To prevent thralls from decaying, the player should have to be close to them to refresh their timer.
The current solution for having thralls decay at half the rate of buildings and allowing the player to simply log in fills the official servers with thralls everywhere.
In game modes where you can’t kill thralls owned by other players it makes this issue particularly bothersome, and frankly ruins the gaming experience in most cases.
It also decreases performance quite a bit when you stumble upon a mob of thralls.
And lastly, immersion.
Why would a band of thralls I kidnapped stick around when they’re left alone out in the wilderness?
Also, why do they not drown?
Yesterday I swam past 6 camels grazing the bottom of a lake.
If anyone else have any suggestions to solve this problem, or you’re just as annoyed as me with this problem please support this suggestion.
I’m a returning player and took a break after we got the feeding system.
Even though the game has improved greatly, I was really disappointed to see that my greatest gripe was back to what it was at launch.
I will follow up with more suggestions in this thread as individual replies, and I urge you to do the same so we can see what gets the most traction.
Another suggestion would be to have the purge target player thralls as well.
A lot of players enjoy the purges, and having a purge wasted because it targeted some lone bearer up on Skyfall Ridge could be an incentive to other players to “clean up their mess” so to speak.
I pretty much agree with all of this, the current method is way too exploitable, and needs some tweaks. Another I would suggest would be that the player has to be logged on for at least 10 minutes before they can refresh decay timers, I mean, if you can’t even spare 10 minutes, why even play?
I agree with you about the presence of this big problem.
But your suggestions… I do not love them so much:
Refresh decay of thralls by proximity: too punishing for players. In PvE and PvE-C you need them to defend against purges, but refreshing this way would be pain in the a…
Purge targeting thralls: no effect. Unactive clans do not produce purge points and they’re not purged. It will be just a punishment for active clans without any effect on abandoned thralls.
Player thralls outside of claim radius can be captured/killed by other players: I will change it in “Player thralls not following but at ward or exploring outside of claim radius etc.”. Making every thrall outside claim radius killable will means being able to kill your follower without you being able to defend him or the thrall being able to defend himself, wich will be a new way for trolls to do troll’s things.
The big problem is in the game modes where you can’t kill other player’s thralls, you cannot kill your own thralls too. At least, not in a fast way.
The old feeding system had a well known problem: if you give them tons of fodd they was able to survive clan leaving the server even for a month or plus.
But this was a problem could be present… with the new system the “at least one week with thralls everywhere” is CERTAIN !
Not to speak to the biggest problem: think at a normal clan of 2-3 peoples each of them having their own base.
Maybe after a while 1-2 peoples will leave… than you, the remaining active player, have no fast way to just kill all the useless thralls of your mates !
Sure, there are ways to kill useless thralls, but the truth is they are tedious, resource-requiring, time-requiring methods.
So my suggestions:
1 decay of the thralls should be SHORTER than building decay timers.
The building decay timer is based upon proximity, the thrall’s one is based upon login, so should be at least max default building timer (usually 1 week, now with “summer time” 2 weeks) - 12 hours.
2 being able to kill our own thralls with just a command like we’re able to do with building.
We still have feed boxes and thrall pots. They decay. If the thralls/pets were tied to the boxes/pots by distance, as they were when you had to feed them, you could say that when the box/pot decays, the thralls/pets disappear.
That would force players to place their pets/thralls within range of something they had to continuously refresh if they wanted to keep their subjects in the game.
We currently have a clan that is mostly gone, except for one player who never goes to the jungle area where their leader had a massive base with over 200 thralls. Those thralls are everywhere, floating in the sky, and underwater. It’s annoying.
If there was a box/pot that they were tied to, they’d be gone by now.
His point is that they should be tied to claim radius of the base they are defending. Right now, it is tied to just lgging in in general. Which means that if i am in the jungle, all my thralls in the north get a refresh. IF they are there to defend the purge, i would hope they are defending a base you actually use once every 2 weeks. If not, then why worry about that base going bye bye?
This is the exact solution I’ve advocated for as well.
Yes, make it so that thralls/pet need to have an appropriate feed station within about 25 to 50 foundations, or they’ll decay within a few days. The feed station wouldn’t actually need to be filled with food (since that was over-taxing servers), simply present.
In this way, once a base decayed, or was demolished, the thralls would go their own way (i.e. despawn). IMO, it would strike a healthy balance between the tedious feeding mechanisms introduced last year, and the logistical nightmare of letting inactive clans maintain vast populations with only a 1-2 minute login every week.
That would work too, though I think the landclaim radius is shorter than what the feeding stations used to provide. Either way would be an improvement over what we have now though…
I like the idea of doing something specific while logged in to keep thralls in line, not escaping.
Like always, the pace needs to be taken into account. When the pace fits, everything is fine. However, having a fitting pace doesn’t necessarily tell of an immersive feature. So when a feature is introduced, pace needs to be adjusted by tweaking the rest variables involved. When everything related is tweaked to fit, pace fits.
The intent of this post is by all means not to create more micromanaging. Or a stressfull pace with a sense of obligation to do something in a game. It’s a game after all.
I strive to suggest things within the existing mechanics of the game, hoping this will encourage the devs to look into it.
So the main focus on my part, is to find a solution within existing constraints, that will solve the apparent horde of “ronin” thralls that populate PvE(-C) servers.
When the player refresh a decay timer of a building, the game should scan all the claim area generated by that building and refreshing timer of all the thralls in the area owned by the building’s owner.
The thing is Funcom has stated in the past (in the forums and in a stream) that thrall decay timers ARE reset by proximity … but I really am not sure that this is the case. As a thrall I put a long way from where I normally travel was alive long after 15 days of me going into rendering distance of that area …
That’s what I understood. I merely meant that if we took some existing features and added them to some end(s), we need to examine the rest related features to ensure the progression pace still stays the same (assumed that the current pace fits the customer base).
Yes. AS far as i know, it works on log in only right now. Basically, log in, and the thrall timers reset across the map for you. But i rarely have hundreds of thralls, and play a more guerrilla type warfare…sans the guerrillas . HAving them work more like a building piece would at least remove the decayed base thralls over time.
. HAving them work more like a building piece would at least remove the decayed base thralls over time.