Archer

For practical purposes yes - we can work with cobblestone and upgrade later, absolutely, it's just that not having those other things available to us earlier on is just not as 'fun' for people who don't really have an interest in the going out and looting part of things. *Plus* - again we play as a larger crowd, so we have to essentially scale up our defenses and progress in order to be able to keep our heads above water towards the middle and late game when we're wanting to start pushing game stage 300. If it is indeed 'officially' just 1 to 8 players then I must say it's worked just fine for bigger communities to build servers and player experiences that are beyond a small handful of people surviving in a base by themselves. There's a huge overlap in this game's playerbase with other titles like Project Zomboid, or even Ark: Survival Evolved and Minecraft, and so forth and all of those definitely support more than just 8 players - was working pretty good for those purposes, even if it's on accident, and it fit 7 Days in a 'neighborhood' of games, and this just feels like they're intentionally taking this into the 'we make this more for streamers' neighborhood. A player experience of 8 or less players just sounds lonely as hell to me. Also, we've used mods in the past before - we just hate how it always introduces even more bugs than were already there to begin with. It's a matter of mitigating problems rather than spending the bit of spare time our admin team has by constantly troubleshooting with other players. Plus, I'll humbly say again: I liked the vanilla base game with default settings, as it was. It worked out great for a big chunk of my life that we'd almost ritualistically hop in every time an update came out and try the new stuff.

lol what in the frasier crane

Where does it 'officially' say that? Also: We've played 'outside of their design paramaters' and never were surprised about it for almost 10 years. They haven't been making their game as intended for 10 years? The way this reads it almost sounds like you're replying to someone else, you're making all sorts of points that I don't see how it applies to what I've said at all.

Again - it was never a problem. Even in the barebones early versions of it when I still played this game on an old office hand-me-down machine, we were able to host a dedicated server and play that way just fine it was never an issue. I'll also point out: how do you respond to all these other people in here who play solo or in a duo that are also saying the magazine drop rates are creating bottlenecks and preventing them from doing one thing while having an overabundance in ability to build something else? It's not *just* groups, it's such a complex way of managing a crafting system that relies so heavily on one item being available to make a bunch of others. It makes no sense to see people having 60+ magazines of one type that allows them to build augers on day 14 (way too early for an auger, but not too early for a workbench) but can't build the auger, because they *also* can't build workbenches since only a handful of those magazines have arrived. I'm not telling you that we're seeing technical problems. It's a *drop rate* problem, whether we were all in separate bases and areas or not, for the volume of players on the server that we have, we're still seeing weird drop rates of magazines. Not only that - but because of again the VOLUME whether they're in a base in one end or not, we've cleared roughly 25% of the loot on the map already, and we're still 2-3 weeks away from loot respawn. That works out later in the game when people have to travel further to get to it so it isn't consumed as quickly, but the point is there are only so many magazines on the map - whereas before you could have 20-30 people on a single server spread out OR in one spot, it didn't matter, we could all progress at a rate and time that we needed to. Under the new system - whether we're across on opposite ends of the map or right next to each other, the drop rates for magazines are wonky, and the sheer ratio of 'lootable spots' vs 'magazine drops' just doesn't compensate for that off-balanced rate drop.

When we move into a town, it looks like a wave of locusts washed over it and picked it clean afterward lol we loot everything we see. I am seeing other people on this thread though mentioning they're not finding crafting books as a reasonable enough rate. I don't think it scales whether it's 1 person or 100 persons in a single game (maybe?) that might be influencing the way the loot table works or something - I honestly have no idea, I just know it seems off and wonky in the spawn rate of magazines, and I think it's partly because the primary people doing the looting spec themselves out with stuff that makes them better at what they're doing - i.e. sneaky, or powerful or capable of using a weapon better etc. The crafting magazines are for crafters - who stay at base usually and do what their job is - to build. So the bonus to finding the magazines that crafters need in order to build better tools and weapons doesn't exist unless the builders quit working on the base and go loot stuff themselves. Thus the 'flow' of these magazines ends up coming in at rates that are disproportionate to their need. We *need* forging magazines, but the only way to find more of them is A. I leave base and go look more, neglecting my construction and organization of inventory or B. Someone 'wastes' magazines, by reading a bunch of them and then increases the likelihood they'll find them. This sucks because someone is using magazines, to learn skills they won't ever apply to anything, and eats up the supply of mags we'd need early game to find them. So if it's a smaller group these balances seem fine, I guess. One or two or maybe three players, it's no problem. But parties can be size 8. Servers can hold somewhere around 32 players before becoming unstable. And lots of people like to play this with two opposing factions that fight sometimes, as well. There's a lot of servers where the larger multiplayer experience is just a big bowl of spaghetti now. As I said before - it's a great update for solo players and small groups, but for people who play this with friends, or on servers where factions exist, etc. it's super confusing now and the rates at which stuff we need drops is askew for everyone. The people who don't need magazines end up getting perks and bonuses and boosts for magazines that they don't need, and the people who do need them have no way of boosting their rate of getting them unless they essentially neglect their job and go scavenge as well, which leaves the base (again this is a base that stores, protects, and gives enough adequate room for crafting for a dozen or more people) in complete disarray, no one can ever find anything, the scavengers coming back in have to stop and put stuff away because we can't 'afford' to have enough folks stationed there to keep an eye on crafting, building, upgrading, and sorting out the inflow of raw materials, or the outflow of refined ones (like guns, ammunition, armor, and other equipment/supplies that the scavengers/looters would use) We've drastically cut down on the size of the home base team, but out of need for more magazines to build things like bellows or other items in those tool trees, we spend too much time looking for those books and because the looted radius is already 1/4 of the map at this point, we're having to travel a crazy amount of distance to find unlooted stuff. There's literally dozens of servers that have more than 20 people online at any given time, and have been for years and years, dude. The built in server player cap is 32. So I'll say the game *was* balanced for that number of players before A21, and it worked fine. None of us had issues or complaints.

Been playing it that way for years man - we sometimes get some FPS drops on blood moon because the game spawns in some massive hordes, but it's so much fun when there's 2 dozen of us (or even more) all in the same base, that we all worked on, all pitch in on, and all built together. Every bullet, brick, and bomb was all something we made so when we defended it, it felt like we're defending our one big collective home, and people depend on each other in that situation. It's fun. Plus everyone I play it with are neighbors of mine, we're all part of a almost 3,000 person Discord server for gamers in our little part of the Pacific Northwest, so we get along great and know how to not make a Discord channel with 30 people in it sound like 'audio soup' lol

I just fundamentally disagree with this. If you're playing by yourself - sure. If you're playing with one or two people - sure. But with a group of our size it's just not *possible* to sustain ourselves in the mid to late game like that which is why we specialize like we do. In some of the other comments people are talking about how the magazine system makes teams have to rely on each other more and we have to be more specialized in order to get by. In yours you seem to be suggesting that specialization into roles shouldn't be as important and this forces us 'back to our roots' which I think is just absurd. We've literally been playing this way - the same way - for almost a decade. There's always been crafters, looters, scavengers, farmers/hunters and everything else, and I don't think that ever needed to change at all. We didn't have to constantly scavenge in A20, we didn't have to constantly scavenge 3 years ago, or 5, or 8 or whatever. It just hasn't been that way ever, at least for us.

Also, for note: Not a fan of the changes to water. Our rooftop is usually a place where we grow crops on our bases, and now it's got 11 dew collectors on it, and doing quests or going to different traders to get the water filters is another thing that isn't exactly 'fun' to keep up with the demand on trying to hydrate close to a couple dozen people. Am I mistaken in that the only way we can drink from rivers, streams, and lakes now is with our hands, and if we do it that way, we end up with a % chance of getting diarrhea? Maybe instead of this bulky, huge, ugly Dew Collector thing, you guys make us possibly filter out the water before we boil it which takes a certain amount of time rather than this system of running around from trader to trader to build them? Make it a step with a countdown on it or something - pour water into a single large item like the Dew Collector, let it filter down - then out of it comes 'filtered but not sterile' which we then boil like we used to? People have (both in game, and in real life) been building settlements and cities on the edges of bodies of water for a long time for a lot of good reasons, and while transport may not be a factor here, having access to potable water has always been one of them. If nothing else just keep the dew collector in game as an *option* for people who would rather base themselves away from bodies of water. Build closer to one, you have easier access to it, although you still have to filter and boil it or something. Just a suggestion.

I just logged in to actually see what day & skill level everyone was at. Still got my inventory. 0 skills now as if I've never read a magazine and I'm back at level 1. Base is still there, inventory still there, and everything physical is still there but my character's skills and everything else are wiped to 0. Nothing is removed from the inventory of my character or from containers, but anything I've read, and everything I'd leveled from XP is wiped. So, I guess I can't tell you the answer now to what level we were, it's day 24 on the server. (P.S. - Not @%$#ing about it, I understand it's an unstable release) Right now the forge ahead magazine is by far the rarest, we've found a total of 17 of those, but the medical magazines I think we've recovered like 60-70 of them. The 'old school' books and mags that were already in the game seem to spawn at a normal/similar rate as before. Lots of 'Tech Junky' magazines are popping up, too, seems to be a disproportionately high amount, I'm at like, level 37 in those? Tool mags are spawning in 2nd to 3rd lowest rate which is preventing us from being able to build certain things. Over the course of the past three days we've had anywhere between 6 and 22 players on the server at one time, last night was probably our largest crowd (we can't add more than 8 people to a party so we just end up making extras but would really like it if the devs allowed us to make parties larger than just 8 ) Bar Brawler, Batter Up, and The Fireman's Almanac seem to be everywhere as well, they're so abundant we also have stacks of them sitting unused. The Great Heist, Hunter's Journal, Lucky Looter seem more or less normal rates I guess. The problem that keeps happening right now is early 'bottlenecks'. We keep needing magazines for another tool or item that we want/need to build in order to make other stuff. At the moment - the blood moon isn't actually much of an issue, because we've only played the first 3 of them, so they don't start 'getting hard' usually until a bit later in the game (which to us was normal, and totally fine) This forces us to stop working on the base, and go out to help the scavengers. PLEASE NOTE: if this is intended, it's not appreciated. We really did not want to be forced to go out. But the 2 of us (which is a skeleton crew of builders/crafters compared to usual) who are staying behind keep "running out of stuff to do" because we can essentially only do basic tasks with the limited options of tools and recipes available to us, which force us to just go out and look for more of these magazines so we can get back to work. We always build the baseline outershell first obviously so we don't end up getting a bunch of breaches, but the interior where we organize, build rooms for crafting, storage, and processing materials from one into the next is essentially collecting dust and cobwebs. I can use the forge now which means I can melt stuff down but once that task is done, it's pretty much "whelp, time to go look for magazines" which comprises roughly 80% of the time we have allocated for building stuff, so the base looks like @%$#. It's functional and holds up but it's mostly just empty rooms right now. I can't think of them all off the top of my head now but overall, each day I play this update I like it less and less. Some of the looters/scavengers in the group were also mentioning that they didn't really care for the 'skulls' system actually, it kind of takes away some of the surprise of 'finding out' just how dangerous an area is before they go in, and now it's as though their character psychically knows how bad the monsters down in the cave/basement/wherever are before they go in. The graphics changes made are awesome in the update, love the new forge/workbench models for sure, haven't seen the chemistry station yet except on streams and that looks great, but pretty much everything else, especially all of the 're-works' are an emphatic thumbs down, with the magazine 'system' being front and center of that negative response. Balancing this out for a group of people just seems impossible, I don't know how they would ever adjust loot rates and spawn rates to respond to a # of people on a server. And because the moderator on here keeps implying I'm either lying or we're just bumbling through like we've been caught in a '90s infomercial doing a simple task of some kind, I've started streaming/recording our game sessions now and can share a link to the twitch, or if want/need be I'll take the time to upload a video onto YouTube or something of it (I don't stream/record regularly or anything) and to triple iterate this because this seems to be the go-to response to every post that suggests there's a possible flaw in the system: THE LOOTERS ARE NOT READING THE MAGAZINES FFS. THEY BRING THEM *ALL* BACK TO BASE AND WE SORT THROUGH THEM. I'm one of the looters MYSELF now, unfortunately. Air Drops are bringing in tons of magazines, in fact they're almost the best place to get them at this point but more often than not it's crap we don't need.

Why do you keep saying this? We are *not* just reading all the magazines we come across, I'm streaming the game dude, we bring everything back to the base what is your deal with always insisting it must be something *we* are doing wrong?

My group is still playing - still not liking this magazine thing. We've halted work on the base for now as the highest tier item I can craft at this point is the damn workbench and literally none of us are reading any magazines at all, there's a whole 8 human beings out scouring for them and there's just *not* enough to go around for everybody. The ratios are off, loot tables, whatever you want to call it but to sustain a group of more than just 2 or 3 people and make the rate of progression not be a complete snoozefest of just digging through trash piles all day pretty much every thing we loot would need to give us 2 or 3 magazines or more. It's tedious as hell.

So far: Everything in the update is great *EXCEPT* the magazine/book changes. It just throws things off so weird for a group of more than 2 or 3 people trying to play this game at the same time, the world doesn't generate enough magazines even though the way it works now it seems like every human being who previously lived in Navezgane basically read/hid/had magazines and books *every* where for whatever reason, (maybe it was just an extremely literature oriented society I guess (it just is weird and bizarre to find books and magazines all over the world in the abundance they exist now). We're trying to go at this as a group, but there's really not enough of a supply of these things out there to supply *all* of us and we're having to not just specialize, but *hyper* specialize everyone's role which kinda makes things a bit more repetitive and makes the incentive/need to go out and find more of these things to feed the crowd working back at base less of a fun, optional adventure and more of a demanding chore that forces more of us to stop building and to go out and find these things. Textures = awesome. New models = fantastic. Trader changes = a bit weird, but I think most of us could get used to them, although again there's this weird problem of having to travel *super* far for the quests themselves, which is the same problem we're having with the books/magazines, we just have to walk *constantly* (because its so early in our game we only have 1 minibike right now, so everyone but one of us is on foot) more of us are essentially *forced* to abandon trying to prepare ourselves for the blood moon and spend so much time hanging out in the woods or at some POI, it's just *so* much time just plain walking around, so I would just prefer the old system. It was goofy, but it at least made sense for groups to play. POI changes = honestly kind of a cool idea, not sure I'll really notice them much myself, personally since quests/missions/jobs are far from the reason I play 7 Days, if I wanted to do stuff like that there's 1039520359305 games in my steam library that already do that for me) This is a review put in by someone playing in a (probably?) larger than average group of players, anywhere between 8-15 of us have been online to try out the new update together on our server. Ultimately, I feel these changes were made specifically to make the streams on twitch more 'entertaining' for viewers, and more oriented towards streamers. What it 'looks like' on a screen and how a single players adventures go with maybe one or two other people that are primarily going around looting or 'exploring' the navezgane map (we've been playing this for 10 years, it's cool seeing new stuff added in, but let's be honest - no matter what ya do to the map itself, other than adding in new areas or expanding the physical size of the map itself - we've seen it all already and that's how it's gonna be) taking on missions, exploring POI, those are all actually more entertaining to watch on streams, I get that part and I get that twitch is a major source of hype/exposure for the game itself, so it does make sense to cater to that crowd. At the same time though, the rest of us who picked this up and regularly played it because it was a "capital 'C' crafting" game are feeling like the pull to make the game 'look more interesting' on twitch streams is not just ignoring crafters/builder players, but actually impacting the gameplay in a negative way and forcing us to do stuff we never wanted to do to begin with. I'll say this: I've noticed that the people who tend to defend/support the magazine/book thing all have like...over 1k comments in here. Some upwards of 3k comments, and then those same people chime in 'people here on the forums complained about crafting/exploring etc.' I would argue that feedback is coming from a very dedicated/involved fanbase, but they represent the tiny tiny minority of people that tend to hang out in the official forums of places like this and similar titles like Zomboid. Devs get feedback from the most hardcore, fanatical (I don't mean this derogatorily btw, I'm just saying they're *really* big fans of the game) players, and the impression on how their product is received by its player base gets skewed because a minority of hardcore players are always going to burn through content fast, most of them tend to play alone, and most of them are asking for more 'stuff' in these areas. I'll say again as I've said in previous comments about the changes: Some of the feedback is going to be distorted by this loyal and enthusiastic demographic, but for better or worse, people who play your game for 3 or 4 or 5 thousand hours (or for that matter people who have thousands of comments on their profile in a game's official forums) are not the best place to get your feedback from about stuff, and I think that tiny group's feedback is a major reason why at least some of these changes were made. I'm sure the devs came up with *how* to respond to that feedback, but the feedback itself is not representative of the bulk majority, and I do think the bulk majority of your playerbase picked this up because it had the word 'crafting' in the title of it. If it was a change made on data points from watching how people play the game and interact with the product, if you're noticing people didn't explore/scavenge/do missions for traders as much, then I'll repeat a point I've said on here previously about that ; maybe it's just something that people don't really care about and no matter what you do to them, they never will. It's just not what they showed up for, so to speak. When the mechanics drag us away from the 'crafting/building' to go dig through garbage piles on the road even *more* (we did this enough already) otherwise we're not going to be able to survive a blood moon, you may be going in the wrong direction. I realize there's a little group of people who have formed a bit of a community in these forums who will pile comments on and replies that contradict what I say here, but again, just consider that I made this account just to voice concerns and have well over 900 hours in the game without ever saying a word; that's because things were going fine as they were, and I liked the direction things were heading in. It may seem counterintuitive, but just consider the title (seems) to have sold very well in its older form. Lean into that. Don't lean into what people on these forums say as being gospel. Even my own comment is just coming from one of dozens of game communities, but I worked as a data analyst for 6 years IRL, so I've got a good bit of experience in "hmm, maybe the feedback we're getting is not in fact representative of what most of our customers actually think" scenarios, and the wonky books/magazine thing is definitely one of the first things I would have looked at as being representative of that feedback fallacy. Anyway, much love to the fun pimps, y'all were doing great, and most aspects of this update are fantastic, but I'm sticking to my guns, and joining the chorus of people who I've seen every single YouTuber who made a video about this update acknowledge, "I know a lot of you guys are complaining about the books & magazines, but it's a great system I really suggest you guys give it a try" means that my concerns are not alone. Someone ping me when a mod comes out that gives us the old crafting system with the rest of the graphical & model updates. Thanks for reading.

What are ya talkin about dude - I've said in several comments now in the thread we play in specialized roles, which means some of them are still looting and scavenging, this is just how people in groups tend to play, especially if it's more than just 3-4 people we've always been doing "all the things". What are ya talkin' about?

Looting and exploring were already part of the core gameplay in 7D2D. That didn't need to change as it was - we still had to go out and loot *and* explore in order to get by. This is just turning the knob up on that dial more and I'm saying it's not wanted by most, and not needed by any. The game was fine before it didn't need a change, it's weird to take the position that, "well just mod it if you don't like it" OK? Why didn't the people who sat on these forums and asked for this "just mod it" instead of hanging out in here? We played vanilla, liked the game as it had been designed, and if the only reason it's changed course is because people were griping about it being the way they'd originally envisioned it, then again I say, they didn't speak for all, or even a majority, of the people playing it.

I guess I just didn't play it with anyone who was bothered by how that was set up.