I’m going to add something to this in the form of a hypothetical analogy.
Imagine the fantasy of each official server having assigned admins. Three per server, 8 hour shifts in a 24 hour timeframe. An ideal fantasy.
You still wouldn’t receive the quality of moderation that you would see on a private server. Many of those moderators will be doing an actual job. Not a hobby, and not something they are passionate about. Most of them will likely not even have played Conan Exiles, and many will not even be gamers themselves.
Which means much of the jargon and culture will be lost on them. They will be doing a job by following something akin to flash cards to try and measure an infraction. In the case of building, they will be sizing everything up by examples printed by the side of the monitor and the idea of aesthetics will be overlooked.
Since they don’t actually play the game, the location will likely not be a factor either. And since they don’t game, they won’t be able to tell the intent or purpose either. I could even admit that some of this may even be happening to this extent now, simply because I do not know exactly who the admins of officials are. I know most of the developers and community managers do play the game and play it often. But they’re not server admins to my knowledge.
But server moderation, even at a fantastic level, would not give any different results. Maybe the tickets will be resolved quicker, but the quality of resolution would likely drop dramatically.
As Hel said, if you play on official, you do need a tough skin. You need to understand that players aren’t going to play nice. They are going to use every underhanded trick, available.
This even includes goading you enough to break a rule and reporting you for it. How many posts have we seen where someone agitates an ‘innocent’ player into saying some bad word then they get banned for using the bad word, yet they didn’t start the altercation.
All the logs say in that situation is that he got raided or killed (PVP’d), the logs can’t show intent, they can’t show purpose. Just xyz building damaged and someone died. Which looks like normal play. But then they see the bad word and that is NOT normal play and isn’t allowed. Logs can’t show context (usually).
This happens daily. It happened yesterday. It happened today. Its going to happen tomorrow.
When you all choose to play on official, you have to cross your T’s and dot your I’s. You have to accept bad things will happen from really bad players. You will need to be clever in your retaliation. You need to stay within the parameters of the rules. Because they WILL use those rules against you. To these players, that is part of the game.
I experienced alot of this when I played Archeage several years ago. That was an utterly brutal game where intrigue, betrayal, underhanded tactics, and even illegal crap was in play. I remember seeing a guild leader get banned because when the guild obtained castles, someone reported them for RMT. And with the first week’s taxes in, they had more gold then a normal player and they had to wait a week before it could be rectified.
Meanwhile the ones who reported launched an attack scheduled in that time knowing without the leader, without the gold available to the guild, no defenses could be set up. They literally used the reporting system and its automation as a tactic against the guild in question.
Other tactics used were using spies inside of Teamspeak servers and Discord to listen in to directions and plans being had. There was even attempts of malware, account hacks, and other stuff to get an advantage.
Most of the PVP in that game was NOT in the game. I’m reminded of a particular devious action I took outside of game. On our server our guild had around 300 members, with about 150 active at any given endeavor during peak time. There were larger guilds. But none of them matched the coordination. We could within minutes get two full raids to hammer a location. Because of that, it looked like our numbers were much higher.
Well instead of denying those allegations. People thought we were dropping far more than that, and I decided to use those allegations to our benefit. I doctored a screenshot of our guildpage in game. Instead of showing 300 members, it showed well over 3000. With about 1700 guildmates online.
Some smarter players deduced it was fake. Some. But even they were unable to show where it was faked. They simply refused to believe it. But MOST did believe it and the server went into total hysteria. Entire guilds simply broke up, the server lost about a quarter of the population as people simply quit thinking there was no longer any point. And for the next few weeks, we did trade runs and raid bosses entirely unopposed.
Not a bad victory for someone playing a healer role. Though admittedly that was harmless compared to some of the BS others were willing to pull.
You’re seeing some of that here on officials. And its the nature of official servers. MMORPGs have had this sort of thing for over 20 years. Survival games have had it since their inception. Hell Minecraft had/has it.
Officials have it the worst, but private servers of large communities can see some of it too. A coordinated admin team can mitigate it. But human beings will do their best to really malf things up with other people if their determined enough.
But then again this is why I don’t play Archeage anymore. Why I won’t touch officials. And if I do play on a 70/70 server its usually lowkey and not heavily competitive. I am too old for that crap nowadays. I know what PVP can do. I don’t even think all PVP is that bad (as I still engage in PVP in smaller scales now). But the drama I can do without.
Anyone who is playing on officials is choosing to be in the wild west. Where its dog eat dog. And the law will hang anyone who irks them enough to make them take action. The only difference between now and two years ago, is the law is actually present, and not some distant thing giving lip service.
If that is acceptable, then by all means play there. If not. Well you all need to stop kidding yourselves thinking it can be anything other than what you’re experiencing. Some of you are good people, sure. But you are choosing to play with some really bad people.
I don’t run around the map and take a picture of every building.
message letting people know some days in advance that their base will be demolished. Just having it deleted with no warning is very uncool IMHO. Let people know - pop up a message at log-in “All your basses belonged to us. Your base violates XYZ and will be removed in 48hours - this decision is final and nonnegotiable. - You have been warned.”