Not having a feed system leads to thralls choking out the servers
People feel like taking the the time to feed their thralls is too tedious and time-consuming
People were using Feed Pots as additional food storage for themselves
Solution: I think the best way to handle this is by creating new food items that cannot be used by the player. For thralls it would be “Thrall Rations,” and for pets it would be “Carnivore Feed” and “Herbivore Feed.”
Thrall Rations should be made from Dried Meat. Carnivore Feed should be made from any raw meats, and Omnivore Feed should be made from plant fibers. Placing the appropriate items in the feeding locations should instantly convert it into the new item. The new items should max out in stacks of 100, and they should have an expiration time of 168 hours (7 days).
Each Thrall or Pet should only need to consume one of these items per day. There should also be 4 levels of hunger. Those are: fed, hungry, famished, and starving. If a thrall has eaten that day is should go to the fed status, even if it was at starving before eating.
The thrall should proceed through each status for each one day it has not eaten. So if it had no food to eat today, it should be hungry. If there is no food in the pot the next day at noon, then it should go to famished, and then starving on the day after that. If it is starving and receives no food on the day following that, it should die.
You should also be able to place rations directly into a Thrall’s inventory, and they should eat one per day.
Conclusion:
Thralls will be less likely to flood the areas because there will be a reasonable way for them to expire.
People will only be required to feed their thralls and pets every 10 days with quick and easy to obtain items. If the food items have a 7 day expiration timer, they have 10 thralls and place 70 rations in the pot, the thralls will eat 1 per day on their own. Day 8 they will be hungry. Day 9 they will be famished, and Day 10 they will be in the starving status. As long as you put food in the pot before noon on day 11, they will go back to being fed.
Instantly converting the items placed in the pots to the new items, which can’t be used by players, means people won’t be able to use them as food storage for themselves.
Supposedly, the feeding system itself was causing server performance issues - and supposedly more than it was helping (or they wouldn’t have taken it out).
I don’t think people using the feed pots as pseudo player-food-storage was a real problem, though it was probably unintended for that use.
I don’t think Funcom will be rushing to spend time implementing and balancing a new thrall/pet feeding system, though. It seems they’ve instead elected to have Thralls have a decay timer like buildings do.
I do agree with you in the sense that something, anything, that promoted less spamming of veritable hordes of pets and thralls would be great though.
There really doesn’t seem to be a fix. Short of a pair of sliders that dictate how many thralls/pets you can own at a given time. Fixed to a certain amount on official servers. Single player can adjust how they want.
But then you’d need to institute some sort of decay on followers/pets not placed in the world, but still kept within inventory. So people couldn’t stockpile them.
No matter the system, people are going to abuse it.
Someone from Funcom, at some point, mentioned that they’d wanted us to have less (or should that be “fewer” ?) thralls, so that in turn those thralls could become more powerful. Not that they need more power than they currently have, mind, I think we’re in a good place there.
I always wished they’d have gone down that route, there’s a lot of potential there, be it in upgradeable thralls, “thrall levels” and more.
I could see a way. No mechanically more powerful, but functionally so.
Give them their own skill tree for crafting knowledge.
Tier 1 comes with one type of basic knowledge, related to their type.
Tier 2 comes with a bit more than that.
Tier 3 comes with more still, and Tier 4 Uniques come with the most “starting” knowledge.
And then you can increase their knowledge through training. Have a fixed number of points to use, so you can’t make a super thrall.
But you could then have combination thralls, based on their usage.
Blacksmith + Armorsmith
Cook + Alchemist
And so on. It’d let us teach our thralls. Still somewhat like the Pokemon “Gotta have 'em all” setup. But you’d get to make them more useful than for just a single station.
I actually just wanted to be able to eventually train up my starting thralls to at or near the level of end-game thralls (it should require similar or greater levels of work than just acquiring said end-game thralls outright which is pretty easy at lvl 50+ and a pushover at lvl 60 anyway).
That would also set me free to use the style/look/naming etc of my preference without totally gimping my defenses. Ah, I know, not going to happen at this point. But a guy can still dream.
Then again I also wish the I, II, III, named tiering was meaningful in terms of power, when in fact it means next to nothing, region of origin being much more important (yet impossible for others to see unless you “just know”). Hell it’s difficult enough for me to remember if this or that Archer III came from a the Volcano or the Black Galleon, unless I go and check their HP.
Crafters I’m okay with staying as they are, for some reason, but opinions differ I’m sure.