Suggestion: Make fence foundation / ceiling stacking easier?

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
46

It is working as intended, just like placing followers was working as intended. And yet, they changed the follower system to implement a limit, because people were using it in a way that affected official servers in an unsustainable way.

At no point did Hugo claim that they would consider changing its designation (i.e. whether it’s a bug/exploit) in the future. He said that “the developers are aware of this”, where “this” denotes fence foundation stacking, and that “should there be an opportunity to revise the building system it will definitely be considered”, where “it” denotes fence foundation stacking.

In other words, the developers are not as uninformed as some people think they might be, and they will keep fence foundation stacking in mind when revising the building system.

No, it’s not. It has been confirmed by Funcom that it’s not an exploit. Go look up any definition of software exploit, and then go look up the post by Hugo that @Mefistos already linked earlier in this thread.

It’s perfectly possible to continue the conversation and go on arguing without denying facts. The claim that this is an exploit has been proven factually incorrect, so can we please move on?

3 Likes
47

I don’t buy it. Do you really believe that they intentionally designed stacking as a feature and yet made it so annoying to use? If it’s WAI why do you need to use tricks to get it to work?

There are plenty of examples of developers claiming a bug is a feature when they don’t want to take the time to fix it.

If it’s working as intended it’s horribly shoddy work. A bug is a bug or it’s not, if it’s not now it’s not in the future. That quote reads like a PR excuse that tells us nothing

When they changed the follower limit they never said “now we have decide this is an exploit” they said it was causing lag.

I’m not sure if your trying to be unnecessarily antagonistic or if I’m misreading your post. I think you know that developers change things all the time even when they are working as originally intended and leave exploits and bugs in products when they either can’t be bothered to fix a problem or can’t figure out how

1 Like
48

They didn’t design stacking as a feature. The designed the building system as it is, and it’s working as intended. The stacking is a subset of infinite combinations of the building system. It’s a textbook example of emergent gameplay.

Please point out the bug required for stacking, and I’ll change my mind.

As I already said, Hugo never said they were going to decide to change their mind on whether this is an exploit.

I’m no stranger to accusations of unnecessary antagonism because I point out people’s arguments are wrong in order to push back against an outcome I would prefer to avoid. For example, I didn’t touch this whole thread until someone started calling this an exploit and asked for its removal.

I’ve already explained why the removal of this building technique is a bad outcome for many players, so I’m not going to repeat that, but I hope you understand my motivations now.

I also know Conan Exiles team hasn’t exactly been shy about acknowledging an unfixed bug, or the fact that they’re not working on a specific bug/issue yet. Despite all that, they chose to declare that this is not an exploit.

So now that you’ve accused me of being unnecessarily antagonistic, you tell me: is labeling this building technique an “exploit” really absolutely necessary for the point you’re trying to make?

1 Like
49

I still think that linked post is a complete cop out non answer

There is even a post from May where FC banned a player(they put a screenshot showing the message from FC, I’d link it here but am not very good at foruming) and one of the reasons given was stacking foundations, because it was causing lag.

If it’s causing lag and therefor getting players potentially banned from a server it certainly should not be made easier to do

I didn’t accuse you of being unnecessarily antagonistic, I even said I might just be misreading the tone

1 Like
50

As stated before, if stacking wouldn’t exist, then the pieces would still be built, but a larger footprint.

Also stability math would be worse, thus more taxing

Fence stacking, the entire column fails a quick back up check if you blow the bottom. If I don’t stack and build 10 founds out, I would honeycomb, which means every time a lower pillar is removed, the system has to refugee the support. That will happen while loading as well.

a 5 x 5 protected by stacking is 7x7. no stacking 23x23. 3 times footprint. And mats are not that much different based on how easy they are to farm. So see more building pieces, because I now add ceilings and pillars and walls all over.

More taxing I would say

2 Likes
51

I’m not sure if I’m thinking of the same one, but yeah, I’ve seen at least one ban happen for stacking that caused degraded server performance. And I still don’t see how that contradicts Hugo’s explanation that stacking, as a technique, is not an exploit.

I’ve already addressed that in one of my posts above:

Why is it a cop-out or a non-answer to say that an emergent gameplay building technique is not an exploit, even though you can be banned for specific abuses of it?

And like I already stated, I’m not arguing for making it easier. I agree with you. I am arguing against removing it.

How about we don’t go there? We both know that if you said “I don’t know if you’re stupid or I’m misreading you”, it would be pretty damn insulting. So can we agree to let that be water under the bridge? :slight_smile:

2 Likes
52

That depends on what taxes the server more, and I honestly don’t have good enough data on that. If anyone does, I would love to hear it.

I do know that one of the things that tax server performance is sending the information about the building pieces and placeables over the network. This is done when the client moves into certain range and needs to load that data from the server. Given a constant range, stacking will increase the number of pieces to be sent within that same range.

The million dollar question is: how does non-stacked build compare to a stacked build in other aspects that affect server performance? For example, how much do stability calculations impact the server performance? Is path-finding going to have a harder or easier time with a stacked build? Things like that.

It would be great to know that stuff, but I don’t have a lot of hope of ever finding out. Funcom devs are the only ones in a really good position to do that kind of research, because they could add more monitoring and telemetry around it, if they wanted to.

Anyway, sorry if that went a bit off-topic.

2 Likes
53

I was being legitimate, I didn’t know and had you simply said you weren’t being antagonistic I would have believed you.

Text is really easy to misconstrue

As to why I think it’s a non answer it’s the inclusion of “not at this time”. Like I said a bug is a bug. It will always be a bug or it never was a bug. If it’s a bug that they like they don’t have to fix it, but would still be a bug. If it was intended and they later decided it wasn’t working and wanted to remove it that wouldn’t retroactively make it a bug. It needlessly muddies the message

If it is intended though I’d think it should probably be made easier to use regardless of my personal feelings about it. Players shouldn’t have to fight against the game to use intended features. Im not sure how you could achieve this without making a bigger mess of the system, but have a few ideas how it could work

As I mentioned earlier I think the best solution would be to make reinforced foundations, walls and ceilings (at greatly increased cost) that would make stacking unnecessary for PvP because you could build just as strong without it and not be forcing the game to render 10X the pieces.

I understand not wanting to get rid of the feature outright because of the neat and creative things builders can do with it.

In a perfect world I’d say leave it in the game for creative building but get rid of the massive advantage it brings to PvP by giving an alternative method to achieve that same level of defense without the headache or extra stress on the system

2 Likes
54

Of course they can ban you if you ABUSE something that it will drop server performance but same thing you can do with or without fence stacking.

2 Likes
55

I’m not saying you’re sandbagging, but if you ever did run a Conan server* you’d figure it out very quickly. It’s more like the 53,000 player question, honestly.

I do believe that this could be answered by simply turning off snapping. Use a mod that does this and you’ll see exactly how much the PvP world could be like layers of pearl coat atop a big iron ball.


* EDIT: next to your desk, with a conventional hard drive.

2 Likes
56

No mods for me, I’m on console.

The simple way I could think of to make the building tricks work that would be console specific is making a button that toggles the snap points.

So you could pick the piece and can lay it like usual but if you hold certain button the alternative snap points become selectable

It would probably need to be done in a way where all the points weren’t just available at all times, because it’s far to easy on console already for a piece to end up in the wrong spot or turned the wrong way.

They even like to move right as you click the button to lay them down although you aren’t even touching an analog stick :crazy_face:

1 Like
57

@OctaviousWrex it still feels like an exploit to me as well but Funcom’s position stated otherwise. I think the reason it feels like an exploit is because we often see players abusing the building system with stacking. Essentially players are ‘exploiting’ the ‘intended’ creativity aspect of the build system by spamming 300+ fence foundations into the smallest area possible. This doesn’t make stacking an exploit, just certain player’s use of the stacking technique. Honestly, I’m not sure how Funcom could remove stacking without completely overhauling the building system as it is simply a clever implementation of intended building features. I for one, don’t want it removed but here’s a thought in progress…

First, the HP of fences and fence foundations, walls, ceilings and standard foundations (both wedge and square), need to be 4-5 times higher. Then, everything in the same building square (grid) must share HP.

If 5x HP, this would mean, 1 fence foundation would be 450k HP (90x5) but stacking 5 in the same square is still only 450k HP for that square. If there were a pillar, a fence foundation and a ceiling tile all in the same square, they would again share the HP total of the highest HP item in that square. This would give that grid square a total of 500k HP.

ceiling tile = 70k (70x5)
fence foundation = 90k (90x5)
pillar = 100k (100x5) = 500k (highest HP in grid square)

  • HP could be tweaked by Funcom to use 4x, 4.5x, 5x or whatever provides the best balance. Explosives could also have their blast power reduced by 10%, but no one likes a nerf, so this won’t go over very well.

This would allow PvE & PvE(C) players to stack for aesthetic purposes while eliminating the HP benefit of stacking. With the benefit gone, stacking will quickly fall out of PvP META, but we can still enjoy the offline protection of the added HP.

3 Likes
58

Way too easy.

Wait, wait. Are you telling me we’re having this whole discussion because Hugo said “this is currently not considered an exploit, bug, nor something our team may act upon in the form of an infraction report”, and that we wouldn’t be having it if he said “this is not considered an exploit or a bug, nor is it currently something our team may act upon in the form of an infraction report”?

Because if that’s the issue, then I guess we can blame me for not being a native speaker, because I sort of interpreted the former as the latter. :man_shrugging:

And I still believe that’s what he meant, to be honest. We’ve all, at some point or another, written something that we didn’t word in the best possible way.

What do you consider to be necessary requirements to consider something “intended”? I’m not being pedantic, antagonistic, or facetious, by the way. So if your definition of “intended” requires it to have been foreseen right from the start – whether through intentional design or pre-release discovery through testing – then you’re right about it not working as intended. But then I would argue that the definition you’re using is overly narrow.

What I’m trying to point out is that something might work as intended even if it has unforeseen outcomes. That’s what emergent gameplay is about, and that’s a concept that has been around for a lot longer than Conan Exiles.

So if you’re willing to pardon Hugo for his suboptimal positioning of the word “currently” in that sentence, then maybe we can finally agree that it’s not an exploit, that the building system is working as intended, but it also doesn’t mean that stacking needs or deserves to be made easier :wink:

I haven’t. That’s why I was hoping someone had better data. And don’t get me wrong, I am not demanding that anyone produce that data. There’s a reason I haven’t done that on my own: it’s because it would be a royal pain in the ass to set up a server, run it, and methodically and systematically test the impact of different builds.

If you’ve ever seen one of my bug reports, you know that I try to dive as deep as possible and get as close as I can to isolating the root cause of a problem. That’s really hard, and that’s why I have utmost respect for anyone who works in testing and QA. Likewise, producing quality data based on measurements of software as complex as Conan Exiles can be really, really hard.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked and off-topic again. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that you’re right, I am sandbagging. On the other hand, I’m aware of it and try to be honest about it. If people like you, who run Conan Exiles server(s), have a better idea than I do, even if it’s based on anecdata and not full-blown research, I tend to trust you. I might ask a question (or ten) about it, but that’s out of my curiosity – because I really like understanding how stuff works – and not out of distrust :slight_smile:

You know how you can’t place a thrall too close to another? That’s how they could get rid of stacking. And that would be abso-freaking-lutely awful and I would hate it. That’s why I’ve been pushing so hard against the very idea of removing it.

EDIT: I learned a new word, so I went and edited the part where it was relevant.

4 Likes
59

Yeah, I guess they could do it that way, although that feels like it would break more than just ‘stacking.’ :face_vomiting:

I only play PvP about 20% of my Conan playtime (I suck at it), the rest is spent on PvE, which is why I don’t want it removed either.

2 Likes
61

This one?

We of course don’t know the extent of the stacking. However the ban notice appears to state stacking as it’s own offence.

But here again Hugo states;

On one hand someone is banned, on the other hand Hugo is stating it’s not something they will act upon.

So if you can potentially get banned, where do you draw the line in the sand?

Also, if someone can get banned for it, surely it shouldn’t be made even more accessible than it already is.

1 Like
62

I don’t mean stacking itself should be easier, but the creative manipulations of the building system using the same tricks, which I think could be achieved with more optional snap points. Think of how much more creative players could be if they didn’t have to learn a dozen tricks because we could just put pillars on the side of a foundation and the like

I know that would take some work, but in my opinion the building system is so clunky at least on console it deserves some significant developer attention

I still don’t believe that stacking fence foundations is working as intended, it might well be working as designed but those two concepts are not mutually exclusive

To more clearly explain what I mean by intention vs design is off line raiding being the ultimate strategy in PvP. This happens because of the way the game is designed, but I don’t believe the developers want offline raiding to be the main technique in PvP, as it’s quite literally no longer PvP if one of the P aren’t there.

@LordKAA yes that is exactly the post, thank you for linking it! The thing that stood out to me was why even mention stacking as a reason at all? If it’s spam it’s spam, regardless of whether it’s stacked or not.

1 Like
63

I was allowed some notice and logged onto a server where Admin Sagged a Jungle mesher. The thing that tripped the intervention was excessive, tiered fence foundies in a particularly taxing area. The fencies weren’t the problem, it was the intent. This is an anecdote, and probably not representative.

Since these things happen on a case basis, I suspect intent is a variable. If you build a layer cake to frustrate enemies and clanmates alike, that’s a whole lot different intent than a lot of exploits in the past. Remember when you could just place smurfs everywhere and after several smurfs the frame rate would go down for every smurf in the area?

I’m no authority and I have only been on two glorious ridealongs.

EDIT: Sorry Octavious for the simulpost

4 Likes
64

I think about it the other way around. If you’re going to ban me for spam, you better be able to cite examples.

funcom_haha
funcom_haha1339×190 8.24 KB

I thought Kholdenn’s ban notice was a good example of stacking not being the exploit itself but rather, being used in an exploitative way to cause lag.

3 Likes
65

In the post he said that he wasn’t overbuilding compared to others, but we really have no way to know exactly how much he did have and how much is too much

When I compare what I consider to be a huge base I built with other bases I see I’m floored by how comparatively small my “giant” fortress is :see_no_evil:

1 Like
66

I believe part of the issue, if not all, is Funcom lack of care to develope raid servers past offline wipe.

How many times have pvp asked for better raid tactics. Like Elephant batterin, personal lower impact trebs, ladders, grappling hooks, no way to repair during a raid, and not being able to scoop and scoot easily? Those died down when most pvp raid players realized the lack of care for raid by the developer. DbD was started, then far as I know pretty much put on the “if we get time” pile of mechanics.

To make raid servers mean anything, need 24,/7 with DbD, claim cost, smaller clans, and decaying explosives. This would make raiding mean something ro get resources. And when you logged in, you were knowingly opening up pvp if someone raided you.

This is not being negative, just factual. Funcom knows the data. It means either way too hard to figure out for the returns it would garner, or in general, not the intent of the future of the game in thier eyes.

edit: to make this on topic, this is why even if pvpers wanted the easier way to stack, it would never happen.

4 Likes