meganoth

One easy way would be to make a second account on your PC and use it exclusively to play A16. I did not test it myself, but this should keep your settings separate. I don't know if the 7d2d mod launcher also switches settings around when it switches between different alphas, but it promises to handle older versions of 7D2D, so it might.

1) Money is very easy to get in early game, just do a few quests for the trader. 2) You can find water bottles in every kitchen, not only in toilets. There are endless discussions here in the forum about how many, some veterans say they find so much water that they don't even need dew collectors at all 3) The trader sells water as well if you get low on it 4) As a last resort you can eat a vitamin and actually drink directly from a lake but you will get damage. If you need an ingame explanation for all of this just imagine all open water is somewhat toxic (which doesn't explain why you can drink it directly but not collect it, but well, game balance is more important)

This was an example calculation with wrong number of quests to advance. Don't get too hung up on the actual numbers, they should only show the relationship between slow and fast players. TFP could always decrease or increase the number of quests per day needed for a level to adjust so that everything stays the same for a normal player. But the advantage of the diminishing returns would always be that the difference between slowest and fastest player would be much less than it is now.

Thanks. It doesn't matter too much because this affects all my calculations the same, the relations would be still intact. One would just needs to multiply every number I mentioned with 0.7 and would get the correct value. Okay, I have edited it now to use the correct number of 7.

Currently you need 7 quests to reach the next level, as RipClaw corrected me. In that case you would reach lvl5 quests after doing 28 quests. Lets see how this works out now, with more quests and with diminishing returns. I will look at John Turtle, who actually does just 1 quest per day, Ken Normalo, who does 2 and Ren Speedrunner, who does 5 per day. Now: John Turtle needs about 28 days, Ken Normalo 14 days and Ren Speedrunner a whooping 5.6 days for this. The fastest player needed only a fifth of the time that the slowest player needed. So TFP changes this and simply adds more quests to level up. You now need 10 quests to the next level (a bit less than 50% more). Result: John Turtle needs about 40 days, obviously too much. Ken Normalo looks better with 20 days, but Ren Speedrunner is hardly slowed with 8 days. The difference between John and Ren is still a factor of 5 in playtime! So TFP uses diminishing returns with the original 7 quests per level instead: John Turtle needs 28 days again, Ken Normalo needs 18.6 and Ren 14.45 days. Notice that the speedrunner is still faster, but the factor is just 2 compared to John Turtle and as much as Ren speedruns through his quests, he is just 4 days ahead of Ken Normalo. (I ignored here that players do not do quests in such a regular way, sometimes they do 3 on a day and sometimes none. But since one still gets some reputation even for the second or third quest on a day, the effect of this is not dramatical and can be ignored for this demonstration)

Undoubtedly changes will always produce complaints. Those would too. Even just reducing current rewards by any amount will produce complaints by people who like an OP trader. Remember that the introduction of magazines and the water changes also didn't end debates, those are continuing to this day. Even LBD still rears its head. So the goal can't be to end debates 😉 You are correct that some of the proposed changes are rather heavy-handed. Especially limiting the player to x quests a day would probably be very artificial and hard to explain. I would surely try out all other options before taking a look at this. And there are probably better, less artificial options. For example if rewards do not use reputation to roll for the quality of items, but use reputation to roll for quantity of the reward. So if someone gets to tier5 quests rather early in the game the difference between a tier1 and a tier5 reward would not be between double-barrel and auto-shotty. Both would give a double-barrel, but the tier5 would also give say 4 times as much money, ammo, magazines and materials. Yes, some players will complain and say they don't care about money, ammo, magazines, materials . But that is a different topic, the game has to provide expensive money-sinks for example so that players care about money and material. Or here is another idea: Diminishing returns on quest reputation: Only the first quest of a day gets you full reputation, the next half, the next half again and so on. You still get the rewards, increase your reputation, but the difference between a slow quester and a fast quester is never too big to balance. Basically this doesn't change anything for normal questers (no, you don't need to do one quest every day unless you actually want some high-rep stuff from the trader, and there are always alternatives to the trader). But it practically limits fast questers reputation gain to less than 2 per day.

I see self-imposed rules and options as a great way to tailor a game to ones tastes after you know the game. But new players first have to find out what they don't like or they have to reach a point where they want a more difficult experience. Rules and options can also be used to fix imbalances of a game, sure, but only an experienced user can adopt the correct self-imposed rules or turn on the right options to reach a balanced game again. How should a new user know that he has to add option X or use some self-imposed rule to get a balanced game? Vanilla should be as balanced as possible. Permadeath is a self-imposed rules that is used to make the game more difficult and is used by players after finding out that vanilla is too easy for them. Imagine that TFP had to advice players that they need to start with a self-imposed permadeath rule if they want a balanced experience. Wouldn't that be rather strange? I am all for those self-imposed rules where the alternative is severly limiting the game, for example the self-imposed rule to not use creative menu unless the player decides he now wants to play a more "creative" game. It is also perfectly clear to the player what he is doing and he can do an informed choice. It is not a surprise that creative mode is the option you need to turn on, not the vanilla default. But telling the player he is responsible for **finding** a mix of rules and options that actually balance the game would be moving one of the central tasks of a game developer over to the player.

It is as feasable as walking 1k to the next quest

So far you are just describing the state probably half of all commercial software is in. Where programmers have to waste 80% of their time for getting around old code. It still gets released and then sold for years. And the thing is, 7D2D is nearly finished and apart from a few armor sets and bandits whose feature set is already in the code due to the zombie cop there is nothing more to come. Even if they would need 3 times as much time to add these features it probably is less at this point in time than to refactor the code because someone on the internet told them to. I don't see anything here that would prevent 7D2D from releasing. You as software engineer might get nausea looking at the code but the customers, the players don't look at the code. They see the result and while it surely isn't bug-free it already has been a game many people would buy as a finished game outside of EA. That may be the case, but as of now those features are just optional stuff on a drawing board. It may be that you think one or more of those features are needed for 7D2D to shine, but TFP seems to have a different opinion there. The only sure thing we will see in 7D2D at release will be bandits and the new armor, AFAIK. Yeah, I read about Uncle Bob. He essentially promotes refactoring to death to produce easily readable code snippets. I am not aware that he promotes just one design pattern, but more like using them at all instead of none. So I don't really understand why he would be the cause of indie devs being stuck into only one design pattern or not using them. I also could not find any reference to a CS pattern. Now one thing I am sure of: if TFPs developers are fans of Uncle bobs design philosophy, it surely won't suffice if a random guy from the internet tells them in a phone call or a forum that that philosophy is borked and they should use option B. And certainly they won't do it when they think (rightly or wrongly) that release of the software is say less than a year away. And even if they know that some part is unmaintainable they won't change it now as long as it works as intended, warts and all. So, I don't want to stop you, please continue as long as you like, but I think you are too late and too noname, even if you were right. Write a book, get a movement going, maybe that's the way to make yourself heard This sounds to me as if it could have been the "clean code" manifesto. No really, clean code promotes refactoring and using patterns. So what is the difference here? Possibly. Though are you sure the software community at large is already past Clean Code? I mean, you might know for yourself that it is wrong, but thousands of developers probably think as fervently that it is right. Hanging around software communities who usually happily argue about which agile method is the best one would not fix that.

You would have to explain that. There have been games released in all kinds of states. As there is no legally enforcable right for correctness of a software a company only has to provide all the features it advertises. So how is it **literally impossible** ?

Well I do the same, and in my MP group we also loot the whole POI. And I would say SP I can do nearly 2 quests a day on average. And you can multiply that by 2 with a group. It also depends on the difficulty level you set and other factors (like how much time you use for base building, how much of that time is done in the night, and how completely you wrench down a poi or whether you delegate some of that to the night) Yeah well, I said you are different type of player. I don't think many players use dedicated weeks for building a horde base. No surprise, the rewards for T1-3 are already too much, so to motivate players to do T4-T5 those need OP rewards as well. The rewards have a reason, to get players to quest together there is this additional reward for each player besides the loot. I still would assume that for example with half that bonus on top players would do quests together, since there is also the increased speed and safety. A balance thing. And if they can't get low enough with the rewards then the second option is always to slow down the tier advancement or actually make quests per day limited. Or make reward quality dependant on your level so you can't outrace your main progression.

What else should a guy do in the first days? Even if you look at it in-character: He could just scrounge some random POIs he walks by. But there is a guy (the trader) that gives 100% of the stuff you find in a POI on top if you loot not the next one but a different one he tells you. You would be mad to not take him up on that offer. All arguments about doing many quests per day seem to boil down to "don't min/max, stay in character". But here is the problem, someone doing lots of quests is staying perfectly in character for a **scavenger** type guy. He loots many POIs per day anyway, so why not add what the trader gives practically for free on top? The only reasons I see to not do it are either because he doesn't play a scavenger (in other words why RipClaw does it) or because someone knows that the trader is OP. And this again means: The trader has to be nerfed. Limiting the number of quests you can do per day is one possibility, even in MP with shared quests: Just make it so that a player can only **return** a specific number of quests per day.

It doesn't matter for data-collection whether your game is a server or a client. All it needs is a network connection initiated from your game to a data collecting service. 7D2D used gamesparks, but it seems that got turned off in November 2022. I think I remember there was an option in the launcher to turn gamesparks on or off and that vanished. The Eula still gives TFP the rights to collect data, but if they still do they would have had to programm their own thing which I doubt. Or use a different service but then they surely would have to mention that service unless it allows them to host the collection servers themselves (which is unlikely for a commerical service as they want to keep their customers on a rope). In other words I think it is likely that they don't have any telemetry data (except what steam can tell them) since Nov 2022.

You can only double-dip once, after that the building has only loot after you started a quest. On public servers all seldom to find tier buildings would have been already looted a short time after server start or a region reset. So most likely the player preventing you starting the quest was on a quest himself. Prevention of double dipping would most likely not solve the actual problem that there are too few T4 buildings on that map for the number of players on that server. And the best solution would be for the server operator to provide a map with more T4 buildings if those are the most popular buildings. Or allow less players concurrently so they don't step on each others toes too much

Ironically double-dipping is probably not the best strategy for fast advancement anyway. Because trader rewards are on par or even better than whatever you can scrounge out of the POI and you want the higher tier-completion rewards as fast as possible, it is much better to fetch another quest in the time you would be double-dipping.

I sooo much want to have this in the game. Sadly the red dots or the fetch quest marker will give it away too early. Practically any meaningful suggestion is forcing a concequence on others. And it isn't the first time this suggestion was made without being considered rude.

Vanilla is one of the topics. As I was initially replying to Khyron's idea his idea should be an approved topic as well, don't you think? 😉 "Best for the game" depends very much on the specific player, or for TFP the group of players TFP is targetting with the game. I for example have no problem with elixier and min/maxers and have no problem with other players using it, mostly because I don't play competitively with anyone. Basic vanilla will never be heaven for PvP players on open servers, they probably need a special mode, or EAC-friendly workshop mods. I don't know what TFP wants to do for them exactly after release, but they show no sign of wanting to nail down the release version itself for PvP and restrict the possibilities for SP, co-op MP and new players. Especially level-gates were already tried out by TFP and they seem to have decided to not want level-gates (and lots of players as well). Now the current perk system would be relatively free of min/max if it weren't for two things: Traders are too powerful which makes higher levels of the daringadventurer and BB perks too valuable. And the (non-perky) magazine system got changed in the last minor alphas to be exploitable. The trader fault TFP seems very reluctant to change, the OP perk-boost we know TFP will not change (at least for now), I got the confirmation through my bug report. But both are fixable in theory. The same goes for any other scheme TFP might implement, perk-based or LBD-based. In theory it could be free of min/max exploits, but it probably won't be if TFP doesn't consider it as one of the most important design principles for their game. If you are proposing to just copy DF into vanilla just because it is not min/maxable (if it is(?), I don't really know), that would be an idiotic idea for many reasons.

If they don't have some special feature for twitchcon, my guess would be that they are simply collecting as many bug fixes as they can. It could mean that 21.2 would be the final release before A22.

I am not arguing about vanilla being min/maxable, I am contesting that "min/maxing" is an intrinsic quality of a perk system. And it isn't, but it has always been a part of vanilla as long as I have been playing it, no matter whether LBD or perk based. A15/A16 could be minmaxed as well, and if they had stayed with LBD, surely their version still would have mechanics that could be min/maxed. It just doesn't seem to be their priority for vanilla. Now if you are not talking about the perk system in principle but just what vanilla looks like then we are in agreement.

It was simply an example of something for which LBD can't be blamed in principle just like a cheap forgettin elixier can't be blamed on perks. Perks in principle are not just for min/maxers. And since I never used the elixier just like I never use cm for anything except bug fixing. I play MP all the time and we have no problems except with the trader and none of my co-players have ever used fergettin to min-max, so no problem on that part. But all XP-getting activities are generally a source of imbalance (not exactly min/max), that was the case in A15/A16 as it is now in A21.

Go on, start a new game and klick on the pistol perk 5 times. See what it gets you I am not here to tell you that the LBD system is bad. I am just telling you that I don't like it. And granted, there is an elixier in vanilla that is, especially at its new price, as OP as the trader and nearly as OP as creative menue. So what? The elixier is not an integral feature of the perk system. Just like getting more resistant by hopping on cacti is not an integral feature of LBD.

I don't care about realism. Simple as that. I like that I have control over my character development. And clicking a few times on a perk first needs the perk points, so it isn't really different than an LBD system. This isn't about min/max, this is about providing the right incentives. If you want to specialize then the incentives in an LBD system are right on target, if not then not. Exactly, no need to merge both systems.

My reason for not wanting LBD is purely personal. I am not talking about "a lot of people". I play vanilla and the usual conversion mods usually once every alpha with my friends (though we haven't played DF in A21 yet, did not see what he did with the magazine system). And DF especially is well balanced, no question about it. But it has the same problem I have with all LBD variants. If I don't use a weapon extensively I do not get good at it. If I use bow and melee most of the time my pistol skill will be lacking. Since DF is well balanced this also means really lacking. I don't have a direct problem with that, I can play DF and have fun. Still, without LBD, I have full control, I can build my character how I want. So, everyone who wants LBD has DF. Everyone else has vanilla. I don't think they can be merged to be both because they are at cross-purposes.

This seems to me to be A16 again, with a few small changes. No thank you. I like me my perks.

A very valid point. The devs can't give everyone the game they want. They only have one vanilla to get them the game they want and some options to give a larger group what those players want. Everyone else has to find some older alpha or a mod if he wants something else. The game was created with a lot of experimentation which is usually hidden from players in closed development games. It is inevitable that some players will find specific designs in older experiments to be better suited for them. As long as this sentiment isn't shared by almost all players the developers didn't anything wrong, they can't make everyone happy. Though concerning your aside it is worth mentioning that he has as much right tossing his hot take onto the pile as you have praising them, even if it were certain that it won't result in any changes. This is a discussion forum. If he ever steps over the line you always have that button above to report the post to the moderators.