When i first started playing the game if there was a problem you could just message Funcom and get help in a day or two.
Now Zendesk is in use players can be left waiting weeks for a reply (if they ever do get one) to find out about suspension/ban information.
Christmas cannot be used as an excuse as they are a company that is supposed to be providing a service.
This is not an isolated incident as many players are experiencing the same lack of communication. And no before anyone points out that you don’t get suspended/banned for no reason some of the players were no longer in a clan and had no buildings.
The one time my clan was banned, we never got an update in game. Ever. I chalked it up to assumed reasons as to why… I could draw my own conclusions based on some of our builds and what the rules for building on the forum say. That being said, it would have been nice to at least insert a reason into the message when I can’t log into official servers.
Just a FYI, yes holidays can be used as an excuse. Just as any excuse or no excuse at all is also admissible. These are freely provided servers that are NOT apart of the purchase of the game itself. There is no warranty or guarantee implied.
A server owner/renter can ban or suspend you for any reason or no reason at all. They can respond to concerns at their leisure. They can make changes for any reason at all or simply make no changes. This goes for whether the server is provided by a single individual or a company provided server.
When players misattribute their experience on company provided servers to the actual quality of the product and the service they pay for, that mistake entirely on the player themselves. Its about time that the small minority of players on these servers get with the times and understand that.
If you truly want to see any changes, let them pay for empty servers.
I was kind of mistaken for thinking Zendesk was a different company. After looking into it further Zendesk is just Software that Funcom use!. So what happened to the customer service?
I didn’t really mention servers but i don’t believe that these are provided free. They were originally provided as a platform to sell the game and now i believe that they are used as a platform to sell Battle Pass and Bazaar items. The cost of running the servers will have most likely factored in to the profits that these generate.
Battlepass and the Bazaar are not tied to a type of server as a platform for sales. The game is tied to it. Playing in any environment advances the battlepass. In fact, the way they let you game the battlepass as an admin actually encourages playing in singleplayer, not on a hosted server.
I am pretty sure that Funcom are not operating as a charity offering free servers until all of their profits are gone. What i meant is that the Battle Pass and items sold in the Bazaar are most likely generating income to help pay for the servers which are in turn being used as a platform to sell content as most players prefer multiplayer.
Also playing Battle Pass in single player using admin commands is cheating, i don’t see the point they might as well give you all of the items every 3 months without any of the challenges.
No, they are not a charity… They are a game developer company… and NOT a game hosting service
When you buy the game, you do not buy a “right” to play on official servers…
You buy a license to use a piece of software… the game… for any servers you choose / have access to or single player. The people who never play on any server pay the exact same price for the game as you do.
As an added privilege based “bonus”, the company also has some servers (hosted by a completely different company) that you can choose to play on for free (no subscription, or no fee to enter the server). They make it clear that these servers DO NOT represent what their idea for the game was, it’s merely a very limited subsection of it, with a different set of rules that limit the capabilities of the player purposely, so that they can fit as many people there as possible.
Eg: The game encourages to “build big” and “dominate”… etc… official servers DO NOT.
Should you get banned from these servers, it’s exactly the same as a private server cluster banning you from their servers… Absolutely no action is taken against your game license, you get to keep the game and play on any other server or SP to your heart’s content, they merely filter you out from these servers.
If that were the case then you would think official servers would be high quality and run smooth, no?.. Is that the case? cuz I don’t see much investment going into them…
My personal opinion is that they have a contract with gportal that the game suggests gportal as the primary game server provider for anyone who presses the “rent a server” button plus they also have their logo in the game… and in return they give Funcom a certain amount of the cheapest servers they can for free or dirt-cheap (I’d bet on free actually, which imo is the reason there has been no quality change)
In fact, they reduced their server costs when they did the last round of consolidation. You don’t do that if those servers were a net plus for business.
Some good points and that could definitely be a possible business model that they have in place.
But if Funcom are not offering a game hosting service then why do they ban players from something that they are not operating which essentially excludes players from making any future content purchases if they don’t want to play solo or private. Surely that would not be in their interests.
Oh i have a conspiracy theory. Maybe the ToS which lead to bans are only intended to remove players from official servers to generate private server sales. Why else would a ban be limited to official servers that they do not operate?
I have a feeling that this thread will self-destruct or something but it does explain a few things.
Good point. I forgot about that. If they reduced their server costs then they couldn’t have been being used by G Portal as a free lure to generate private server sales. Therefore Battle Pass and the Bazaar must have been subsidising the server costs.
I think they factor that in to some degree.
Keep in mind that up to this point there was no bazaar or BP and since they introduced them you sort of see more customer service staff “buzzing around” And imo they’re also picking up Zendesk a bit, it will just take them time. The purpose would be to target the “ban fearing” crowd a bit more.
However the major contributor to them financially are typically the RP - PvE crowd (of which more exist on private servers), who simply buy everything… absolutely everything and also install ALL the mods (good good!)
So I think it’s one of those situations where it’s good business for Funcom either way. They try to put some effort into improving customer service to try and entice “ban-fearing” official only players to spend a bit of money, but at the same time they’re not the ones bringing in most of the money, it’s typically the RP PvE crowd and the console people (who have no other option)
Ofc we can speculate all we want here, only they know the truth and what kind of market research they actually did… Their new marketing direction though is absolutely ruthless so imo if there’s money left to squeeze out of any lemon tree… they’re gonna try and squeeze It’s still in the evolving phase though so we don’t really know what’s gonna happen next… They either grab the money and run, or stick around and reinvest it on some of the issues they probably also agree that they have.
Sounds like an astute observation, but there’s one teeny tiny problem with that: they don’t make money from private servers.
They don’t host them, but they do pay for them. Also, they can’t ban you from private servers. The ban is simply a blacklist file that the server has to read when it starts.
Of course it will. It has an abysmal signal-to-noise ratio.
True but official servers cost money hence the recent server cull. Less players on official gives them a reason for another cull which could save more money.
The thread shouldnt vanish if it sticks to an honest, non-hostile conversation that doesnt devolve it to assumptions of nefarious intent. I dont think we’ve come close to the threshold yet.
When i started the game on official servers i didn’t have anywhere to message and gain an answer! When i was seeing player abuse in the game and started a conversation with these players their answer was, “i don’t care what you think, you can’t touch me”.
People that already abuse the map with their beautiful builds were reporting in here people that was building ugly and closing obelisks, or brimstone lake, or whatever you can imagine! No matter if the ones that complaining were owning half of the map. On official servers at these times chaos existed. I don’t say that Zendesk is perfect, no way, but there is no comparison, or even a discussion of comparison between the times before and after Zendesk, no way with all do respect!
I can agree with this. The amount of complaints back in those days about players not being able to build anywhere because everything just being blocked off was ridiculous. It was just about every other post. Since they took a more active role in moderating and using Zendesk, the complaints dropped dramatically.
We see a complaint about the new moderation about 2-3 times a week now. Whereas complaints about the wild west system before was nearly a dozen a day or more. Its why I took such a hard and blunt stance against such players for a while. Such players on a whole were just ugly to one another. But now that many of them have gotten the ban stick I’ve taken a lighter and more accommodating stance to the ones left.
I just wish people would understand that many ugly people weren’t caught in the initial ban wave and still lurk around. And they will complain loudly when they do get caught. They’ve been doing their selfish things for so long they believe they are entitled to them.
And you can tell who these individuals are when the crocodile tears come out about their ban complaint. They treat their ban as a game. They think its funny. They joke about it. Just as one did very recently here in the forums a day or so ago. When someone like that gets removed, the community benefits.
I just wish more people would keep their dirty laundry on Zendesk. We get maybe one post about non-provided servers once every 3-6 months or so. And when its seen many of us are quick to report it and get it locked down. These forums definitely don’t need server drama adding to what we already have here.
Is Zendesk perfect for those on provided servers? Yeah. It is actually. Is it the best system? No. But it is the perfect system for the situation. You have hundreds of servers. Less than a dozen people slated to moderate them (I suspect its 3-4 tops, but that’s just a theory). And you need a way to handle infractions and information.
The best system would be to cull the hell out of the servers. Every survival/building game I’ve played has an amount of official servers you can count on one hand. That includes their test branch servers too. How they manage it is they actually active moderate them. Which means when you play, there’s moderators online observing in real time. They also heavily moderate inactive play. Your stuff is gone if you’re not actively playing. There’s no logging in once a week to refresh. They don’t need decay on such servers, if they notice stagnation, it gets wiped out. That does wonders for performance.
If going by population ratios, Conan Exiles should have no more than 15-20 servers. Maybe even half that. If they did this, the experience on provided servers would improve drastically. Moderation would become much easier, more personable. Server performance could also improve (unless they cull the machines they are on too, in which case it will be the same).
This is a 2 sided blade! You know when the sorcery update arrived, speaking for my console you cannot imagine how many players returned to the game. At this time unfortunately they were not prepared. The problems were sooo many, the servers were not enough, the behavior of old players was “the old one” and officials became simply br… ls!
People went really fast frustrated, playing in an environment that was already really problematic and the chance of hitting an enormous success again simply lost!
These are very expensive lessons that the company pays!
Every failure is experience and experience costs a lot, that’s why it worth a lot when you have it! I hope the next time something like this will happen they will be better. Not for us, we love the game and we will play it anyway, but for them! They have a way to misrepresent their beautiful work to the audience with these mistakes and they do not deserve the review they got!
Hope for a better future and a glamorous Conan exiles 2, a perfect game with the best reviews!
Making an alt to play? Lmao but it’s annoying cause I bought stuff on my main. Banned for building ain’t it. They never should perma ban for building super irritating. But it’s not that laggy any more on PS5 at least I know on ps4 it’s pretty bad and the loading time still mad annoying
And imo they’re also picking up Zendesk a bit, it will just take them time. The purpose would be to target the “ban fearing” crowd a bit more.
and also install ALL the mods 