Why are you being intellectually dishonest. I clearly stated in my post under what conditions these items become pay to win. If you choose to ignore facts and then pretend you are right so you can sleep better at night be my guest.
But they wouldnât because that would be wrong.
Thank you for admitting you and many others are wrong. You do see that is what you did there, right?
Yes, very much. step 1 is the only part that is already done. What you see is where all the work is involved. Thing is step 1 is what you are mistakenly calling âcosmeticâ, step 2 is rigging it the skeleton for animation.
And at that point you would be wrong.
Bobâs arm is preprogrammed with certain animations. one of those is swinging an ax. Does not matter what single hand ax it is Bob is only set to swing it one way. What you buy in the bazaar is a new ax for Bob to swing. The swinging animation has 0 to do with the actual model other then telling Bob how to swing it.
Once again, does not matter how many times you call a watermelon a peach, it doesnât make it one.
No, you are saying a textured model mesh is a skin and it is not. Not matter how many times you say it and model mesh is not a skin.
They look different because they are actually different.
But that literally is just comparing actual skins. Remove the textures from those two axes and they will still look different, the peachs wont.
Oh no, there is only a certain group that think that. Iâm going to say kids, or those that know little about game development.
A common animation is not a common base.
No only a very few.
And prove it with every post.
No, we call it beef stake because steak can be applied to any meat. Even us.
The sad part is, you are serious with that answer.
I weep for our lost educational system.
Youâre right, itâs the âMoney for Nothingâ attitude, just like in the Dire Straits song. âThat ainât workinâ, thatâs the way you do it!â
And now all of us â artists and programmers â have mouth-breathing pieces of shŃt gleefully telling us how weâre soon going to be âreplaced by LLMsâ 
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That is a completely different bucket of snakes.
I actually have done CG art. But are we not our own worst critics?
Iâd spend quite literally days rendering something out, just to delete it, reset light or some other setting.
What I did was staging, I did some modeling and a fair amount of texturing, a bit of animation 
But Iâd spend weeks staging, and rendering. Finally get something acceptable, post it in a gallery only to get a âthanks for the nice background picâ. Ya I put my time and electric it to staging the models I bought, and rendering that picture, so you could have a free backgound picture on your PC
Pay 2 win isnt the point. The point is making any new weapon at the bazaar/bp is more than a âskinâ
Damn is that song just as relevant now as it was in the 80s!
Not that it matters as it was already used but I pulled most of my galleries, social media, etc.,⊠I will not post my art online anymore. It was mostly for exchanging of ideas and discussion as Iâve known for some time that I had no financial future in it. Writing was on the wall and everyone passed by it chewing gum and spitting about their lattes.
Talking about being influenced by art I just realized I kinda referenced this with lattes XD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHcmnowjfrQ
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It feels like you are, because you keep insisting that Funcomâs artists are doing something they arenât. Here, let me illustrate it by oversimplifying your line of discussion 
- Kapoteeni: The so-called âclassic Conan Exilesâ that Bathory and co are asking for is a lot more complicated than just making an old version available, because they also want Bazaar.
- Nemisis: Bazaar is just skins, reused over and over, reskinned over and over. It would be easy to keep adding it to the classic version.
- DarthPhysicist: No, itâs not just skins. Itâs more than that.
- Nemisis: But theyâre not 100% new items, so itâs all just redrawn things with the same animations and collision boxes.
- DarthPhysicist, Taemien, DeaconElie: No, itâs not âjust redrawn thingsâ, thereâs a lot more to it.
- Nemisis: If itâs not 100% new from scratch, it probably takes 10% of the time it would take for a brand new item. An axe is an axe, so every new axe is just a reskin.
- CodeMage: No, youâre using the term âreusingâ and âreskinningâ wrong. Here are some examples of reuse in the base game. And reskinning seems to be rare in the Bazaar.
- Nemisis: Look, here are 3 examples of very different axes. But they only differ in looks, so itâs just a reskin.
- CodeMage: Hereâs an analogy that explains the difference between making new models and reskinning. I hope that helps.
- Nemisis: Fair enough, I was using âreskinningâ wrong.
- Nemisis: keeps calling the cosmetic changes âreskinningâ in pretty much every subsequent post
But okay, letâs say the wording doesnât matter, weâre not doing phrasing anymore. I get what youâre trying to say, because I havenât forgotten the context: youâre saying that itâs all just cosmetic, as opposed to functional, so having a âclassic Conan Exilesâ with Bazaar would be easy.
Youâre wrong.
Take whichever version of the game you want as your âclassicâ baseline. As soon as the game deviates enough from that baseline, the Bazaar items canât just be dropped into the old version; they would either have to make a classic version of the item or not offer it in the classic edition at all.
If youâre interested in the specifics of how the game can change to make this happen, ask people who have spent a lot of time in the devkit â we have a few of them in this thread.
For my part, I have a hunch that the game has already changed enough from its pre-AoS state to make it infeasible to simply reuse Bazaar items in the âclassicâ version, even if you could just plop the Bazaar tech itself into the pre-AoS game with minimal effort (and thatâs a big, shaky, unlikely âifâ).
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You stated conditions under which those items can be used at a lower level than other similar items. That doesnât necessarily make them pay to win. To be pay to win, they should offer an advantage over normal gameplay.
So letâs see, you need to be level 30 to unlock Master Mason and be able to build base-game T3 pieces. There are people here who claim they can get to level 60 in just one hour. I play at a more leisurely pace, but weâre still talking about level 30, not 60, so it takes me less than an hour to get to level 30. On the other hand, Iâm still pretty damn experienced in this game compared to a newbie, so letâs estimate that a newbie would take 1 day to get to level 30.
The question is, which value do we take to reason about this? We could say 1 day, but thatâs for a newbie, and a newbie wonât have an unfair advantage over an experienced player just because they can build some T3 stuff. So letâs take an hour, instead.
Do you really think that if you spend your first hour on a server looting T3 mats you canât normally craft and using them to build T3 building pieces instead of following the normal progression, youâll have an unfair advantage over anyone?
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Ok are you saying then that each new axe that is released gets all new animations done? Bin knows how to swing but not âwhatâ to swing. So each axe is reprogrammed or coded or whatever itâs called to know that the first heavy attack is the leaping slash?
It was my understanding that âanimationâ of the attack is âhardcodedâ into every axe. So when they make a new one, they position it in bobs hand, and make sure it looks right during each animation.
If they redo that for each time a weapon or item is created no wonder it takes so bloody long. It just seems there would be an easier way to do it. Thatâs why I kept asking which step takes more time, bobs initial actions or the work of designing the new axe.
If the step 2 takes longer, I learned something. Iâd have thought the initial work with bob would have taken more time.
I understand that the current version of Conan would not be compatible with a âclassicâ Conan due to the coding being different.
But that would ultimately depend on how far back a person wanted a classic server. If they did just before the first Age, wouldnt it be fairly similar? Have they changed the base coding that much that an introduction of a bazaar to classic servers would not work?
Iâd certainly understand it if people wanted the EA version. And I can recall watching a breakdown video year and years ago of a guy explaining why duping will always be possible in Conan. It had something to do with how the base coding was, or something like that, and at that point it was not possible to fix unless. They started from scratch which will never happen.
Iâm betting it could be done, adding a bazaar to a pre Age time, likely the restraint is the work vs profit problem. Although Iâd bet people would still buy things from it if such servers were available.
Heck if I got my dream Iâd take Conan back to before followers could follow you. It was true player va player. If such a server existed and we had a bazaar selling items - weapons, armor and build pieces Iâd be a buyer for sure.
The illusion system is probably all it would take.
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The animation isnât really in the ax. Just the rigging to attach it to Bobs hand; and maybe a few positioning animations.
The attack animation with the ax is in Bob, not the ax. What you are buying is the ax, Bob already knows how to swing it.
Iâm not sure. I wasnât kidding when I said you should ask people who actually work with the devkit. I opened the devkit once or twice, saw some of the blueprints in there, and ran away screaming 
My hunch â and like I said, itâs just a hunch â is that itâs already more work than just including the .pak file from the new game in the classic game. For example, they reclassified which weapons are epic, which are legendary, and what those terms even mean for the gameplay. Does that mean the data tables are different? Is it modular enough to not matter? I donât really know, but that just gives you an example of things you have to consider.
Even so, the Bazaar in the classic edition would be living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, they would make a change that they would need to backport into the classic edition if they want to keep selling Bazaar items there. Just a novel weapon effect would do it, now imagine a deeper revamp. 
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I find this subject pretty fascinating due to my personal experience with other games that have done a âclassicâ experience.
The one that comes to most peopleâs mind is World of Warcraft. When Blizzard offered the classic experience, they did so in a way that was⊠well interesting. They didnât have a functional copy of the original release of the game and instead had to use a version set to just before their first expansion, Burning Crusade.
Well⊠this suited them just fine. Balance changes were already done and it would have made for the best âvanillaâ experience and allow them very little effort into unlocking content over time to get that vanilla WoW experience. At least once it was all setup.
That setup wasnât easy. Getting the 2004 code to work with Windows 10 systems (and 64-bit OS I might add) was one thing. But also setting up a modern payment system and user verification system on a very old game was another. Canât simply cut and paste in the one from the live version.
Then you had to make sure the game works on modern CPUs, Mobos, and GPUs (shouldnât be too hard, but tweaks are needed). And do so out of the box.
There was considerable effort across the board. And one that was a bit of a risk at that. What if they spend all this effort, resources, man hours, and payments on hardware and setup only to have less than a few thousand users. Thatâd been a catastrophic failure.
A failure Blizzard feared for years and why it took them so long to actually try it. Why did they actually even bother to try in the first place?
Well two major reasons. One being the player ran servers being quite popular. As well as the success of WoWâs major competitor for decades, Everquestâs own progression servers.
While Blizzard put the effort into giving a classic experience on modern hardware. Daybreak (or rather Sony Online Entertainment when they started this) took a different route. So when you login to a progression server on EQ1 or EQ2 you donât use another client. You use the modern client.
How the servers work is they have switches that limit your level, your abilities, and whether certain zones are accessible and whether certain NPCs spawn or items drop. This gives a âclassic-likeâ experience using the modern version of the game.
The benefits is they donât need to use heavy development setup to work it out. They donât need to use multiple branches of development. And they get to use ALL of their modern microtransaction shops on everything.
The end result was astounding to say the least. I remember when they released on server set for EQ1 TLP, they used a prototype server hardware setup. It had a server capacity of 10,000 instead of 5,000. It filled up and used the queue system (developed for a previous TLP server) which prompted them to launch another sister server, which also had a queue. So over 20,000 players were trying to login at once.
Now⊠hereâs the problem. Blizzard doesnât see the same ratio of players to live to classic servers as the Everquests see from their live to TLP/TLE servers.
The reason I bring that up is while the Classic servers for WoW seem to do well. They arenât as universally successful as EQ1 and EQ2 do within their own communities.
Thereâs no guarantee that Conan Exiles could have a thriving classic server. Much less a whole dedicated development team and project to it. You have to understand WHY people tend to play on progression servers or classic servers in these games.
The main reason is because of the experience of starting over alongside everyone else getting that community wide starting fresh experience (trust me, its fun). For EQ, EQ2, and WOW, you need to go to unauthorized sources if you want your own experience unless Daybreak or Blizzard offers it. In Conan Exiles. You have singleplayer, private servers, and (had) Blitz servers.
So we already have authorized if not Funcom-provided sources of that experience. And donât get me wrong. I love the experience. I have started over due to wipe, new servers, and rerolls about 2-3 dozen times. There is a certain appeal to starting over with everyone else on a server.
But the problem with Conan Exiles versus a game like Everquest or World of Warcraft is getting back to speed is much much quicker in CE. What takes months in a game like EQ or WoW takes days in CE. Its not a game that lends well to that. Its a Sandbox game vs a themepark game. The content comes mostly from how you play the game and how you interact with other players, or for our solo folks how they like to express themselves in game.
None of that is especially enhanced in Conan Exiles as much as it is in those themepark MMORPGs. I mean in EQ you could take a while to get to finish a current expansion and your friends and you could take a while, dropping in and out randomly working towards your goals. Where in Conan Exiles, you could literally get to 60 and get all recipes and such in a weekend your friend has to work and when youâre together again the disparity is way more apparent then maybe getting a FBSS in a weekend of Lower Guk.
With all that known, is it worth it to Funcom to put in the effort? Bring the 2017 (or even the 2022) version of the game to modern specs and get the shop working, or simply using switches to turn stuff âoffâ in the modern version in a new server setting?
I donât think so. I doubt there is even enough people to fill a single server.
The less than half a dozen looking for the âclassicâ or Age of Sorcery Conan Exiles experience are stuck using a google search to find the ways to provide themselves with the experience and all the limitations and issues that come with that.
I would also point out that those looking for a bug free experience arenât going to find it with earlier versions. Thereâs definitely some rose colored nostalgia happening there. I have a decent memory of many complaints (even more than Age of War) during both time periods mentioned (2017 and 2022).
Also any procedural and policy changes Funcom has done since those dates would still be in effect in a separate branch of the game. Weâre not going to see non-FOMO bazaar bundles turn into $9.99 DLC you can steam exploit into getting for a few bucks.
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Thatâs actually a good idea, but it was brought in with sorcery and Iâd bet people wanting a classic Conan would t want sorcery.
Granted they could likely peel that code out but again, itâs time invested and they just wonât do it.
Ok thatâs what I was trying to get at earlier and maybe I didnât call it right.
Im calling that âthe animationâ, the move set.
Fair enough I understand what youâre saying. I guess too bad they didnât have an older version saved somewhere they could use then, and forget upgrades and the bazaar. Seems that might work rather then trying to cobble sections of code together in hopes of it working
For anyone interested in trying out out a âClassic+â version of the game I do have a server up for it.
Iâve stripped out most of the new changes that undermine the core survival and crafting of the game, Iâve changed all legendaries to be tied crafting, you no longer get legendaries from chests, instead you get an item that you get to craft into an item and recieve the perks of the weapon being crafted by a thrall so itâs actually part of crafting.
sorcery is gone, horses are gone (for now at least), al merayah is gone.
high value loot such as epic equipment now drops rarely, in general you wont be able to get an epic or legendary weapon or armor before 60. you actually have to craft it. you also arent able to run into well of skelos and come out with 200 dragon powder anymore.
Iâve restored the thrall conversion time because thralls now have value again. Iâve made a lot of changes to make it more like the game it used to be but with a few improvements.
Iâd very much appreciate if anyone took the time to check out the mod and server, its a very quick download of 47mb.
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Oh, those are available, at least for PC. Several people mentioned it. Hereâs one post about it.
But again, the problem there is that Funcom wonât turn that into an out-of-the-box option, much less host servers for it, because why would they? Why would they invest into an edition that would cut into their profits?
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True Funcom doesnât owe us the option of a classic server, though if people were happy with just an old version of the game they may have, Iâm sure Funcom could revert a couple dead servers to this, with no new cost.
But, since they wouldnât release the save files for the servers they merged years ago so people could enjoy their games and builds, I canât see them ever releasing to us an old version of the game so we could host our own.
Wishful thinking. (Itâs still funny to me that Wildcard did it with Ark and saved many, many people years of work)