Honestly, this seems to be one of those topics that keep popping up and the team just doesn’t care. In all my time on the forums, I haven’t seen a single month without at least one suggestion about how to deal with foundation spam, claim griefing, ridiculously oversized bases and all the related stuff.
At no point did anyone from Funcom ever signal that they have even the slightest intention of recognizing that the problem exists, let alone that they intend to do something about it.
FWIW, I’ve also tried my luck with a suggestion – I called it a PVE-C claim totem, but it could be adapted to work in all game modes – and it was received like this:
I don’t think anything will ever be done to change the claim/decay system, for the following reasons:
- It’s just not important enough. There are too many issues with higher priority: bugfixes, improving AI, and balancing PVP. Whatever free time and manpower is left from that will be spent on new features and releasing DLCs to give us PVE players a new dose of “sugar rush”.
- As everyone is quick to point, these issues only happen on unmoderated servers. If you don’t like the lack of moderation, go play on a private server.
- Any big change to these systems will provoke a huge shitstorm from people who don’t agree with the idea of upkeep.
Bear in mind, I’m not saying I agree with these reasons or like them. For example, I strongly disagree with @Barnes’s take on #3; like many other players, I also have work and family and limited time to play, and yet I still think that we should be made to invest some kind of effort into keeping our bases on official servers, because building a base that spans 4 grid squares and refreshing it with just a few seconds per week is not good for the game.
Regardless of whether I agree with those reasons or not, whether I like them or not, the history of Conan Exiles seems to indicate that this is the way things are going to stay. In my native language, there’s a saying that can be translated roughly as “the dog keeps barking and the wind keeps blowing”. That’s how I feel when it comes to this. 