Yes, most of us PVE players feel like we need a certain number of thralls for two main purposes: defending from the purge and making our bases look alive. Those of us who are willing to compromise and sacrifice – instead of just saying “I don’t want this” – are willing to let go of that second purpose, or at least trim it down to essentials. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find those who are willing to give up on the first cause.
There are many motivators for PVE players, but I would hazard to say that two biggest among them are: 1) building, and 2) collecting (weapons, armors, thralls, pets, etc.)
As a corollary, PVE players tend to build differently from PVP players. Every post I’ve read on these forums, every image or video I’ve seen, tells me that PVP players build their bases to be defensible. You try to secure your bases from thieves, raiders, purges, etc. PVE players build for aesthetics. Our bases are often sprawling villages or castles or temples or other poorly defensible creative jumble.
On top of that, PVE clans will invariably have more than one base, and perhaps additional builds on top of those. It’s completely normal for PVE(-C) servers to have public map rooms near obelisks, to facilitate fast travel for everyone. One or more clans will also build an arena, with battle standards, for the whole server. Sometimes there will be more than one clan offering arenas.
Point being that PVE players usually don’t form a clan to bunch up in one base. Although that would be a fun exercise for an “architect”, nobody really wants that; people on PVE generally don’t want to “crash on someone else’s couch”.
Which is why PVE players argue they need more thralls – for purges – than a PVP player might find reasonable. You know better than I do, but I would guess PVP players want to use their thralls as a layer of defense against raids. We don’t have raids, but I would wager our purges are a bigger source of concern to us than to a PVP player.
Don’t get me wrong, none of this means that PVE players want: 1) unlimited followers, or 2) risk-free purges. I’m just trying to explain why “you just need 20 good thralls” is not going to sound satisfactory to most PVE players.
It’s really a hard problem to solve, and behind it is another problem that’s even harder: overbuilding on official servers. I’ve finally decided to jump back onto officials and I did a “tour” of PVE-C and PVE servers in my region, creating a character and running around the server to see if it’s worth settling down. I’m pretty sure I’ve done close to 10 servers now, and more than half of them are hideous.
There’s one where a clan built an abominable hodgepodge of structures spreading all over the Oasis of Nekhet, with a “road” going from it down to Shattered Springs. Parts of that mishmash are finished T3 builds, but most of it is T1 crap that looks like the Conan Exiles equivalent of those kids’ drawings that parents put up on their fridges to make their kids feel good. The cherry on top? Someone in global chat said “Yeah, it’s been like that since I joined the server.” A whole landmark area completely ruined.
Then there’s another one where a clan has huge sprawling castles west and north of New Asagarth. And I mean massive stuff. My Citadel is a relatively big build, but these things dwarf it. They extend into Godsclaw Passage, ruining somewhere between 25% and 50% of iron nodes there. It’s nuts. And it’s even more nuts that I spent a few hours on that server alone, during “PVP hours” (i.e. server prime time) and the owner hasn’t shown up once. I imagine they pop in periodically to refresh their stuff and then go back offline.
The crown jewel is the server where I used to play before going on hiatus. There’s a clan there that I won’t name, whose behavior was the final nail in the coffin where I laid down my opposition to the follower cap. When @JJDancer talks about a clan that accidentally let one of their builds decay and there were 500+ followers in that space, that’s the clan. They had already built several massively sprawling builds before I went on hiatus. I visited the server yesterday and it was much worse than before. They’re everywhere. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they’ve paved over roughly half of the Exiled Lands with their stuff. Anywhere you go, you risk the server FPS going into the red and the ping getting stuck at 1020 while the server churns and sweats, trying to deal with their stuff.
So overbuilding is very real, and it’s very much a problem. It’s a problem in terms of server performance, and it’s a problem in terms of discouraging new players.
And it’s a hard problem to solve, too. The purge doesn’t do anything to solve that problem or even discourage that kind of behavior. What’s more, Funcom has officially confirmed that the purge isn’t designed to deal with overbuilding. Its purpose is to 1) “control and demolish unused buildings that players do not use”, and 2) “give players meaningful, challenging content to create usefulness of their buildings and forts”. I would argue it doesn’t do the former at all – you can refresh your builds indefinitely while keeping your purge meter empty – and the latter is nice, but doesn’t help with overbuilding at all.
The follower cap will help, a little bit, by making those huge sprawling builds much less defensible for active players. But it won’t deal with those who simply refresh their overbuilt monstrosities. We need a different, better system for that.