What's holding Conan Exiles from greatness?

So many great points throughout this discussion.

These are my thoughts, some have already been mentioned and I’ll be adding my voice to it:

• lag - need better servers that can handle such a chunky game
• COMMUNICATION - this is in many forms, from the distinct lack of impactful modern marketing to the way in which the company communicates with its players (how many people really look to Twitter for game info?)
• persistent bugs that have evolved/been the same issue since the start
• punishing players for building infractions by suspensions and bans, lack of consistency and clarification in the process
• putting in place a measure to actually address the rampant hacking problem
• tie reports to accounts, Zendesk while was a great step forward to deal with ToC issues but is easily abused with anonymity and spam
• did I mention communication? Ya… seen an uptick here on the forums but it tends to be generalized and vague
• agree with lack of polish, work in progress as it is the game often feels lacking
• yes more dungeons!
• some QoL interface changes would go a long way to make gameplay feel more fluid, as mentioned certain keybindings, placement, etc.,…

I can complain forever about their monetization plans. In all, there will always be people who complain and I’m right with them in that the new schemes are costly. But, people would feel less inclined to deride those problems if there were more serious issues addressed. Cost of the game itself is enough for many and it is relatively cheap by itself and the rest will not impact gameplay thankfully. This topic is hardly my biggest concern.

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I agree that would likely make for a better-received game, however, the reason I love CE is partly that it tries so many things. It’s a weakness in some ways, sure, but it’s also what makes it unique. If this seems contradictory, well perhaps it is. But while I would love to see more polish (who wouldn’t), turning into a run-of-the-mill fighting or adventure game is not what I’m advocating, either.

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Your thralls are stronger than you. Always been an issue. I can stand with my shield up and my thrall kills most enemies and does more damage than I do. The player is 2nd fiddle in the game while the AI fights the AI.

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Objectively false. As has been proven by several videos posted (there is a topic right above this one showcasing how objectively false this is).

I have authority 20 and my strength is only 15 and my thralls still don’t out damage me.

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Are people still going on about this?

Before 3.0, I could take pretty much any thrall with me to the Unnamed City and have it spank the Red Mother while I browsed Imgur in another window. Now I have 0 points in authority, and my followers are about as menacing as a sneeze in a N95 mask.

If your thrall is still outclassing you after the 3.0 update, it’s because you either chose to invest points into authority, or you’re supremely inept at investing points into other stats and/or fighting in general. Or you’re playing on a private server with some weird configuration that makes thralls stronger. There is literally no other explanation anymore.

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What’s holding Conan Exiles from greatness?

In my opinion, only the servers and map size. You mean like “WoW” or “WoW Classic” like greatness with over 100,000 logins per day… something like that?

  • Yeah, the servers and net code need to not suck! (Eliminate The Lag!)
  • Make the max number of players per server between 300 and 1,000 somewhere.
  • Either make the maps bigger or portal them together Elder Scrolls Online style.
  • Kill more of the bugs that annoy most.
  • Spend a ton of cash on ads and influencers.
  • Optional: Maybe add raid bosses with mechanics and a group finder.

That’s it. The game by itself is good enough and doesn’t need almost any of the “do it my way” and “cater to my playstyle” suggestions and demands sited in this thread.

Funcom never understood that a satisfied players base is much more important than New Features Ads. I influenced five friends to buy the game at first. Now, I must accumulate more than 10 friends that I convinced not to buy the game.

There is always some serious problem with the game that makes everyone say bad things about it in public. For me specifically, the most recent is the one that I will expose here

In Brazil, we have a problem with price regionalization. Funcom sells Crom Coins in Epic Store priced in Brazilian Real (BRL, our currency), and in Steam, the same itens, are priced in US Dollar (USD). This makes buying items in Steam 3x more expensive than buying them in Epic Store. This is generating a immense frustration on players who bought the game in Steam. I bought the game during pre-sale in Steam, I have all the DLCs. And if I want to continue buying items, I will have to pay 3x more than players who bought the game in Epic Store. What does Funcom say about this? Nothing! I have to decide between pay 3x the BRL price or stop playing. Not even a message: “We are doing everything to solve the situation.”. Or at least: “We consider your situation and we will try to help you” The answer I received: “We’ve Passed Your Feedback Over To the Rest of the Team”. And that’s all!

There are many Brazilians who bought the game in Steam and they are frustrated with this lack of attention with Brazilian consumers. Many players stopped playing because of that. Brazil is fifth in Battle Metrics “Top Countries by Players”. And even so, we have no feed back about this situation. Brazilian forums, communities and YouTubers are detonating the game because of this. And it certainly doesn’t help the game to grow at all.

In my opinion, the situation exposed by the author of the topic has nothing to do with game. The game is amazing. But with FUNCOM’s incredible ability to make players base frustrated. So the natural expansion of players bringing in other players doesn’t happen. And it’s easy to understand why

This is my feeling too. It’s the only game I’ve ever played that tries to give you the option to do almost anything. That definitely causes problems, yes. It’s so ambitious. But it means every time I log in, no matter what I feel like doing I can do it. Relaxing farming? Raid another player? Forge weapons? Build a house? Explore a dungeon? Or probably my favourite, just roam the map with low-key gear surviving and seeing what happens. There’s never a reason for me not to play.

Except poor server performance. So I guess that’s what’s holding it back in my opinion.

That really sucks. But I’ve heard this a few times now, from people in Turkey as well as Brazil. Probably other places too. Do you know why this happens? Is it even something in Funcom’s control or is it something to do with the laws of your country?

Just coding i believe.

Anyways , id like to see difficulty level on officials increased to barbarian level.

Dev reaction and implementation time hurts a lot for official servers. They were told about lightning being unbalanced and of the new item dupes and still haven’t made a statement.

In general I agree. I really like this game but there are some things that hold it back.

My list would be:

  • Yes combat needs lots of help. many times it’s just too easy. But other times its a 1 shot insta-death. it seems that most of the “difficulty” comes from spike damage or massive dot stacks. In addition one of the most frustrating things is getting body-blocked & stuck on geo while mobs beat you to death. Difficulty should be based around mechanics & phases like the Wine Cellar boss or ai that won’t let you cheese the mobs to death, not plinking a dps sponge once every 10 seconds making sure to never ever get hit or you instantly lose.

  • Purges should be, as far as im concerned, the entire focus of development for several whole cycles. They should be a fully-formed major feature that entire guilds can revolve around. They should be much better scaled to your thrall number, have siege weapon phases, boss mechanics & even structures or to counter attack. If this feature was done properly it could almost be the focus of the entire game, but it’s going to require tons of time & SLICK programming.

  • Game just needs more content. It needs more dungeons, more events, raids etc. Some things seem too easy to accomplish, while others are just dragged out for no reason (massive craft times etc). most dungeons need a difficulty boost, but they need it through mechanics & phases & ai, not spike damage dps sponges.

Agreed 100%. Purges are very lacklustre as-is.

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There always is and always will be - and for every game.

There’s always some group of people who criticize some aspect. And the percentages don’t seem to change from game to game - of course given that the game is conventional in most ways and works on most people’s hardware. Game companies only need player numbers to break free or meaningfully reduce the affect of this negative influence. As the user base increases the ratio of noisy critical players is nearly always the same but the influence they have doesn’t increase linearly.

People are mostly followers. Whether people decide to try a game or not and whether or not they’re “satisfied” depends a lot on who they’re listening to and how independently minded they are.

Lots of good points, many of which I agree with. The lack of polish hurts, but the thing that stands out to me is the lack of an “OMG” factor. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game a little too much, but it’s not like I don’t want more from it. Like others said, it does a lot of things okay, and some things well, but nothing exceptional.

Between bugs, server performance, the ban-meta (seriously, how hard is it to issue a 24-hour remedy-or-be wiped warning?), the lack of mainstream press (like others, I’ve seen more ads for Valheim and Ark), and the struggles with dev-to-consumer engagement, I’m not sure I can put it on one sole factor that really holds this game back. Since EA, it seems to be an endless cycle of two steps forward, 1 backwards.

Taking myself as an example, I was drawn in by 3 potential factors: City Life, Purges, and Avatars. I will admit that I am disappointed in the implementation (or lack thereof) of these things. City life was nixed (understandably) which was then replaced for me by the hope for Sorcery (which I’ll get to later). Purges…well…they just don’t work. I want to be in constant fear of these things, but the reality is far from it. The decision to lock in zones to maximum purge levels without offering server admins the ability to change this is unfortunate. No mounted purges, no siege weaponry, it just seems so tame. And now, how I would love to see “A coven of sorcerers is attacking” and seeing dudes in black robes casting LS and CotD against me, but I doubt that’s gonna happen. And then Avatars…well…ya’ll know how I feel about them.

It just feels like I see the effort, but the mark keeps getting missed every so slightly. Its enough to keep me here and engaged, but down the line I just really want to see something that makes me go “OMG, you have to try this” to my friends.

One question I get asked is “What’s the whole point of the game?” and unfortunately, “Build, Survive, Dominate” doesn’t do the trick, especially when it comes to the endgame loop. Dungeons? Too simple and lacking in substance. Yes, I know there needs to be a way for SP players to beat them, but c’mon, right now (especially with 3.0) they’re just strolls in the park. PvP? Unbalanced, and I don’t mean in-game, I mean in RL distribution. Either a few servers attract a bunch of active (and potentially toxic) players or you’re on a dead server that nobody visits (or has abandoned due to toxic alphas). Private servers have bad reps (some earned, some not) and on mine, those who have had the cajones to actually raid me disappear after 2 days without ever establishing a base and actually fighting a war (seriously, EVERY time we’ve been robbed, the people don’t go far, don’t defend themselves, and disappear after a week at most, like what’s even the point?).

And Sorcery…hoo-boy. Look, I’m cool with it, for now, but it seems like another one of FC’s close misses. Lots of potential, but for now I’ve just been treated to a small nugget of what could be something awesome. But here’s my big issue: the press should have been “oh look at this awesome new feature in this game! Tell your friends! Post to Youtube and stream on Twitch!” but instead we’re mired in “BP doesn’t work, Bazaar is a ripoff, Moar broken things” fiasco. Look, I get you need monetization to keep new features rolling in, but I would much rather have the community start talking about the next phase of the game and the future potential of this new system instead of getting the game working again. When the community is sitting here focusing on this stuff instead of singing its praises and spreading the word, that’s a problem. Instead of “OMG they made this game even more awesome” its “OMG they broke it more!”

FC, no joke, I want you to succeed. I want this game to succeed. More players means more people potentially stumbling upon my server and finding a home. More new players means more funds to add in newer cool features in upcoming patches. But seriously, get your act in gear.

TLDR: Endgame feels half@$$ed, nothing that makes people go “Wow!”, Bugs. Basically what others said: Lack of Polish.

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Overall it does seem that there’s not much direct engagement with the community. Which is weird for 2022.

I understand if the actual designers and developers working full-time on improving the game don’t feel like facing all the negativity of the typical game forum, but is there no community managers or anything either?

Very much this. I hope they just focused all their available budget for half a year on fixing purges, making the dungeons a smoother experience, fixing bugs that have been known for years, improving server performance…

I am personally certain that this would greatly increase the reviews and potentially cause a second coming for the game. Looking at how many people own this game, there’s so much market unreached at the moment. It could double or triple its playerbase.

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There used to be a fair bit more, particularly when the game was new.

There are, and they do pop in both here and on the unofficial Discord, but it’s not been much lately.

Of course right now there’s a lot of negativity out there, much of it warranted, some decidedly less so, and it must be draining to deal with that.

Could also simply be a case of not having much in the way of new info, apart from tagging bug reports with ‘received’.

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Plus, a lot of times completely bokrs other aspects of the game.

Steam replied saying that Funcom defines this. And it only depends on Funcom, because in the Epic Store the price is regionalized. Only it Steam that is not

But each company deals with this fact in a different way. And the way to inform and relate to the public is very important in my opinion.

Advertising’s most valuable resource is testimony. You will never convince me that what people say about something is not critical to people deciding what to buy.

These are the real heroes. An amazing team of artists. That’s why I said that the problem is not with the game itself.

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One correction: the game WAS one of the best games. Now with this magic crap the game (at least PvP) has been destroyed. Now it’s complete nonsense.