The moderation of official servers is very poor, why, and how to solve it

This is my feedback on the moderation of official Conan Exiles servers. My experience is this of PC PvP servers. Other people’s experiences may vary, but I hope my feedback will be taken serious nonetheless.

There are 2 major problems with the current moderation of official servers.

1. Tickets take way too long to get resolved or even get a reply on.
I will give my own experience as an example, but I have heard this same complaint from other players, so know that I am not alone in this.
Once upon a time me and my clan played on an official PvP server. We found out that a player there had made an illegal flybase. While raiding everyone who wasn’t online, he happily transported all his loot into a flybase where no one would be able to reach him and get revenge. When I found this flybase, I reported it to funcom, via Zendesk, on the 20th of June 2021. I provided as much information as possible, even including the exact coordinates. Locations, screenshots, names, were all provided. The next day I received an autoreply thanking me for my report.

The player, however, continued to live on in his flybase and rummage through the server. On July 1st I decided to update my ticket and ask if Funcom needed even more information from me, because no action had been taken. I got no reply for the entire month.
On august 3rd I got an auto-reply telling me that they experienced a high number of tickets, and that they hope ‘‘the issue resolved itself’’. I replied in a friendly manner that it had not. They replied to that, 2 months later, by re-sending the same auto-reply.

It is now 4,5 months later. To this day, the illegal flybase is still there. The exploiting player in question had built even more of these bases. The server’s population died a long time ago. A lot of people that were playing on this server, stopped playing the game entirely because they were being tormented by a player that was gaining an unfair advantage and funcom has done nothing but plainly ignore all requests to do something about it.

The second problem is the bans that Funcom is giving out for landclaim.
2. Banned for landclaiming.
Many PvP players on official servers have recently (in the past few months) been banned for ‘‘abuse of the claim system’’. Technically, this rule is written on the forums and you are greeted by a message containing a link to the rules when you join an official server. So funcom does inform people that ‘‘Abuse of the claim system where blocks are placed for no other purpose than to prevent other players’ access to resources and building spots.’’ is not allowed, and will be met with a ban.
There are several problems with this rule in my opinion.

  • For a very very long time in this game it has been integral part of base defense to claim around your base to prevent people from building raid FOBs and trebuchets next to you. It wasn’t until 2020 that funcom made this a rule, and 2021 since they started enforcing it. Players that have built bases before this are, to be honest, screwed. They either take the risk at a ban or spend countless hours destroying landclaim because this game has no way to quickly delete or remove your own buildings.
  • It forces players to make decision they should not really have to make. If you do not claim your base at least a decent amount, you run the risk of other players griefing you, building raidbases next to you, or god forbid, wall you in. Combine this with issue nr 1, reports taking too long, and players may just choose the risk of a ban.
  • There is no clarity in this rule. ‘‘blocks that are placed for no other purpose than to prevent other players’ access are not allowed’’ sounds like a good rule to have, but in reality this is a very silly and vague. I don’t want people to have access to my base, so I built a modest wall around it. This is allowed. But if I don’t want people to build their trebuchet base next to my wall, I have to claim around it. That’s not allowed. Should I arbitrarily make my landclaim into little pretty houses to give them ‘‘purpose’’? Then it would suddenly be allowed.

3. Entire clans get banned.
This is kind of ridiculous. Why does my entire clan, including the level 15 newbie that just bought the game yesterday, get banned for a landclaim that I made 1 year ago? Was that level 15 newbie really supposed to read every rule and then scour every building we owned to make sure that our clan abided by the rules? And nevermind the new guy messaging funcom to plea for an unban, because they will not reply to his ticket before the ban has ended.

4. If you do get banned, there is no information given. No duration, no reason, nothing.
Anyone could’ve done something wrong in any of your clans on any given official server. You will not know the reason or duration unless you find your way to the forums, and end up finding the zendesk ticket system where you can ask and then wait for weeks, maybe even months on a reply.

All these reasons combined have made me come to the opinion that funcom’s server moderation is very poor. A cheater report with clear proof will go unanswered for months, but if you build foundations around your base without giving them purpose, you will get banned when another player feels like reporting you. Ofcourse, for some reason, their report will not take months to take effect…

How to solve this?
I don’t know how Funcom’s team is structured so I can’t really say much on the first issue except that there should be more time or people spent on tickets.
Landclaim bans should first of all never include an entire clan. A player cannot be expected to keep up-to-date on what their entire clan is doing at all times to prevent 1 player from breaking this particular rule. Since funcom ofcourse cannot find out which player builds what, I think that removing the offending structure + a warning to the entire clan suffices in such situations. If funcom still wants to be even more strict, they could remove all clan structures, though I personally find that too much.
And ofcourse, when a player is banned, it should give a message with duration and reason. Not having this and forcing players to send tickets to ask for this information, contributing to problem number 1.

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