Roland

Welcome to the forum and glad you enjoy the game. Hopefully you will survive the upheaval of your first major update. Adapting to the new normal can be.....distressing for some. We look forward to hearing your feedback for A21 as someone who has only ever known A20.

Do I have more hours logged in the game or more hours logged in the forum...?

Ah... my favorite subject: The Type of "Friends" I Play With I'll just point out simply that not all teams experience the dynamic you describe so there must not be some control beam shooting out of the game code that forces people to act uncooperatively with each other. All of that originates from the hearts and minds of the people you play with. There is a remedy. But sharing is one of the skills the game rewards. You can get better at aiming, driving, flying, meleeing, as these are all player skills needed in the game. Same goes for sharing and coordinating as a team. Your suggestion would be like adding auto-aim or fast travel to the game which would negate any of the skills required by the game. That is one opinion but it is eclipsed by the thousands of people who have expressed that 7 Days to Die is one of the best cooperative team building experiences they have ever played. We have had letters from fathers who have told us playing our game with his children healed their relationship because of how they bonded while playing. I bet they figured out how to share loot. That is definitely not a universal outcome of friends playing the game together. Sorry you guys are so competitive with regards to loot. Since you added the line that these settings would be optional I have no problem with them being added. I doubt I would ever select them as I think 1 & 2 would be detrimental to the gameplay experience but just like there already is a loot multiplier I don't care whether others decide to give themselves more loot. I definitely don't believe these measures are necessary for effective cooperative play but as a mod or an option for those that want them...sure. This is not accurate at all. There are biomes you can go to for more difficult enemies and better loot as of Alpha 20. Are you playing Alpha 20? The enemies also do not ALL get stronger as you progress. There are still regular zombies but as you progress there are more feral zombies and radiated that start appearing. But this is not the same thing at all as the entire world progressing in difficulty along with the player so that no progress can be felt. You can definitely experience progression. You can select T1 and T2 and T3 quests once you've progressed to T5 for an easier experience. You can even without a quest try and take on a T5 POI and clear it on day one with all your low level gear as a challenge if you wish. What you describe as wanting is already in the game on the biome level and on the POI level and what you accuse the game of doing is more subtle and less in your face than you describe. There has to be SOME progression of challenge so that the game isn't essentially won by Day 3. But there is definitely a feeling of progress when you start out needing to hit a zombie several times to kill it to when you realize you are one shot killing most zombies. Then as ferals and radiated start appearing you are back to needing a few hits to kill but then again you progress to being able to mow even these foes down as your ability to scale up your ammo production and your access to the top tier weapons and highest perk abilities make you practically unstoppable.

On the community side, I agree. But not on the development team side. All of those changes that were controversial among the community were unanimously supported by the team. There is no consensus on these issues (or zip lines) among the team. It will have to be a mod.

The problem with item degradation and food spoilage type mechanics is that they are very polarizing. Some people love them and some people hate them. And it seems to be pretty evenly split in the player base and just as importantly on the dev team. I think entropic designs will be able to be modded into the game and when that happens that mod will also probably include early game lucky finds.

haha...that also explains why I couldn't approve the post. By trying to fix it you removed the part that had to be approved and so it was impossible to be approved. Once a post is marked for approval only a moderator can approve it. Users can't fix it by editing. I would agree IF we had permanent item degradation but since we don't and TFP is not interested in putting it in, we cannot have best stuff showing up early game that lasts forever and makes looting irrelevant for the rest of the game. Someone just was talking about how underwhelming a T5 quest can be when the loot rewards are items of lower quality than you already have. No, loot progression is a must in a game design that eschews entropy. Think of it like this: what if you found a lucky cargo drop that had 20 stacks of 64 meat stews in the very first drop? Great right? Not if you like farming because now farming is irrelevant. See a deer? So what? When you get something that will last the whole playthrough and invalidates part of the game so early, it isn't good.

We have been under attack by a very aggressive spammer and so we changed the post approval process so that we have to approve any posts with links. I’m not sure why your post stayed hidden. I couldn’t unhide it and it wasn’t in the approval queue. I retyped it into your follow up post which was the only way to make it appear. Very strange.

Well A21 is going to feature at least one brand new T5 quest location so it will be interesting to see how it fares in the minds of experienced T5 players. I know the level design team is very excited for you to try it. They really rock the Wheatley vibe when it comes to their creations...

We need a new word for zombies with heightened awareness if we are going to call tier 2 zombies with glowy eyes "feral"-- and then there's the Feral Wight that many used to just call "The Feral"

New three word clue for another A21 change....

I believe that has been fixed in A21. At least I haven’t run into any huge overlaps like the one you mentioned. Even so, that STILL doesn’t negate the fact that you won’t have an auger to use while waiting to find enough magazines to make a Q5. That was the original point—having to go without for most of the game if you couldn’t find the schematic

There is feral as a setting that makes all zombies more sensitive to your presence from a lot further away and then there is feral as a zombie type. "Disabling ferals" does not remove the zombie type from the game. It simply disables that mode so that all zombies have regular sensitivity.

Exactly the kind of tough decisions that make a game good. Scarcity of resources means making a choice to make a Q1 or wait for Q2 or Q3 before doing it. Regardless, you'll have an auger of some kind until you can somehow acquire or craft that Q5. As I said, some people will hate that they are using a Q2 auger for longer than 5 minutes. But it is still an important distinction that you will have an auger of some quality whereas before when there was just one rare schematic drop to find you went completely without.

Sure, its going to be different for each person. My point was that intentionally looting repetitively with the intention of quickly moving up the shotgun magazine ladder (for example) is going to quickly reveal itself as an exercise in futility for most min/maxers and as is their nature they will turn to more effective and speedy methods of acquiring the best shotgun they can get. So I'm not saying that the act of looting itself can't be grindy. I'm saying that going for a specific magazine can't effectively be accomplished through grinding. Most who care about efficiency and effective activities will just naturally abandon that tactic as their means of gaining the specific things they want.

Another important difference is that back then you had to live without an Auger at all until you could find the schematic but long before you get to 100 magazines you will be able to play with augers you crafted yourself that get progressively better until you eventually gain the recipe for a Q5 Auger. Its not the same "all or nothing" feature as before. Now, if a person refuses to craft a Q1-4 auger because they can't stand playing with sub-optimal gear then the result will be pretty close to how it was by their own choice.

I don’t know if this helps or not but in my experience the new system doesn’t feel like a grind at all. A grind requires that you have control over the outcome of an action and through repetition of that action you can determine the outcome you want. So you can grind on a safe with a stone axe because you know by repeating that action you will eventually get into the safe. You can grind skill points by finding the best action that grants xp and then repeating it to rack up the points. You can grind the trader by finding something to sell and repeating the action of getting that item to sell and make money and of course you can grind the quests. It’s all guaranteed. You quickly will realize that there is no way to choose a specific magazine title and grind for that. It’s random and because of that there is no incentive to focus on one magazine to grind it out efficiently to get to the top. Even with your perk bonus you still tend to find a wide range of magazines. You can mitigate that a bit by being selective in which POIs you enter and which loot containers you open but it is still random. You don’t know and can’t control which magazine will be in any crate and you intuitively come to realize the futility of this as you play. (MP will be different as teams can funnel specific titles to their specialists). Now, if you are the type of person who only likes to play with the best gear and can’t stand the inefficiency of lower tier stuff and have always maximized the grinds to get to top gear as quickly as possible, then you probably won’t like the crafting change. BUT chances are that you never crafted your own gear anyway in A20 and so you probably won’t in A21 either. You’ll just grind your Lootstage up quickly and visit biomes with a Lootstage bonus to find the high tier gear as quickly as you can. You’ll grind your quest tiers up as fast as you can to get the top gear rewards as quickly as you can from the trader. Just because you can only craft a yellow pipe shotgun doesn’t mean you can’t still use to full effect a purple auto shotgun you got from a T5 quest reward and that gameplay loop probably feels pretty much the same as A20 and below as far as results go—always getting in loot or trader rewards stuff that is better than you can craft. So in summary, recipe learning is random again like it used to be and can’t really effectively be grinded. You simply make do with what you have which will be a really nostalgic feeling for a lot of old timers. However, if you want the best stuff there is a min/max grind fest option still available to you that hasn’t really changed. Use the trader and quests and grind up your Lootstage and you’ll get your top gear goodies more quickly than those who like a more slow progression and who like to mostly craft their own stuff.

That isn’t a complete list. Once the devs start their dev stream to show A21, there will be some lengthening of that list. Personally, I can’t imagine myself going back to A20. Everything about A21 feels more refined.

He's talking about their souls.

Also agree that clearing a building should be about interacting with the world and not your HUD. Clear the building using good effective searching instead of asking for more blips to appear on the compass. We don't need to make quests practically guaranteed to succeed. The lighted path should just be the way to eventually reach the loot room if followed to the end and not be a crutch to finding every single zombie without fail. I think the simple notification on your HUD that you've found all but the last area is sufficient. Keep searching until that comes up or give up and go home with a failed quest if you'd rather. I'm all for improving the balance of time/risk/ and reward for T5 quests but adding more hand-holding (unless as an option that can be toggled) is not the way to go, imo. If I was in charge I would remove all HUD notifications but make a drone mod that when installed would add them back. Then those who want those HUD helps could have them as an option by crafting/finding them and installing them into a drone and taking their drone with them. Alternatively, there could be a scanner mod that would have the drone seek out and "point" at any zeds within a 15 block radius. That could help you find the missing zeds if you use the tech.

Once you have a lvl 6 steel club you need to stop hoping for a better club no matter where you loot.

Remember that it isn't simply for our pleasure. As professionals and artists, they also want to offer up a technical masterpiece as their finished product.

I'm not against a background color change or a filter category but I think the blocks that have that attribute are simply any that don't fill the entire voxel volume so that water fills in all the visible space not used as well as flows past them. It may be completely intuitive which block shapes will allow water to flow in and through them. Don't mistakenly build your underwater base walls out of bars and arrow slit blocks....

I don't think anyone has claimed the game is done and sound is finalized. Rather than voting for whether it needs to be done, how about everyone simply list the sounds that are unacceptable in your ears as some have already done. Striking metal would be my big desired change.

I’ll come outside in California and beat some pots together to steal a few spawns from you guys.

What was that? I’m sorry but the wind factor way up here is so powerful it makes it hard to hear you way down there gup! Let me drift down a bit to where Laz is and see if he could make out what you were saying….