One of the big things about multiplayer survival sandbox games is that… well, griefers are a thing. People who get their kicks ruining other people’s stuff when they’re off-server (and sometimes still on-server) are generally not thought of highly, but people still do it. Now it seems it’s become such an issue for one recently released that the developers have had to step in to put in a fix.

Conan Exiles’ official servers have been suffering from EU players logging on to find out that while they were sleeping players from the NA and Asia regions have come in, and destroyed their camps overnight (and vice-versa). Obviously this doesn’t feel fair to them and Funcom have agreed because they’re now region-locking official servers – which means only EU players can access EU servers, NA players access NA servers and so on.

“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.”

This does mean that for the moment there’s no official servers for Asia, SA or Russia but Funcom are hoping to get some up within the next week. The other snarfu in this has been that clans who are formed of players from multiple regions have suffered a little bit, and some players are even asking for a refund on their game because of it.

Either way, if it was that much of an issue region-locking had to be done it really has to be for the best. From what I’ve seen of it, Conan Exiles is a challenging game to play, so I can see why people would consider griefing to be a very big issue in this game.