from my discord server (Testerles Conan Exiles Mods):
Better Thralls after the thrall leveling patch or the future of thrall/pet pickup
With the announced thrall leveling system and the informations from the last dev stream (see Developer Stream Recap: November 7th, 2019 for the stream recap) I have to rethink at least on of my current features: thrall/pet pickup.
I doubt the current implementation will work with the new thralls but it should be possible to pickup the legacy (old) thralls and place them down again as new thralls when the patch hits the servers. thats a good option to save existing legacy thralls and keep them valid in the new system. That’s fine and definitive a feature I will keep active for some time after the patch. Later on I will remove it for one simple reason: clean code. After some time no one will have legacy thralls and without legacy thralls we did not need the feature to pick them up.
Lets talk about pickup for the new thralls. The one with stats and growth chances. Will I add a pickup feature for the new thralls? Maybe not… but why?
The way the new leveling system is implemented makes it very exploitable to allow thrall pickup. Place down a thrall, check the random generated stats and growth chance and if you did not like what you get than pickup the thrall and re-place it… that’s exactly what I not want to support. Removing a key feature of the new system. The random factor of the stats system. Catching one thrall and do the place-pickup loop until you have the values you want sounds not like something I want to support. On the other side if you are on a single player game it did not hurt. It’s the same with the current pickup implementation of damaged thralls. On single play it’s on you if you want it or not. On a server it’s not a good idea to allow pickup of damage thralls and replace the thrall at full health.
Conclusion: I’m not sure if I add pickup for the new thralls to Better Thralls and if I add it it’s at least off by default with a big red warning to not activate it if you are on a server. So don’t expect pickup for new thralls directly after the leveling patch. I will definitive wait some time and see what’s the demand is.
so yes I will deactivate/remove the legacy pickup code but not with the update (see above) and the exploitable part is what I see for the new system and not for the old one.