‘Conan Exiles’ Developers Target Offline Raiding With Server Region Lock

The Conan Exiles developers have taken a shot at offline raiding by locking official servers to specific regions.

One of the biggest challenges survival game players face when on public servers is the variance in play times of the different players. One of the largest complaints within survival game communities is the abundance of offline raiding. Western hemisphere players, such as those in North or South America, tend to be offline during their night, which happens to be the time Eastern hemisphere players in Asia or Australia tend to be most active. And the reverse is true as well.

As a result, the game devs for Conan Exiles decided to implement a region lock on official servers, preventing players from joining outside their region. When the plan was first initiated, this resulted in Asian players from being locked out of official servers, as none had been created for Asia at the time of the patch.

Funcom contacted PC Gamer with an update to the situation in Conan Exiles.

“The region lock does not affect Russia and South America. It just means that players from Asia can’t play on official North American or European servers, but official servers in Asia will be introduced this week. Players anywhere can still of course play on the thousands of private servers which are available.”

And for those who play a lot of survival games, custom servers are often more popular than the official ones, if in part due to the capabilities of mods within those servers. Rust is a great example, where custom servers not only outnumber the official ones, but also have a much higher player base.

Jens Erik, a community manager for Conan Exiles, told PCGamesN, that “We have decided to East/West region lock the official servers for three reasons. The language barrier and the different playstyles is proving jarring for a lot of players…. Also, the vastly different time zones between regions made offline raiding an unavoidable issue for a lot of players who would wake up to all their stuff being completely ruined.”

Hopefully when everyone has official servers, the issue will become a moot point. In the meantime, no Conan players are being locked out of the game itself, just specific servers.

The region lock may end up being a really good thing for Conan Exiles. Many players join servers in other regions so they can do offline raiding. Many games suffer from the offline raiding, which, while permitted by most games and even private servers, can seriously ruin the gaming experience. New players especially may find that they tend to get wiped out more frequently when they cannot be on to defend their bases.

Additionally, latency rates can be a major issue for combat in games like Conan Exiles. When you swing at someone and the weapon hits, you expect damage to be done, but if that person’s connection is poor, the system may not register the strike. Some players excel at this kind of combat, taking advantage of the poor latency to land blows when a target is not even in range of the weapon.

While the region locks may reduce the number of players on some of the servers, it is likely that the result will be beneficial for those who do play, keeping a more equitable balance outside of simply when people are online or off.

And there is always the possibility the developers will change their minds. Conan Exiles has barely been out a couple weeks or so, and there will be plenty of changes coming in the near future.

So what are your thoughts on the region locked servers in Conan Exiles? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!

[Featured Image by Conan Exiles/Steam]