Roland

I estimate it will happen in the second half of the window.

Who knows. But everyone who likes Pokket more than you do will tune in to watch her play A21. They will want to see her reactions and interact with her. You can take her or leave her and obviously care more about the actual information. And...if you aren't busy that weekend and it comes to mind you still might tune in to see her play. In fact, it's very likely despite your feeling now that the dev stream this Wednesday will fully satisfy you especially since you'll be on the forums over that weekend.

I don't think it will be a thunder-stealing stream even if the streamer weekend happens this coming weekend. There are two major audiences really: Those who watch and follow the person they enjoy watching and those who watch to get information on the game. The first group will watch their guy or gal no matter what and enjoy it immensely-- probably more than watching TFP staff play. The second group greatly prefers just getting the information and will be interested in the Q&A aspect and that it is TFP staff answering the questions. Many in the second group are often annoyed by the personalities and antics of professional streamers and just want the info and are likely to just skip the streamer weekend but will want to watch QA staff playing and showing stuff off. At any rate, experimental is at the door and about to come into the house and when it comes, any and all annoyance is forgotten in the excitement of getting it and playing it.

@faatal be like

Without water there can be no kraken. Think about it.

I believe they were removed due to chunk rendering time and multiple people traveling at top vehicle speeds. Even without caves they’ve throttled the top speeds of the vehicles to not outpace the terrain rendering and with the complexity of caves they’d have to slow things down even more. Fire burning blocks has never been part of the default game. You must be remembering a mod. It would be cool though.

I don't understand why anything has to be explained to new players who are just joining in A20. Why should they particularly care that the game used to have a minimap or that you had a chance of vomiting out the entire contents of your stomach, or that enemies in houses were awake instead of asleep? None of that matters to them playing the current version of the game. For anyone who will begin the game with A21, why would they even need an explanation at all about empty jars? Memories of the way things used to be are one of the perks of being an early adopter of this title but those things are just that--memories. They have nothing to do with the current state of the game or where the game might go next. Some veterans of the game would be a lot happier if they could just let memories be memories and move on....

One would argue that if jumping is so insignificant in the game then there isn't really a need to level it up so significantly. I know some people liked being able to jump to rooftops in Morrowind but I never felt like that was critical to the game. Jumping at a superhuman level was just something you did for fun. What was the purpose for needing to level jump up to such high levels to the point that you felt like you had to grind it out? Well, I do much prefer spending skillpoints since it gives so much more flexibility. If I don't enjoy grinding a critical skill I can still level it up to the point where I can use it to good effect by doing things I do enjoy. I'm not locked into doing that one activity in order to improve it. Skillpoint spending can still feel organic and natural provided you aren't farming xp through only one method. If you are playing the game in a well rounded fashion then the xp feels like it is a representation of your overall experience and so when you spend points to improve there isn't really a disconnect between the activities you have done and the improvement you are gaining. It is only when someone power grinds doing the one activity that they perceive grants the most xp in the fastest way possible that they feel like the xp earned doesn't match with the skill learned.

Since you insist on taking everyone at the most literal and to-the-letter interpretation let me help you out so you don't keep getting confused by perceived inconsistencies and contradictions. First, you have to realize that the dev streams are not scripted. Nobody goes through and fact checks everything and edits a script for the presenters to say. They are just speaking from the heart and so their words are not like contracts that should be analyzed and taken to be in stone. And before you suggest that they should, don't waste your breath because they won't. They are perfectly fine with the current level of "professional quality" of their streams. The damage change for vehicles was for added realism but not solely for that reason and not to the degree of making vehicle use and repair simulation level realism. It is still very arcade-level abstraction but definitely has more realistic features than it previously did. It is more realistic for a car to be able to be used as a weapon against zombies and that it will take damage doing so. It is more realistic for a vehicle to take more damage when going off road than when staying on the road. It is less abstract and a bit more realistic to have repair kits only repair some of the damage rather than all of it and based on a player's grease monkey skill have a repair kit be able to repair more. This granularity in repair and the tie-in to the grease monkey skill makes the process feel more realistic than it did. Does that mean the pimps are going for "REALISM"? Not at all. They are still the Fun Pimps and fun is their first priority and they obviously don't care about making the game into a simulation. However, within the realm of where the game is at, aspects can be tuned to be a bit more realistic or a bit more abstracted and streamlined and they will often make those choices. Vehicles and vehicle repair is definitely not realistically represented in this game. But A21 does make things a bit more realistic than A20 was in that regard even though as a whole it is still miles away from actually being fully realistic.

It works well in any game as long as the player isn't focused on leveling up for its own sake and is fine with leveling up at a normal pace. If the player can play naturally and allow their skills to advance at a normal pace based on normal play then LBD gives an incredibly organic and natural feeling of progression. I agree that limits to how much you can progress per day would definitely help those with min/max tendencies to refrain from power grinding but that would bring new complaints and hate from players. There are those who hate playing the actual game at suboptimal levels with suboptimal gear. They like to grind themselves up to highest harvesting levels (for example) BEFORE they start chopping trees or mining ore. Just knowing that they are missing out on wood they could've gotten from that tree if they were just a higher level frustrates them. The issue is that there are those who power grind and love to power grind and find it fun and rewarding to do so and they never complain about LBD. Then there are those who power grind because they feel compelled to power grind but don't find it fun to do so and complain about LBD. Finally, there are those who don't power grind and simply play the game looking to complete tasks and objectives that arise within the game world and are happy to have their character level up in skills as they use them normally and they never complain about LBD. So really, it is only one segment of a player base that complains about LBD-- those who level for the sake of leveling but find the grind boring and awful and yet can't refrain from focusing on leveling. The problem is that with limits placed on daily LBD, the only players who wouldn't complain are the ones who don't focus completely on leveling up. I don't think that is a problem with the design, itself. That is simply a result of player choice and psychology (which can be changed btw)

You know what will happen. 😆 Several people in the chat will start screaming at them to check the health of their vehicle and then they'll check it and be fine. There always seem to be few in chat who are always calling out directions and corrections and warnings and whatnot- paying way closer attention to the game than the streamer is 🤣.

Of course you are and it doesn't surprise me in the least. As I said, this is a polarizing topic. I have no doubt at least 50% of the Minecraft player base disliked the degrading weapons and whoever could did download a mod to change that. It doesn't change the fact that as a game feature degradation works well and adds gameplay value. What it does show is that many people don't enjoy that feature. One of the mistakes a lot of people make is equating a feature they don't care for as an objectively bad feature. A feature can be good and well designed and also be disliked. I don't care for LBD as a feature but I acknowledge that it is a good feature that works well in a lot of games and is a valid and effective design.

Its time consuming to quote a question in one thread and answer it in another. Developers wouldn't take the time to do that. They would simply answer the question within the discussion thread and we would be back to where we started.

We've done variations of that in the past and it stifles developer participation because there are no questions for them to answer. If you follow the developers who post here you can see all of their contributions without the rest. We usually prune this thread every few days to move player discussions over to the overflow thread in general discussions but when we get close that kind of slacks off because the developers are often so busy trying to get the update out they rarely post. EDIT: Okay, I did a huge prune back to the last time faatal posted.

I've already acknowledged that item degradation will have to be modded in. I'm not arguing for its inclusion in the base game, I'm answering the question of why I would want it. I have modded repair kits out and I've also just played where I don't use them. I'm fine with that-- but when someone asks me why I like item degradation or how I think the game needs it then I answer.

That might be true of A20 where you can rush xp farming and ramp up your crafting ability simply by spending points in targeted areas. In A21, you won't be able to do that and you will have no idea whether you will be able to craft something at a higher level than what you can find. Even if you do, you will still be glad to find gear in loot and save it for the future instead of get rid of it immediately. That's only because durability isn't an issue. If durability was finite then for sure durability extending mods would have a greater impact in the game. Perhaps you don't care about the abilities of mods beyond their damage enhancement properties but I don't think everyone feels that way. Crafting might fill that hole immediately but not necessarily and especially so in A21. You might be able to replace what you had with an equal quality replacement through crafting but depending on your progression you might only be able to craft something of lesser quality which is what "making do" refers to. Eventually you might find in loot another high quality replacement. Also, parts are always a limiting factor on what you can craft so you would be looting to find either parts or a replacement item. It's obvious you don't value the things that spoilage and degradation add to the game-- which is fine. Some people like inventory management and others hate it with a passion and say it adds nothing to the game. Some people like lots of intermediate crafting steps wanting to start with raw ores and then refined metals and then components and then final products essentially having to go through multiple stages of crafting to get the item they want while others just want to get the resources and get their item crafted in a single step. It doesn't mean that those design choices don't add anything to the game. It just means they aren't to the taste of that particular person. I don't want to have to deal with the challenges of scarcity the whole game. I want to overcome them with advancement. You don't seem to want them in the game at all even though you claim to enjoy having holes early on and then progressing past each one. Spoilage is a hole to be progressed past. People who hate spoilage in their games always claim that it is going to be some pervasive tedious thing that will last all game long and yet every game that has spoilage also has means to mitigate it and overcome it to the point that it is overcome. It is interesting that different people have different preferences. I do like challenges of scarcity in survival games. But, like you, I enjoy overcoming those challenges through progression and over time. I just wish we had a few more challenges to overcome. Their complete absence from the game doesn't really count in my book.

It works fine in Minecraft. I think it could work just fine in this game. I've done it voluntarily by scrapping broken gear instead of repairing and I felt that it was a little to fast but not too bad at all. But that's neither here nor there. It isn't going to happen except through mods or personal choice.

I totally get where you are coming from but I can assure you that the devs truly expect players to set the game options to their own preferences-- and that includes changing values in the xml files. Obviously, there has to be a default setting of some kind but in the case of this game, it isn't necessarily a statement of how they feel you should play the game so much as it is a starting point for you to decide how you want to change things to suit your playstyle. Longer days and 10 day bloodmoon cycle should definitely take the pressure off and bring more exploration time into your game so it isn't dominated so much by the horde night. Hope it works well for you!

So what? What’s wrong with tier 5? Tier 6 is supposed to be legendary so you should be playing most of the game at tier 5 with rare tier 6 gear to supplement. I can’t think of a single activity in the game that can’t be handled adequately with tier 5 gear. Tier 6 is way too common imo and degradation would help with that if they aren’t going to nerf Tier 6 availability. How do you make that leap? Random stats can work just fine with degradation. And who said that an item would break after a day? That is what balancing is about but nobody who is for degradation wants to go from infinity to a day. We just don’t want infinity. There’s no need for exaggeration. There’s no danger the status quo on this issue is going to change. I’ve argued this with Madmole and he is firmly on your side. 😀

Again, you show a huge disconnect between your belief and reality. We do not ban people because we don’t like what they say. Perhaps you are sincere in your comments and not purposely trying to troll. In that case you are just completely off. You are drawing upon your own experience and it doesn’t look like it applies very well. At any rate, you are quite mistaken in the assumptions you are making regardless of your background.

Now you’re just trolling especially given that your premise is that faatal spent a year and a half doing this one thing. That is a false premise to begin with. I think you’re trying to set yourself up as some kind of an expert so you can gaslight and troll the community. But it is clear that your perspective is quite off from reality. For example, you assumed that the same people working on 7 Days were splitting their time to work on another project. Also, your perception of the work done in the game is surprisingly superficial and surface level only. Again, you assume that since you aren’t from the USA it would be too difficult to hire you when the team has several people from a variety of countries and native languages already It all cast doubt in my mind that you actually know what you’re talking about.

You don't have to play the blood moon event by defending a base that you've spent every moment of the week prepping. You can ignore the blood moon by exploring that military installation miles away from your main city and then sealing all access to the top of it and just chilling up there until the night is over. You can certainly do that every once in a while. You can also change the settings to make the blood moon occur every 10 days or every 14 days. Personally, I think the game's blood moon difficulty progression curve is a bit on the slow side compared to player power progression. Players can get access to concrete and traps and produce ammo in huge quantities weeks before they actually have to do so in order to survive the weekly horde nights. TFP cannot slow it down even further without destroying any kind of challenge at all. That's why they offer game settings that allow you to change how dominating the blood moon event is in the game. The game was called 7 Days to Die long before the blood moon was added to the game and the weekly horde night was ever a thing. If it could be called 7 Days to Die with no blood moon horde at all, then it certainly can still be called 7 Days to Die with a blood moon that only happens once every 30 days if that is how impactful you want the event to be in the game.

1) It would add more significance to looting and crafting. Without degradation, if you find a purple pick axe, you never have to craft or find another for the whole playthrough of that game. In fact, finding another one is depressing since you already have one and that find could've been something you don't yet have. Why ever craft a pick-axe if you already found a better one than you were able to craft? With degradation, eventually that pickaxe would be used up and disappear and then you would need to craft yourself a new one. If you were to find another one then that would be rewarding since you needed one. 2) It would make mods that add durability have actual relevance. Who cares about the current diamond edge mod that adds durability to your item when it is infinitely repairable? Instead of actually adding to the longevity of the item, it simply reduces the frequency with which you need to repair it which is meaningless because repairing is such an insignificant mechanic itself. 3) It would increase the situations in which the player must make do without. These situations add variety to gameplay. One of the staples of survival games is that you must often try to survive without the perfect set of tools and you need to get creative in how to overcome the threats with whatever you have on hand-- or use inferior items until you can replace them with high-quality items. Without degradation those situations are often never seen in the game. 4) It would make first-day or first-week super lucky finds be amazing but not balance-breaking since they wouldn't last for the entire rest of the playthrough. TFP could even increase the chance of finding a rare epic item on day one since it wouldn't stick around forever. Those are four big reasons I can think of that appeal to me and why I think degradation is needed but like I said, some people just hate losing stuff they have and those reasons above are not enough to overcome their distaste of non-permanence. But I'd be happy with permanent degradation as a mod and not part of the base game. In addition to the above for item degradation, food spoilage would also add many new dimensions that are a lot of fun (for some) and I would love for that to have been something they wanted for this game.

Remaining in early access and spending money for ongoing development and hiring specialized talent is not milking. You may not be able to see all the labor-intensive work that has been done on this game over the past 18 months but I can assure you that the amount of development put into this game has been epic. You want extra content because you're bored of the current content and so are dismissive of the type of work that has been done but that doesn't change the fact that TFP has been busy. Nobody on the 7 Days to Die team is ignoring this game to work on some future project. They have an entirely different team working on their next project and nothing that team does steals any talent or resources or time from this game. There really is no more to say about non-7 Days to Die projects though since that is off-topic for this thread. The 7 Days to Die team is 100% focused on getting this game finished which is why they are not spending time doing extra content that expands the base game even though there are those that only want those kinds of updates. The change to vehicle damage was not simply increasing vehicle damage. It was balancing vehicle damage with environmental damage and damage to zombies. It was adding graphical indicators of the damage that vehicles are taking and when that damage is getting close to complete vehicle failure. It was also adding graphical indicators to zombies for their damage from vehicles. It also included changes to the Grease Monkey perk and the balance of how much damage repair kits fix. It also involved play testing to dial in the right amount of damage and fixing to make the feature balanced. It was a bit more than one line of code.

Sure it was more of a process to craft your own weapon at different times in the past but you could always loot weapons and ammo without needing to craft them. The game has gone back and forth between having craftable weapons and no craftable weapons but the constant unchanging feature has always been lootable weapons and ammo--even before traders and quests were a thing. We have been discussing this game in terms of survival horror. I agree that there have been periods of time when weapons were easier and harder to obtain but even during the times in earlier versions when weapons were more scarce they were nowhere near the level of scarcity that you see in actual survival horror titles. For as long as I have played it, you've been able to get a lucky find during the first week that can set you up weapon-wise for the rest of the game. Since the beginning people have complained that finding weapons in loot that are better than you can craft have diminished the crafting aspect of the game. A21 is the first time in forever that I feel like I can often craft better stuff than I can find. Everything CAN be obtainable but you can choose to have a different experience without ever touching a setting or installing a mod simply by.....not doing quests. Ignore the quests. You can go a step further and ignore the trader completely if you want but for sure nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to spam quests. Any POI can be explored and looted without a quest attached. It is perplexing that you find questing such a detriment and source of making the game too easy but....you do them anyway? People who want a challenge set limitations on themselves all the time. They reset the world if they die. They start themselves in an upper floor room of the hospital. And....they ignore the trader to varying degrees depending on the level of challenge they are after. You want a challenge. So play it in a challenging fashion. Yes, it can be that way if you exploit it. A21 has a better balance than A20 but perhaps hasn't gone as far as you might wish. 50% loot is a much tougher beast in A21 than in A20 since it affects your loot AND your ability to learn so that setting might be to your liking. I don't think I said that vanilla didn't use to be harder. I feel like the challenge of the early game has fluctuated over time. I haven't really been talking about difficulty anyway. I've been talking about this game as a survival horror genre title.