Hello Exiles,

as some of you noticed, we asked Valve to temporarily disable family sharing, after we were in discussions with them.
Here is the info on how this happened:

As you know, we do take actions against players in very extreme cases in which we also have indisputable proof. However, we did notice that some players, we took actions against, managed to get back online and keep on doing their shenanigans.

After some investigation we realized that steam’s family sharing enabled them to get back into the game despite being banned from our official servers. So in short: Family Sharing was the reason that players that shouldn’t be able to play the game, were still able to do so. After discussions with Valve we got more info on how we can solve this from our side.

Family sharing was never supposed to be available with Conan Exiles and we didn’t think the feature would be of any benefit other than dodge the bans mentioned above.

So when given the option, we gave the OK to temporarily disable family sharing. However, we weren’t aware that it would be done immediately and thus it wasn’t communicated beforehand, which we really would like to apologize for. That wasn’t ideal, to say the least and shouldn’t have happened.

We learned now that a few of you were using family sharing for roleplaying/admin reasons. While that was definitely never intended, we also understand that it’s a convenient way and some of you have been playing like that way for a while.

However, if we weigh the current situations and look at which is the more serious, we feel that keeping the worst offenders off of our official servers is the most important at the moment. The idea is to re-enable family sharing again as soon as we can verify that the players who shouldn’t be able to play, can’t do so even with family sharing enabled.

We do have a fix in the pipeline and will let you know as soon as possible what the eta on that is.
So let us apologize again for the hiccup in communication and thanks for your patience in this. We really do appreciate it

UPDATE:

We decided to re-enable Family Sharing for now until we can:

• Implement the fix so family sharing can’t be abused by players we have taken action against
• Decide how to proceed with family sharing after we implemented the code above with our different communities and their play-style in mind.

We will talk to Valve and ask them to flip the switch. We don’t know exactly when that will happen but it should be sometime today so please keep an eye out.

A few additional notes:

• We realized, that the way in how some players used this feature, was way beyond what we had anticipated.
• There was no malintent towards any of our different communities who play Conan Exiles.
• There was no relation to the steam summer sales ending in regards to when we disabled this as assumed by some players.

Thank you again for your understanding and feedback