meganoth

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.

@Adam the Waster dang, your cover was blown

I don't need to, but I can. Would be nice to also have rationalizations for the strange fact that zombies are attacking me every 7 days, or why I can put 20 motorbikes into my backback. But in these and many other cases I have no rationalization. And as you can see I don't need one, as I am still playing the game.

I rationalized it differently: Books or schematics are complete works of knowledge about a topic, but magazines are periodicals where often information is spread over many issues in article series. So each magazine you find is an issue from a different month and year and only has part of the information you need to build an item or many items. It also is a good explanation for getting better quality levels of weapons. You might be able to make a crude version of a weapon without having seen all issues of an article series. But then you have to guess about some parts of the fabrication and that leads to subpar items with many faults. Only when you find further magazines you find out details that make that item more durable or more reliable. As an example you might find out from some magazines how all parts of a specific weapon look like and can build it. But it often jams and is inaccurate. Only in a different part of the magazine series you can read that some part of the weapon should be built with a different alloy. With that knowledge you suddenly can built it with a large boost in reliability and accuracy

I must confess I always forget to turn down loot abundance in SP (something I really should do). Because I use melee and bows a lot I usually have a lot of ammo left for my main gun and in horde night I usually don't spray and pray. In other words, I have plenty of everything and have not much reason to economize.

Idea to limit inventory space use: You have a general repair kit that is relatively expensive to craft and can repair X amount of damage on any item. And there are special repair kits which need specific parts but can repair exactly that weapon or thing the part belongs to cheaper and for say X*3 amount of damage per kit. The general repair kit could either be the current recipe with an increase in materials, or it would also need a number of general "parts" you get by scraping the specific parts. This way the player can directly choose how much inventory space he wants to invest to save resources. Most players would probably use one inventory slot for a special repair kit for their weapon and another slot for the general repair kit to repair anything else.

Think one minute about how illocial that sounds: The devs have invested 4 years of work into changing the game from something more like your vision to what it is now, becaus they are lazy? Wouldn't a lazy dev simply have released A16 after some polishing? This look like the devs were intentionally doing this because they WANT the game to be this way. And while you feel this is just a looter/shooter, I see all elements or genres in the game that the devs promised. I still feel it has survival and sandbox in it. I personally don't like the massive perk-bonuses of the magazine system which is the reason for the miner playstyle to be more difficult, but apart from that the magazine system is fine. If you want to play A21 as a miner I would suggest to make yourself independent from crafting progression as much as possible and concentrate on the few magazine types you really need. For example by using the trader to get vehicles and also buy traps instead of crafting them. And having your looter put 2 points into lockpicking (which is still affordable even if he doesn't need anything else from INT), which ironically will make him find lots of engineering magazines to bring back to you AND help him opening safes. You can get better armor, weapons and tools either from loot or the trader as well, no need to craft them. He also should find enough farming and cooking magazines even if not specced into them so you can be farmer/cook. If necessary, he could leave magazine boxes in cities for you and you could, from time to time, make a short trip to town to loot them. Well, we can cut that short. Your suggestion is good and could be probably developed into a good game. Your draft naturally left out all the details, and only the details will determine if it eventually is a good or bad game for a specific group of players. It won't be implemented in vanilla, because the developers think they have a good game that appeals to many players as well and they have already tried out elements of your suggestions and did not like them.

Ah right, forgot that detail

Explain. I don't get it: Schematic - You find a schematic, you can suddenly craft something new Magazine - You find a number of magazines, you can suddenly craft something new

You mean RNG like schematics you find in loot? Which has been in almost all alphas of 7D2D until now. With my bad memory I can't name examples, except Arcanum, Wasteland 2/3 and Fallout 3, but schematics in loot have been in lots of games.

What is certainly correct is that the "stay home" playstyle is almost dead if you also want to craft some stuff. But if you stay home the rest of your party could still just loot whatever they want, you wouldn't be there to loot yourself and wont get your magazines anyway, right? So I'll assume you still accompany them and then YOU get your share of loot boxes and again, there is no need for an elaborate loot scheme. What you seem to forget is that crafting progression is just a part of progression and I would consider it an almost optional part. For almost everything you can craft there are the traders, trader rewards and looting as viable alternatives. Invest in better barter and daring adventurer and get whatever you want that way. Cooking and seed magazines on the other hand have a lot of special containers standing around so your friends can't avoid getting them. If your friends don't want to loot those containers anymore because they don't want the recipes then you can simply ask them if they want to continue eating charred meat for eternity, otherwise they need to loot those containers. Or if you are with the group, well then loot the containers yourself when they don't want to. Another possible low-maintenance solution, if you want to stay home and still want to craft, would be that each of your friends needs to put one point into a perk of your choice and another one at say lvl 20. So they would automatically loot recipes for you. Sure, they might not like that as well, but they sure don't need to think about it every few seconds while looting somewhere

In normal circumstances (i.e. server and network connections up to the task) lost bikes are very seldom, while logging out of the game happens a lot. You should ask yourself if replacing that bike through creative mode (if available) isn't much less fuss than doing that routine every single game day?

The devs (at TFP) are not writing the engine, they are using Unity (did you mean interface code to Unity instead ?) But even updating to newer versions of Unity (which they do regularily) does only get them bugfixes, not any advanced features because they use a legacy engine inside Unity from which there is no upgrade path to the modern engine. Official word from Faatal a few months ago was that they would have to rewrite their interface code so much that it would delay release too much. So they have no intention to do that for this game.

Either thrown away or simply kept for the next water one finds. Containers are simply not shown in the game, except to show the items themselves. A stew without a container would look like some brown mass, could as well be a wet turd. So it is shown on a plate or in a bowl. Doesn't mean you really transport it in an open bowl or on a plate, right? How could you immediately see that gas is not something to drink if it wasn't shown as an iconic red container you can identify with a single glance as a gas can? If it wasn't for that reason you would not see containers at all.

It is also scarce for groups. And at least in A21.1 it still was scarce for me in SP. So I must be a noob because I did not self-challenge myself. It is quite possible that the balance of water changed from when I started my SP game and the current minor version. Either by accident or on purpose. It is no secret that TFP balances the vanilla game to be playable by new players. It may only be one group but accept that for TFP it is a very important groups. If you now have no problem with water I am sure TFP is shedding crocodile tears but probably considers the change a success because Exactly. Most problems in 7D2D are either reaction based or can be made rather trivial by playing or looking at youtube videos. Isn't different to other games (best example: almost all Bethesda games). To say it clearly: TFP surely isn't seeing it as their task to make the game endlessly playable for experienced players. They mentioned before that mods will have to do that, not vanilla. Water and food scarcity (both are non-existent for experienced players) are clear indications for this. Our only "vanilla" hope is that TFP adds a config option for trader like they did for loot and that experienced players are intelligent enough to use those, if they don't want to mod the game.

The desert may still have actual use as a source for oil shale.

And I said before that there usually is more than just one reason for a change. Have you really missed all the talk about reasons number 2: making water scarce (... for some people. I'll add this so we don't get into an argument loop) Also you should ask yourself, how much this change is jarring for you because of its realism nerf and how much is it because you are used to the game doing it differently before and it is therefore very conspicuous to you?

Nothing to do with creative mode. Most likely explanation is that your savegame is broken. First try to delete your player data (in the directory Players in the savegame) and if that doesn't help search your logfile for errors (except shader errors)

So, would you agree that it is a balancing problem? I.e. too much water to find in loot, price of water in vending machines too low, money too easy to get?

One easy thing to change if immersion is important without much change to balance would be to remove the ability to drink from water directly. Lake water is simply toxic. Because if I understand many of you correctly the discrepancy that stands out among all the other discrepancies that were always and will always be there is that you can drink lake water but not store it and drink it later for the same effect. Balance would be affected by having no emergency source of drinking. But you could simply incorporate the damage done by drinking lake water into the debuff of being thirsty. I.e. when you are under 10% water you simply get the damage as if you drank one water from a lake. And this would be repeated in about the same time that one lake water drink would last you.