I really dont see how people think this game is an MMORPG.
Havent people notice how much struggles come to get together a clan with enough people to make it less than a “way to share stuff with your friends”.
Sure, in a Massive Multiplayer game, it would make sense to have layers of association. Conan Exiles, for the “eternal sadness” of forum copium, is a game mostly, vastly more frequently, played as a solo game, and in second place co-op.
While a lot of people play on servers, they are a minority. You dont need to take my word for it, just check the full server stats with the steam charts alone. If the server population “overall”, in all platforms cannot be significant compared to the Steam population alone, what does it signify over the whole population ?
Why I say that: While efforts in making interesting stuff is cool, you would miss the mark by making stuff to a small part of the population while leaving the rest of the population watching.
That is already what they do with all these “theme park” things, like companion model, mission table prototypes, and what not.
It would be a much better time spent to build on the existing things, and make stuff that the small clans floating around can participate to make up for the fact that they are small, instead of making an alliance system that at best will slap people on the face with the realization most clans cant put enough people together to face a “purge” without thralls.
IF instead you have not “medieval game of thrones inspired” but an REH Conan Universe adequate version of factions to align your clan with and make up for the fact clans cant have that many people with better mechanics so thralls can actually work among “half a dozen” clan members, it is a vastly better work more adequate to the population playing the game.
If people want a game in which mechanics would benefit clans with a dozen people, which is a number many servers would be happy to ever have had in the first place, they are playing the wrong game.
And given how poor it is the server play in comparison to solo and co-op, probably the reason most players do play in those mods, there are many things to be done before it.
For starters, any reasonable game developer will agree that until this game uses a server software that is a really dedicated server, not a version of the game without “dreamworld”, server play will never be good. And for that, a lot of work is required.
No game that supports “high performance” server play uses that many systems in the server application. You cant. What you are doing is requiring the game to have “a server” to each player that plays in it. Conan Exiles would not be playable as it is with 500 players in a server even if the game had no bugs at all. Some 50 player servers already feel the problems of having “that many” players at the same time playing.
, your worst enemy is crashing, lagging, bugging, etc… Yet all these has nothing to do with the mechanics of the game, but the server performance.