What a year it's been, Exiles! Let’s raise a glass to 2024!

Conan Exiles General Discussion News and Announcements
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Greeting Exiles!

Another year of great achievements has passed. With times of outstanding combat and good ale! Our tavern keepers had a brief vacation for the first time this year but came back stronger to carry as many mugs as thirsty Exiles demand.

:beers: Let’s raise a glass to the entire Conan Exiles community.

To our dedicated players :beers:

You’re the reason our lands are filled with absolutely amazing builds, with friends and foes alike! It’s all in the name of having fun and sharing incredible tales for years to come. You are Exiles! And no matter how long we’ve been here, you’ll be here longer and stronger than ever. What started as a life raft became a continent of great joy and fierce battles, and you made it all happen!

Thank you Exiles!

Now, let’s take a look at all the mayhem and results from your achievements this year:

To our dedicated creators :beers:

Our community is filled with incredibly creative people, and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to highlight those who have made Exiles a priority and have shown so much love for these lands!

:clinking_glasses: Cheers to our modders who dedicate their time and effort to creating amazing pieces for the community to enjoy Exiles to the fullest!

There are thousands of mods out there, and tons of amazing people behind them. We want to thank everyone for enriching Conan Exiles experience on PC! Here are just a few mods and their creators’ workshop links so you can navigate all the great contributions they have made and learn more about the possibilities they yield:

And for the Exiles who don’t know much about mods, make sure to check Steam’s workshop and these amazing modifications that can make unbelievable transformations to the base game. They create new maps, new interfaces, brand-new lore, new mechanics, more customization, and much, much more!

It’s fair to say we can’t bring up creative endeavors without talking about our content creators too!

:clinking_glasses: Cheers to our content creators, video makers, streamers, guide makers, lore seekers, wiki curators, and all those who dedicate and care for this community. You all are highly appreciated. Your curiosity, game knowledge, and creative skills to put this all together into media form to help other players are notable!

Here are some commendable names everyone who travels our lands should know by heart:

Check out their channels Exiles! Like and subscribe. :wink:

As community managers of these great lands, Andy and Caroll would like to say a few words:

Andy

Man, what a year it’s been, huh? It’s never a dull moment in the Exiled Lands and 2024 certainly lived up to that. We closed out Age of War with its fourth and final chapter, heralded the beast lord, and quenched his thirst for blood. Conan Exiles turned 6 (well, technically 7 if you count Early Access launch, which I also fondly remember), we got to partner up with Save the Children and Tiltify to raise over $15,000 for charity, hung out with some rad folks at the Neebs Gaming anniversary event, Launched Age of Heroes, and I turned 40. What is time, anyway?

I’m thrilled to have Caroll on the team and in the trenches with us; I don’t know many people who know Conan Exiles better than she does, and she’s already been hitting the ground running with a bunch of new initiatives and more down the pipe. Keep an eye out on her, Exiles - she’s a rockstar.

Now, Conan Exiles also had its ups and downs this year and we’ll be the first to say we know some things weren’t where they needed to be, and we’re all still working hard to really make things right. I’m excited for what’s around the corner in 2025 and we hope you will be too once we’re able to go into more.

Here’s to surviving 2024, and may the coming year be kind to you all. Thanks, Exiles.

Caroll

Exiles, I may have just met you as a CM in August, but I have been in Funcom for over 4 years now. And in the Exiled Lands since 2017, with over 7k hours - probably more but who’s counting?!
For me, the best days on the job are the days I get to chat with you! When we share memories we have made on Exiles since Early Access. When we discuss which building sets work best together, whether on the Exiled Lands or Isle of Siptah. All of our conversations are what keep me motivated and committed to doing my best for you!

Conan Exiles is still my favorite game of all time, and it wouldn’t be without the wonderful people I’ve met along the way. Whether on official or private servers, the forums, Discord, Twitch, or any other channel, I’ve always found incredible groups of people who have stuck together through the worst times and cheered vividly on the best ones. Sitting in a tavern learning each other’s stories or dancing in an RP party, Exiles has it all and it’s my home!

Unfortunately, this year has had some difficult moments for us all. The pain of losing a follower you’ve relied on and grown with is hard. Seeing a new feature that was promised years ago, that we were so excited about, and that we had been anticipating for so long, being disabled was tough. But if you’re reading this letter, it means you’ve stuck with us through it all, and for that, I’m very grateful.

Let’s raise a glass in our taverns for 2024 and wish for a greater future for our lovely and brave community! Cheers, Exiles!

You achieved and endured so much this year! May 2025 bring even greater tales and adventures!

We will share more news in our end-of-year Producer’s Letter next month.

Happy holidays Exiles, and here’s hoping for a brighter 2025!

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Thank you, @Caroll , for the letter!

What is the likelyhood of your team also presenting us with a sort of “State of the Union” with respect to the open issues that Conan Exiles is presently facing? And some idea about when we can expected fixes and corrections? It would be extremely helpful to the play community to understand what you are focusing work on to provide remediations.

It would also be helpful to get a roadmap for the rest of the Age of Heros releases. Knowing what to expect will generate some buzz, and will keep us engaged! :slight_smile:

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A …… For a busy year, we can say that indeed it was it !!! On the other hand without wanting to question your efforts, I am not sure that this was a big year

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The difference between the two heroes is pretty staggering. I’m curious if it was due to the Freya quest line being longer or more prone to the errors (still sitting on a couple of servers with the quest bugged and cannot complete.

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there are more important issues , than telling people how many times the rhino boss has been killed.

such as,

  1. when to expect a fix to the still broken settlement system and thralls still dying at 0.0.0 , the settlement syste is still a disaster and setlements do not feel alive, (it was a lot better before)
  2. when to expect performance fixes to official servers
  3. when do you plan to fix the black corsair faction in siptah which you cant KO them anymore (many months old issue) .
  4. any plans to fix the insane issue of having people able to demolish other people bases, open locked contained from other clan/players etc (PVP, PVE etc)
  5. any plants to fix the issues with the skelos bearer, and tavern exploits ?
  6. any information about improved internal (QA) and public testing methodologies?
  7. any information about when can we expect more engagement and better communication (as promised several times)

and the list is longer, but ill keep it short, and i beleive this covers the most relevant information people are after!

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Raises a glass
Looks to the assembly
Slowly pours the the contents of the glass on the floor

May the good earth forgive this one for polluting it with such vile ichors as “libation” consecrated to this miserable year.

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I’d like to share a personal achievement: I managed to avoid replying to this topic a whole day :smiley:

Sadly, I couldn’t make it any longer, but I swear it’s not completely my fault. Blame the YouTube algorithm for suggesting the following short video:

For those who don’t know who Swen Vincke is, he’s the CEO of Larian Studios, the studio behind Baldur’s Gate 3. So it’s not just some rando spewing random idealism, it’s someone who knows what they’re talking about.

His words are a balm for my soul.

Over the last year, I’ve often criticized Funcom’s treatment of Conan Exiles – the game and the community both – on these forums. In those discussions, I’ve seen many people profess an attitude that idealism has no place in game development, because it’s a business, and a business is about making money, baby. It’s about revenue and profit and KPIs. It’s about numbers and spreadsheets.

And we can damn well see the evidence of that attitude in this celebratory blog post that pretends that 2024 was a great year for Conan Exiles and that the “dedicated players” are appreciated, as if botched feature releases, configuration snafus, and the steadfast silence towards those same dedicated players are signs of appreciation.

The evidence I’m talking about takes up half the post: it’s numbers, numbers, numbers galore! Statistics of all sorts, proclaiming proudly: “See? We know what we’re doing! We know what the players do, therefore we know what the players want, therefore we know how to make good decisions.”

Frankly, I’m surprised at just how much telemetry and metrics they implemented. Makes one wonder if they could do the same for diagnostic purposes, to help diagnose and fix the bugs that their dedicated players are so frustrated about.

Silly engineer, numbers are for marketing! It’s kinda like that Trevor Noah sketch about numbers in sports and economy.

And whenever we bring up how profoundly unsatisfying this whole situation is, you can count on there being someone to “explain” that this is how businesses works.

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No, it’s not. It’s not fine, and 2024 was not a good year for Conan Exiles, unless all you care about are whatever numbers are keeping the suits happy.

But I still have hope. Not for Conan Exiles, but for the industry in general. Maybe Swen’s words are a sign that the pendulum has finally reached the extreme and is starting to swing back towards more emphasis on creative integrity and player satisfaction, and less emphasis on milking the customers.

Maybe one day we will remember games like Conan Exiles the same way we remember the arcade machines that were deliberately designed to get us to spend as many quarters as they could: with fondness from enjoying those games, but also as exploitative practices that the industry grew out of.

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“What a year that was!”

…don’t make me even start - and tbh it’s kinda insulting to post such “hurrah” post, when game (and/or servers) is in such terrible condition right now.

ps. I think they should add another trophy: “number of thralls lost due to hackers, wrong decay timer and living settlements bug”

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I would love to write a multi paragraph comment about the last 1 1/2 years… How CE went downhill since AoW chapter 1…

But for what? For our personal amusement?
FC aint gona read anything we write anyway.

All i can say is: WOW… how disconected from your own community can you actually be?!
Got they coked out of their friggin minds?

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This - 100%

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What a year it’s been, Exiles! Let’s raise a glass to 2024!

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it’s the season and all, so I’ll say this: I assume this year hasn’t been easy for the CE team at Funcom. Stay strong, and keep your spirits up. Times can be … well, as they are, but after a low point, there’s always a high.

Next year, maybe there’ll be an opportunity to finish some of the stuff, fix some of the new systems and, most importantly, restore Telith’s ghost. Or finish the gaps in Razma’s story. Or both. I mean, Christmas is coming, so it’s wishing time, isn’t it?

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Wow. Read the room.

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@Caroll @AndyB

I’ve got some stats you missed out from your post -

Number of Funcom Reps who posted in the opening of this thread that promised ‘improved communication’ - 2
Number of Funcom Reps who actually provided improved communication - 0

Number of years Bug Report Template has been broken - 2+
Number of times this has been reported to Community Team - 30+
Percentage of all bug reports that ‘fail’; because of broken template - 75%
Number of failed bug reports that receive any response other than pasted message telling them to ‘use the bug report template’ - 0

Number of platforms game is available on - 3
Number of platforms with multiple reports that singleplayer cannot be played - 3
Number of individual threads from different players reporting these issues - 35+
Number of meaningful Funcom responses - 0
(I would have given Andy credit on that last one, but it took a month to say ‘we know but don’t have a fix yet’ - that should have been the message within the first couple of days, with regular follow-ups.)

Number of Mods in the top 4 of your list that have been discontinued by the modders - 3
(And there are several others in the list that haven’t seen any update since April - seemingly having been abandoned, but without official statement)

Number of players that signed up to Funcom’s ‘mailing list’ in the hope of actually getting told anything, since Funcom never manages to post updates to its official forums anymore - unknown
Number of ‘mailshots’ sent out to people on that mailing list - 0

There’s plenty of other statistics I could dig up, but let’s just jump to the big ones -

Evidence that Funcom actually gives a damn about the playerbase - 0

Number of f*cks given - 0

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yep , the letter they wrote , is just then thinking that its been a great year for the game… and they seem so proud… that makes want to puke.

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xD yes good year of slaughtering conan … from hero to zero level each update ruins mods, or something in raw game raises glass for that game is like half killed animal that still not dead

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O_o

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spent most of the play time rebuilding the base on pve that people broke using purge expliot moving the base to high grounds to avoid those type of pve-raid, and replaceing thralls that hackers deleted. And thinking in ways to minimize the effects of bug and vulnerabilities introduced on every update. I dont know why i still doing it, to be honest, its for dancers, nudity and horse riding that there are not found in other games.

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What is the difference between voicing legitimate criticism and whining?

When, where, and how you do it.

This thread is full of whining.

I don’t disagree with any of the complaints. We got bugs, features we didn’t ask for, features that aren’t ready, lack of communication, official servers running like a legless centipede, etc.

But…

This topic is not about any of that. These end of the year review and stats posts are an annual tradition.

What do you think they were going to do? “Yeah, we aren’t going to publish any stats this year because the community managers are going to code big fixes instead.”

Don’t be ridiculous.

I would think worse of Funcom if they didn’t post this, and derailing to talk about bugs or whatever is not voicing legitimate criticism; it is whining.

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