree, I’ll let it drop here as well.

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