Poojam

PVP servers need some love with technical fixes (terrain glitch prevention, cheat prevention, dupe prevention, better admin tools, and DDOS protection). Looking through the server list, and it appears these servers are really dead now. Played on a couple of the remaining ones, and it's clear they are new server admins that don't yet know how to balance the servers nor prevent cheating/exploiting. Been around since A9, and this is the deepest in the ditch that this segment of the playerbase has ever been.

1) Adopt terrain glitch hole protection to prevent players from intentionally or unintentionally seeing through the ground. Several mods are available that do this, but it should be adopted by TFP for inclusion in the vanilla game. They really do work well. No reason that the admins have to mod their servers to fix this prevalent exploit. No reason for TFP to not do this, since several modders have fixed this problem already for free. Just download, copy, verify, and you're gtg. 2) Itemblacklist.xml that the server regularly checks against to monitor inventory items of players. Auto-kick and Auto-ban options. This will prevent players from spawning in unavailable items via creative on multiplayer servers. Not perfect, but it catches the lazy cheaters that download teh H4x and hop in a MP game for a quick fix. 3) Provide improvements to ensure servers are protected against DDOS attacks. I know of multiple servers that were very popular and DDOS'd to death by salty scrubs in early A19. Why is this not a major problem for other publishers.... or maybe it is? Even with setting up VPN's and all sorts of fancy double natting, tunneling, and bs that adds latency, these owners couldn't defend themselves. Really, they had to break down and rent very expensive servers that provided sophisticated DDOS protection tools which only sort of worked. Very disappointing to invest in a $3000 server to run this for a community of over 2000 active players on it (running 40-50 active players at a given time), and then have it DDOS'd to death. Rentals ran about $150/month.

Right. Thought so.

Me too. - - - Updated - - - I don't mean this in a derogatory way. But... are you on the spectrum? Maybe just a little?

Yea, score doesn't matter because there is an overiding aspect beyond digital numbers on a board. That aspect is to take other people's stuff. I hate sports for exactly the reason you have stated. What part of this game is meant to be a sport? You're dissecting my milkshake example, comparing it to your personal opinion of a different aspect of your liking, and missing the point. Yea, the rewards don't change for me for the first 3-4 days of low level gameplay. You're right! We finally agree on something. If you read on, you would find that your recommendation of restoring loot to the owners does change for the rest of our existence. What are you going to get from someone on the 2nd kill of camping a bedroll that you can't get from raiding? Your inexperience is really starting to show here. Yes, the raider does pay an ante. They don't know what they are going to find. Could be nothing. Could be a lot of usefull stuff. They spend resources on fuel, food/water, repair kits, tool durability (on big bases, I can chew up a purple auger completely) without knowing what they are going to get. They also expose themselves to 3rd parties that can come by and shoot them in the back and take their raiding gear. It's an ante. And to my point if you give people their stuff back when they log back in, then what is the point? You've just destroyed the notion of scarcity, encoded a great way to dupe, and damaged the competitive aspects of the game. This notion is the epitome of pvp-butt-hurt here.

I didn't do a good job of quoting his arguments and framing my responses. I'm not pro/against the scoreboard in it's current incarnation. I was just using it to support my argument that making my numbers bigger on it is not a reward to me.

A scoreboard is meaningless because it has no value. It's like that Drew Carey show from the 90's, "Whose line is it anyways?". The points don't matter. If points were all that mattered to me, I would be happy with CS Go because I would strive for a high-tier ranking and positive k/d at the end of my matches. The scoreboard that we already have doesn't really matter. You might look at it to gage whether you are going to trust someone that has 45 player kills, but other than that it's useless. The current system, where there things at stake for both parties involved in raiding or protecting your assets, matters. It matters because if I drink your milk shake, you don't have a milkshake anymore. It may have taken you hours to get that milkshake. But I took it by killing you and now it's mine! There is risk and reward. What you are proposing is eliminating the risk part of that equation, which cheapens the reward. It depends on where I am in character progression and the server settings. If I'm low level, then I may get something of value. But if I'm high level and have an established base, it has very little value to me. I'm raiding for the purpose of taking it from my competition. If they aren't being raided, they are spending their time and resources working on raiding me. It is the survival of the fittest. If the server is drop all, I won't turn down anything. It all has some value. If it's bag drop, the only thing that has value is mats. I will never lose my bar (weapons/armor/critical tools/fuel/kits etc). If it's belt drop, the only thing that has value are weapons. But this is to a smaller extent, because I just won't use those slots on my bar save for a weapon and a stack of med kits. If it's no drop, then I view that as the same as there being no point for half of the game. I can only raid people. And they can just store all their good stuff in their inventory, where I can never get it. What a miserably boring server setting imo. That's fine that you are motivated at "being the best" at something. We just differ on what that is. IMO, points on a scoreboard don't make you the best when it's so easy to game those points by camping a noob's bedroll. I've seen players farm a hundred kills and conflate their scores. That would make them the best by your metric wouldn't it? I mean this in a good-natured trash talking PVP way, but if you are level 75 and I raided your base and killed you on a drop all server. Raided everything to the point where you have to go out and punch trees to get wood for making a stone axe again, I think we both know who is the best regardless of the scoreboard. No i disagree on the little league. I normally play on a drop all server where griefing and base raiding are not only allowed, but encouraged. On good days, there are 25 other players competing on it. We're all angling to kill each other and take each other's stuff, eventually. We all spend dozens/hundreds of hours on some server builds. Any individual can lose a ton of work in obtaining resources/tools/weapons by being careless and losing it to your opponent. The adrenaline that gets pumping when you run into a stranger that is gunning for you, and you have 15000 stone in your bag, is quite high. When you die, it's rough. I get motivated to exact revenge. To get my stuff back and to take a piece of his while I'm at it. When I live, it's simply a thrill to have survived the encounter knowing there was something at stake. Getting the contents of their bag is a bonus. Eliminating the risk from killing a player or a base raiding perspective (by restoring the owner's loot) would be what I call little league. And it would not be any fun whatsoever because the only one that had to pay an ante, was the one doing the raiding.

PVP has long been the whipping boy because every problem is magnified 10x in a competitive game environment. When there are problems, it is always the PVP'ers voicing the complaints first and loudest. I'm sure that's why Madmole had gotten so negative about it in the past.

I'm not one either. But I am an engineer. And your last statement is pretty lol-worthy.

Roger that. Options a plenty. Good. Aside from those main technical fixes, the sound system needs to be dialed back in to something more reasonable. I talked about this in an earlier post in this thread. Those really are the big picture things in my mind. If you're truly soliciting ideas; Player built arena's/deathmatch areas are a cool thing that modders have been playing with for awhile now. It's PVP and fits the genre of survival a bit too. Think gladiator-type deathmatches within the same world. If the dev's could formalize that into something that can be accommodated in game as a prefab unit that would be pretty popular. I'm thinking it would be a large prefab where players gather to fight it out. Maybe make it so an audience can place bets on the survivor with dukes. The winner is given awards. I'm envisioning a large invulnerable paintball arena surrounded by grandstands. The grandstands would disable PVP for the audience until they leave the prefab area. Lots of possibilities on weapons/stakes that could be drawn up. This would definitely provide a means to scratch an itch for players that just want to fight. I know I have several friends that didn't stick with 7dtd because there just wasn't enough action. Once you killed someone they usually disappeared for the evening. Maybe you could even make it possible to fight boss zombies/herds of ferals etc/or bandit leaders as a challenger in the arena, such that it works in a PVE-only setting as well. One idea I had about the education side of things is the development of an NPC that does that. I think a lot of players don't know what to expect when they join a multiplayer server that allows PVP. The disappointment raidees feel is because they didn't understand or know that they are being hunted by other players. So tell them in a fun way. For example, a lot of RPG and surival-genre games use wilderness guides or NPC's to disseminate tips, tricks, and dial in expectations for learning the game. Copy/pasta traitor Joel and build him into a hardcore character archetype housed within a fortified bunker. Make finding him part of the starter quests. Players could take him beer and ammunition or whatever he wants will change in exchange for certain information. You could trade these for guidance or medium-rarity items (calipers, chem stations, forges, skill books). Make the things he says (like the trader who talks ♥♥♥♥ all the time) a paranoid hardcore niche PVP type. "Hide your stuff or the other surivors will take it! They took my mother's favorite auger." I'm picturing the well-prepared survival guy from Tremors, Burt Gummer. You could make his place filled with absurd amounts of food and supplies. And I mean this in an endearing way, but you could name him Mr. Bloom You could also achieve the same sort of thing with a simple, handheld radio that survivors start with. Let the broadcaster be some survivor cooped up in his base looking for friends out there. Flash bangs would be a cool new item that I don't believe is implementable within the current coding. It has offensive and defensive capabilities for PVP. Most of the mechanics and player model templates are there to support the actions, but variables to be called on by the audio and visual need to be supported. Refine support for clans/factioning to foster and promote cooperative play. Friends lists are a good start. But I'm talking leadership, building privledges on shared claimed areas. Take a look at ARK, which has a pretty robust factioning support system to get some ideas. This game is about survival, but it seems too common that people are going at it alone in the wilderness. Most people simply can't trust anybody to bring into their houses. I understand it can be brutal for new players. Logically speaking, survivors would seek the shelter and protection of groups if a post-apocalyptic event actually happened. Personally, I find the game so much more rewarding when you have a few allies and you can cooperatively build, mine resources, and protect each other. As a logical extension of that, it would be neat if we could have clothing/armor items and signs that are customizeable and identifiable from a distance. Rust does this with a crude paint-like feature in game that is kind of neat. But if you wanted to be refined, it could be integrated into the steam workshop so that higher resolution emblems/icons can be made to incorporate into their bases and clothing. There are probably some significant backend changes that would need to be made such that when a custom model is worn by a player it shows up correctly to other players. This is not just for PVP, but once you have steam workshop support for icons/emblems then allow the same for purchase and placement of custom prefabs. Create the backend technical support to allow players to go into single player, build a custom base, export it to the steam workshop, download it, deliver it, and enable any player to place it in the game. Empyrion does this with ships and it's really awesome. You download a schematic and must have the mats in your inventory.

So a central claim block is going to recompute the health of the claimed area after every bullet hit/tool swing? Don't you think that will be resource intensive?

I don't think you're far off the mark. I would lump myself into that category too quite frankly. But I think he, as well as several others that have posted in this thread, are still trying to make a sincere effort to provide input and guide the decision making process. I suspect you could agree that my trepidation (and likely others) that are passionate about this topic are not without basis. Let's not frame the picture of how the conversation went after the fact to support your own interpretation of how the thread has evolved. I think there has been valid points on both sides of the aisle on most the relevant topics. Some better than others. Some from left field. It's all there plain as day if anyone cares to read it, or as you say "will turn it to Madmole for review" once it has borne fruit. To be clear, you did say additional options later on down the line. This is not how it was represented in some of the "throwing out ideas" posts at the beginning of this topic. This thread was billed as a "PVP Mode" and ideas were pitched by you and Gazz to achieve those ends. What the "mode" actually meant in terms of server execution was not really communicated. I interpreted it as a standalone product like H1Z1's King of the Hill. Knowing how the dev's have portrayed the development of the game, I suspected this was something that was being explored so they sell it. It would be all packaged up to satisfy the "PVPers" and conveniently enable further silo'ing off the core game's development so that they could develop it to cater to their PVE-only audience's desires. I'm skeptical like that. Please tell me I'm wrong. But on the arguments in question, it was quite specific that it was seen as a positive move to flatten out the progression curve, which could theoretically be customizeable. Fair enough. However, I don't understand how Gazz's ideas about creating a single, centralized claim block +/- perks protection assets +/- invulnerability status would be be compatible within the current or simple adaptation of the server customization variables. It seems likely that this is a stretch to say it could be supported both ways. ...? I'm all ears.

Yea they are. Which is what and how I enjoy playing it. Gazz is talking about changing that. The only trouble is the proposed system (single scaling difficulty claim) will be very restrictive in terms of base design. It will also be very easily exploitable by the owner. As I understand it, the point was to create a disencentive to causing a lot of damage to a base. Well, everyone will just build a giant tower on one wood block. Defriend or get an ally to destroy that block. Then a large claimed structure will collapse causing the claim strength to spike thereby gaming the logic. The only thing that is broke with the current system is that hacking and exploits have exacerbated the rate of raided bases combined with poor player expectations to trying out multiplayer. To be clear, this is not even a pvp issue. This is a tower defense risk/reward game issue. Do the zombies care about not trashing the base too? Or how about when teams claim a store, or a whole city with their indestructible claims? There is value in having destructible claims because valuable areas and resources can be lost and regained.

Do you have any statistics on how the playerbase is playing the game? Like... 80% of players are playing on single player/privately hosted servers. Eliminate the console population from that too. Why do you keep calling us hardcore PVP players, as if you are putting us in a category to foreshadow the oncoming dissapointment? There already is a way to "test the waters" with the claim strength modifiers. Set the mux at 64x and go to town. But you are operating on a playerbase's complaints when their negative experiences are 1 part tough-game-difficulty and 3 parts you-got-hacked/exploited and lost your stuff.

I'm glad you are supportive of those recommendations. We need you to relay this stuff to TFP and make the case for why it is important. Wanted to post a little snipit of a situation of what I just ran into recently. I've seen Madmole claim in the past that the duping only hurts those players themselves. Well... not exactly. I've been playing on a somewhat poorly adminned server for a few weeks. The server runs fine. It's just the owner doesn't play much and the mods aren't very active in trying to ban abusers. It was more heavily monitored when it was a younger server. But we're getting up into the 500+ days now. Anyways, I have run into a team of exploiters and dupers that are wrecking everyone on the server. The server pop went from averaging 25 in prime time to about 12. These guys are glitching through doors and walls via terrain or maybe minibike chassis glitches. I have caught them inside my base in sealed off rooms that were impossible to get into multiple times. They are always max wellness the next day, no matter how many times we kill them. They always have a pile of ammo, steel, steel upgrade, pile of rare resources on them. Doesn't seem like they have any concern for value of resources. Decide I'm going to raid them and destroy all their resources that I can get at. They have a 25x25x30 block tall fully upgraded steel and upgraded steel base with a shallow moat and steel spikes. Perimeter claims outside the moat extend the protection zone out to about 30 blocks further. I have spent about 18 hours over the last week removing 8 perimeter claims late at night when they aren't online. Work on it a little bit each night. Doing it legitimately by mapping the claims out on the surface and carefully by entering beyond the claimed area and covering my tracks so they won't notice when they come back online. I removed the necessary, final 2 claims last night, which allowed me to frame up close enough to the base that I could easily jump in. But it's not going to be easy, because the whole base is steel and upgraded steel. I'm looking at a 3-4 hour raid in front of me to hit their loot room with a high level auger based on what I can see on the outside of the base. I spend yesterday collecting mats (75 repair kits, steel, food/drink, backup pickaxe, gas etc), upgrading a good auger to higher purple quality, and prepping a forward operating base close to theirs. I'm ready. I go to their base an hour ago and some other duper has exacted their own revenge on these turds while I was at work today by using hundreds of explosives to destroy all of the terrain surrounding their base. This revealed the gaps in their claims, since the explosives didn't destroy those blocks. The owners noticed this, and have now replaced the claims I removed and added another perimeter ring. All of my effort was for nothing. Tell us all again how dupers only hurt dupers Madmole.

Most raids occur while players are offline because there is only a huge additional cost to doing it while the defenders are online. That is you are defending against someone that is spawning in the base trying to kill you. Where you are most likely bedrolled a ways away. The online/offline claim modifiers don't work. If they did, then servers could be configured such that there was a reason to conduct an online raid. For example, the online claim modifier would be 8x and the offline 64x. Well... maybe it's worth the risk to battle while breaking in because it will take you 8x longer to raid through that base while they are offline. Repairing blocks are also much faster than damaging a block at just about any multiplier. So you can literally be hitting a door for 10 minutes, then the guy walk by and repair it 2x and erase all of that. Why subject yourself to such pointlessness? A hokey scoreboard is simply that. It is meaningless. There is not much point in raiding someone if they get to keep their stuff. Stealing from other players rewards you with their resources and disadvantages other survivors because they are a weaker potential enemy. Where will be the incentive to build a good base if all your stuff gets returned to you? What is the point? This shouldn't be little league, where everyone gets a medal.

I'm sure there are many. I believe they enable a very simple server-settings variable to adjust scalability of block durability. This provides online and offline security, while also enabling diversity of game types. Players can dial in their protection settings to suit their preferences. This is a game built around progression, gathering resources, crafting, killing, stealing, scavenging, and defending against other survivors and zombies. That's a very large investment in time to do most of those things well. LCB's provide the ability to protect that investment. LCB's also allows prefabs to be built with the same materials as bases without having to introduce base specific blocks.

Divides the players no more than they already are. They were talking about a separate pvp only mode, like h1z1's king of the hill. Which is basically a different stand alone game. There are multiple problems with offline multipliers. That is the most obvious. You also have to add logic for friends list now. Just add a 60 minute timer to it really though and problem is solved for the most part.

Then they should play on servers with a high claim multiplier. And/or TFP should fix the offline claim multiplier so that it actually works, which would provide a middle ground that is currently absent. Flip through the server listings and you'll notice they are usually different values. I think that most people are not aware that it doesn't function.

Oh, I know the audience. I guess I thought this thread represented an opportunity to perhaps expand that pool to re-attract "PVP" players to the game. Something about Roland's posts led me to believe that. I and others have given our reasons why singular claims +/- invulnerability is a terrible idea. I simply fail to see the attraction. All I see are pros/cons and the cons far outweigh the pros. More importantly, I see a lot of exploits and hacks that exacerbate the problem into what it is currently perceived. Instead of fixing those outstanding issues, you propose to design a system around it without addressing the underlying issues and then doing an evaluation before proposing large changes. Just to be clear, this is not a "PVP Update" if the purpose is simply to neuter it into something more palatable for PVE players to stomach. The problem is education in this regard. If players on a raiding server knew the risks, then they play and get bent over backwards, they shouldn't be devastated. Play it or don't. There are tons of combinations of claim strengths, claim size, and partial area safe zoning via mods that already give players the ability to choose a ruleset that meets these needs. I've tossed out ideas that comport within the lore & current quest system design that can greatly improve these problems, but I feel like that was ignored. Singular claims are awful for how that will be a great restriction to base creation. Invulnerable claims, if they are to be implemented, need to be optional. (They are useless mind you, people will still raid their crap). Implementing both would simply be just another huge degradation/nail in the coffin for anyone that enjoys raiding.

If they are hiding for two weeks before emerging to compete, they are playing a very conservative, boring, or perhaps a PVE-build-focused strategy. It's a common strategy for first timers on a PVP server and is somewhat more effective than it ought to be simply because of the steepness of the force multiplier. Which is a topic I think we have exhausted and can be addressed easily enough by Gazz's massaging. But I argue that is not a playstyle that a lot of experienced PVP players do. It's what a lot of PVE minded players do, and a prevalence of the current audience do because that's the type of players that has stuck around and still plays the game. Many true PVP players stock up on a bit of food/water, then gather a stack of arrows and set off hunting these types of players to kill and steal their mats they've been harvesting on Day 2. There just aren't very many of us left. The reason 7DTD doesn't have a healthy PVP population is simply because of a few of the dev's and forum moderators past attitudes and blatant disregard (I do insist this is putting it mildly) towards maintaining a healthy multiplayer game environment over the alphas for the last 2 years. The PVPers were the first ones to be vocal about declines in stability, but it affected large cap PVE players the same. I'm not looking to dredge up a lot of old dirty laundry, but you even admit it in the title of this thread. "Eventually" they will come around to PVP. I love your optimism, but I'm not easily convinced. I'm engaging in this thread because I would like to see that happen. More importantly, I would like it done in intelligent ways that maintain the integrity and unique spark of the game. But I don't know where a lot of these new ideas and "problems" derived from (a separate PVP mode, invulnerable claims, perk claims, protecting griefers etc). Many of these problems aren't problems to begin with that have been vocalized by PVP players. Some of them appear to me as simple as trying to implement a system that makes players happy that got beat on a PVP server. Most have quite effective solutions currently supported in the game to counter. It just takes perseverence and learning-through-playing on a PVP server to learn how to survive. That lesson is far more lengthy and rewarding than learning how to survive against zombies in 7 days. With regards to the PVP population, a few of us have stuck it out. It's sporadic at best though. But I've known hundreds of players, modders, server owners, and regular teammates and friends that quit for an array of reasons that ultimately boiled down to the fact that Madmole does not want a PVP game. He has stated it in no uncertain terms many times. A lot of them left when the switch to U5 came about, and it nuked the viability of servers with more than 8-10 people on them. When confronted with this evidence, the line was "we do not care about supporting multiplayer servers. this is a single player/coop game., go play rust". The forums exploded around supporting this sentiment, and people that wanted to play the game in a PVP way got the message. They left. Most of them for good. As a couple posters in this thread have pointed out. It's not the land claims or experience curve that drive away PVP players. Heck, look at just about any MMORPG. You want to talk about grind. Look at WOW or EVE online... it takes forever to level and the risks can be devastating. As in thousands of real life dollars and hundreds of hours devastating. They have millions of players though. But they do have a perfectly stable game environment that protects players assets from needless waste (hacking/exploiting). - - - Updated - - - In my opinion, the following are what drives away PVP players from this game and should be TFP's primary focus on any "PVP Update". In order of relative importance. #1 - Develop support for high population servers. 30+ is an abolute minimum. 50 is warmer. 100 is awesome. This has two aspects of it which are critical to building a playerbase of "1000's", regardless of whether it is PVE or PVP. These two aspects are attracting an audience to play a multiplayer game and also enabling the ability for people to adequately host sufficient large cap servers. This game world is pretty big, even at 10k limits. You can play for days and sometimes weeks irl without coming across another player on a 20 man server. On the 2nd aspect, the game's stability seems to be consistently getting better in the last year, but I'm not convinced that's for any pvp-minded reasons. I feel like it's more of a convenient side-effect of improving the game's code. For example. It is uncommon but it's not impossible to get up to around a 30-man server and maintain stability for 1000's of days. BUT - it takes a hell of a good server, and a great server manager program to keep them afloat (regular scheduled restarts, backups, active admins to remove glitched bikes/suspended terrain, chunk restorations for corruption). I know the owners of several of the long-running large cap servers and have donated $ to several of them to keep them running. These guys are true lovers of the game and spend a lot of money to do this. Teammates and I have even rented our own 30-man server. It costs about $120/month to get a good enough box to host a 30-man, reliable server. That is simply cost prohibitive and the ultimate reason why no matter what you do to any of this game, PVP will not flourish until you can support enough people to play such that you can find each other in a persistent world environment. - - - Updated - - - #2 - The need to develop better admin tools so that owners & mods can identify and deal with the hacking/exploiting problems themselves. I'm convinced the game and server code can't eliminate hacking with the way it is currently setup and still provide the desired, moddable nature. And I'm not proposing to change that necessarily. But I think it's getting time to address this by building better server managment and admin tracking tools now that the core framework is largely in place (or seems to be). Currently, most server owners use 3rd party server managers to achieve stability and control who plays on their servers. There are a multitude of things they all do, and some implement systems that others don't have. The critical things they provide are supporting; region blocking, ping limits, inventory flagging with auto-banning, and adequately support entity removal (for all those bugged minibikes). Server owners that have been around the block know they must block China. The consequence is they will literally get 3-4 hackers per day that will teleport around and destroy/kill everything. It's just a cultural thing, but it has to be done. These players login and destroy PVP and PVE servers alike for the lulls. Some owners have developed techniques such as invulnerable claims, area zoning rulesets, and other systems to try and mitigate it. Some of the people that are asking for these things in the forums are doing so because they are not getting beat fair & square in a PVP server, but they have actually suffered from the hackers. - - - Updated - - - #3 - Reduce the number of exploits, trivial annoyances and needless grind. You can place minibike frames on claimed areas and scale people's walls! Projectile explosives do excessive block damage for their cost. I shouldn't have to explain that the dupes cheat the system in order to beat your competitors. Honest players face real consequences when they die and have to go farming for metal to make a new set of armor or spend 3 days looking for another decent sniper rifle. The grunts/sighs/broken legs/belly aches/temperature system are the low hanging fruit here for annoyances. What do these really add, honestly? Did someone wake up one day and say "ya know what would be fun? when I get warm in-game, I should suffer until I take off my coat". We should be setting our sights higher here. Build toggles for these into that server manager that doesn't exist yet. This turned into way too long of a post. But my point is the vast majority of players want to play. Fewer will launch their own server. Most of those will do it from their own PC/home connection and can't support more than a few people. And an extremely low # will shell out $120/month for a dedicated server, learn to mod the game into something that supports large cap/PVP servers, and spend all of their free time on nights and weekends keeping the thing running. TFP have to improve these things, reduce the load, reduce exploiting, and make hosting a server easier in order to get the 1000's of PVP'ers into the game.

One thing that pvpers learn is that hiding is your best weapon for security. Once your base is discovered, your safe days are numbered. You better have good defenses or backups in place. Most players do not even try to rebuild a base that got raided. You have lost the battle and that location is now very insecure. It might as well be a hole in the ground. I usually reserve the act of actually making it a smoking hole in the ground for players that deserve it. Because it usually means a big time investment to remove all their claims.

From a claimed area perspective this is the same as having multiple land claim blocks. If you want to add protection rulesets attributable to the "nodes" of a central claim, then you can achieve the same thing with just creating different types of land claim blocks. The game and server coding required to support unique attributes is very similar. If you wish you could then set an ownership limit on the server for each type of LCB to each player profile to achieve the same ends. Personally, I would not play on a server that had such limits though. I feel like I understand where you are heading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like a system similar to the central core used for Empyrion's bases. Something that behaves as a central processor that controls claim size/strength etc. That thing is really neat because you can control power usage/toggle individual defenses on/off etc. At the end of the day, you can change the way the claims work. But I don't see how you can ever create a system with an interface as dynamic as just letting the players plunk down the block wherever they need to in order to protect their creations or protect important resources (stores/mines/forests etc). I don't see a problem with the current system at all save for the fact players can spam out a ton of claims once they get steel because the recipe is too cheap. If you just change the recipe to require 500 concrete mix, 50 steel, and 1 diamond/gold/or silver nugget, then spamming will be drastically reduced (with respect to the time investment and rarity built into the current game's loot tables). I understand that exacerbates the pain when a newbie loses their starter block. It also makes them a somewhat higher value target for mid range players. But are we designing the game around the first 7 hours of gameplay or something more for the long haul? If we are trying to build a system that promotes PVP for an update, then making new players have something of value right from the start would actually be desirable. It gives players a reason to seek out other players to fight.

Yea. I did that. Maybe I'm blind, and I just didn't see it in the post. But Shivan is the only one on that page that said "git gud". It looks like you paraphrased Bloom's post within quotes with your own exacerbated flavor and then chastised him for the language.

Did you remove a post? I don't see the source of that quote. I wouldn't call us hardcore niche gamers. We are just playing the game exactly as it is designed. The person you are defending is promoting the idea of neutering the game into a zero progression, protect my base while i'm at work, make me be able to defend against 4 players, eliminate the ability for advanced players to hurt me.... weird weird environment in a thread to talk about how we can make PVP better. None of these concepts are true to the scope of 7dtd, and it just comes off as noise. It sounds like polluted entitlement thinking where someone has literally gotten beat. If anything, designing a game around those ideas is catering to a hardcore niche gamer mentality.