meganoth

Nobody wants to stop people teaming up, but there is enough incentive to team up, for example time savings (faster clear, less driving back to trader inbetween), shared xp, safety in numbers. I would distribute items and dukes from the quest reward into the poi loot chests. This would mean no change for single player (you would get out the same as now), but groups would get less for a single quest. Also quest rewards should not get better with tier but follow the same pattern as the loot, i.e. the normal loot stage should be used like when opening containers in the POI.

Crafting being on equal footing would not mean a guaranteed level of magazines read, it would just define the average case. It is still random whether any of the weapons you want is ahead or behind the average. I agree that crafting just like looting is a relatively cheap method of getting stuff. On the other hand, if you get mountains of dukes then buying is cheap as well (cheap in the sense of not being a difficult decision). And quest rewards are as cheap as looting but multiple times better as you can choose between a few rewards and one of those will almost always be useful. Day 15 is certainly a day when the player should have AK or double barrel shotgun and the occasional tier2 item like a pump shotgun, but I would guess you got all or nearly all of the good stuff from the trader and this "single source" of good stuff looks like a problem to me because it devalues crafting and looting. Many players especially in MP seem to have a lot of better stuff at that time though and the problem is all that advanced stuff comes from trader and rewards.

Realism ("other people selling to him") is a useless argument for this game if we talk about balancing. Secondly 2 to 3 weeks is less than 20 to 30 hours except with a longer day setting but he said he plays default. Now a magnum isn't endgame gun either, but steel melee weapons are and the pimps seem to target a longer playtime than say 4 weeks. My multiplayer group is at day 12 and already has an assortment of tier3 weapons and armor. Reaching quest tier3 with a group of players is a matter of a few days, giving out end-game equipment with such quests is a recipe for making the looting itself and crafting irrelevant. I agree that the trader should have stuff to buy, but that either has to be in the same random range like the stuff you find or craft. OR the amount of dukes (which you mainly get from quests) has to be reduced so you can't simply buy anything valuable that the trader shows. The quest reward of dukes needs to be one of the random choices, not on top of it, and needs to be reduced. Or maybe it could be removed completely and you only make money by selling the most expensive quest reward!

I looked for Madmoles comment on this: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28129-alpha-21-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=486407 If you allow me to interpret this then he seems to imply that the reasons for not wanting q6 to be craftable do not exist anymore. At the same time he doesn't sound like he would rush to his telephone immediately because he was just reminded of the most important balancing fix of A21. It sounds more like an issue he hasn't made up his mind about, and that isn't very important to him either way now that the reasons are gone. It definitely does not sound like it has a date attached and I would not be much surprised if it happened a week before gold or never. It might be eventually discussed in a team meeting, or it might never surface again unless players call for its change. And if they still plan to add legendary weapons into the game (and man, I really hope for that) I can understand that it isn't an important issue for them anyway because it would be temporary. @pApA^LeGBa In the course of looking for the comment above I also stumbled over this: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/32098-what-was-the-point-of-the-water-change/?do=findComment&comment=522917 Madmole listed 3 reasons for the water change. Interestingly uniformity is not mentioned as a reason (which supports my impression it was just Roland and me talking about gas and acid being similar). Neither is there a reason "because we want players to go out". Why wouldn't he mention it then? He hasn't been shy of saying it in other contexts. But lucky looter seems actually quite balanced, especially compared to DA and trader. LL seems almost negligible in early game and only slowly increases its effect. And its best feature is that looting is faster!

Sure they are not linked and progression is random. So a game designer would simple assume an average progression from time of play or level/gamestage and gives rewards accordingly. If you are lucky with magazines you would craft your guns and the rewards would be meh. If you are unlucky with magazines the rewards would save you from being underpowered. As Papa said they could also just check the magazine level but I would not like rewards be linked with magazine levels. Imagine you have really bad luck and just don't find any magazines for your main gun (and the gun also doesn't drop in loot). Also imagine for simplicity sakes the trader just gives you a gun one quality level above the gun you can craft. So instead of being a safety net the trader would now give you a gun nearly as bad as the one you have and you would still be outgunned by the zombies. On the other hand if you are lucky with finding magazines and already have an OP gun the trader would give you an even better gun. The trader would not be a corrective.

But he said it in different context and he didn't say whether that means they will force something or just give incentives or remove incentives to just stay home. I don't remember at all on which occassions or to what he replied this way, but what if he said it when they removed zombie loot bags after more and more players made zombie farms with dozens of forges to farm zombies for example? Or what if he said it after they increased quest loot? From our position we can not prove anything either way. If you feel 100% sure, good for you. but I hope you'll never get selected as juror 😉

Two days for just surviving a horde is overkill, yes. But if you want to make groundwork for a horde base that should last to endgame hordes you want to plan ahead and leave space for the future enhancements at the right places. Though we probably will drop that game long before because we all got endgame equipment. Practically it looks like they are just at the second round of balancing. I would call it a bit premature to make predictions from that where TFP wants the balance to ultimately be at. We had the situation where crafting was not doing anything 95% of the time (A20) and it seems to have been one of the reasons to redesign it.

Or they simply were assuming that players do quests and loot, and do other stuff. In that case the changes were not changing anything (for the use case they were looking at). For me it doesn't, for my co-players it doesn't, except that it improves some things. You simply can't know if your are a target or just accidentally happened to be in the line of fire. Maybe that there is no sensible reasons for base-moms being the target means that they were not a target. For me it makes a lot of sense that TFP just does not have them on the radar when thinking about ways to make water relevant and fix crafting. But I don't see it making sense to target them specifically, especially because the result would just be them leaving or using mods and continuing with their playstyle.

Well, all three sources give you the same stuff. If any one gives you everything the others become secondary, with the exception that with crafting the other sources could still function as material sources. In A20 and before crafting was very planable as you just needed to invest into the perks and could almost reliably plan when to build everything up to iron q5. Because it was planable it had to be inferior/slower than looting. As crafting is now a smooth progression but still somewhat random it could very well be on par with looting or only slightly behind. So for example you might find better melee weapons than you can craft but since you found more armor magazines you might be ahead with crafting your armor (all IMHO) And the trader could have better stuff if money is made scarce enough, otherwise he needs to be only a safety net and therefore worse than what can be found or crafted.

Building as alternative activities is fine IMHO. Looting and looting with quests have the same goals of basically getting stuff and money and are directly comparable. Building is about using whatever you got from those activities and mining. And the normal player will not start building a massive base at lvl 1. He usually builds a small base or bases to survive the first horde night and with better tools and better materials extend that into what may become a massive base eventually. And since you get XP for upgrading you also progress while building. Just now our group is two days before a horde night and we decided to use those two days to prepare a new horde base (and abandon our first). Now I think 2 days is not really enough for that and consequently our new base will suffer from some hasty design decisions. But I think it shows that at least with out group building is not replaced by quests. Though we did only the absolute minimum preparation with our 7day horde base.

As I said, just a conjecture of you. I disagree, I find removing the ubiquitous glass jars that nobody ever wanted to see in loot was in line with the removal of other almost useless or too frequent items, for example the turds or the zombie loot bags. I don't even know if TFP themselves had uniformity as a reason or ever mentioned why they exactly wanted glass jars removed. The gas cans and acid cans were usually brought as examples from Roland or myself in discussions among us forum users. And it was to argue that it isn't something exceptional and people will just get used to it, as they have been doing that with gas cans all the time without asking why their motorcycle swallows plastic cans. Crafting was broken in A20 and before (and many players were complaining by the way), and I was posting the reasons why they probably did it even before they mentioned them "officially". If even I can spot the reasons immediately then there really must be something wrong. Now if the reasons don't seem important to you and the new solution steps on your shoes that doesn't mean they aren't valid reasons, and the stepping on your shoes could be anything from hidden agenda, one of many reasons, or just a coincidence. What you as stay-at-home player never seem to take into consideration is that your use case might be ignored by TFP and any changes are not about you. They are about getting the balance right for the "normal" players (as defined by TFP) who build, but also loot and do everything the game offers. And while crafting is momentarily not "there" yet, anyone could experience that with the first experimental it was OP and with the second experimental too weak again. Which means somewhere inbetween could easily be a spot where it would be well balanced with looting. And even now you can see how the progression in crafting is finally smooth, something impossible with the old system. If you can't acknowledge that there is progress in that change then my only conclusion is that your feelings have taken over your reasoning.

Great men think alike 😁. The same test occured to me, though double dipping is not necessary as I am sure you find the same stuff in a POI whether it was created in RWG or after a quest reset. So I would just do a quest and compare loot with loot+reward Another test could do the same with infestations quests though, it might be different.

The reasons they told us are different and sound believable (to me). If you think they are lying or not telling us all reasons you should at least mention that this is your conjecture and not a fact. I think Madmole has said on occaison that they want people to go out and loot, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the skill and water changes were done for this reason.

My impression is: In single player clearing POIs with quest gives about 3 times as much value as clearing it without quest. When playing in a 4 player group that factor seems more like 5 times as much. My gut feeling is that most players would have enough incentive to do quests even with a factor as low as 1.3 or 1.5. But with such overwhelming odds the only reasons not to do quests are meta-reasons like "I don't like the quest loop" or "I want a slower progression and not questing is needed for this". In my group game we like to do quests, and some of us don't like the slow progression especially in the stone age, so neither meta-reason really applies to us. Preferably the game should be well enough balanced that the decision to loot a nearby house instead of treking back to the trader would be a rationally valid decision from time to time (i.e. "ok, I will not get as much value out of it, but I save some time, it gets near evening and I need stuff I can get from that house"). With a factor of 3 or 5 that is never ever possible.

Sure, but even if the quest rewards were fixed to not include OP weapons you would still get too much money out of them and could buy all the stuff the trader offers you with DA perked even minimally.

It is possible that much of that imbalance is because of DA. This is only my observation but in our group we have a player investing heavily in lucky looter, which resulted in no measurable difference at all. And two people with 1 and 3 points in DA and even with only 1 point there were (affordable) iron and steel level items available. Either they should not be easily affordable or they should not be offered at all at that quality, even with DA investment. Oh, and I agree with Saltychipmunk that trader rewards are just as problematic or more.

A partial fix for Daring Adventurer might be that instead of a traderstage buff some (not all) DA levels would just add a quality level to any weapon, tool or armor. So if everyone else would get a quality 3 iron axe from a quest the player perked into DA would get offered a quality 4 or 5 iron axe. Though I don't know, maybe if they just balance the traderstage buff correctly then the result might be the same (?). But with the fixed quality boost the advantage is a lot easier to understand for the player.

But my impressions from posts here (and my own group game) is that doesn't seem to be the case for players starting with a new game after the nerf. Without the boost you got from the first experimental you may have had the same experience, who knows.

Ok. I tried your way of calling it with my server, which is located in /home/days/server.a21.0/. And it created new directories inside so that the logfile was /home/days/server.a21.0/server.a21.0/7DaysToDieServer_Data/output_log__2023-07-04__20-19-42.txt Note the two "server.a21.0". This is because the script first creates the variable SERVERDIR as relative path "./server.a21.0/", and then changes into server.a21.0/ with "cd". And then the server is started and it creates "./server.a21.0/7DaysToDieServer_Data/output..." in the server directory with all intermediate directories. A correct script would use "realpath" for example to convert the path to an absolute path before using dirname.

I have a similar experience now. Group of 4, on day 12 as well, but two of us have specced into DA. We have a bunch of tier3 items: I think about 2-3 steel armors, 1 military armor, pickaxe, axe and shovel in steel, tier3 wrench whatever it is called. A steel sledgehammer and maybe steel spear and shotgun. All either bought from the trader or as quest rewards. In loot we found a few iron level items, crafting of some weapons has not even reached quality 3 stone. I don't think crafting and loot are that much apart, just finding less cooking and medicine magazines might almost make up for the difference. Part of the trader problem may be DA, another part is probably that quests just give too much dukes in addition to the item rewards. We could afford everything interesting we saw at the trader

I would call them lemmings 😉

They have at least two possible ways to achieve an accepable balance: 1) Individual magazines that are found in more places (like the cooking magazine) or have less competition in their loot boxes (medical) get general correction values for their drop probability until tests games seem balanced. I would assume they have a loot simulator software after all this time where they can test this without human interaction, if not that is something they should write even this late in the game as it saves a lot of time. 2) An easier way would be to find out how often specific boxes are looted by an average player and how often a specific magazine drops from those and adjust the probabilities of those individual loot boxes so that every magazine is found with the same probability. So the probability of finding cooking magazines in cupboards would decrease as well as the probability of medical magazines in medicine "piles". And the probability and number of weapon mags in safes would have to increase. Now naturally players will tend to look for specific magazines and prefer looting one type of loot box. But that a player can influence his chances is intended by the current design of 7d2d, only the 'average' case where a player does not look for specific loot boxes has to yield every magazine with about the same probability.

Yes and no. If you agree / make a deal that everyone gets to open a box of the main stash then you can quest together. If you can't co-operate that way then you either have to get your weapons from trader or loot directly or hope RNG is with you as your magazines will also drop in the loot boxes your co-players loot. If that isn't enough as well then the best option is probably to split up, at least when you have the chance for shotgun messiah for example and you wanted weapon magazines.

Ah yes, I understand why people would protest it being survival. Though that view will **literally** die out 😉. Really, nothing is as fluid as the definition of game genres.

We simply may have a different definition of survival in mind, but we are not having a meaningful discussion right now (sure, I see your smilies, the answer is to your first sentence which seems to be serious(??)). Food production and eating is survival in my book and I have enough food and good enough food in my game. As I said I have no problem being in the plains IF I have eaten my three meals. But to do that I have always to do my survival part of procuring and eating foods at appropriate times.