Roland

Despite agreeing with your philosophy of play and let play, if a block is bugged then the devs need to know. If just a few players are basing their entire horde night strategy by exploiting a bug then it is better to get it fixed sooner rather than later as that will impact fewer people. TFP has no problem with people using blocks in creative ways but if something is bugged then they usually want to fix it. Especially if fixing it will harm the players….lmao.

No no no. Metaphorically it’s an elephant’s trunk and an office branch. Obviously. A tree is waaaay off.

I think you stated it quite well when you listed all of the tasks and the process involved with getting water going. That process is a huge gameplay improvement over the nonexistent effort required before. It competes with the other tasks you need to get done and creates additional choices for how to play the first few days. You don’t like it which is noted. But for those who do, it is much more engaging than what we had before. Hopefully it will grow on you as you adapt to it and/or if the devs make some adjustments based on the negative feedback to make it more enjoyable for a larger portion of their players.

Oh please… Of course we have your feedback just like we have the feedback of others who don’t like it. What I meant is that your personal dislike isn’t going to be enough to convince them to change the game. There are others who like it and we listen to that feedback as well. I didn’t say that your feedback isn’t wanted or considered. TFP listens to the whole range of feedback. They won’t have the full range of feedback until A21 goes stable and people have plenty of time to play it and get beyond their first impression. Look, you’re at least tangentially related to the razor. So let’s break this down to simplest terms. 1) The devs made a change they believe in and enjoy. 2) The internal team played with the changes for almost a year and some adjustments were made but the feature was kept. 3) Since release two-weeks ago there have been many comments. A lot have been positive and a lot have been negative. 4) Nobody has reported that the game is now unplayable or broken due to the changes. All of the comments have been of the nature of liking vs disliking the changes. The simplest conclusion is that the feature is well designed and functions well within the game but that there are a lot of divergent opinions about whether it is fun or not. Since fun is a highly personal and subjective concept it is impossible to design a feature that is fun for everyone. All they can do is watch as time goes on to see whether most people come to find it fun.

*gasp* And YouTube comments are typically so positive… 😉 Joking aside, there are plenty of comments both positive and negative with thousands of likes. I can acknowledge the negative posts. I know that no feature is going to please everyone. Interesting that you can’t acknowledge any of the positive. When has anyone ever tried to withhold the truth that TFP isn’t making a survival simulator? This is just a case of you letting your own expectations get in the way of you seeing the truth. The same thing happened about five years ago when all the PvP fans who expected that the game was going to be a voxel version of Rust finally realized that the game was actually being designed as a cooperative or single player game with role playing elements. Oh the outcry we had and all those players predicted the doom of the game if it wasn’t going to fully support 50+ player battleground gameplay.

The fact that we never had one complaint or a single eyelash batted over all the other consumable containers being abstractions over 9 years shows that the design isn’t bad. The bad feeling you and others are getting is the normal aversion to change. If jars had been treated as they are from the beginning there would be about as much outcry about it as we’ve seen for every other container that shows up in your inventory when full but disappears when empty. 1) Anyone can reduce any mechanic in the game down to a tedious sequence of repetitive mouse clicks. The fact that you find the new mechanic of overcoming the water survival problem more tedious than the old method is immaterial. Everyone finds the fun in any sequence of mouse clicks to a different degree. It’s already known that some like the change and some don’t. That was anticipated long before the release. 2) Everyone plays Day One differently. Thanks for sharing your version of Day One. In my version of Day One I almost always had many jars by the end of day one regardless of sand or windows or forges and it seems that was the case for many others as well. Once the forge was complete there were so many jars available that there were never any choices involved with how to use water. Some important recipes didn’t even use clean water. When there is enough abundance to do everything then there are no choices. 3) This change creates tough choices. Every update when a change is made, those who initially dislike the change think that it creates less choice and more forced gameplay but after some time goes by it becomes apparent that all of the perceived restrictions and forced non choices were just a product of unfamiliarity with the changes. It’s happened so many times now. In my opinion, within a few months, most if not all game play styles will once again be present as innovative players adapt and figure things out. Some people will never think that the series of mouse clicks involved in building dew collectors is fun. That’s given. But the devs like it and are betting enough players will also like it.

So Warmer and Riamus each represent a few thousand gamers? Their posts don’t even mean that they see less inventory clutter as the best REASON for the change, it only shows that they enjoy less inventory clutter as a BENEFIT of the change. Also, TFP have never ever claimed to be making any kind of simulation here. You decry aspects of the game shifting toward the arcade end of the spectrum as if it is some shocking detestable thing. I fully expect the game to land fully in the arcade realm by time they are finished with modifications to make it more sim-like being left to modders who want to shifted that direction. If A21 is helping you adjust your expectations away from a survival sim then that is all for the best. This game was never designed to be a sim nor have the developers ever claimed to be focused on realism. Fun over realism has always been their mantra and that usually results in a game well within the arcade realm. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Well at least we know who the mystery author is now…

No its not. Just empty your hand and press E repeatedly to drink. If you have a vitamin and med bandage or painkillers you can drink even more. Nobody has to die of thirst while standing in a lake in a rainstorm in A21.

Possibly…or maybe they realize that being able to collect 20+ empty jars on day one which can then be filled all at once and all thrown into a fireplace without need for a cooking pot and then refilled (except by then you have 50+) for the rest of the game is not as much fun as building “abominations”. Im thinking that most people recognize that the old mechanic is far inferior. In my experience, people who never liked inventory management got a modlet to extend their backpack size ages ago. They haven’t been waiting around hoping TFP creates dew collectors to free up another slot….

I'm talking about the actual containers of consumables as they are represented in the game and yes, they are factually all consistent with each other now. Are the gathering methods of consumables all exactly the same? No. Is the history of what substance was loot only and what substance was harvestable or craftable the same? No. But I never claimed they were. I agree that for veterans who can't let go of the past, the history of how things used to be is probably a very important piece of this. I also agree that for someone who wants the method of extraction of different resources to be consistent then that piece is very important. All I am telling the OP who asked the question was why TFP got rid of the physical representation of a container for a consumable and that is because it was the only one in the game and they wanted such empty containers to be consistent across the board. As to how water vs shale is collected or the historical differences in the game between water and acid, those things weren't the concern. But getting rid of jars was which is why I didn't want the OP to have false hope that jars would be reinstated by the developers in case the OP thought that getting rid of jars was simply collateral damage for the water change. It was, in fact, the impetus for the water changes. It's fine by me if you disagree with that design goal or think the game was better before. I'm just giving information about why the change occurred and why it is unlikely to be reversed. Not everyone thinks every aspect of a game is fun. Fun for 100% isn't a realistic goal. The developers and the team found it fun and have continued to find it fun for about a year (The water change was implemented about a year ago internally). They are developing the kind of game they like to play. There are other features that have been implemented and then removed before they ever were experienced by the public because the devs decided that they didn't like them once they got to play with them. It's not like they would have left it in after playing with it for a year if they didn't think it was fun. So there are some (pretty important) people you waved at. It's only been a couple of weeks with the public so we will see if there are others. So far there have been a lot of positive comments about the water changes on many social media platforms including here. Since you're waving at them maybe they'll say "Hi".

I've found two filter mods for the helmet during the early game after countless restarts over the past year. I agree that finding an early helmet filter mod ruins the water survival gameplay but I wouldn't exactly call it a common occurrence. In both cases, I just sold it because I wanted to play the water survival game but I guess it is there for someone like you who doesn't. If you're finding it as a common item in all your restarts over the past two weeks you must be very happy. congrats.

Oh excuse me. Let me rephrase for you. I think it shows that they restart the game and replay what they think is the most interesting part of the game. Sorry, I didn’t mean to give affront to your favorite T5 POIs by making an absolute statement about what is actually most interesting….

Because that would obviously break the water survival gameplay of the early game so infinite collection of water from bodies of water is limited to just drinking. If you want a bottle of murky water to go into your inventory every time you press E while standing in water then you may as well just open the creative menu and give yourself all the water you want. It would amount to the same thing. The jars are now more consistent with how every single other consumable container is treated. If consistency is what you want then you’ve got it. As for depth of simulation, I’d say it’s a mixed bag at best. Some aspects of the world have been deepened to simulation level but others are definitely at the arcade end of the spectrum. It all depends on what the devs see as important. Whatever they feel is important gets the royal treatment whereas those things they view as peripheral get abstracted, streamlined, and cut altogether.

Let's be crystal clear. @Laz Man joined the team and Alpha 21 was the longest dev cycle in the game's development history. Just saying....

I think that what it shows is that the early to mid game is the most interesting part and people like to restart a new game and go through the early build up and feel vulnerable again after outpacing the difficulty curve before they get to late game and gameplay becomes wash rinse repeat. There could definitely be some mid to late game challenges added to help people not get bored once they've overcome all the early and mid game threats and hopefully bandits will fill that niche and perhaps we will see the percentage of people who play further into the higher gamestages increase after A22. That would be an interesting study. But I don't think people are playing to gamestage 49 and then quitting. I think they are replaying over and over and over the portion of the game that is most interesting to them.

One of their primary design goals was to remove glass jars as an item from the game and have them only exist as an inventory item just like all the other containers of consumables in the game. That was their starting point when they developed the water change. So it is unlikely that they will reinstate glass jars as a physical item even if they make alterations to water survival in the future. The dew collector is not producing glass jars any more than stumps are producing glass jars. Instead, it is assumed that the player has a supply of glass jars and when you find honey in a stump you scoop it into one of your jars and when you collect water from the dew collector you scoop it into your glass jar. You aren'r finding a glass jar full of murky water in a toilet tank. Instead you are scooping out the water with one of your empty glass jars you always have on hand. It is what is called an abstraction. It is the same mechanic that is used for the clay bowls you eat your stew from. It just takes a little time to get used to the mechanic and once your brain makes the adjustment it becomes the new normal. I've played without glass jars for months now and never think about it any longer while I play. I just know the glass jars exist in the background.

I like it!

Really, the only problem with Road Smoothing is that there is no visual representation that it is progressing. Overall, even with the slowness of road smoothing, maps are generating faster in A21. If players could see that it was making progress it would end all the worry that the game is frozen.

Hopefully TFP can hear more feedback related to this so they can decide how to adjust. I mourn for your losses.

The chance of exploding increases as damage is taken after your vehicle reaches zero. So it could happen immediately after or shortly after. But….you have to be ignoring the health quite a bit to not repair BEFORE it reaches zero in the first place. I always repair mine as soon as it reaches 50%.

ummmm...the glass jars are now gone. Goal accomplished.

Took over? Madmole has never not held the reigns...

Over the long term yes but in the short term there will be times when you don't seem to be finding the magazines or parts you perked into. I've seen plenty of people posting their concern that they aren't getting what they perked into and I've experienced it myself. If you are constantly getting everything you need then great.

Not necessarily. There is a wide spectrum of hydration survival and how it is represented across many different survival games. There are even survival games where thirst isn't differentiated from food at all. 7 Days to Die has no obligation to be just like any or even every survival game out there. The developers of some games just ignore water survival altogether. Other developers of other games put tons of detail into water survival to the point that it is basically a sim for hydrating the body. 7 Days to Die has chosen to make some aspects of hydration an abstraction. You don't have to like it but please just know that "any survival game" is not some bible for how particular survival games must depict thirst and drinking. There is a lot of wiggle room based on all the different ways different games choose to do it.