So the story goes… Once upon a time, there was a large clan, and when they decided to leave and go to another server they left all they had to another smaller clan.
That clan grew into a great and powerful clan. Their reach spread far and wide through the map. Gigantic bases with armies of pets, as well as hidden outposts far off the beaten path with perhaps a thrall or two to stand guard. This great and powerful clan, like all things, eventually fell at a time of weakness, and once again all that the clan had was passed down to a new inheritor.
Times, they were good… Coffers full, pantries stocked, supply lines mastered, and the population booming. Then news came… News that soon not everyone would be welcome. News that soon those happy places once filled with life, would soon be empty… For the culling was upon them…
All dramatics and humor aside… Seriously I inherited stuff from maybe 5-6 generations of clans?? There are thralls in places that thralls should NEVER be… How am I supposed to get rid of them when I don’t know where they are or how many of them are out there so that they don’t count against my over all limit, without leaving and abandoning the clan and all of the buildings with it?
I’m sure there are plenty of others out there with a similar issue…
How do we make sure we don’t get stuck with “hidden” or unknown thralls that count against us after the limit change?
Ah, damn. I can just visualize what I’ll be doing during the grace period: running around the whole map with a thrall pot in my inventory, examining each spot to see if there are any thralls I missed. FML.
A thrall list menu of some sort would certainly solve a lot of problems, as long as it gave some indication as to their location as well. Kinda pointless if you’re just presented with a list of fifty "Archer III"s or something and have no idea which one is which.
Better than nothing, though ideally it would be presented in a way that allowed you to track down those thralls that got left out in the middle of nowhere because they were abandoned or they slipped under a foundation or something. Would kinda suck if after the limits get implemented you found yourself several thralls short because some of the ones who weren’t culled are, you know, somewhere.
They already stated, on their Dev Stream, that they will not be implementing anything like that for this update. So yeah, the update will hit, then the culling will be enabled, and then they might implement the thrall inventory UI later. Sucks to be us
As long as it gets implemented at some point soon after, I think it’s fine. As long as “soon” isn’t another case of “six months, a year, maybe sometime next millennium”. As I said in the other thread, you’re pretty much gonna want to replace them all eventually anyway, and that’s going to take some time.
At a minimum, I would love to see a UI list of all my thralls, that includes type/faction, level, grid square and a button to remotely dismiss. Unlike a lot of folks here, I’m a fan of the follower limit, but implementing it without also including a way to remotely manage thralls seems like a pretty big miss. This update is going to cause a lot of ill will on the part of the established player base, and sometimes it’s the little QOL features that can really help with that.
To be perfectly clear, I’m not adamantly against the follower cap. I am just trying to give feedback and establish discussion about some very real problems that the cap introduces. As they say, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Purge defense is one of my most important considerations. The thrall cap wouldn’t bother me that much if we had, for example, a way to quickly and easily redeploy our thralls. But we don’t have that, we don’t have an alliance system, we don’t have an AI that can help deal with attacks on multiple prongs, and the cap is just too low. Not to mention that the way cap formula deals with the clan size has a really toxic effect on PVE and PVE-C communities, where there are almost no incentives to clan up anyway, and now there’s a powerful disincentive.
So basically, all I’m trying to say is “throw me a bone, will ya?”
I mean at this point, I want to dismiss any and all existing thralls anyway… None of them can level and we all saw the potential (22k+ HP) in the Dev stream. A way to remotely just kill them all would be fantastic. The other details can come later. Perhaps just a complete and utter initial wipe of all “legacy thralls” in existence on all servers if nothing else. (Once we have all had a chance to get the gear off those we do know of.) That way we aren’t stuck with undesirable thralls we cannot track down.
I’m curious about your base location and layout. I get the purge from up to three different origin points at my PvE base, but I’m able to handle that with a pretty small number of thralls because there are two really obvious “attack here” points for the purge to target.
Another QOL feature would be more information about the purge. In particular, can the purge path all the way to a targetable structure? It would also be nice to know what kind of purges a location can experience before I start building.
I’ll get some screenshots later today and post them. Maybe it will also help some people stop judging me
To be fair, I haven’t had a purge at my main base for quite a while now, so I don’t know if I’ll have the same problems as before. That said, I had a particularly nasty problem when the Purge spawned enemies inside my base. Bear in mind, it’s in a perfectly accessible location, there are no unconnected parts or anything weird like that. I suspect it hits some weird, stupid edge case on the algorithm.
Maybe a solution Funcom could consider would be to add a favorite button on the new thrall pop up window to favorite those followers that you want to save from being randomly deleted when a clan goes over the limit. Also they could add a stat to the Clan panel that says something like “67/75” to let us know how many followers we have favorited out of our max number allowed.
Also I would like to know what happens if a clan member quits a clan. How would one protect that coveted level 20 Spinas the Marauder that was painstakingly leveled from being randomly deleted because the clan is now over the limit? Cause if the game just randomly chooses a follower to delete, there is a chance that you can loose them that I am sure won’t go over well with the player.
Another question, what happens if you level a follower to max level, join a clan, then leave the clan? Does the follower still follow you or is he considered property of the clan you just left?
Hopefully Funcom is working on solutions for these issues.
Alright, I posted some screenshots in the Share Your Shelter topic. I hope it’s easier to see why a two- or three-pronged Purge wave might be a problem. Also, it should be pretty clear that the base is not in an area that the Purge AI can’t access, so there should be no reason for any enemies to spawn in the courtyard.
I am personally very much looking forward to “the culling” and the leveling system BUT I would like to say my heart goes out to all you guys with sprawling empires. And in that regard I feel that Funcom should not roll out this change without such a counter. Just make the controversial change a bit easier to swallow.
Good luck to all with the beckoning doom of ai popullations.
“Maybe” being the keyword there… I mean what if someone built a crazy tower with some thralls at the top of it and it decayed after they passed the clans stuff to someone else when they quit or transferred servers?? Floating thralls are still a thing… If they are up so far they are out of render distance or maybe just within render distance, how am I supposed to see that? Just wander the entire map looking up?
Yeah this or a menu list like I was talking about with an option to dismiss them remotely. They need to put something in place, I mean you can’t just screw people over and tell them to deal with it. The game should be fun not a bunch of work. (Removing gear from 100’s or 1000’s of thralls.) Or Stress. (Worrying about awol thralls missing in action that cripple your already limited defense numbers.)
This is starting to just be too big of a pain in the neck.
Edit: Honestly about the removing the armor/weapons… I am starting to not even care… I might just leave it on the thralls. I mean, what am I gonna need all that armor for now? 100’s or 1000’s of flawless epics suits and weapons for?.. Throw em in a vault I guess. Derp.
Ya never know when you might need 1000 sandstorm masks…
