🚨 We Love Conan — But the Servers Are Breaking the Game

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I’ve complained a lot in the past about issues this game needs to address, because it constantly feels like the focus is on fixing smaller problems while the bigger, long-term ones get ignored. But at this point, I’m not even asking for content changes, balance updates, or anything like that anymore.

I just want to be able to play the game.

Server stability and lag are completely out of control right now.

Private boosted servers are getting hit the worst. Many of them are sitting at 400–500+ ping, sometimes even higher. Officials are only slightly better, often around 200–300+ ping, which is still terrible for PvP, raiding, or any real-time combat.

I currently own a PlayStation server called Parabellum, one of the more populated servers, and it’s constantly struggling with performance. When you look at the player list, boosted/private servers consistently show double (or more) the ping of official servers — and officials are already struggling badly.

Years ago, as a US player, you could play on EU servers at around 200 ping, and that was considered high.

Now, 200 ping on your own local servers is considered a good day — and honestly, most of the time it’s worse than that.

If the bigger systemic issues aren’t going to be addressed, then the bare minimum should be fixing server stability and performance. People should be able to run private servers, build communities, and manage their own environments without fighting constant rubberbanding, desync, delayed hits, and crashes.

Right now, this level of lag and instability is actively damaging the player base and the community. It’s driving players away, killing private servers, and making the game feel unreliable no matter where you play.

We’re not asking for miracles.

We’re asking for the game to function.

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This issue of dying servers does not just affect online players. It should also be scary for solo/single players. (I am mostly just single/pve/builder)

If Funcom does not care about game servers. No communication. Bazaar problems. Login / FLS verification problems.

What is the direction? If key elements of the working game are in terrible condition!

Dead game.

I have already questioned the dependency of Funcom Live Services FLS. Issue hasn’t gone away. And I am still quite certain that game die when FLS shutdown.

I truly like / want to keep this game alive.

But I have no glue at the moment how??

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I had no clue single player was bad to!?! That’s crazy

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@Jacob1976

I am not taking sides here. If I’m wrong in my thoughts, I’m sure some one will let me know.

Ping is not controlled by FC. Ping is a measurement of data speed. Data speed is controlled by ISP’s.

Data transmission is the same as pumping water. No matter how much you want to move (data/water), the max amount you can move is soley dependant on the size of the pipe you are using. At peak hours your water pressure drops (ie the speed the water moves through your pipes). At peak hours your Data speed drops. The Peak Data Hours could be in your region (the sender), or their region (the receiver). The Internet companies control the data speed, not FC.
Data transmission is the same as a chain. It is only as strong as it’s weakest link.
You may have 100 Mbs at your end but that doesn’t mean that will be the speed all all the way to the FC/GPortal servers.

I am no fan of FC, but I find it hard sit back and watch anyone be blamed for something outside of their control.

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Not completely. But latency issues in server end is controlled by FC.

And there have been quite a lot of people complaining about ping issues lately. Is this a problem that affects all other games too? @Jacob1976 have you played other online games? PIng issues or not?

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You picked every weird unrelated tag for the thread, except a console one to indicate you’re talking about Playstation :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s the main source of the problem here… namely the fact that gportal is the exclusive host for consoles and gportal is simply a horribly bad host for this game.. their machines are old, underpowered and oversaturated.. it’s almost as if they deliberately pushed conan on their worst hardware because they know there’s no competition. Getting a decent gportal server is like winning on the lottery, they’re totally unreliable.

Here’s an example of my PC private server that is NOT hosted on gportal. I have indicators under the healthbar that constantly show ping and server tick rate:
image

and just to note, the server is physically located just short of 3000 km from my location in a completely different country.

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That’s some solid performance right there @Xevyr .

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I get what you’re saying, and you’re right about one thing: raw internet speed and ISPs absolutely affect ping. Nobody is denying that.

But that doesn’t explain what’s actually happening here.

If this were purely an ISP issue, we wouldn’t see consistent patterns across hundreds of players, across different regions, across different providers, all reporting the same problem — boosted/private servers showing significantly higher ping than officials, even when players are on the same connection, same console, same time of day.

People are literally switching between official and private servers and watching their ping double instantly. Same ISP. Same console. Same location. That’s not a pipe issue on the player’s end — that points to server-side performance, routing, hosting, or infrastructure problems.

Also, server stability isn’t just about ping.

Rubberbanding, delayed hits, desync, stuttering AI, delayed building placement, inventory lag, server hitching — those are all server performance issues, not just ISP speed.

And historically, this didn’t used to be this bad.

Years ago, US players could play EU servers at ~200 ping and it was considered high but still playable. Now, players are seeing 200–300 ping on local servers on a “good” day, and 400–500+ on boosted servers regularly. That’s a massive regression.

Nobody is saying Funcom personally controls everyone’s internet. The point is that the current hosting setup, server performance, or infrastructure clearly isn’t handling the game’s load anymore, especially for private servers. And when that directly impacts the playability of the game, it becomes a legitimate issue for the developers and their hosting partners to address.

We’re not blaming to be toxic.

We’re speaking up because we care about the game and want it to survive.

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Not completely, but I agree that server-side latency is something Funcom (and their hosting partners) do control, and that’s the part people are frustrated with.

And yes, I do play other online games. This isn’t something I’m seeing across the board. My internet is solid, and other games run normally. The problem shows up specifically in Conan as a whole — both officials and private servers suffer from lag and instability. Private servers are just noticeably worse, especially as population increases.

I’ve also tested this with a lot of other players, and it’s a very common experience, particularly on console. People with good connections, different ISPs, and different regions are reporting the same issues.

That’s why so many people are speaking up lately. It’s not random complaints — it’s a consistent problem people are experiencing across the game.

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That’s a fair point about the tags — I’ll own that.

And honestly, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying about GPortal too. If they’re the exclusive host for console and their hardware is outdated, oversaturated, or inconsistent, that still circles back to the same core issue: server performance for a large portion of the playerbase is unacceptable.

From a player’s perspective, especially on console, the experience is the experience. We don’t get to choose alternate hosts, we don’t get to fine-tune infrastructure, and we don’t get visibility into backend performance. What we do get is lag, instability, and degraded gameplay across both officials and privates — with privates just being worse.

If anything, what you’re describing actually strengthens the point being made:

  • If GPortal hardware is struggling

  • If console servers are locked to that ecosystem

  • If performance varies wildly depending on which machine you land on

Then that’s still a structural problem that needs to be addressed, because it directly impacts the ability for people to run servers, build communities, and even enjoy the game.

Your PC example sounds like exactly what players wish they were getting — consistent performance, transparency, and reliability. Unfortunately, console players simply don’t have that option, and that’s a big part of the frustration.

At the end of the day, nobody here is trying to argue technical theory. We’re talking about real, lived experience:

the game feels worse than it used to, and a lot of players are feeling it at the same time.

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Yup, I never even argued the point of the post, was mostly trying to provide context and a show a drastic contrast which I’m sure probably raises some eyebrows. :slight_smile:

Fact of a matter is a lot of players who only ever played on official servers or consoles probably have no idea that this game is capable of playing smooth and with minimal issues.

Sure, it does have a ton of bugs that we all know, but those are more of a nuisance than anything when the game actually performs well, they become far more annoying when you can’t even enjoy the good parts.

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But we do . We met the game this way. We fell in love with it this way. All this changed after horses arrived. After horse patch the game lost more than 70% of the PlayStation PvP population. In Europe especially, the French community of Conan exiles PvP was saying the same … Conan exiles is dead. Some hard core players stayed, me with them. For months no updates with humongous issues unsolved and just the argossean dlc . They were working on Siptah but kept silence to their community for absolutely no reason. The Forum especially on our console was on fire . The word dead was the most common headline of each post.

Why silence still? No communication at all!

Then the bomb of Siptah will drop, but it was very late. Gamers are very punishing, they should know that.

New benches now , more broken features, more bugs, less stability, worst performance… so PvP died for me too .

The player who never experienced Conan PvP back in these days …

When massive clans were continuosly hitting eachother with zero lags and performance issues…

…Cannot understand how GRAND this game was .

And yes it was PlayStation 4 , not 5 …

And my internet connection was 10 mbps max :rofl: …

And it was g Portal, not any other…

But still we could play on 60/60 PvP servers without a single performance issue…

That’s why gamers cannot forgive!

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Aside from network issues the biggest contributor to latency is actually other players. By that I mean their activities/builds in-game. Purges for example can degrade server performance. This is not the players fault but it’s an issue. The fact that players are allowed to build huge structures all over the place and fill them with whatever contributes to latency depending on the situation and what objects are there. Take taverns for example. I’ve seen players put several in one spot which lags the crap out of the area. While these causes stem from the player ultimately, they are allowed to do it in game, so whose fault is it really? lol

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This is a conversation for official servers.

The op is an owner of private PvP servers on console PlayStation. My reply was exactly for my experience on private PvP servers on playstation. Admins on private PvP servers do not allow these behaviours and most of them have a discord page to explain on real time and warn the players that go off limits. Private PvP doesn’t care for pve , just the necessary. Private PvP is working hard for anticheat and fair play. Private PvP is working hard to create activities for the players to have fun with the mechanics of the game and many of them create artificial dungeons so players compete eachother.

These people spend serious amounts of time and money for others to have fun and the only thing they ask back is to have happy players in their servers.

And guess what? Now the private servers have worst performance than officials , what gives? Is this how Funcom and Gportal treats their best costumers?

Wow !

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