Testlive Patch (18.02.2020) - Followers Management System plus Funcom Launcher

The thrall management feature looks absolutely great, well done to the dev team.

Even so, as a server admin I do have a few points of feedback.

  1. It would be great if servers could turn off the distance requirement for managing thralls (along with any other restrictions).
  2. It would be great if we could turn off the “drop inventory on rescue”; I manage an rp server, I do not care about potential ‘cheating’ in this manner and it would be great to be able to use this ‘rescue’ feature to call in new actors into our rp (with a wave of his hand the chief summons a couple of guards to take the prisoner away).
  3. It’s great that we can now see thralls on the map, but can we please have the ability to toggle off (categories of) the other icons so that we can actually find the thrall icons amid the hundreds of icons on the map?

Oh, and while I have you, can you please for the love of Crom make it so that thralls don’t run towards every single player in another clan when, seeing as we have PvP disabled, they can’t do anything anyway (and just end up blocking doorways, getting in the way, messing up the carefully planned scenes, etc). Thank you.

Keep up the good work. :slightly_smiling_face:

6 Likes

@Amrita like your ideas for private server users. I am on ps4 and gportal limits what we can do compared to PC. Looking forward to digging up lost legacy NPC,S
By the way players thralls still run up to you with server settings for pve they don’t attack and go back to their posts when you are out of range. Looking forward to seeing this implemented every one at Funcom.

Hi, great improvements there.
Only suggestion I would have is to move the summon thralls to be more integrated into the game somehow as currently it looks like an admin tool.
Maybe have a summon lost thrall potion or perhaps build on this idea and have a pair of Summoning Portals?
That way you could easily move thralls and pets between different bases without having to run them individually. They’d need to keep their inventory if they were to go through there.
You’d need to make the Summoning Portal hard to build otherwise it’d be overused and misused but I think it’d be a good way of linking a pair of bases.

it should completely delete the thrall inventory, but no the items it is wearing.

1 Like

Really ??? it isnt Important to Fix Undermesh bases in Walls and Mountains ???

The feature is meant to “fix” when a thrall bugs out. It is not intended to be used at every chance to find ways to teleport thralls. Being a UI admin/clan tool makes more sense.

2 Likes

This tool is to manage thralls, and help when they bug out (which was a very good point brought up during the discussion on thrall limits). I do not think it is meant as a game play mechanic to summon a fighter by your side for combat, whether PVE or PVP. I would say lets clean the tool up for what it is intended for before we start debating using it as a strategic mechanic, and how it could be better that way.

4 Likes

This will be wonderful.

make them come naked, and get their items only after the cooldown resets.

A naked thrall is a useless thrall.

A check box to select/deselect all thralls in the followers tab is essential and needs adding. It will be tedious scrolling through 55+ thralls to deselect some. Being able to clear it with a check box would streamline the process.

4 Likes

Personally I don’t see myself ever using the rescue option, as I have never had a thrall get trapped under the mesh. I did have one trapped in a wall once, and it took a fair amount of time to find its location using thrall pots, and some luck as I was looking at the wall when it moved slightly, but once I knew where it was I was able to grab it and pull it out. I do understand that it’s a common problem, so this is a good feature for those situations, but it seems like people are trying to make it into a “thrall caller” which doesn’t seem like the intended purpose. Basically it’s a feature that you hope you never have to use, but if the choice is not getting the gear back vs not getting the gear and the thrall back you can at least get the thrall.

5 Likes

I agree. This feature was added due to the worries about thrall limit and how to manage against that. Unfortunately, when given something for one thing, people in general tend to criticize that it is not doing something it was never meant for.

Real life example:
At my company we came across an internal solution to stream line shipping ot a speicific customer. We added barcode labels itemizing the insides of the box, os the shipper did not have to open and scan every one again, basically undoing the packing and haveing to repack when shipping. 2 or 3 months later we got a quality ding from the custoter saying the labels were too small, and ending a 2 year run of perfect quality scores from shipping to the them. The labels were never meant for them, but tn the end we had to rework it to fit their need which they never asked for to close out the CAR we had due to our processes.

So short story, appreciate the fact we got a way to monitor and break bond with abandoned thralls from afar. The rescue is nice icing on the cake we did not think we would get.

2 Likes

You might want to reconsider that, especially if it’s a super-rare Purge-only thrall and you’ve spent hours on it to level 20 only to have it stuck somewhere you can’t reach it.

4 Likes

I think it was meant as in “thrall could not be used right after it was rescued if it is naked”, thus not being able to utilize it in mid fight as a summons type button. but all one would have to do is re gear it with new armor/weapon until the old stuff popped up after the cool down.

But yeah, naked is better than nothing. Armor can be replaced, the leveling time is more important in the recovery.

3 Likes

This follower management system looks fantastic :clap:. Please don’t have recalled thralls drop their armour and weapons though :pray:. Mine all carry precious legendaries (PS4 PVE)

1 Like

Do you see the potential for abuse if in addition to the current menu options, one of them was “Place?” This would be limited by proximity: you’d have to be within range of the thrall, so park yourself close to their map dot.

Imagine there’s also “Place” and it allows you to esc out and have access to the placeable follower?

Scenario:

  1. Dalinsia24K comes back from a snipe hunt and disappears.
  2. You know you placed her.
  3. She’s probably down in the soil below your apex base.
  4. You can peel back the defenses to climb within a few blocks of her.

I see. I took it a bit literally and I was also a bit biased by playing PVE-C only, where on the one hand it’s pretty common to have a boatload of spare gear in chests and on the other hand leveling the followers is an absolute pain due to the “0.25x effect”.

2 Likes

I doubt the Rescue option is intended to be convenient. This is a last resort for when something goes terribly wrong with your follower. Losing it’s inventory is a small price to pay over losing the thrall and it’s inventory because it ended up in the mesh somewhere.

6 Likes

But is that a common thing? honestly i only see people walking around with volcano/zerkers/dalinsias.

Are purge fighters better?

As long as it’s a Purge-only fighter from one of those top two factions (the Forgotten Tribe and the Votaries of Skelos), they should be better than normal T4s from those factions.

However, I can’t actually test that without either downloading the DevKit or doing singleplayer tests with modded weapons. @Firespark81 could probably prove or disprove it :slight_smile:

1 Like