Conan Exiles war on lag continues

Conan Exiles [official site] developers Funcom have temporarily shut down the game's official multiplayer servers while they switch to a new host. The majority of servers for the early access survival sandbox game are unofficial player-run ones, mind, but perhaps you're a good little warchild who sticks to the playground and never jumps the fence to play in the woods. This switch is part of Funcom's battle against online lag, which was one of our John's complaints after he played but far from the only one. Funcom have also released a flurry of patches aimed at tackling lag in other ways.

Funcom addressed the problem with official servers in a Steam post yesterday:

"Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming demand for servers and our needs for administrating them, our official partner has been unable to deliver the level of quality and service we require. Because of this we have mutually agreed to end the partnership. We are in the process of finding new partners with the ideal hardware we can move the existing game databases to."

So the 200 official servers are going away for a bit. Funcom say they've saved the databases and plan to, so folks who played on them should keep their progress. Plenty are servers are around. As I write, this server tracker says there are 9,451 online servers live. One digit away from opening the comm van, there.

Funcom have released really quite a few patches since Tuesday's launch, tackling lag, rubberbanding, crashes, and more. It's enough patches, fast enough, that they've now half-apologised for the flurry which has left a lot of servers outdated. They say:

"In our rush to get fixes out to you we never really stopped to think about the fact that for Exiles we have thousands of unofficial servers (Over 9000 now) that actually require their Server Admins to get them updated. That’s our bad."

"So while urgently critical fixes will still go out ASAP, we will try to be better about the timing of less critical patches going forward. Of course that means we'll be patching when more of you are online, and we know that no matter when we patch, it will be at a bad time for someone."

Conan Exiles does support offline singleplayer too, mind.

Our John didn't dig Conan Exiles but I see almost 45,000 players online right now, making it the 11th most-played game on Steam. What do y'all make of it?