Kalen

And is enjoying the hell out of it!

Ironic, because a few minutes of research reading these message boards probably would've answered every question you had. But I suspect you weren't really looking for an answer, you just wanted to make a point. Well done.

Yeah? Not sure how that is relevant to you thinking something was real when it wasn't. But carry on.

Lol, except it wasn't real info.... and he told you that later in the post.

I doubt the change was intended to be overcome with skill or luck. I would guess the change was intended to make you have to think about water. In the old system, you didn't have to think about it at all.... you passively solved your early game water issues with barely a thought. Now, its still not terribly difficult to solve your water issues, but you do have to think about it for a bit in the early game. If that was the intent of the change, then I'd say it was successful. I still have issues with the change from a realism perspective, which I've brought up in other threads, but overall, I'd say the change has improved the early game experience. In a survival game, you should have to think about food & water.

Yeah, people get so fixated on the game being in alpha for so long.... but I've been playing this game for 8+ years and 6k+ hours and if the game hadn't been constantly changing, I would've been bored of it a long time ago. So the fact that its an alpha has extended my enjoyment of the game far beyond what I would normally get from a similarly priced game.. I hope it never goes gold!

Yeah, this topic has been beat to death a number of times. If I recall, TFP's official stance was: Yes, stealth may need a bit of a bump.... but no, POIs aren't meant to be 100% stealth-able.

Garbage post.... garbage replies. Go figure.

They've certainly stole my money.... I've paid about $0.0025 per hour played. Crooks!

Eh, I still standby what I said... what the developers intent was isn't as important as the players perception. That's still true. You saw it as a recipe, so that is still a valid way to look at it.

100% agree... well thought out plan.

But see, this is where thinking of magazines as skills actually make sense. You do need to become skilled at something, like cooking, in order to craft more complicated things, like cheesecake. You say you're already skilled enough to make cheesecake.... I'm curious what in the game represents that skill? As I mentioned before, what doesn't work, if you think of magazines solely as recipes, is the fact that you find recipes in the exact same order every playthrough. You find stone axe before iron pick before steel pick.... every single playthrough.

An interesting thing to say.... this is one of the very large drawbacks of the magazine system. The only way to improve your ability to craft is to loot.

Its all good, I very rarely play with mods. None of this is really a deal breaker for me, I still find the game playable and fun.... I just think its interesting to talk about ways it could be, IMO, better. I appreciate hearing the other side, even if I don't agree with it. That said, if anyone ever creates a mod that adds item degradation back in I'd be all over that.

I hear you, but what they call it or what they intend isn't nearly as important as people's perception (at least in terms of people's reception of the feature). They can say that magazines only represent recipes, but when magazines directly control what QL you can craft things at (something that has always been determined by skill in previous alphas), magazine have functionally replaced skills. I honestly can't see how you could see it any other way.

Yeah, I dont really have a problem with not being able to craft the M60 until I get through the previous tiers because there is clearly a balance component to it. Plus there is a logic that you can't craft a higher tier item until your skill is sufficient. Of course, that just further demonstrates to me that the magazines represent skill as well as recipes. I actually like the overall structure of the magazine system... just not the way you acquire them. If you changed "magazines" to "skill points" and changed the acquisition from "looting" to "gaining skill points as you level" I think the system would be much better.

I would agree if you could suddenly find a QL5 recipe. You can't though, you have to progress through QL1-4 first, which to me sounds more like a skill than a recipe.

The ability to craft a M60 is a recipe The ability to craft a QL5 M60 instead of a QL2 M60 is a crafting skill I'm fine with the first one being random, based on the magazines you find. I don't like that the second one is also RNG based.

Its a moot point.... and I KNOW its a moot point because TFP have been very clear that LBD is not coming back. But, just for fun: LBD could've worked with 2 additions, IMO. 1. Item based skill caps. What I mean by that is spam crafting stone axes only gets you so far. It used to be you could get to max level with stone axes alone. There should've been a restriction where items stop giving skill points when you reach certain thresholds. Maybe stone axes only get you to 25 skill.... iron picks get you 50.... steel gets you to max. Something like that. 2. Diminishing returns. I would've had it so that if you spam craft something, over time the chance of gaining a skill gets less and less. For example, if you spam craft 100 items. Maybe the first 10 items have a 90% chance of giving you a skill point. The next 10 items have a 50% chance.... and so on until you just stop gaining skill entirely. Taking a break will eventually make that system reset so you're back to 90%. This would eliminate the benefit of just sitting in your base and crafting non stop to level up.

I've said this before, but item degradation is my answer to making parts more valuable. If it were up to me, every time you repaired an item there would be a chance it degrades in quality level. The greater your crafting skill, the less the chance but it will never be non zero. The result of this would be that eventually, you're going to want to recraft the item... keeping crafting relevant and giving you a reason to stockpile the resources to recraft an item.

Ok, that's probably a fair statement. But in that hypothetical, I think my reaction would be along the lines of, "I can't collect water? This is stupid." That's generally not a reaction that bodes well for my long term interest in a game. But the reality is that this game did allow you to collect water at one point and removed it. That, in my opinion, makes it worse than never having been able to do it at all. So yeah, if the argument is that my past familiarity with game is driving my dislike of the change... I guess it is. Not due to some sort of nostalgia for the "good ole days", but because I legitimately think its not a good change.

I ignored that aspect because water isn't really scarce. So if that was part of the reason for the change, its failed. I have asked myself that and the answer is it's got nothing to do with what I'm used to and everything to do with the reasons I outlined in my previous post. I've played this game for many years and have seen many changes. There have been plenty of changes I've agreed with and plenty I haven't. Whether or not I was used to the way something was very rarely has anything to do with my opinion on its change.

Have to disagree strongly here. At least for me. To me, its about realism. Yeah, I know, a zombie game isn't real to begin with, but you have to have realistic elements in the game to keep it grounded. How much realism you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of gameplay is going to be different depending on the person. As far as I'm concerned, having a water survival component but not allow people to bottle up water at water source crosses that line of what I find acceptable. Like I said before, its not a huge deal and I can still enjoy the game.... but, I personally think this was a bad change. If it truly was about making all containers work the same way, there was a great suggestion earlier in this thread that would've accomplished the same thing. Make it so you can gather jars of murky water from open sources of water.

I gotcha.... just seems odd for the developers to be concerned with consistency in how something is consumed but not be concerned with consistency in how its gathered. At the end of they day, the overall impact of the change is minimal (once you get used to it). I'm just not sure the game is better for it.

I have found that I can't always drink from a pool. Not sure if thats just a bug or something intentional. Not exactly what I'd call a disaster... but I appreciate your concern. But you can loot gas cans from them.... you can't loot jars of water from a pond. If you could, it would be equivalent. In your opinion its equivalent, which is fine. I don't agree. In my opinion resources like gas don't need an empty container. Start filling the world with pools of gas and my opinion would certainly change. It would actually be kind of useful if there were empty gas containers, if you could then use them to fill up with water. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that removing jars was really a big deal. I just find the reasoning of "making it like other containers" not very compelling.