Why do people play on Official versus Private servers?

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
23

I’ve played since launch four official servers and about a dozen or more private servers. Let me go over some pros and cons:

Official

Pros:

  • No admins
  • No wipes

Cons:

  • No admins
  • Slow report times
  • Rampant with cheaters, exploiters, and hackers
  • I used to play 1944 until it devolved into an actual race war. That was the last official server I touched for over two years

Private

Pros:

  • Moderation in place to get rid of cheaters and racists
  • Custom rates more catering to a larger spread of players
  • Curated events
  • Option of modding
  • Helpful admins that are more new player friendly than the official servers

Cons:

  • If the admin pulls the plug it’s gone
  • Admins can be abusive or biased. It’s an assortment but an unwarranted blanket statement to assume all are.
  • If you like claim spamming you’d get banned faster on a private than official

I’m definitely more biased towards private, given my experiences. Has every private server I’ve played on been good? No. Have they banned people for saying the N word faster than an official would? Significantly.

24

I’m talking more about name recognition. When you buy a new Ford GT and the Eco-Boost seems to not be working, do you take it to the Ford Super Car Service Center, or do you pull into Joe’s Discount Auto Shop? Sure, Joe might be a great guy and even someone you know but the “quantity” in “known quantity” just isn’t there.

Almost none. And likely fewer than the number who do by going to privates first.

25

Right then, so, from a small sampling size here…

  1. No mod Private server is more appealing.
  2. Infrequent wipes, if any.

Normally do #1 on servers I’ve run as a given. Unless doing a specific thing for roleplay purposes. But on last two servers have found that mods generally are better left proposed by the player base, and considered by admin.

#2 though, that is a tough one. I get it if the server is meant to be a long term, build a dream base, sort of endeavor and game experience. Perhaps as part of the PvP game. But, doing a PvE server, with maybe the occasional and limited PvP event, epic base building tends to contribute to factors that can cause stagnation from my experience, not just in CE but in other games as well, like Neverwinter Nights. Granted however, this is due to my own administrator and game master style (coming from pen and paper roleplay games of the 90s) where new adventures and ability to bring in new players needs a touch of in character turn over. Then there is the issue of dealing with escapism identity problems that long term characters tend to create over time. Seen slightly in CE, still see massively in RP NWN servers, where people identify too much with characters, they’ve allowed themselves to get emotionally invested in, and they start to think they are the server player base. It is hard to tell a great game player, and role player, that they as their character have become a bigger detraction despite everything they bring when this happens. But thankfully can put a pin in it with clear expectations of server wipes, and rules for recreating characters, over server cycles. But this is all a lot more into my own personal GM take than anything.

So, what are some other issues though that a Private, versus an Official server can address to make them more appealing to players?

26

This is easy to explain. For one thing, these “wipes” are a new thing. Most of us who prefer official servers rely on the assumption that Funcom won’t wipe official servers. That assumption has held for years now, for the vast majority of official servers.

Second, there are no server wipes on official servers. There’s downsizing, which isn’t the same, even though some players will be affected in almost the same way they would be with a server wipe. There are also the new rules, but those don’t end up in a whole server being wiped, only the builds that are against these rules.

For starters, just finding that private server can be a needle-in-a-haystack scenario, except you’re not guaranteed that the haystack even has a needle.

Before even considering whether I gel with the the community and administration, I need to find a server that satisfies the following conditions:

  • It’s a game mode I like.
    • I prefer PVE-C, but will settle for PVE if I have to.
  • The ping is decent.
  • The settings are close to vanilla.
    • I’m not into 5x harvest multipliers or 10x XP multipliers. I’ve even seen one server where sprint cost multiplier was set to 0, so you could sprint endlessly.
  • The mod list is short enough and doesn’t include stuff I hate.
    • I respect the effort and the skill of the people behind the Age of Calamitous, but if I wanted to play a generic Tolkien-derivative MMORPG, I would have picked something other than Conan Exiles.
  • No requirement to hang out in Discord voice chat. (Yes, there are servers that require it.)
  • No onerous rules.
    • Some servers have rules limit the building sizes way too much for my taste.
    • Others have a whole process that requires you to come up with a backstory for your character and get it vetted. I respect hard-core RPers, but I’d rather go play a TTRPG if I wanted that.

Even if I find a server like that, I still have the following risks to worry about and problems to deal with:

  • Is the admin good?
    • Admin abuse is something to worry about, but it’s not the only thing that can go wrong. Being a good admin takes a lot of work.
  • How long will the server last?
  • Every time there’s a major update, I won’t be able to play for at least a day, often several days, because of the mods.
  • Speaking of which, what happens if the community wants to add another mod?
    • Every new mod is another thing that can break during a major update.
    • It’s also another thing you could get used to, a thing you might not have again if you ever have to move to another server.
    • What if it’s a mod I hate?

On officials, I don’t have to worry about any of that, except the admins, but even that is a different concern than the one I have on privates. True, I need to worry about whether I understood the rules correctly and whether a malicious report will happen to be seen by an overworked (or negligent) admin, but there are some mitigating factors there:

  • Getting wiped by a Funcom admin due to malicious reporting is not substantially different from getting harassed and griefed by some troll clan before Funcom started moderating officials. Both scenarios end up in having to move to a different server and starting from scratch there.
  • Speaking of which, moving to a different server is not hard on officials. You don’t have to get used to a different mod list or the subtle (or not-so-subtle) effects of different settings.

So yeah, I prefer official servers. In fact, in all my experimentation with more than 10 private servers, I’ve only found two that I liked, but not enough to stay there forever:

  • @Ramtex’s Lawless Sands was an excellent place. Sadly, my ping on it was insanely high, so I had to move on.
  • @Larathiel used to run excellent PVE servers. He was a great admin and the community was awesome. I eventually decided to go back to officials because I missed PVE-C and because I didn’t like waiting for the mods to get unborked on every update. Neither of these reasons is @Larathiel’s fault.

Sorry for the long-winded post. I hope at least a portion of this wall of text is helpful to someone :slight_smile:

EDIT: Added some past tense and sadness.

27

I think I played about 20 hours or so on Official servers way back when. The abusive play back then made today’s abusive play kindergarten stuff. I moved to Private and have never looked back - and am never likely to go back on an official server again. Private servers are usually modded and usually have PIPPI mod front and centre. PIPPI allows Admins to immediately ‘see’, on the map, exactly what player/clan has built and thereby easily identify the baddies out there (who knows, perhaps FC have incorporated something into the core game that helps them do similar during their official servers clears.

All I can say is that the Private vs Official question is, in my opinion, a no-brainer - Private wins hands down. Any abuse on Private is usually quickly cleared, the player(s) warned, and all back to normal (or player banned if they keep abusing things).

28

What if, as the Admin/Arbiter, it all worked up to a war between Alpha Clan and several aligned smaller Clans? If Alpha is beaten, Admin drops a God on their dominant base unless they move it.

Private operators have so much flexibility, especially if there’s RP in the mix. The Admin can be the actual Server God without any breaking of the Fourth Wall.

ETA

This post is like a beautiful mountain. I want to climb it. :kissing:

29

Private server is my playground and testing for potential strats for Officials. So while i can manipulate anything, if im testing something it has to be harder than officials. So for example NPCs hit harder on my private than officials.

The rest of the time is pure choice.

30

Like I said in that thread, don’t play on official either. FC admins play there too. I’ve said this a dozen times, officials are private servers, rented by a company rather than an individual.

Besides admins playing on their own servers is no different than someone playing Street Fighter or whatever game on their own console with a group of friends. This hasn’t really been a problem for half a century of video gaming. Its an arbitrary thing made up very recently.

31

Do they? I’m going to claim that’s a wild guess… or some proof maybe?

One can choose to look at it this way. Most do not AFAICT!

It’s ALWAYS been a thing (a source of complaints, fear, and conspiracy theory) since MMOs were 1st created. Zero exceptions. I have some Q3a stories to share if you have the time - LOL.

32

Livestreams and Forum posts in the past. For obvious reasons they likely won’t announce themselves when actually logged in.

As I said in the other thread, I played with and against (he had the ability to switch factions even) Matt Higby in Planetside 2, a competitive MMOFPS. It wasn’t a problem. Heck the recursion stat tracker even had dev kills as an achievement there. The “You are getting banned!” Achievement was always a giggle to hear.

If you play on a server and funny business goes on, you’ll see it immediately. There’s been servers running for years with very large communities. You don’t get there by cheating your playerbase.

33

So here you are basically admitting that it does happen and is a problem?

34

On my server, I have less problems than officials.

35

That’s probably an acceptable and true statement there… yeah. But one isn’t a majority - or even a valuable statistic. :wink:

36

Well you asked a subjective question. What you and I consider funny business is different. I’ve been on record saying I don’t like playing on Officials because I don’t like how FC admins on them. But that is my opinion. And I doubt you all would like the changes I would make.

37

I didn’t ask any question at all!

But here’s a counter to that. I’m on a private CE server and connected discord which I silently monitor. It’s an open container PVE server with zero thrall or building decay. Steeling from each other is common there and some people even leave containers out for the benefit of all in need. One person took some thralls through a window which belonged to a discord pal of the Admin’s. The player in question was logging on every Friday and Saturday. The Admin’s pal complained and the Admin sneakily retaliated by by informing all the discord members to be sure to log on during the week and then on Thursday he set the thrall decay rate to 5 days. We were all thieves on that server but that thief stole from the wrong player and the Admin cleared out his thrall collection for good. That server is over two years old BTW and has an active membership.

That to me is “funny business” and that sort of thing is extremely common on private servers!

People who don’t play favorites, don’t exist!

38

One anectodal experience doesn’t represent the whole. That’s reductionist and a harmful blanket statement, and it’s not constructive or based in reality. If you want to push the narrative of privates are full of admin abuse, why don’t we also adhere to the stereotype of toxic officials full of cheaters?

39

You’re not reading the conversation properly Jimbo. Taemien made several blanket statements which we finally got reduced to “his experience on his server”. AKA: Anecdotal. I then offered another anecdotal example as a counter. And I can offer several more from several other servers too.

I’m not saying these things represent the whole or better said: the common daily experience.

Percentage of cars that get flat tires on a specific day: 0.0001%
Percentage of cars that will eventually experience a flat tire in their life times: 99.999%

Given the two statements above it is more or less correct to claim that flat tires are extremely common!

40

I never made a blanket statement about private’s. So with that out of the way, let’s stay on topic.

41

You absolutely did: Why do people play on Official versus Private servers? - #31 by TeleTesselator And this like it or not - is the topic. Why people play on Private or Official servers… that’s the topic. o0

42

Well if you want to believe that, then go for it.