meganoth

My answer to bachgamans question has nothing to do with modding. Honestly - you are using the word "honestly" too often 😉

No. You say I made contradictory claim, one of them being it is not a sandbox. So again, where did I say "It is not a sandbox". No. You made a claim that the game isn't a sandbox. But you never explained it fully, you never made a logical chain between "Trader is unbalanced aka an option is missing" to "This is not a sandbox". So I have to fill in the blanks and guess what you might be driving at. So now you can either provide a concise logical argument why 7D2D is not a sandbox without such an option or explain what you really meant or say "nevermind, that wasn't thought through, forget it". A logical argument would show what a sandbox needs to be a sandbox, and would show how 7D2D does not provide that. Off the top of my head 1) The trader is endpoint not only for quests he gives out but quests that can be found in the wasteland. All of those have to be deactived **depending** on this option. According to an experienced modder this might not be possible yet in XML so further changes in c++ code would be necessary. 2) The trader in A20 is a neccessary ingredient of any town as it is the endpoint of the highway to it. No trader, no highway that ends in that town. It probably would need some changes in random world generation to use an alternative newly-created POI for this as well (which I think would be the easiest fix) 3) Whether you believe it or not, bandits and story and possibly a faction system will be in 7D2D in the future, with the traders assumed to be in the middle of some of the mechanisms of this. Only TFP knows the detials, but such an interconnectedness would probably need additional code to make the game work without trader. Blood Moon is not part of anything else, it just makes lots of zombies spawn at a specific time. I don't see any other feature of the game touched by BM. Understood. We are talking about many things, too many at the moment.

All the perks seem to refer to a parent, even book perks, and every line of parent-relationships seem to end with an attribute on top of the tree.

TFP does not care if the streamers are really using it. It is a beneficial deal to both sides that has nothing to do with what the streamers do outside of that weekend. Internal testers could play A20 months before you. Another beneficial deal, in this case one side gets money and the other side bugs reported. Is that unfair as well? Thousands of gamers will probably still play the game in a year. That they still have fun (without a single dime to pay) is their reward, why do they need to be pampered now? I mean, sure, the gamers deserve recognition for promoting the game to their friends and all, but TFP for example developed a much much bigger game than what was iinitially promised in the kickstarter (without you paying for that as DLCs) and the developers are present on the forum to answer questions. Is that not recognition and reward as well? In other words, you get a present but you can't pick which one.

Maybe the game expects you to add all perks to abilities!? Make the condition to perk into it with points impossible and it doesn't matter that it is listed

I'm talking about people wanting that feature. If TFP looks for interesting options for people they don't count people largely indifferent to that feature, they look for a mass of people who would need it. You claim to speak for "new players who play the game a lot", I just don't see any trace of them here in the forum at least to call that a **basic** neccessity "Now you literally tell me "no, man, this game is not a sandbox, well, more precisely, a sandbox, well, not quite, well, you know, I just don't want to agree with you on anything."" And there is the freedom to set your own goals and objectives. There is the creativity available. But no game is a perfect simulation and allows EVERYTHING you just invented as a goal, there are always limitations. In a space sim sandbox you often can play as trader, pirat and headhunter, but you usually can't play as a cashier in a bank, it is still called a sandbox. Furthermore the only wall between you and your ability to play without traders is not even installing of any mods, it is just to not use traders. But tell me what profession is that you are playing here, a non-trader? What role are you missing in this sandbox? Thanks for searching. These seem to be the only posts where I mention sandbox to you. In both those posts there wasn't a single mention of modding and one was a speculative piece about treasure hunter, the other I mentioned sandbox to say that there a a few goals in the game you can choose. And we argued a lot already so I have a bit of a difficulty to match those two posts with your assertion that I made a link between modding/limiting yourself and this being a sandbox game. Please refrain from adding insults. A child grows up to be an adult, but when someone says "child" he doesn't refer to adults. Same goes for "new users" and "veterans" I just said it would be a somewhat bad example for your case because it didn't start as something planned and developed by TFP, it was never an item on any priority list inside TFP. And the drone is a much clearer case to argue about because it was clearly high on the priority list of TFP. "but the game also needs content" So the drone is not content? How about we wait first whether it proves to be a popular item or not. The drone isn't much farther ahead to current tech than the robotic turrets and traps that all have a friend-foe detection, some even a detection between living and dead person. Questioning realism in this game is rather useless, there is a heap of unrealistic stuff in it. Accept it or play a more realistic game. The developers won't change the overall direction of the game because you don't like it. So what? If you look around, you can find stupid people anywhere. Why should people who don't play the game enter into a discussion about features of the game? And no, max perk level does not give you the schematic of a tier3 item. True, but the drone was your example. Obviously cost of development alone is not the only metric to decide which feature gets implemented and which isn't. What others have tried to say that removing the trader is not a thing TFP can implement in 2 days and forget about it the rest of development, it is NOT an insignificant effort. Good, you found a mod to your liking. Vanilla is supposed to be "outplayed" by veteran players, everyone eventually gets fed up with the same stuff. This is why games-as-a-service exist (7D2D isn't one but sometimes feels like one when a new alpha gets released) and this is why players get mad with anticipation when a new alpha in EA comes about.

Yes, sloppy reading on my part, you did mention to add a second option No, the word toilet is YOUR analogy of a basic need. And I used your word to describe the same thing. Instead of searching everywhere for an insult maybe look for the message. For you and (judging by the support you are getting from other forum posters) only you at the moment this option is a basic need. Everyone else seems to cope quite well without that option Where did I say this is not a sandbox game in that paragraph? I would say this is "inattentive reading" from you now. I said that this is partly a sandbox but to be called a sandbox in a genre mix a game just needs very few of those features. I made this point because you were arguing that this game having "unnormal" xml modding meant it isn't a sandbox. Or maybe you just meant the missing option preventing the game being a sandbox? I didn't really want to ask, I#m sure you have a definition of what a sandbox is supposed to be and so 7D2D is not a sandbox to you. Fine by me. For me 7D2D is still a sandbox although other genres are more dominant in 7D2D. My memory is very bad, so please show me a few of those posts where I supplemented anything by the words that this is a "sandbox" game. This sounds very unlike me, so maybe you are confusing me with Roland Wait, you are "redefining" new players now as people who stay with it for a long time? 😄 I would call them long-term orr even veteran players. And yes, they need replayability. Now seriously, you are talking to a guy with >2000 hours in the game and complain to him about missing replayability! Twitch integration was a private project by a 7D2D team member, care to tell him he can't do that in his free time? Sure, further development is likely on company time but I still would say this is a bad example. Drones are a legitimite feature TFP planned though, lets look at it. Intelligence was missing a tier 3 "weapon" and fitting with the theme they created the drone. It was necessary to complete INT and it was an excellent idea in my view. Your twitch player who plays for 2 days will probably never see that drone (if it really will be classified as tier3). And yes, even though I have said repeatedly that the trader is OP I would prefer the drone to any trader config option. By the way, an important information you might not know: TFP will add steam workshop support when the game goes gold. If you don't know, steam workshop is a simple way for "noobs" to install mods into games. Yes, there is a reason this will be a late addition and yes, again, EA is not for everyone. If you need to install mods and can't, wait for the game going gold.

I mostly agree, it is rather unusual and I prefer services to be off by default too. Still, this default is "reasonably" secure and once you want to use telnet for more you are bound to read the comment and act on that information. I only use telnet to shutdown the game on the server per script. I assume server management programs for public servers (like botman) use it to control the game.

Balancing the amount the trader gives away is one part of a fix, if a quest gives too much at 100% it would give too much at a 25% setting as well. The other part is simply not in the game (yet), at least not as an option. EA, remember? The loot setting by the way is called **loot** setting because it is about changing the loot, not the trader rewards. It also doesn't change mining results nor scrapping results, which would be necessary for a complete solution to all resource aquiring. What constitutes the toilet in this game depends largely on personal views, I can easily ignore traders or quests or make limits what I buy from the trader if I want to, but throwing away 3/4 of any loot I get is hardly practical. As a mix of lots of genres they can pick whatever they want from each genre and call it that. And there is no clearcut definition of sandbox. The obvious element of 7D2D that gets them the label sandbox is clearly the building part which many other sandbox games lack in this detail. Another sandbox element is that you can largely play as a miner or tradesman, though in earlier alphas the "sandbox" part was much bigger. Care about new players? You are pushing for a setting that has nothing to do with new players. New players don't need options. They can't estimate if this or that option should be set or not. And turning off traders would definitely be the wrong move for a novice player. Options are for experienced players who know the game and want something different.

I assume you know what "loopback device" means? As long as you don't expect intruders getting acces to an account on your server it isn't that critical that telnet has no password. Though I always set one nonetheless

Telnet is activated by default without a password but listening only on the loopback device. See this comment in the serverconfig.xml: Password to gain entry to telnet interface. If no password is set the server will only listen on the local loopback interface

I used the word "broken" tongue-in-cheek as the poster I replied to used "broken" and I wanted to mimic his language. Seriously I would say the barter perk is merely OP, simply as a consequence that the trader himself is OP and the perk allows you to utilize the trader fully to circumvent many of the limits the game puts before you. 5 perk points is nothing. If you want you can have barter 3 (like any other perk) on day 1 by reaching lvl 3 and üutting all points there. Then make a few quests and sell stuff. Since you also get XP for selling and buying you accelerate your lvl advancement as well. A player well versed into trading (which I'm not, I never tried to optimize the trader game, but I know at least one person who is skilled in it) can accumulate absurd amounts of money in a relatively short time and buy the best stuff the trader has to offer, **In A19**. The trader has many problems, including offering too good stuff too early and if you have the money you can simply buy yourself almost everything you need. I don't mind INT to be specialized in trading and having perks for it, there must be something INT is really good at to offset its disadvantages in fighting capabilities. Once the trader is better balanced and maybe, just maybe this includes toning down the barter perk as well, then bartering could still be a way to win the game, but not as easy as now. That's you. Maybe not that good with min max bartering if you need until the endgame. I profoundly disagree. The on average less than 10% better quality 6 weapon (compared to 5) does not win the game, you can easily afford to use 10% more ammo to be as good as with the top weapon. Meanwhile the INT player already won the game when he bought the tier 3 weapon at the start of mid game when you are still searching for tier 2 armor and weapons. He also is able to buy himself a lot of ammo from multiple traders while you might have to conserve most of it for horde night and have a much slower way through POIs. Irrelevant. Do a few quests and just have a high enough level and you'll automatically find your quality 6 trophies. Your progress in early and mid game decides whether you have it easy or not ot reach endgame

I don't get the impressions you are making any concessions for the game still being in development. The 200 bullets quest reward was acknowledged to be a bug months ago and is supposedly fixed in A20. I agree that the difficulty setting should include some further changes, but adding to it and balancing it when the game isn't feature-complete is possibly premature. While we players can give suggestions it is the advantage of being a developer to be able to decide on what work needs to be done now. In the meantime the game is working well enough. You were warned that EA is not without downsides, weren't you? Play something else and wait for this game to be released if you want to play a finished game

Please use "Mods/Discussion and Requests" for questions, Mods is for announcing mods And you are missing that we are not mind readers. Please post the code you changed and give a clear example of what went wrong

He is probably refering to your icon. In other news: your post is back again.

Oh, you ARE supposed to play liike this. And then TFP is supposed to notice this and ... ... rebalance so it doesn't break anymore. We are the crash test dummies.

??? Banned in this forum or some other forum like steam? If here, what was your username then? And yes, this should preferably be handled through a private message to any of the moderators.

The first boss zombie was the demolisher. Not sure there will be more though, time is running out if TFP wants to release the game in the next 2 years

Just edit the first line in traders.xml on the server and change markup from "2" to "5" or "10". Optionally decrese markdown as well. You will see enthusiasm for trader visits vanish but he would still be there for quests and very very limited trading.

In the games industry this is called crunch and it slowly is acknowledged to be a way of exploiting the workers and burning them out. If you have no problems doing that, wait until you are older and not as resilient as you were in your youth. Now one single week in a year surely is not really crunch but there is no reason for TFP to demand this from their employees simply to be able to release an experimental 3 days earlier. First of all that weekend has to be payed in free days later so ultimately they don't win time to complete the game. They also don't have a contract to release the game at any specific date (unlike your company I assume), And the impatience of gamers is there whether they have to wait 5 or 8 days. The impatience existed already weeks and months before. Worker satisfaction is worth much more.

There is no reason this couldn't be implemented, I'm sure. But 7D2D is no Borderlands. It hasn't the variety of Borderlands weapons. Does Borderlands allow you to sell weapons and get useful stuff for it? If I remember correctly it doesn't and that makes it much less unbalancing to give out 8 weapons to 8 people as that translates only to potentially small improvement of their weapons. Does Borderland increase enemy count or difficulty if more than one player enters? This could be another difference, 7D2D does scale zombies in POIs only slightly in relation to players so that a group of people can clear a poi in a fraction of the time a single player needs.

There is cntLootChestHero and cntLootCrateHero, do you mean one of those? Alpha19 was critizised by some players that it didn't allow any exceptional find like a steel spear in the first days. So I have no explanation for this. If you are playing A18 or A17 instead, then yes, quite possible.

The result you got is impossible in vanilla A19. Also I never heard of a herobox. Have you already installed a mod that changes loot probabilities?

Moin, moin. I assume they have simply adjusted prices (which are selling prices) and the trader usually buys everything with a specific markdown. In A19 the markdown might have been somewhere around 1/10th of the selling price if you don't have bonusses from perks or books or candy. Correction: Checked XML and selling prices have a markup of 2, buying prices a markdown of .2. So the ratio is still 10. But buying at the trader is at double the price the item says.

Analogies often show only one thing, I think I made that first analogy to say that you don't have to do something yourself to enjoy watching it. My analogy with sports was to show that you even might like to watch stuff you CAN do yourself. Action movies, sports and comedies are all entertainment. And Streamers can deliver similar "products". Excitement similar to action movies or sports or information will come from watching expert players, but humor will come from watching comedic streamers and nobody expects information when watching a streamer for the humor