sorry to bring bad news this coming from someone with thousands and thousands of hours in game , and had played and tested this feature at beta, and also watching closely what @Kikigirl is reporting :
Disclaimer : i am reporting the actual reality of what is happening on beta client using persistent worlds (beta servers) , some of this issues might not be as bad in SP or CoOp, as it is in online game,
as seen on the beta, your settlements will feel more deserted as they are right now. your settlement will NOT feel more alive. funcom claiming the settlement will feel alive is not true.
they are and will bug out, and dissapear, some they will autoplace in the world once you break em on the wheel of pain, and dissapear, with no entry on the logs.
they are and will stop moving shortly as they are placed (this happens oon beta servers, and it will be much worse on battle hardened live servers when this joke goes live.
crafters will consume your limited slots for thralls, and you wont be able to have more than 1 or 2 outpost in the map functioning with crafter thralls, (very limited) (rest will be totally deserted, with no crafters , meaning you will end up with empty husks)
thralls dissapear , to god knows where, and you cant dismiss or rescue them , but they will still take your thralls slot.
the ai is dumb, and they will often block doors,
they will open doors, and allow enemies go in (unless you build in certain way) this affects pvp.
removes the liberty on how you want your settlement to look, you have absolutely no control on how your settlement works, this feature even overrides your emotes placed on workers, funny enough the system does NOT work on fighters , archers, bearers and performers, yet it is forced on workers.
this is an imposed change that removes one of those very few things that did not had any issues , and replaces it with one that brings TONS AND TONS Of bugs , problems, and inconcistensies.
beta servers has not seen a SINGLE fix since Age of heros “beta” launched. so expect no fixes on launch, and expect hotfixes that are NOT tested by the community in a couple of weeks, meaning that this hotfix might break even more other systems, since it is NOT tested. we all know how much QA sucks for funcom do we?
the fall thru foundations has not been fixed, and it does affects the crafter thralls as anything else already in the game.
no major bugs has been fixed in the current beta , in fact VERY few smaller bugs has, if any.
brace yourself to one if not the worst update Funcom has done to this game, it will break many things on top of the things that are already broken.
if funcom was smart it will delay the settlement system, it is a total mess, filled with a insane ammount of bugs. they need to work more on it, fix stuff, have this fixes tested in beta servers so it get more fixing, before bringing a mess to the public, which is where it currently stands and @Kikigirl will not let me lie about it.
do hope a ray of wisdom hits people like @den and others. at funcom, do not shoot yourself on the foot. this is not ready for the public.
Well, i honestly don’t expect it all to go swimmingly what with it being quite a substantial change. Who knows what will happen until it actually is released though.
Personally i’d say just prepare for the possibility of not wanting to have your valuable shieldwrights/bladesmiths out and pre-craft all that you reasonably want and need for yourself, thralls and whatever other situation.
Worst case scenario you won’t want to place any workers until a month or so after release.
Until they do actually release this though i’ll just keep an eye on what people say about the beta and hope some priority fixes are introduced to it.
this is exactly what this post sumarizes is the bugs being reported and confirmed, and knowing we are almost already at octuber it is clear we are not getting fixes on testlive. or fixes that people can actually test to see if they do not break something else. (it usually does).
based on experience i can tell that most if not all of the bugs reported will go live, and they will launch a few hotfixes here and there in the following weeks, with fixes that no one tested with the potention of breaking more stuff as it had has happened in the past. do wish to be wrong i swear… but as of this moment it does not look good,
you know what people say. “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”, i am just telling people to prepare , based on how things are right now on the beta. i do hope this settlement system gets pushed out and more tested and worked on with the beta testers, until it is in a reasonable shape to be sent out. it does look awful right now it really does.
most people will not read that recomendation, and when people start loosing or having your thralls bug out , getting killed or dissapearing, then complaints will come in large volumes. also people should not rely on such things, if they had a functioning real public beta program and have the people fixing stuff working with the community , that will be more than happy to assist and help, (at no cost for funcom) .
I am simply not ruling out the possibility of a release date delay or -proper- untested fix yet.
From what i read, the former is needed and the latter would be a risky thing to do on Funcom’s part and unlikely to be a proper release, but i am not ruling out either.
Edit: i do agree that if this gets released with crafter thralls disappearing and whatnot that it will create a lot of preventable traffic and loss of good will.
do hope you are right, pray Set, Derketo, Mitra, zath, and yog, that this is delayed, and more mature,
got that deja vu feeling of funcom using officials as the real Beta testing enviroment…
if it only was that part…, the issues are multiple, (oulined the major ones on my OP) and in general what i can tell the update fails to achieve what it was supposed to improve, your settlements will look TErribly deserted, compared to what you can do now with your inventory thralls.
i agree, its and unasked change and useless, break a system that was working, make settlements more desert, if i had two stove with two cooks now one will be empty. We will never enjoy the thrall variations if i got a one lonely fisher man all other cooks will be obsolette and i cant store them anymore to varieaty time to time, i will have to waste it to not block thralls slots. Then some one will say play single player, not its boring, go private server, some private server are more restritive than officials. i was chocked to see on devstream they was considering to reduce thrall cap instead of rising it up.
Right off, this is my first time testing a CE Beta. It has been interesting to say the least.
I also have thousands of hours in game as well.
I’ve come to some conclusions; if anything testing has corroborated my opinions from previous updates without the knowledge I have now. Strengthened them. What we see is a symptom inherent in the processes in place.
I will respond to your points though:
The reason for this is because the actions that the worker thralls perform breaks. This can be achieved on purpose to complete stationary or by simply playing with most actions gone without interference. If left alone, sometimes they’ll be “lively” for minutes or hours if you’re lucky.
I have not had issues with crafter thralls disappearing and autoplacing only occurs with fighters.
Yes for crafters absolutely.
I am not sure what you mean here, there’s currently no limitation to amount of bases in the new functionality. As long as crafters have their needs met: fire, bed and chair, they’ll stay in that vicinity.
They’re disappearing to the highlands 0.0.0 point. Sometimes you can retrieve them and sometimes not. I’m happy to report that although I lost Sully to the dreaded issue with disappearing after popping off of a wheel unattended, after I had attempted to use the rescue option and received the message he could not be found, the next day after server reset he was gone off my list. Not good but also not my problem anymore.
That’s always been a thing. I’ve only had issues with Liu Fei’s apparition blocking my doors - this isn’t a thrall issue, it’s a quest issue where he presents himself as a mesh.
This was one of the most tone deaf additions ever. It doesn’t matter if it is for PVP or PVE, it lets in the world AND potentially causes a host of issues with calculations. Bar patrons also opening doors is driving me nuts. Luckily I’ve cut off access to doors for my workers because holy hot damn, no way in hell are they getting access to open doors!!!
Can confirm, if they’re performing settlement actions they do not perform the emote you set them too. Only the fully broken ones will emote.
Agreed. Whatever is intended for the future right now it is a shell that fails in both execution and functionality. Not even the thrall crafting bonuses UI in benches work fully as intended; often they are overriding, there’s little in terms of selection and too much defaulting instead of player setting remaining.
This is not correct. I have not had issues with inventory sort method problems since I reported it and fixed within a couple of days, it has now been weeks - except now a separate issue with inventory items auto slinging back into the spot they were intended to be moved from and that only started occurring once I placed a Tavern Bar. There’s only 2 (a possible 3rd) other Bars on the server and a great distance from me (I am the jungle witch).
While I have not experienced falling through foundations and actually being stuck, I know it has been reported from other Betas. This is incredibly disappointing. An issue that has been happening for 5 months now.
Nothing major for ALL modes, but there has been a fix to an exploit that has been arguably a tipping of balance in PVP; it has been beneficial to PVErs too but not in terms of the Player vs. Player nature of PVP.
I agree that a delay is required. Now that I’ve been testing companions, they’re broken for me too and I didn’t do any of the known things that would cause them to break. It has been a test of patience, a hindrance on gameplay and entirely disappointing, yet again.
That there are the large amount of pre-existing, some years long and in some cases since EA… (I also have many more to write btw)… anyway I said it before: I truly believe that if these were addressed that it would give a good base to build upon for new content. I’ve also mused in the past that new players experiencing some of these things can be insurmountable, I get second hand embarrassment. Recently I also stated that if I happened upon a game with these issues, I probably wouldn’t play it.
I’m being very critical here of course and I don’t want this to be in an echo chamber. I’ve already communicated what I like. But what I like is overshadowed by being forced into playstyles I don’t want, a HUGE new change to gameplay and the amount of issues already present.
they consume your slots, so as a 10 man clan you have 200, crafters will eat that limit, you will have less fighters and archers etc.
i am talking whats happening to thralls in general, imagine loosing a hard to get fighter thrall, due to this. …
i was refering that there has been not a single fix deployed to test live since it AoH launched, nothing has been fixed , so people can test such fixes.
you have no idea how much i admire your resiliance and your tests, point is they will be deploying a broken system, there is no reason to do this , its DUMB, and they are shooting themselves. because all is coming is pain and complaints. …
your words holds a lot of power, since i believe no one knows better the issues of this updates than youself.
Only if you just started last week. Doesn’t even crack my top ten.
Don’t worry, they have no feet left by now.
This update will make little difference, at worst it’s going to screw up your thrall count.
Thing is the biggest bug in game right now have not been fixed. Still logging in with thralls up to their necks in foundations, Still dropping through when some one starts a purge.
The issue with this next update isn’t the bugs it adds, it’s the bugs that didn’t get fixes. The ones everyone has been waiting on since the age of war hit.
Thanks for explaining. Sure ya that could limit your bases but then there needs to be decisions I suppose… decisions that wouldn’t need to be made if this wasn’t a thing XD
I’ve never been big, even when fighter thralls were strong, on having a ton of thralls. They’re a lot to deal with. I get many players like having them but they’re mostly useless except as snake pits for me.
But as we know, the call to limit thralls did not fix the biggest problems with performance, so moot, and now we’re all stuck with the limits imposed in 2021. I can understand the concern of a possible additional limit.
Yes but the distinction is important. Worker thralls also don’t pop off the wheels on their own. There’s something happening specifically to fighters; it could be a change with thralls in general, a result of the settlement system changes or something else entirely affecting it.
Not an announced change, no. I completely agree with you that Funcom needs to adopt a segmented Beta with planned updates that includes Beta patchnotes so that we can test those updates as they’re fixed. But what I am saying is that I DID experience one of the UI sort issues as soon as I started, reported it on September 3rd, and on the 6th upon second server reset it was fixed. At first I was like ??? Then as the days went by I realized I could use Heaviest First as I WANTED. I use Heaviest First with my inventory, all benches and containers without issue anymore. This had been the catalyst for me that forced ME to uninstall the first time.
So what you’re saying is incorrect. They did, in fact, deploy a fix. There are perhaps more but none I’ve encountered to say that it has happened with others. Of course not the fixes that everyone wants or everything that should but it did happen.
so i was doing beta testing at that time, and did not communicate a fix, or what was fixed ? was it only that? i mean, how can i test soemthing if they dont say it?
well it looks the important bugs are still there, and will most likely go live, and well, you know , we have been here several times with their " beta" before.
i just cant undertand their thought process, if there is any
My guess is that there was a fix that was supposed to be implemented upon Beta release and didn’t and when it was reported, they went “oops”.
The most likely thing that happened was that it was being worked on all along and by end of week was when it was ready to be deployed and they could -jam it in-. If that is the case then I am not sure what their expectation of testing numbers are supposed to be in relation to getting certifications done for consoles enough to have the Live released… less than a week and sure ya most of the content creators did their dues and admin spawning but… not in terms of testing overall gameplay over a period of time.
Get your bottoms in here, and please talk through these issues. Now is not the time for you to be snickering at the purple gassy thing in your white tower. These are some pretty catastrophic allegations regarding the Settlement System.
LET ME BE CLEAR: I love this game, and Funcom I want you to succeed. If you deliver this what Hansel and Kikigirl described, you will absolutely be killing this game. Period. Why implement your “Living Settlement” if the settlers are dead or missing after they are placed? Sounds to me like this whole thing is simply a GD liability.
And on that liability front - why the heck have you not considered supporting a switch to TOGGLE this system OFF ?!
Don’t remove how I want my settlement to look, please!
Don’t impose a change that isn’t ready, and is going to cause my artisan crafters to fall off the world!!
Remember this gem? Hahaha. You and I were the ones that found this vortex in the map, and couldn’t figure out a damned thing to do about it. Remember when every single thrall that fell through the world would come out of this aperture, and hit the ground in the highlands KO’d by trunch? Good times.
i just wanted to share this screen in case some people think i dont know what i am talking about or if i have the background to provide an unbiased opinion of the state of the current system,
i am about to hit 18k hours in the game, (its around 12k really as i do leave my pc on at night with the game running on the background, (god bless solar energy! :). by the ammouint of hours i got in this game, i think its safe to say that i am quite “intimate” with it. i know ever little dark corner of it.
as you can imagine with the time invested i also love the game and i want it to be succesful as well, it pains me to see what they might be trhowing out to us, this update as it is rigght now is going to be painful, and @Kikigirl does believe the same, this is not ready, and its implementation is awful, they need to kill some bugs before going to public, those fixes needs to be tested. and they need to implement controls for players, so we decide, how the system will work based on what we want. (this system needs to be flexible enough to please a large selection of play styles, and cant be forced on everyone as it is right now)
also, you should keep the ability (even if it is only cosmetic) the inventory crafters to show on benches, remember this should be about freedom! … and since this is mostly for the look and feel, it needs to be fully under player control, otherwise whtas the point? of something if it cant be controlled?
You know what? HAPPY BIRTHDAY, my dear sweet Brother!!
As for the game, remember that time recently you told me how to do that thing with a thing and that was the way the nasty cheaters were getting into the terrain? That I then reported and you summarily bombed into oblivion?
While testing that glitch out, I was dumped into this world “entry” hole. Multiple times. You’re really good at pulling threads, I wonder if there’s anything you can assert about this that might help the Dev Team (or Blunt Instrument me) in stamping this out before the Settlement System drops.
You know what would make a terrific birthday present, Funcom? How about doing some communication here with your players, and favoring an old man with 13k+ hours in your beautiful game with some BETTER MANAGEMENT decisions.
