meganoth

For 1 I have a suggestion. Start a server on your machine and connect to it locally. The advantage is that you can change stuff like daylight length in serverconfig.xml and there you can use any value you like (ok, there will be some max value, but it is much much higher than what you can set in your client) For 3 you can use creative menue. Just think about how much such a barrel would cost, get some from CM and pay the price by throwing away Dukes.

You also have to factor in the time opening a box with a stone axe. That is a lot more time than the repair time.

That looks quite impressive, but when we say overpowered then we should note that you actually got killed 😉 (if we substract god mode) Would you expect to clear the whole building with a high probability without getting killed? It seems for that you probably would have to do a perfect stealth rehide in each trigger location, maybe 5 of them in this building alone. In the video I don't see you have any indication to determine whether your stealth worked until they are actually stepping on your shoes. So if it fails you are totally surrounded and I'd say you have to endure at least 5 hits and multiple conditions before you can jump out, if at all. Normal low ceiling and you are simply done for. Stunned and it is guaranteed death as well.

Not only that, but giving money AND loot for quest reward is too much. Dukes should be just one guaranteed choice and probably a bit less than now. Because ideally the trader could have better weapons on display if buying it would mean you would have to save up for it and get nothing else from rewards in the meantime. The typical player would then start the game by saving up dukes for the filter in his first 2-3 quests, then either going full on saving up money or mixing it up and getting quests rewards or money whatever seems better, For example on day 5 the save-all player could then actually afford an iron quality 4 weapon by giving all his money, the other player could just buy a stone tier5 or iron tier1. As it is now, my group of 4 gets so much money from questing that we could afford to buy everything of iron level useful to us the traders had offered. AND I got a quest reward from a tier2 infestation quest of a q4 steel pickaxe. On day 7! The only iron level item we actually crafted is a q2 turret, nothing at all was looted(!), about 5-8 iron level items were simply bought from the trader or were quest rewards

I am a bit confused about your post. For example if say magazines and fake randomness(?) were removed, of course players would not say "because of this change nobody will help me clear POIs anymore!" because that was a result of the shared xp, not magazines or a fake randomness, right? And which of the things we talked about forces players to be farmers, builders or miners ???

TFP surely won't do anything about the balance. But there is a difference between having to install a cryptic mod that modifies low-level stuff in the game and depends on one talented guy who could loose interest in supporting the mod at any time, and a rather "simply" XML balancing mod for servers lots of people could write.

I don't remember exactly what the description of BB says, but I know that it was a bonus on buying AND selling for as long as I can remember.

NOT AGAIN! This is wrong and I had hoped these false rumors were gone after more than a year Lotl1 is perfectly enough to have a self-sustaining farm and making seeds out of plants will generally grow your farm. The only drawback is that with a string of VERY bad harvests you could be left without seeds eventually. But for that you have to also be so unlucky to never find any seeds in loot. Only without a single point in Lotl it makes no sense to convert plants to seeds. Just put any seeds you find into your plots and grow them. But if you have Lotl1 or more, you can just convert any plants you have into seeds and on average expect to get more out of the seed later. And mathematically it makes sense to start planting as soon as you have plants, there is nothing gained by waiting except if you plan to put more points into the perk later.

He knows. The optimizations used could still have positive effects for <=8 players too, and making more players happy is nice if the changes are easy to implement and have no detrimental effects on normal play.

Players getting upset? Pfft, happens automatically at any change. The magazine and water redesigns and the last patch had, IMHO, more massive ramifications for players than some flipping points for weapons or tools moving up or down a quality level. The group that will notice it the most will be expert players and I expect them to adapt to new circumstances. Not call for preservation of the status quo. Maybe lost maybe gained. Maybe both in different places. The progression discontinuity between the tiers is quite a big "hole" in the design. You may have a different opinion, but I think it obviously violates design rules TFP seems to follow. For example that all items in the game should have value at least once in the game. And tier1 iron items have none. Nobody would ever craft one currently.

Do you know that you can have more than one dew collector? Yes, you need to factor in that damage. Either drink only a few sips, eat something afterwards or have a first aid bandage ready.

I am pretty sure it once was only 6% per mod and could well go down again, even to smaller values. I still think it has a positive effect since you'll never be sorry when you find an installable mod even if you are not interested in the function of it itself. But I also would not shed tears if it vanished completely. Mainly I think that adapting that percentage as well as the random variation are balancing details that would be "automatically" looked at and adapted when doing the range shrinking. And yes, the 10% are very probably too much, but consider that currently a q5 stone item has 3, a q1 iron item has 1 mod slot. If all are filled the maximum bonus the q5 item gets from this is twice that bonus. Once the actual gap between q5 stone and q1 iron after the shrinking is known that bonus should be less than half that gap. Fast and easy balancing I would say. Sure, you still have two more mods installed, which could skew the balance. But on the other hand many iron tier items have additional advantages. For example the q1 pistol has also more ammo capacity and the ability to load the magazine extender mod (though that could be a false rumor, I heard it but didn't check it myself). I am not saying that your ideas are bad. Just that the current system has enough knobs to turn to make it work as well

Oh yes, Q5 gets nerfed but now players learn to change faster to iron tools tier 1 and 2 because those are actually taking over the place of stone q5. While currently you stop at Q5 stone and there is a "long" stretch of progression where you are NOT progressing at all. Naturally that is till a change overall, but now you have a smooth progression instead of a jumpy one. I don't think the jumpy progression was intended. There is no guarantee for a q5 stone axe doing the same damage between alphas. The interesting thing with this change is though that the length of overall progression is exactly the same. If you have a q5 steel tier weapon on day 40 on average before you will be there exactly at the same time. As it is now stone q5 is miles above iron tier 1, not only in damage but also like you just explained in repair cost. I.e. even if compression is not enough it still changes the balance in the right direction. And if it wasn't compressed enough it can be compressed more or more advantages added to the higher tier. So? I have done that in the old system as well, ignoring steps because the change was not worth whatever dukes or work or material was necessary. That is every users personal choice how much damage more is worth a change. If you get the next tier for naught (aka through looting) even 1 more damage may be enough to switch, if you have to pay 12000 dukes for it, not even 6 more damage may be enough to sway someone. But when you already have something lower-tier that is objectively better, NOBODY will ever switch to it. Remember that one reason the crafting system was changed that there almost never was a reason to craft a large section of the weapon progression, and this is still a remnant where progressing feels like not worth it.

The redesign of crafting didn't happen to change group dynamic. The change in group dynamic is a side product. If the redesign never happened then a few problems with crafting could not be corrected. Since the redesign had to happen anyway, the only question is whether players are expected to cooperate when playing co-op or whether that has to be solved for them. And the answer (for me at least) is the former. For gaming as a whole I want to find more players on the internet who act like "human beings", and for society as a whole I want more people that have learned to work well in society even if they learned all their socail behaviour in front of their PC. Furthermore the same problem was in A20 as well. If say the Agility player found the auto-shotgun recipe and read it because he thought it too much trouble bringing it back then he is doing the same harm to the group as someone not bringing back shotgun-magazines, because he never will be able to craft anything better than quality 1 autoshotgun. Just that the opportunities to read magazines one should bring back are more numerous but at the same time less damaging as eventually someone will be able to craft the higher stuff. Shared XP is different because a player can't give XP to some other player like a magazine. So if XP were not shared it would not be a motivation or opportunity for players to cooperate or share. As it is XP sharing is a motivation to group up and raid POIs together, so again it is motivating players to act socially instead of separating.

Do you find anything entertaining about eating? Probably all survival games make you eat or you will have massive disadvantages or simply die. How much fun do you feel opening the inventory and clicking "use" on your stack of bacon&eggs twice a day? If fun were the only reason why food and eating were implemented in a survival game then there would simply be no food and water in survival games. As it is, the solution fullfills everything it set out to do: Lots of players have a water shortage for the first few days (just like with food) and later on the water problem is solved (just like food). In fact in our game food and water seem almost indentical in their progression. Though I agree with you that the daily harvest you need to do to get the most out of the collectors is a drawback to the current solution. I probably will just get myself more dew collectors so I can ignore them for days and immediately collect a bigger stack of water when I need water again. If TFP doesn't do it himself I'm sure there will be a mod to increase the size of the dew collector storage.

Broken is such a strong word. There are reasons for people to not like the change, because of immersion, because filters are basically single-supplier only, because looting the filters may be seen as a chore. But I don't see anything broken. You can basically buy yourself as many dew collectors as you want and looting them with hitting "E" "R" keys while going along a row is done in less than a minute even with 20 or more of them and much less time than farming a similar number of farm plots.

Ich habe dasselbe Problem gehabt, als ich versucht habe eine b313-generierte Welt mit b317 weiterzuspielen. Ist es möglich, daß ihr, statt einen neuen Weltnamen einzustellen, ein neues Spiel in einer alten Welt gestartet habt? Weitere Hilfe kann nur kommen, wenn du mehr Infos lieferst. Statt im Kaffesatz zu lesen untersuchen die Leute hier lieber Logfiles anhand deren sich oftmals die Fehler finden lassen 😉. Eine Anleitung dazu steht in einem der festgepinnten Threads hier in General Support

2) has been mentioned as the reason multiple times, it just means the problem is objectively present and not a result of misinterpreting random effects. And it means that RNG or not, on average players will be much much faster progressing in cooking. RNG just means that with bad luck this might not happen, but with good luck the situation will be even worse. There are a few options to address this, for example generally reduce the probability for finding cooking recipes, or reduce their probability after early game (so that you still progress fast in early game) or reduce the probability it can be found in kitchen containers. Anyway, the problem seems a universal problem. At the moment our group finds cooking magazines in heaps, but also lots of traps or electricity magazines. But with almost all weapons we have almost no progress and we are at day 6 or 7. Our agility player can not build any of his weapons at q2 stone. This wouldn't be so bad if we couldn't already buy iron tier stuff easily at the trader. Yes, our game is statistically insignificant, but it seems many players see the same happening and there is a logical explanation why this is happening.

You missed the easiest option that would not need any global balance changes: If TFP diminishes the stats range between q1 and q6 weapons, then the differenence between the tiers will be automatically bigger Currently each quality level increases damage by 5% of the base damage for a weapon (if I remember correctly), plus/minus a random value. Reduce that to 3% and a q5 stone axe is not on average 20% better than a q1 stone axe but only 12%. An q1 iron pickaxe would now be 8% better in relation to that q5 stone axe without changing anything about it.

Even if it wouldn't they have the same right or desire to discuss it as you who discusses a problem that doesn't seem to affect you either by your own words, as you are talking about a play style you don't do. The claim you made is "affect not at all" which is a much bigger claim than "affect only slightly". If you only had said the latter or similar I probably would not have commented at all. Any xp increase for an activity will increase xp gain slightly for people doing that activity. In fact the player who does the farming in our group will get exactly the same amount of xp from farming as a guy only doing farming except if that guy produces food just for the sake of producing food. Incidentally such a change may even be beneficial for the "normal" balance and it is probably the least controversial suggestion. If the misstating is about him saying "your playstyle" then it is at best even correct if he meant it as a shortform of "the playstyle you are discussing here" and at worst something he forgot in the back and forth and other discussions he is probably in. And yes, there were one or two posters who were rather hostile, but the art in forum discussion is to not lump everyone together. And his point is relevant. It may lead to anything discussing it in the dev diary if TFP thinks the solution is already there and it is creative menue and modding, but not balancing, which is already difficult enough. We have a player in our group who often uses the nights to dig, say 3-4 out of 7 nights, while normally questing or looting with us on most days. I am sure there are groups who don't quest in the night (we usually don't as a group) and 1-2 players do exactly the same or more, maybe even 5-6 nights a week. Their resource pile should be in the same ballpark of a miner/cook/farmer who stays at home. Any increase in Dukes you can get from selling that stuff that would perceptively help that miner would help them as well. See example above, all these "hobby" miners I talked about get nearly as much of an advantage out of better tools than your miner gets. Moreover everyone in our group is using stone axes, pick axes, fireaxes, shovels, even augers daily when available. To open chests without lockpicks, to open windows or doors, or walls, to remove stairs at nightfall where sometimes every second counts, shovels to pick up resource stacks and yes, to mine as well from time to time. I usually have 3 weapons and 3 tools on my toolbelt. Now in the first week of your playthrough we ask our tool crafter twice or more each day if he got a new tool level ready. How can you say tool quality is not important to us? For XP probably only our "hobby miner" will see a bigger difference, usually he is 10 levels above our scavenger. Sorry, have to stop here. My group starts playing 7days now.

I can only say the number 50 was just an example invented by me to have an easy calculation. I have heard them say they have an idea/notion/maybe even a design target of how many days a game should go, but I don't know anything about how much this influences the design.

Correct.

This isn't different from tracking which books (like Urban Combat books, Spear books) everyone wants and saving them up. Usually with two players you have about 4-5 magazines you want to read yourself anyway (2 of them weapon books, 2-3 utility), 6 magazines are for weapons nobody uses, and only 5 magazines you have to remember to give to the other. I play in a group of 4 players and in the first 3 days there were a lot of questions of the type "Who needs ... again?", but I feel that has died down. I would suggest putting a chest on the street in front of POIs you loot. That was a good idea previously and it is even better now. Drop magazines you don't read yourself into it as well as any stuff clogging your inventory and whatever the other player wants he will read automatically. Total team progression is faster. Because you are faster looting POIs as a team you can loot more POIs in a day. And you get a multiple of the magazines from quest rewards. But always only one in a team needs to progress in a magazine series for everyone getting the benefit. In other words, N co-op players will only need 100 magazines of a type same as 1 player, but they obviously loot more and get more quest rewards than a single player. My group seems to like the team aspect of collecting magazines and giving them to the other players.

Seeing how the loot bonus is skewing everyone's expectation and the usual misconceptions about randomness emerging, I fully agree with you (at the moment 😉). The loot bonus is meant as a safety net, but due to randomness is also only randomly a safety-net. And since the bonus is always there it isn't really a safety net but a bonus that directly influences the balance of how many magazines drop. I.e. if TFP wants the games progression to last until day 50, they have to space out the 100 shotgun recipes over those 50 days, but they have to include the safety-net bonus in the calculation because a shotgun player will normally get that bonus. So without that bonus each of the magazines would drop twice a day on average. Because of the bonus now perked magazines have to drop twice a day while all other magazines drop less than twice a day because the bonus is missing. In effect it seems more like a nerf for all other magazines. Now surely TFP could also say, nah, we want the progression nominally until day 50, but we are ok with the progression of perked items being over early. No matter, it doesn't really feel like a safety-net looking at it this way, more like a fast-track.

I have a different view about this. They did change their progression system completely only once, when they switched from LBD to a perk system over multiple alphas (even though for us players it felt like the main change happened between A16 and A17). Madmole told me that the LBD system was always only a placeholder, and I think a developer also said that it was a system they got from an asset store or a similar source. From A17 on they had an almost pure perk system, though the first system in A17 had to be redesigned once for A18. The crafting recipe system though was as long as I have known the game already learn-by-looting, basically. Finding schematics or magazines is just a different implementation of the same, you go out and loot to get better at crafting. And this crafting recipe system changed in A17 as well to be partly perk-based and was reverted back to be only learn-by-looting again. So in summary: Progression of the player changed from LBD --> perks v1 --> perks v2. The evolution ended in A18 basically. Progression of the player knowledge aka Crafting recipe learning changed from LBL1 --> LBL1 with perks --> LBL2.