Roland

I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread. Threads about streamers being appropriately politically correct or woke in their monologues and conversations with audience members is beyond the scope of this forum which is to focus on the game itself. There have already been two separate flame rants in this thread that I have hidden. This is why we don't allow discussion of religion or politics and to that we can add racial or gender issues because they are hot topics that polarize discussions and create toxicity in the forum. Probably the better place to have these discussions is with the influencers, themselves, in their discords or chats. Here, we want to keep the focus on the game. Thanks to all who attempted to discuss this with measured responses and without name-calling and ranting.

Those who would sexualize and objectify those three were cancelled eons ago through natural selection...

Damn...

My hope is that T6 will drop back down to be the top tier that is craftable and that they will have truly legendary gear that can only be found and that it is truly rare. I have no idea what is going to happen though in this regard since time is clearly running out if they want to get to gold before their 10 year anniversary hits... If we do get legendary gear I want it to be so rare that people come here to brag about what they found and nobody believes them and when they show a screenshot to prove it everyone accuses them of faking the pic...

Yeah, I'll double down on my opinion and say, "absolutely". Tier 5 quality with 3 mods and fully perked is going to be plenty to be able to survive with against pretty much anything the game throws at you. And if you say, "but I'm playing Insane Nightmare Horde Night Daily 300% xp and Tier 5 is not enough to survive against that" then I'll just say you picked that setting to be challenged so...be challenged. Tier 6 is supposed to be placeholder for legendary gear and legendary gear by its very nature is not something you and everyone else on your team are kitted out with completely. It's freaking LEGENDARY. Maybe in your lifetime you come across 3 or 4 pieces of legendary level stuff. If you find a legendary M60 but you perked all the way up shotguns and it bugs you so much then buy the elixyr that lets you respec and change up what you are doing. You played the whole first part of your game with shotguns and now you can play the rest until you feel done with a legendary M60. Sounds fun to me. I'm not super bothered by it right now since Tier 6 is supposed to be a placeholder and old timers are used to running around all decked out in purple stuff-- but if the devs run out of time and change their minds and decide to just go with what we have right now instead of designing actual legendary tier gear then I absolutely would want them to make Tier 6 a lot more rare than it is even if it means you don't get a legendary version of the weapon you perked up to the top of the tree. And don't worry about my opinion anyway. The devs don't seem to share it since they obviously know how to make things like beakers and crucibles have legendary rarity and they've never applied that to purple gear-- so they must like to see lots of it in the game. I'm 52. My first console was something that had Breakout and Pong preloaded on it. That's all you could play. There were no cartridges-- probably 1976 or 1977 if I remember correctly.

I don't think so. But that's just my opinion. There are quite a few boardgames where you have a deck of 20 items or abilities that can be aquired during the game and during setup you shuffle that deck and pick only 5 random cards to be used in that playthrough. The very fact that you absolutely can't get all 20 items in any one single playthrough makes that game more replayable. If it were up to me, one player would only ever get 3-5 tier 6 quality items in a 100 day playthrough they were so rare. Tier 5 would then be the true highest quality level for most things in the game with only a few special items being tier 6. But that's just my own opinion and I guess an example of at least one person who does like random items and being denied some things due to random factors and then making do without those things. I don't call it a @%$#ty game because I never found a beaker. I call it a game with a different feel from the last one I played.

I would agree completely for anyone who plans to play single player exactly once and then put the game away and move on. But if you like to restart and play through to the point you feel you have succeeded-- and do that multiple times then on one playthrough you'll have to make do without something and on the next you'll have to make do without something else. In one playthrough you'll be strong in one or two attributes and weak to mediocre in the rest and in the next playthrough that can shift if you make different choices. It's not that the game is meant to be played as a team and single player is screwed. It is that it is meant to be played through multiple times and offer different experiences and challenges with variable weaknesses and strengths each time you play. You are misremembering. It was this way for sure in A19 and I believe it was also true in A18 but I can't remember for sure on that. At some point, Madmole changed things so that T2 and T3 schematics had to be looted or purchased at the trader. That was either A18 or A19. A17 was the change to the parts system we now have I believe or that may have even been A16. At any rate, there was no change in how weapons are crafted and how schematics work for A20. It works the same as it has for the last 1-2 years. But this is the required sauce for survival games. Survival games are all about reacting and adapting to the events, bad fortunes, and circumstances the game throws at you. Maybe you want to go do a quest but then on the way a dog pack catches you in the open and while you live, you have a broken arm and an infection with no splint or antibiotics. Do you go for the quest anyway since that is what you wanted to do or do you change your plans to heal your conditions first? Its your choice and you can try it either way. Same thing with wanting to perk into shotguns but all you find are machine gun schematics. You can choose to stick to shotguns or change your plans and go for machine guns since that is what you can craft. I know that some people are not going to like this type of design but that doesn't make it a bad design. What we have is a good design for replayability and survival style gameplay of making do with what you have and adapting to your circumstances and overcoming despite having areas of weakness. It can be improved for sure and the devs are constantly experimenting and fine tuning to find the sweet spot they hope to achieve by time the game goes gold. If this type of gameplay is not to your liking and you are playing SP then for goodness sake, set a fair price for yourself to enable the creative menu and purchase what you want. If you desire for the things that you want to play with to be guaranteed and deterministic and you are solo, then that is one of the purposes of the creative menu. Throw away 50,000 dukes and open the creative menu and grab the weapon you want or the weapon parts you need to craft it if you want to do it that way. Then the game is deterministic and you aren't cheating because you earned it by spending those dukes. Make it as expensive as you need to not have it feel like you are just cheating it in.

Loot tables are being worked on and @schwanz9000 most likely would want to know this feedback. I’ll let him know about this thread in addition to the poke above in this reply. It’s probably most troublesome for min/makers and speed runners who are leveling so quickly that they don’t spend enough time in the window of opportunity to be able to find those items before they’ve rocketed past….

Yeah, they’re fake. I just felt by referencing industry knowledgeable friends it would bolster my own personal opinion. You caught me….

Some people are always going to accuse others of cheesing horde night. “Cheese” has become simply a trash talk way of saying that you handle horde night in a way that I think is easier and takes less effort than how I handle horde night. The devs aren’t designing a la trash talk. They want the zombies to be able to reliably path through the world and navigate the often complex terrain and they really don’t care how players develop strategies to survive. If they see behavior by zombies they did not intend they fix that. If that fix ends a particular strategy, it was just collateral damage. There have only been a very few enemy behaviors they have changed because of player strategies and in those cases they were up front about the fact that they didn’t want players to be able to do something they were doing. Zombies digging, zombies swimming, and vulture hordes attacking vehicles during blood moon are the only actual dev design vs player strats situations I can think of that were put in because of how players were playing.

@Laz Man can you weigh in on this issue?

You may not know this but I have about 20 buddies who are senior software programmers, level designers, and play testers for a little old game known as 7 Days to Die. So listen up. with all due respect to your gf, my buddies told me that the code for land generation was completely overhauled and there is no old code from Alpha 1 that anyone is twitching around with as far as how the world generates and interacts with objects and entities. Also my buddies did some complex calculations probably using internal data your gf doesn’t have access to and they came up with 8 years in development rather than 10 years. Weird. While your gf was chuckling about the QA guy, I asked my buddies what is meant by the term “stable” within the context of early access and they said that it means it is simply good enough to play without undue fatal crashing occurring on a wide scale basis. As long as game corrupting crashes are marginal so that the majority of players can test and report, the game is considered stable for their purposes. Your gf probably doesn’t deal with early access for public testing of her indev software so “stable” might mean to her something completely different. My buddies and your gf probably have different standards of quality that they feel satisfy “good enough”. My buddies say that if a software company is willing to spend the time and money to polish and improve quality rather than just add more mediocrity in additional forms and models, the customers will appreciate it. We hit 70K + concurrent players this weekend which indicates a record breaking group of customers that are willing to play the current version in the manner it was delivered. Maybe your gf has some perspectives relevant to her industry but for the context of this game in Steam early access and still being an alpha product— my buddies really seem to understand what is going on with 7 Days to Die.

I want to say that the change to being able to craft T2 and T3 gear being reliant upon finding a schematic happened in A18 more than two years ago. I’m pretty sure the complaints about being doubly affected by rng thanks to schematics and items like beakers and acid has been around a long long time. The devs are most definitely aware of the complaint so we will see what they choose to do with it. This is not a brand new change with A20 that they might be unaware of the ramifications.

If it is too many repetitions of the same cycle that you don't like I suggest changing the frequency of horde nights from 7 days to 30 days or maybe a random day somewhere between 20-30 days so that if you typically play 100 days, horde night would be an event that occurs only 3-5 times in your entire playthrough rather than a common cycle that dominates the game. Think about it..

Yeah. It should be one of the first things they fix. They agree it is super important and high priority.

Ah….so force TFP into acknowledging officially what it considers a cheesy vs legit player base design…

For official fan-made POIs to be included in the game, they would have to be vetted, tested, and approved by our level design team. The members of that team already have a long list of their own designed POIs that they are designing and testing and approving for inclusion. It comes down to time and right now there isn’t time. What TFP has done in that area is hired some of the most talented fans who were designing POIs and made them part of the team. So in that sense A20 does include fan-made official POIs— and so will A20.x updates and A21.

And this is where things get interesting for a developer.

"Digging" is not an AI Task that can be excluded or altered, Rather it is an integrated part of the pathing code that determines how zombies get to the player. That's not to say that @faatal couldn't do something to allow the option but it might be more work than they are willing to do if it involves rewriting the pathing code rather than simply editing a few values.

Not simply as complaining— mostly as feedback based on unsubstantiated fears and speculation rather than feedback based on actual testing and experience which makes it much less compelling. As a comparison, here as an example of much more compelling feedback since it is based on actual gameplay results.

This is a good point and when changes are made everyone should remember that it wasn’t because TFP succumbed to a group of whiners but because they felt it important to fix unintentional behavior. When @faatal ended the steep slope exploit, he didn’t do it to stop players from enjoying their play style nor due to the excessive complaints that were posted about the exploit. He did it because it was a pathing bug and a collision issue that needed fixing— pure and simple. When plates were reduced to 25% hp the floating base people were pretty unhappy and many of them even said the change would be the end of that type of base. If TFP decides to go forward with that plan it will be because it is how they intend the blocks in the game to function and not because they are at war with players and their strategies.

It was for the better. I just built an underground base in my current game and have had zero problems. The people complaining right now seem to be basing their anger on hypotheticals instead of actual testing. You’re whining about something that you have no actual experience with— just like babies! And you’re mad and having a hard time coping with the change you didn’t want—just like someone used to always getting their own way and then being denied. Try it. Nothing is ruined. In fact you should try it soon because I’m tempted to let faatal know that the zombies seem to be ignoring players underground to such a degree that it might be a bug… 😜

Known issue. Should be fixed for 20.1 as it is on their todo list with high priority.

With no perk points spent on farming you can still plant and grow food and have some ingredients for cooking randomly as you find seeds and get some back after harvesting. In order to have a sustainable farm you need to spend at least one skill point on Living off the Land. If farming is an important part of your game then you should spend that single point.