[Is the hype for a new alpha dead?]

I would say in many ways 7 Days to Die has "matured" and gotten into a more stable cycle. With more players than ever before, there appears to be less radical changes to gameplay and instead more refinements.  This by its very nature makes for a lot less "hype", just an incrementally better game for new players. Players who've been around for a longer time might instead feel that the game while better, doesn't hold enough interest in between updates.

 

Looking at gameplay, Alpha 18 until Alpha 21 plays very similar in my experience. Alpha 21 is a fair bit improvement across many aspects, but the core gameplay is very similar. This means that while one might've spent months exploring the game in Alpha 18, subsequent versions while better simply had insufficient new content to continue playing past a certain point. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, nor unexpected. Alpha 22 had a fair bit of hype for bandits, being a short cycle and all that, neither of which came to pass.

 

So yes, the hype at the moment is quite dead, I hear no one talking about the game, but I invite people to check out steam charts which clearly shows the game is doing better than ever over time

[Kinyajuu's Bio]

He certainly will be missed! I'll always remember him as a super cool guy who would happily spend time with us to explain, answer questions, and interact with us all.

 

My most recent memory of him was actually just about 2 months ago now, where he went back to a video I made 5 years ago now for A17 (gosh time flies!) and the (then) new buff/effect system. I thought it was so cool and a huge deal for the game and wanted to really highlight the great effort, and while it's such an old  video now apparently Rob must have saved down the video and came back to view and comment on it!

 

While memories can be painful, they also serve as the joy of remembering the good times, and definitely would like to see something in game as well for one of the heroes we lost along the way.

 

❤️

 

Tom aka Vedui42

 

 

 

 

 

[New YouTube Policy and 7 Days to Die]

On 1/18/2023 at 5:51 AM, nitnoid said:

This did happen to Glock9 for violence.  He had an opening montage for his current series and was demonetized for violence.  The timestamp referred to his opening at the point where he punches Arlene in the face.  They demonetized 3 or 4 of his videos for that.  I guess screwtube doesn't know the difference between violence against women and violence against zombies.  I mean, zombies are people too, right?

 

You have to understand that most of these things are done by algorithms, and those can be tripped for really weird reasons. Even when they say they have "manually reviewed", they actually have not. I have a single video demonetized in my library. Apparently it has "excessive swearing" in it, as confirmed by YouTube's manual review.

 

Except, it's a 30 second short, where I've gone over it with a finetooth comb, forward and backward, and there's no excessive swearing in it. There's actually no swearing in it at all (It's extremely rare to ever hear my swear, due to my kids watching them).

 

But despite this, YouTube in their "manual" review finds excessive swearing, where there 100 % is none, nothing even close to it, no aggressive language, nothing that could remotely be taken or mistaken as rude. Now it was a Shorts video where I happened to get killed by zombies, so if they had said "violence" I could have understood it, though peculiar still as it's just a video game, and death in video games doesn't normally cause any issues.

 

So knowing WHY a video was demonetized is super hard.

 

I do think people will have to be more careful with the opening bits of their videos, ensure cleaner language, trying to avoid excessive violence... and hope this whole thing blows over.

 

What I find more weird though is that "all" swearing/curse words are seen as equally bad. "@%$#" and "crap" is now a curse, which I personally would not consider it.  The worrying bit is that they'll expand the vocabulary of "cursing" even more, making it very hard to actually describe something "This game runs like @%$#" caused demonetization ... so you'd be saying "This games runs sub-optimal below the acceptable range" or something else, which is dumb.

 

But that's YT!

 

 

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

5 hours ago, Roland said:

 

It seems that way on paper but in reality I craft much more often in A21 than I ever did in A20 or A19. It does seem counter-intuitive but it is true. I still do occasionally find something better than what I can craft but it is nowhere nearly as often as it has been in the past.

 

And that's a good change. I think many of us have seen that over the years crafting has been de-focused, to the point of obsolesce for weapons/armour/tools.

 

However, this change likely has nothing to do with learn-by-looting, and more due to looting/buying/questing for gear the last few years was simply far superior, as you'd pretty much always have access to higher quality gear than you ever could craft. I'd definitely prefer if loot/quest/bought gear was much more rare, and inferior quality to what you can craft.

 

What I would like to see is Q6 gear crafting restored, and removed from loot/quest/trader ... want that top quality shotgun? Better skill into it, as you'll never get it from buying or looting it. That would flip the current situation where eventually you still are better off using a looted/quested/bought Q6 piece of gear as you can only craft Q5.

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

17 hours ago, meganoth said:

Remember the arrow slits that zombies could not traverse at all? Many players loved it and simply made unbreakable bases on horde night. And complained that the obvious bug was fixed.

 

 

Actually, most people I ran into complain because fixing the zombie pathing over arrow slits was done at the expense of using them as arrow slits. You used to be able to reach in through the gap, which was immensely useful for base building to wire your base up. Put up your trip wires, electric fences, dart traps and even restock. After the change, you have to break them every time you need to access them. I can't overstate how bad this is now, making their use extremely frustrating every single time you need access.

 

In other words, the price for preventing "some" players from using them in "cheesy" ways, was to prevent EVERYONE from using them properly. This is probably the worst trade off the TFP has ever done, where legitimate players gets punished by TFP trying to prevent cheesy players. It's one of the "fixes" that TFP really should revert, as punishing all those of us who never use them to cheese, just to stop those who might cheese, is really an unacceptable trade.

 

While I think fixing the lack of pathing in this case was good, if it can't be done without punishing regular use, it really shouldn't be done

19 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

19 hours ago, Grue said:

Now that you mention it, I have hated the zombie AI since A17. 

Please bring back the zombies that actually act like zombies instead of the conga line of structural engineers who magically detect and path to the weakest block.

It was far less predicable and exploitable when the zombies would just swarm in waves and start beating on random parts of your walls. Now all horde bases are basically identical because the zombies are too "smart" for their own good.

 

I think you bought the wrong game then... did you miss the part about "tower defense" elements? That's exactly how monsters behave in a TD game, so unless you want them to also change this game's sub-genre, I suggest you adapt your gameplay to it.

 

 

I'm with Grue on this. Alpha 17 change over to a new AI pathing while it has benefits in POI's etc (less swiss cheese POI's), when it comes to Blood Moon Horde it's far inferior. Not only are zombies omniscient, they don't act like zombies. There are no more tower defense elements of 7dtd as a result. You used to be better off making layered defenses as zombies would come in from a direction and break down the base walls trying to get closer to the player from that direction. Now they lemming their way to their death seeking the path of least resistance and just making a kill-entrance is sufficient as you know the zombies won't go anywhere else.

 

I think TFP should keep the omniscient pathing in POI's (the zombies lived there, so it makes sense they'd know where to go), but use a different AI for blood moon hordes, make it cheap computationally, waves of zombies storming the base, and maybe we can have a horde defense game as opposed to small squads of zombie commandos.

 

 

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

On 12/4/2022 at 4:11 PM, Roland said:

That is a big part of the art update: creating new original assets for the game. This is furniture, decorations, vehicles, building structures, vehicles, etc. Adding all of this is what is meant by A21 being a big art update.

That being said, we won’t necessarily be able to craft or purchase all of these things.  A lot is only available in the creative menu. 

 

 

Is this a decision made by TFP to only allow creative access to many of these art assets? I have to say, 7 Days to Die could be the best building game in vanilla, if it allowed you to craft and/or buy all these things. There's an AMAZING amount of great assets out there that are used in POI's and it's a huge shame you need to go creative to utilize them.

 

Of course yes, you can mod that (which I've done in my Expanded Deco modlet) but I really think it's something which would HUGELY improve the builder's enjoyment if people could decorate with these awesome assets. I mean, they're there. They've been implemented, and while there's some work to balance crafting/scrapping/buying them, that's honestly worth it.

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

6 hours ago, FinkPloyd said:

 

In Project Zomboid if you die you become a zombie, so to get your stuff back you have to find your previous zombie self and kill it.

 

That would be a funny (and possibly fitting) way to implement the Kickstarted goal/feature of "Be a zombie" ... would not only look awesome, but tick the box too!

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

4 hours ago, Annihilatorza said:

 

In the interview that did mentioned that and I would not surprised if they block nerd polling in and around POI.

 

It might be nice to have nerdpoling blocked during active quests, AND have POI's only with normal loot until a quest starts at which point the "quest" loot is generated ... so while there might be some normal crates, there won't be any quest loot unless you're actually doing a quest. Since there are already provisions for the courier satchel, this should be a possibility to extend. And likewise, if the quest fails for all involved due to dying (or exceeding x hours/days in game) the quest loot also vanishes. I think tying the quest loot chest to individual also stops the current problem where a party of 5 goes into a POI, and 4 go through the dungeon crawl and the 5th nerdpoles up and "steals" all the end loot making for much less fun experience by the party.

[Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow]

14 hours ago, Lycaon said:

I just saw a video about what changes are made in A21:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuTvWxt4hGM

 

And I have to say: I don't like it at all. I am done with this game, waiting for things to actually get better or make any sense. After nearly 10 years you clearly have no idea where you want to go with this game, making weird changes just for the sake of changing anything. I just signed up to tell you this. Bye.

 

Personally I'd blame that video creator for all the problems, as them content creators just stir up trouble and add no value! If only he had some useful suggestions instead!

 

Such as ... Hey TFP... do you think new UIX/mechanics would be possible for A22+++ ?

 

Ie such as:

 

1) Pin Recipe (something a number of survival games have implemented to the delight of users, and that even was custom made for a particular Modpack in 7 Days to Die).

 

2) Crafting pull of items from nearby chests ... while mods (well, one mod in particular implemented it) might do it, I suspect it's not as easy as a simple "stand alone" mod, meaning it's likely to be extremely rare to see it outside of a mod that specifically implements it. Subnautica for instance had a standalone mod like this which was awesome, and really made it more enjoyable...especially if coupled with auto-sort mod and so on

 

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

24 minutes ago, spud42 said:

switches are in the same position wether the lights are on or off.....  also the L and R are put in the part of the x-ray where there wont be an image so it doesnt cover anything... nit picking i know but its still wrong...lol

 

 

Not nit picking, important information sometimes! Much like people who know guns highlighted that for A20, some designs of the new weapons were insanely dumb, with one even had a scope on backwards?

 

That said, the 'off' is probably not off, as much as "power outage", so the switch would be the same.

[Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow]

3 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

Hey Vedui, I really appreciate your videos, you explain everything in a clear, thorough and ordered way. However, I don't like YouTube as a company and I don't want to use my account to subscribe there. Is there any chance that in the future you'll open a Rumble or Locals account? Thanks!  

 

Thank you! I try my best!

 

Anything is possible! Had not heard of those two platforms but they seem interesting technically. A big problem is still that many of these pop up, run for a couple / few years and fold, due to the huge expenses of managing video channels (for "free"). I had used a couple in the past and they all folded, which was a waste of effort sadly   But who know what the future brings?

 

That said, you don't need to subscribe to view, though you do get the ads. Follow my twitter and you always get notifs of my new videos.

 

Oh... and apologies for continuing the non-dev diary stuff, this comment can be deleted as fluff (didn't want people to think I was rude and not reply!) I'll send Jost a PM

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

2 hours ago, Roland said:

 

Yes. Just like every major update. But don't worry. Alpha 21 will release to experimental first so you don't have to opt in if you don't want to start over. You can then opt in to Alpha 20.6 before A21 goes stable so that you can remain in your A20 game until you feel you are ready to start over. But if you decide you want to play A21 the day it goes to experimental you will have to start a new game.

 

If there is ONE feature which I am indescribably grateful for (XML configs edges ahead though!), it is that TFP have taken the amazing decision to give us access to which version we want, allowing us to easily play and enjoy even old versions. I can't think of any other game developer who's been so respectful of the player's desire to enjoy their game, their version of choice, and made this so easy.

 

Thank you TFP!

[Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow]

15 minutes ago, Matt115 said:

Nope. 7DTD is prety simple sandbox. So small of role NPC like this works now suit here good.

Only need things in 7dtd is water rework, bandits, story and 7dtd can be finished

 

NPC etc. maybe in sequel but not here

 

Yes, it's a simple sandbox.That's a huge part of the problem.

 

Over the last few years we've seen systems and mechanics changing over and over, lotsa graphic improvements, but core features have not been added to any significant degree post electricity in Alpha 16. Mods back many years ago had some rudimentary features like that with NPC's farming,guarding your base etc. A bunch of other games made by small teams have that in their games.

 

7 days to die without it will be just fine. It just won't be great or at the top of the genre.

 

 

[Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow]

18 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

A lot of people have posted dissenting opinions, so not everyone is happy. But everyone happy is NEVER the case anyway when a feature changes or has its balance changed.

 

In my opinion a seed that I get back should just stay in the plot so the replanting isn't so tedious. But mostly I don't like all the clicking necessary to recraft seeds and put them into the plots again, switching around all the different seed stacks into the toolbelt and out again. Just too many clicks for my taste. But this is critizising the UI, not the harvest returns, which I find quite ok.

 

 

 

I fully agree! Artificially making farming worse due to requiring all the extra UI effort to open inventory, count how many seeds I need, craft which I need, put them back on hotbar, re plant and figure out where to put them so it's organized, yada yada as you highlight is a major pain which is unnecessary and just made people hate farming, even though after some tweaks the yield wasn't really a problem.

 

You should work for The Fun Pimps! Your voice needs to be heard!!

 

However! Tediousness as current system COULD be acceptable, if late game you could say hire an NPC as a gardener who would go and harvest, recraft, and replant for you, as part of end game content. That way the system would simply be part of a progression where someone could after appropriate quests/progression/base building/whatever remove some tedium by higher level progression.

 

Raft did that pretty well, where for water you start with tedious 1 cup manual refill and continually adding wood to burn --> This progresses to where you can add multiple cups at once, and no fuel --> Which in turn progresses to where you automate with direct pumping and purifying (at cost of battery use) --> Which at the end can then be pumped into a water tank storage, using a higher tier battery and essentially free recharging through windmill.

 

And yet, water is a huge thing throughout the game. It's always there, it just becomes easier and easier to manage, never goes away (it is survival after all), but has a progression that entices and rewards the player as they tech up.

 

We need far more of this in 7DTD.

 

/Ved

[Compo Pack TOS "Addition"]

2 hours ago, Deedbix said:

Had a look at the 7days EULA and any user created content already includes terms to give TFP license to them, furthermore you wave moral rights thus there's no need to even attribute peoples mods or prefabs back to anyone. I wonder what's stopping people ripping out the prefabs and distributing via this forum to be honest.

 

That is correct. However, granting TFP a license to the creations, doesn't mean others can also freely use. Now the grant to TFP includes the right to sub-license, so TFP would be within their rights to say "hey, we got a license to everything, so we're gonna freely sub-license to everyone too!" ... however while that looks easy on paper, there're a lot of details. Ie, how do you even distribute it? TFP doesn't have someones POI created in the game. Heck if I change 1 block, my world is now different than before. Do you have the game automatically transmit everything to TFP to store/process? That'd simply be unfeasible. You could require players to submit every creation within x days of creation. Which means we'd all have to auto-batch sending GB's of data as our worlds continually change. So not feasible.

 

And so on. It's not a simple thing to implement.

 

The specific EULA referenced I believe:

 

USER CREATED CONTENT: The Software may allow you to create content, including but not limited to a gameplay map, screenshot or a video of your game play. In exchange for use of the Software, and to the extent that your contributions through use of the Software give rise to any copyright interest, you hereby grant Licensor an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferable and sub-licensable worldwide right and license to use your contributions in any way and for any purpose in connection with the Software and related goods and services, including the rights to reproduce, copy, adapt, modify, perform, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise communicate to the public by any means whether now known or unknown and distribute your contributions without any further notice or compensation to you of any kind for the whole duration of protection granted to intellectual property rights by applicable laws and international conventions. You hereby waive any moral rights of paternity, publication, reputation, or attribution with respect to Licensor’s and other players’ use and enjoyment of such assets in connection with the Software and related goods and services under applicable law. This license grant to Licensor, and the above waiver of any applicable moral rights, survives any termination of this License.

 

https://7daystodie.com/eula/

 

 

 

13 minutes ago, Roland said:

You’re mixing up laws and forum guidelines. Legally, all derivative work belongs to TFP. Period. 
 

on this forum the rule you quoted stands because it results in the least number of disputes that rise to the level of moderation. We have had less than a handful of large scale disputes since our forum rules were posted and all were able to be resolved quickly and none of it had to do with the law because— as you pointed out— if we are going to involve the law then it is TFP enforcing their ownership and either enforcing free distribution or locking behind their own download guidelines. 
 

So, legally, terms may be able to be renegotiated and permission revoked for failure to comply with the new terms, but if you want to be a member of this forum and be involved in our modding community then you can’t revoke permission once granted because that used to lead to sooooooo much drama and ever since everyone accepted that forum rule it has greased the wheels of better community collaboration.  

 

Absolutely, forum vs other places would be different. I normally never download POI's (or CP) from the forum as such, so was more speaking to it in a general sense.

 

Overall, I think once the game is done and we have steam workshop, things as noted will change substantially and for the benefit of everyone

[Compo Pack TOS "Addition"]

9 hours ago, Roland said:

 

2) Permission to use, once granted, cannot be revoked.

 

 

 

This is not entirely accurate. There is a reason assignment clauses specifically mention being "irrevocable", as where they are silent the IP holder often can change terms and can revoke assignments. While this is up to courts ultimately, from my knowledge usually courts hold that where it's silent on the issue, they are revocable at will by the licensor.

 

 

9 hours ago, Roland said:

 

@Guppycur is concerned that we will have to add new rules regarding prefab collections that would make things more restrictive. I think as moderators (some of us modders as well) we are pretty united in wanting to keep the traditional convention of sharing prefabs without demanding express permission-- intact. Its kind of our culture. I wouldn't mind hearing from the community what you all think would be the best way to word things in order to help people resolve disputes but also to keep the sharing and building of collections of POIs open and non-restrictive. On the one hand, Stallionsden's choice is a driving force to encourage people to make new compilation packs. But on the other hand, as a community we shouldn't expect Stallionsden to do all the work of maintaining and updating hundreds of POIs for new Alpha releases and just benefit freely from his work. There has to be a balance.

 

 

 

 

I don't think TFP should be getting involved. TFP could claim that any content created within 7DTD belongs to TFP, which would be draconian. TFP could issue terms that creations made in 7DTD are freely available and shareable, which is also draconian, and simply opens up a huge headache for people as effectively it means whatever they create is no longer theirs.  Could I pop into a random server and demand to get a copy of a POI then? etc.etc.

 

Like any intellectual property, laws already exist. If people want to give non-exclusive, irrevocable licenses for others to use, they can. If they want to give exclusive, revocable they can. And if they want terms that whoever uses their POI credits them in the server MOTD, they can. People can freely enter into these agreements, or not as they choose.

 

In either case, MANY mod creators while allowing download and free use of their mods, do not allow re-distribution OR re-use of their modpacks within other modpacks. If CP wants to do the same, who are we to say that "this specific modpack" shouldn't be allowed to have such terms?

[Motorcycles don't activate pressure plates?]

On 8/2/2022 at 1:42 PM, Apocalyptical Survivor said:

Really?  I  have a powered garage door with a 1x5 pressure plate on both sides. Works great if I walk on it, but riding a motorcycle over it does NOT activate the pressure plate. Is this a known issue, or working as intended?

 

It actually used to work. I believe it was between Alpha 17.2 and 17.3 that there was a change, where pressure plates no longer triggered on vehicles.

 

Annoying though, but perhaps there was some reason for the change

[Alpha 21 Dev Diary]

On 6/4/2022 at 11:25 AM, faatal said:

The water simulation is completely new code. It flows into neighbor blocks that are marked to allow it, like into air blocks.  Water is no longer a block. It is a water voxel, which means the water voxel can be in the same place as a block, so you could have water flowing into and past grass, a fence or a pole block.

 

The game is not a real water simulator. The new water sim is designed to be performant and work in a basic fashion that makes sense for our game play.

 

I guess this means no longer picking up water blocks in survival after an explosion dropped 'em...

 

Although in fairness, that bug was fixed

[Multiplayer Sad State of Affairs]

On 5/4/2022 at 1:11 PM, Roland said:

 

 These changes were things that had to be done under time constraints in order to meet the deadline of when Microsoft wanted to launch 7 Days on Game Pass.

 

 

 

Might I make a suggestion, to communicate more of this as part of the patch process and in the patch notes? I think with a greater understanding people are better able to appreciate the situation. I'd be the first to admit I thought the patch was pointless (especially in light of the damage it caused to people's gaming with critical bugs and fatal errors wiping servers etc), but as part of my patch review I was also SPECULATING  that it was tied to the Microsoft gamepass launch. However it's only speculation as there was no mention of that at all in the patch notes, which really would have helped.

 

There are many times where the patch notes contain information on specific changes (even if in a cryptic fashion), but does not actually highlight why things are occurring.

 

"This patch contains a number of fixes and tweaks that we were intending to hold off until we had more sizeable "meaty" items. Current Steam players might not benefit from a MS Store inclusion, this is a very important step forward as we move towards launch, and getting the game onto multiple game stores and enaabling cross-storefront gaming capabilities with view of cross-platform support later on."

 

With something like this, written in better English than mine and sprinkling relevant important facts, we as a community have a lot more to go by and can better understand why it was necessary. While it might not prevent bugs, I would suspect it would make a difference to those 3 people of us who read through the patch notes!

 

Likewise, 20.4 was probably the poorest patch for a long long time in regards to errors introduced, as I've for years never gotten as many people telling me they've had serious or even fatal errors (world wipes) as a result of a patch. Going back to updating the community of TFP's assessment of what happened (was it rushed? Insufficient testing? Touching code in areas which had very very unintended and hard to test/catch problems?) would also be really helpful. I'd much rather see THAT on twitter, than "Here's our new merch!" or "catch this streamer!" posts, and help give people a better idea of how this can be avoided in the future.

 

All that said, I LOVE that TFP is probably the only game I have that allows us to roll back and choose previous patch-versions of the game. A stroke of genius that no other publishers seem to have adopted!

 

[Multiplayer Sad State of Affairs]

In my experience running multiplayer for many years, is that small group PvE works fine, small "fun" local PvP shoot-outs work alright, but going beyond 8 players PvE (not even talking about PvP), or even PvP with players spread around the world makes things a challenge to say the least!

 

However while I'd love to have a perfect game on both PvE and PvP, I'd rather have a 2x as good a game in PvE that had NO PvP at all, rather than bump up the PvP capabilities to be on parity with how PvE right now. For anyone who plays "dedicated pvp" games, be it fortnite or Battlefield or CoD or whatever flavour one might prefer, latency, networking capability and so on are huge deals. I've yet to see any Open World Sandbox Building Crafting game do great PvP for that reason, even though certainly some can be better, and some can be worse.

 

Still, even with what we have now some fun occasional player killing shooting or melee fights happen (especially during mischief maker hunger games), and it works well enough for a laugh, but I can appreciate PvP servers having a challenge to create fun gameplay. But, I'd still prefer time was spent on the PvE experience over PvP experience nonetheless.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

On 2/8/2022 at 10:30 AM, faatal said:

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I am planning on doing bandits in two phases that will span two alphas as we are hoping for shorter alphas in the future by moving away from giant monolithic changes.

 

Wonderful! While I've only done extremely non-scientific polls on this, the sweet spot seems to be 6 months  for updates. Once it pushes 9-12-15 or 18, frustration levels from loyal fans who just want to play with new stuff implemented definitely grows!

 

 

14 hours ago, Grandpa Minion said:

Bandits are a perfect example how players want, yurn, and Desire the "X" factor for this game. This is why so many people love pvp - PVP gives an element to the game PVE  just doesn't have. Instead of focusing on creating bandits my recommendation would be to realize that "real life" bandits already exists - PEOPLE. 

 

Well no. A player in pvp acts entirely different than a bandit can and would be. A player happily throws away his life just to grief another player, knowing he can respawn. A bandit would not do such a thing.

 

People are desiring the PvE aspect of Bandits, not bandits that act like PvP real players do

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

On 1/18/2022 at 1:13 AM, Jost Amman said:

Did you experience this in SP or MP?

 

I'm asking because I only play SP and I only experienced n.1 once in a long time.

 

I don't know why other people see these anomalies so often.

If it was an MP issue, it could be explained maybe with the pathing data is not being synced properly between host and client? Just a guess.

 

I get that both single player and in multiplayer

 

I run across them all the time. It makes me long for the Alpha 16 AI where they ran towards you and attacked you. Having them run away from me to fight a tree or a rock, or just forget about me, really is jarring

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

15 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

You may have set up your base so that the best choice for them is to go in destroy mode.

Try to "fix" the path they should follow to you so that they have the most clear and easy way to you.

 

Also, as faatal mentioned some time ago, there are different types of "AI levels", some zombies are very dumb, and they almost always go into destroy mode.

The "smarter" ones, instead, will path to you even if the path is longer and "complicated".

 

In my experience playing Alpha 20, they all have in common that they act decidedly like Matrix Buggy Software Entities very often that need to be deleted

 

They have behaviour that clearly is not intended, and unrelated to being dumb or smart.  For instance:

 

1) Charging the player, gets stuck on a tree (or a 1 wide block) and instead of moving aside, just beats on it. Even with the player moving to stand watching right next to it.

 

2) Rushing towards the player. Then running away from the player. Then running perpendicular to the player. Then again towards the player. This can repeat making for a super jerky and buggy path.

 

3) Running towards the player. Player moves a few blocks. Zombie arrives at player position and stops, then starts leisurely walking (having obviously lost track of the player in the span of 5 seconds, despite no obstructions, daylight, etc).

 

4) Player jumps. Zombies run off to beat on a random tree or pillar, as for a moment the player is now not in the exact spot it was, being 1 meter up in the air.

 

There seems to be something seriously wrong with the pathing, OR the zombie AI is hitting a lot of unintended decision tree branches struggling to adapt in a reasonable fashion. While we had some of this in Alpha 19, it's almost comical with how this makes zombies act decidedly non-zombie like.

 

A "dumb" zombie I can understand trying to break through rather than path a convoluted path. This is not what is happening

 

 

 

 

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

23 hours ago, Roland said:

Depends on when you started playing most likely.  To me, the game is still firmly on the RPG end of the spectrum compared to when I first started. 
 

To someone who started in the last few alphas, some of the changes may seem like a trend towards FPS, but to me it is just a small fluctuation and one that will probably continue until the devs settle on the exact mixture they want for this hybrid genre busting game. 

 

I would say the game has progressed towards more action rather than survival focus. Which is not entirely bad, it does make it more accessible. Progression still is super fast though, hundreds of rounds of ammo day 1-2 along with pipe weapons.

 

Still with the view it's a Tower Defense game, I really do hope next alpha actually focuses on that and gives us a bunch more trap types to use. We've essentially had the same traps now for years with no new additions, even some that were eagerly anticipated back in A16-A17 like fire turret, piston crusher and what have you.  Adding a few more trap types at the very least would be greatly in line with being a tower defense game ambition Just look at Night Of The Dead which has a huge number of traps, and while the overall game is nowhere near as good as 7DTD, that aspect is a huge draw as people love making traps

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

13 hours ago, HungryZombie said:

 

Do you think with these changes there would even be a desire to use pipe weapons? Would you still use it?

 

Yes. If progression was altered. I personally had the comment watching dev streams that ammo and weapons were super common. It's not hard to have hundreds of rounds of ammo day 1-2, and a few pipe weapons. Save a bit of cash and buy a proper low quality "proper" firearm is easy day 1-2 as well.

 

If progression was day 1-5 bows and if VERY lucky a pipe weapon, then day 6-12 pipe weapons, and 13++ getting into "factory made" firearms, I think people would for sure use them.

 

Right now I commonly find pipe weapons that are better than factory made weapons. Why use that q4 Ak-47 when your Q6 pipe machinegun has more mod slots and better stats?   I'd be proud if I could with some pipes and duct tape put together something that's better than a somewhat beat up ak-47