meganoth

... and then there is the big guy at the drum providing the work rhythm.

Nope, sorry. "Placeholder" is well defined as something that is never intented to survive into gold. What is surely true is that we have no sure way to know which of their features and mechanisms were meant as placeholders or were experiments that might have turned up in the final version. One heuristic you could employ is that anything that was in the first few alphas was mostly placeholder while anything after that was experiment. Some stuff was labeled clearly as placeholder stuff **by developers** and is also very likely placeholder stuff, for example all the graphics bought in the unity-store. Some people on the forum said that LBD was a placeholder. I have my doubts about that, I think that was an experiment.

I think Laz Man mentioned multiple improvements. I think simply increasing max range by ~3% after each quest (together with excluding already used POIs) would solve the problem. Eventually I would get quests far away but at that time I would also have a selection of 5*5= 25 quests to choose from and a gyro.

That is an interesting point you are making here: That due to district settings the same POIs could be placed near the trader. I am not sure about it though: Farm, Pass N Gas and the L shaped house would probably belong to rural, commercial and residential zones, all the zones you would find in a small starting town.

There are a few reasons IMHO: 1) Actually not enough time to create a more expansive game. But thats ok since this game is supposed to be 7 Days to Die Part 1. Expansion is for part 2 and for modders, that's why the game is designed to be easily moddable. They thought of a lot more features they would have wanted to include but the time and size of their company didn't allow for more if you also include the following points 2 to 6. 2) Since the game is EA they needed a fully playable game from day 1 of EA. Hence the game was filled with placeholder graphics and mechanisms that had to be replaced eventually 3) If you design a game that hasn't really been done before you need a lot of experimentation on mechanisms of the game. In "older times" this experimentation was hidden in closed development and many games were light on new mechanisms anyway so we players are not accustomed to see experimentation being done. Even now many EA games start to enter EA only after their main experimentation phase which means you don't see that a lot. 4) There are surely developers who don't experiment much and developers who like to experiment. I am quite confident to place TFP in the latter category 😉 5) There are surely developers who just look at established games and take mechanisms from there and developers who like to use something new. I am quite confident to place TFP in the latter category 😉 . And actually I think a part of the appeal of 7D2D is that it is chock full of new mechanisms. Now the problem is: If you use a lot of new mechanisms then some of them turn out to be not working as good as the designer had envisioned, i.e. some disadvantages only show up after extensive playtesting. So a lot of tweaking or even replacement of such mechanisms has to happen. 6) TFP seems also very keen on having a fluff-free game, in other words they don't want to have lots of identical stuff in the game. For example each vehicle you can drive is quite distinct from the others, there are no two variants of the jeep for example. So expansion of the game is always hard as new features don't come cheap. If we take the vehicle example: What could be a new vehicle with new features? I can think of one immediately, a boat or raft. But unlike adding just another vehicle that acts like a jeep (say 2 days development, testing, bug fixing and balancing all in all) a boat or raft would need surely weeks now to be added (including testing, balancing and bug fixing)

After about 10 quests you will be promoted to T2 quests. The problem is if you get the same POIs after 5 quests already. How many (questable) POIs does a typical town have? If we say that it needs 10 each of tier 1 and 2 and at least 5 tier3 (at that point you should easily be able to travel to adjacent towns for quests) then a town would need to have at least 25 buildings, which seems a lot. One solution would be to place a lot more wilderness POIs that act as viable quest buildings in reach of multiple towns. Since wilderness seemed too empty in previous alphas that solution would kill two birds with one stone. Laz Man, how many wilderness POIs did you add this alpha ? 😉

This is not happening because of the game, this would probably happen with many games and applications that really stress your CPU. Most games though tend to stress the GPU more than the CPU. If you notice this only happening with 7D2D then the other games you tested probably are GPU-bound and because of that still run well at the 3600 setting even though you have a potentially unstable configuration.

I am pretty sure that Roland gave us all the info he was allowed to share when he was super mod. So a community manager could only change frequency of posting the same stuff again and again or style. Is it frequency or style that should be improved in your opinion? Or is it a cleaner presentation of the facts you are after?

Yes, you can buy them. But the question is whether you can progress at an acceptable speed with traders alone. It isn't workbenches alone, trap, weapon and tool crafting depends on magazines. And the trader often has parts instead of complete weapons or tools. I'm not saying it is impossible. It is just not known yet if it will still be a viable way to play the game. We won't know until someone tries it out.

Ripclaw got a point because XP is not the only progression in the game. And unlike A20 **item** progression is now unobtainable with XP alone. In A21 you won't get a workbench if you play a pure builder in SP. He actually may have to mod the game in the future.

I think this will stay a possible way to fight horde night, at least in early and mid-game. TFP could put weak blocks into its most sturdy building. Either as damaged blocks or fake-blocks (i.e. wood blocks that look like concrete). That would make this take a little more work. I don't see how TFP could change this any other way without changing the rest of the game fundamentally. It would be a fix similar to the horde-night vultures attacking players on vehicles (with probably the same level of complaints about "destroying my playstyle")

His point is probably about pulicity, not about playing them.

Sure. But when TFP changes a feature to something else there is always a group of players crying over the lost old feature. Many of the voices you tried to represent wanted quite different features to stay, TFP could only avoid this by not changing anything and only adding. In other words, TFP has to step on some shoes whenever they change something, just the shoes change. You may not have meant to say that ONLY things should be added, but that is the only way TFP could fullfill your wish for ALL the people you try to give a voice to.

What you want is a development model where only stuff is added and never changed. That is possible if developers know exactly what features they want and how each fature should work. This is the easier the less you need to provide playable versions in the interim (like in closed development) and the more the game is following established trends and genre conventions (like if you are just making the next installment of a series or a copy of a successful game). If the developers want to create something new and need to experiment and also have to provide playable versions all the way because of EA then sorry, they have no choice. They added a lot of gameplay features as placeholders so they could provide early adopters with a playable game. Change is inevitable when those placeholders are replaced. They also have to adhere to some limits imposed by the engine they are using or earlier programming choices. This sometimes makes it necessary to trade one feature for another because both features together would go past the limit.

The situation has not changed with more POIs, even in A15/A16 taking over a POI at first was the easiest path, but the trader was less important. From A17 on the trader was OP so it usually would have been a POI near the trader. But the veteran players changed. For example I took over POIs in A15 and A16, but started building bases in A17 because it was the first time it made a noticable difference how you built a base. I cycled through many ways of building a base until I practically had tried out all general types of base I could think of at least twice. And now I am back at taking over POIs again, unless I can think of something new I want to try out. There were concrete buldings in previous alphas too. You just need one in your starting town to do lazy building. Whatever floats anyone's boat.

I agree with your first half. But I don't think bandits were an afterthought, they were planned to be in the game from the start. But a lot of code (for example the first AI) was merely a placeholder because they needed one asap. Effectively (AFAIK) they started implementing the AI from the ground up at the start of A17 development, And when I say "they" I really mean one person that had a few other tasks to do in parallel. Terrain change can be done by simply shooting with a shotgun. You can have 8 guys on a horde night, changing terrian 8 times a second 😁 . Plus up to 64 zombies doing some terrain changing as well

Sylen is not an employee of TFP, so he tramples nowhere. He gave you a solution, what you read between the lines is likely just your imagination. If the site blocks VPNs then it is likely because of Spammers using VPNs to post their Spam messages. Wrong person to tell it to. There is a "Support" button on the top line, maybe you have more success there.

You don't like to watch streamers? Welcome to the club, I don't watch streams or youtubers as well. Not only for 7d2d, I don't watch any streamers. But I understand the bussiness decision TFP made to attract attention and word of mouth. For a 10 year old game they need streamers and something of a release event so the game is not forgotten

The streamers have something TFP wants, and TFP has something the streamers want. Seems a fair deal. 😉 Many people can't accept that streamers are now what games journalists were 10 years ago. Does it matter that streamer don't have a press ID-card? Not to a company in want of some publicity. And the streamers need exclusive content just like the games journalists who get shown a game before release. Do you think it unfair that games journalists get to play games earlier than you?

The game is at the end of its development and just a few specific features need to be added to be ready for release. Currently shooting from vehicles is not in the game and a horse would be a somewhat bigger new feature and not add anything significantly different to the game (basically it brings people from a to b like any other "vehicle"). So no, I don't see them adding a horse, at least not before gold.

Seriously, you are imagining problems where none are. There may be some outlier maps you would be able to generate (though I don't know if the final RWG won't fix that, who knows) that are minimally different because one type of trader is missing. But every trader has the chance to have all items, he is just specialized to have much more of one type of items. And even if that were not the case, neither trader rewards nor trader stock is essential to playing the game and never was. But looting is and looting provides everything you need, randomly. In the case of armor you might run around with only a quality 3 steel armor in end game because of bad luck at looting, but thats all there is. No destroying of playstyles, no impossibilities.

According to TFP there is a small story with a finale planned for Navezgane at least and it involves fighting down either the Duke or White River. That will be essentially all for 7D2D 1. Remember that they have made every effort to make the game easy to mod so that modders can jump in and provide continued fun for veteran players. Vanilla is essentially to introduce new players to the game and "get them addicted" 😉

You act like a player couldn't survive if no trader had any armor for example. You may not have heard of crafting or looting but I assure you such mechanics are in the game 😉 There are players who play without trader. Apart from missing out on the free loot on top of loot missions that just means the loot and equipment is a bit more random than usual.

Don't want to sidetrack the subject but it occured to me that the quest rewards should be skewed to the trader specialization as well. That way looking for a trader and relocating to the right one when you are looking for something specific would be even more important

Please use the correct section for your question next time. I moved it from "Mods" to "General Support". If you just want to change settings you can access in the menue in SP, then the corresponding file on the server is called serverconfig.xml. If thats not what you are asking then you need to provide more information.