Can we turn on decay?

[sochee]

I know it's nice to play without decay, but I think this should be revisited with the changing circumstances. 6 hour reboots may solve the server crashing issue, but please come to EU Pure and try to circle the ring road, half the map lags uncontrollably even on a high-end gaming PC. Most of the server complains about lag and electricity not working constantly.

Decay is the proper mechanic to fix this; even a decreased rate of decay would discourage huge unreasonable bases due to unkeep, and clean up unused player structures faster than the inactivity timer. Please please consider turning this on instead of rebooting the server more often or whatever. You can put a huge automated message in chat hourly saying decay has been turned on, so that players know.

[AlexaNightfire]

Hello,

Adding decay to the Pure servers is certainly an option, but I sadly doubt it will do much to curb the issues of massive builds. 

I think it would also add the issue that anything that was built without all the foundations connecting (as is possible to do on Pure servers now) would start decaying automatically, and active players might intentionally lose parts of their builds and items in that way.

If you ever hop on a Scourge server (especially US Scourge) it is easy to see that decay does little to prevent players from building huge bases, or placing huge amounts of deployables. 

Some other possibilities to combat lag and massive builds were discussed at length in this post here: 

Another possibility might be to further reduce inactive purge. I am not sure how many days it is set at for EU Pure, but it does the best job of clearing up builds from inactive players.

 

Edited January 20, 2021 by alexanightfire

[aNoNiM]

Limiting the stacks to vanilla stacks in the TC would help reduce the large build on Scourge. The no decay or large stacks both independently allow you for larger builds. If you can only put vanilla stacks some of the huge structure would only last for a few hours. unless they plan and put multiple TCs and connect them.

I do agree, you can't really change this mid-wipe as a large amount of active bases would decay.

There should be a limit per player/team of planters, composters etc.

There should also be a vanilla stack limit to food and berries. This would significantly slow down the abuse of farming as a meta. It's not possible to do some of the things being done here on a PVP server to this scale. Farms also get raided on there.

[sochee]

11 hours ago, alexanightfire said:

Hello,

Adding decay to the Pure servers is certainly an option, but I sadly doubt it will do much to curb the issues of massive builds. 

I think it would also add the issue that anything that was built without all the foundations connecting (as is possible to do on Pure servers now) would start decaying automatically, and active players might intentionally lose parts of their builds and items in that way.

Yes that would be an unfortunate consequence, but honestly I think most players would take that tradeoff if the lag was decreased. Just scan EU Pure chat, literally every 10 minutes someone is asking about lag.

Quote

 
If you ever hop on a Scourge server (especially US Scourge) it is easy to see that decay does little to prevent players from building huge bases, or placing huge amounts of deployables. 

I think it is easier to obtain and store resources on modded Scourge compared to Pure. On Pure it would be more of a hassle, and thus more effective.

I'm suggesting this because I think the mechanic already exists in the game to solve these issues (and in a fair way as well - if you want to build huge bases you can, just pay the upkeep and be active), we don't need to restart servers every 6 hours or wait for new hardware. I saw a fun party break up yesterday because the server restarted right in the middle and people just didn't care to log back on. Also had some friends leave the server due to lag after playing there many wipes.

Edited January 20, 2021 by sochee

[30013Z3R0]

Decay for twig would be excellent.  I think that alone would stop or remove a lot of spammy builds. But the upkeep rate, if there was one should be higher than wood to entice people to upgrade.