Novamourne

This jar thing is such a weird hill to die on. Never really noticed any difference this time around other than that I didn't have to carry empty jars. Water still seemed super plentiful, and I really didn't mind the change. Obviously, the effect on immersion is subjective and people are allowed to not like something, but this certainly doesn't impact game play much if at all.

This is that age old "just don't care about it and it will be fine" argument. The entire progression of the game is pushed on the rails of this system. If there is no need for any particular person to open any particular container then why did they put a priority drop mechanism in place? Your mentality is to prioritize the fun of looting and having a normal game play loop over progressing and growing stronger. My mentality is that I want both a normal game play loop and for that loop to not actively be hindering progression. Sounds like a good solution on paper, sure. We tried that too but guess what, because of the priority drop system, 9 times out of 10 whoever looted the box got a magazine from it that they specifically needed unless it was a box that didn't even have a chance to drop something they needed. In that event then, why not just pass on the container? Bottom line is that normally, I'm what my friends refer to as "First Builder" and I stay home and do the crops and base defense. I can no longer play that way as if I'm not doing quest for rewards and Im not looting containers then Im not progressing because they receive a very minimal amount of the magazines that they don't specifically need themselves The only way you can have fun with this system is to disregard the fact that it actively harms your growth if you play normally. The min/max argument doesn't even apply here because it's not extra steps to gain "a little more." The system actively punishes you for not playing this specific way. That's not min/maxing, that's mitigating bad design.

Just finished up a playthrough with a friend and to be honest, it's so anti-multiplayer that I just could not enjoy the system at all. At first, it showed a lot of promise. I didn't mind the idea because I agree 100% with the goal stated by development and the reason for doing so. Still, I think this systems side effects are too detrimental, and I hope this is iterated on. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out who should loot which containers. It didn't make a lot of sense since they were spec'd into looting but I was asking to have priority on boxes I needed books from. It really felt like it ran against the grain there. In the end, the obvious answer is to split up and play separately but it's not a very fun one so I just told them to loot and pass books to me that they didn't need. This, of course, meant I didn't get any benefit from the systems priority drop mechanism but at least we got to play together and one of us was able to cap out. At the end of a 40 hour playthrough, I had exactly 0 items I crafted for myself and at no point past making iron tools did we ever again use a crafted item. Between the super lucrative quest rewards, insanely well stocked traders, and gamestage-based loot quality we were in steel tier purples before the day 21 horde. Items with quality may as well be removed from crafting altogether. I hope this system is iterated on or changed again because I don't think I'll be playing unmodded 7days while it exists. You can tell me all the ways I'm wrong but it won't change the fact that it just wasn't fun for me. Other than that, A21 was a blast and I enjoyed pretty much everything. Really loved the new POIs and the facelifts on the older ones. You can tell whoever is working on these really love their job and I appreciate the heck out of them for that.

I really don't care for this argument/counter point. It really shouldn't be on the players to solve the balance issues presented in design implementations. It's not always about min/maxing either, it can just be the path of least resistance. Humans are hard wired to prefer it. Development needs to design with that in mind. Also, if you're playing alone that might be fine but if you're playing with or against people who are using the quest system exclusively then you will fall behind and not be relevant. This is another player solution to bad design argument. Sure, there is nothing preventing me from using other weapons and they will surely all work. I guess there's no reason to spec into any weapons then, right? Those are just dead points. No, you spec into something to see progression and increase power. Why would you make player progression decisions based on one specialization and then not do what you can to use that advantage you worked for? What's the point of progression at all if you're just gonna ala cart the game and whimsically use whatever and whenever regardless to any sort of power gains you've acquired? Very weak argument, imo. There's a massive difference between zombies who present a new thoughtful challenge to you and zombies who are specifically designed to counter something you are using as a strategy and I feel like I do a well enough job in my OP of illustrating those differences. Demo zombies were a development response to people being able to fortify behind strong walls and defend themselves with traps/turrets. They don't change how you do anything. There's no base design or trap design to counter them. They are there solely to mitigate the strength of automated defenses and nothing more - again, compulsory combat. No more building smart and outlasting the night - you must fight them. The game is not always been that way.

All they need to do is apply the bonuses you get from stealth while crouched to also be applied to you in any stance during a blood moon. It still wouldn't be as good, but it would prevent the points from being completely wasted during bloodmoons. As far as the zombies waking up, I have never cared for the triggers. I think the major issue is that if they don't have an unspawned or sleeping state than anything other than stealth wouldn't be feasible as you'd just aggro the entire house/poi from the first gunfire. Honestly, I don't know how they work around this but I do think they should work on it. If nothing else, they should make it where the zombies are unaware of stealthed players even when they wake up from a trigger.

I bought this game back in '14. It quickly shot to the top of my played list on steam. I loved it and revered it as my favorite game. Now, I want to share with you why I haven't been able to enjoy the game or hardly play it for the last couple years. I think a lot of people will disagree with me. I don't really care; I just need this off my chest so I can move on I suppose, idk. Most of the things I will list aren't wholly terrible, in fact, the concept might be really good, and I might like it but feel like the implementation took something away that used to be important. Anyway, in no particular order: Quests - Way too lucrative and way too often. The gameplay loop changed from exploring and checking every nook and cranny into an endless cycle of Point A to Point B rinse & repeat quest completions. Bullet and material production rendered obsolete. Just buy what you need with the mountain of coins you get, if the rewards from the quest themselves don't keep you topped up. No reason to duck into this building or that - there's nothing in there that you can't find in the quest POI and the quest POI has extra super lucrative loot containers. Bottom line is, you can do quests too often and there's no incentive to explore anymore. You should only be able to do 3-5 quests per ingame week, especially if they are going to remain so lucrative. Game Stage - Game stage scaled the world to you. What a terrible thing. Game Stage should not make sure you are powerful enough to do anything you want, but that's what it does. It tries to make up for it by also making things rewarding in a way that is relevant to you so you're not getting better stuff than you should be getting. It fails at that balance. Game Stage should have been used to prevent relevant content from being too difficult or too easy for you, what it became instead is a world nerf and removed incentive to do anything other than the most lucrative things because they were just as easy as the less lucrative things. Everything should have a minimum Game Stage setting so that if you wander into the wastelands and try to do a Shotgun Messiah in week 1, you get absolutely obliterated. Bottom line is that Game stage should keep relevant content manageable and nothing more. Some places should be more dangerous and you should have to be aptly prepared to go there with skills, equipment, and consumables - all of which are not considered in Game Stage difficulty scaling. Progression is important, and watching the color of my gear change isn't progression enough. Skills - I thought skills would be a lot different than they are. I thought everyone would be able to progress through everything and I thought it was going to serve as more of a "mastery" of tasks and actions. Instead, we found ourselves fractured. Now, so much of the game is inaccessible to you in a single playthrough. It took away a lot of the ability to self sustain or to support yourself through the way you wanted to play. The skill system locks you into weapon choices. This is an apocalypse, I should have to be using everything at my disposal because I shouldn't have so much of anything that I can specialize. It's not immersive and it makes the game smaller. Screamers & Heat Map - Nothing killed this games crafting and production aspect faster and more efficiently than this atrocious mechanic. I don't even know where to start. The old roaming hordes were so much more immersive and enjoyable. I remember being able to crouch in the corner of a dark room and wait for them to pass. It was immersive. It was horror in a video game. I loved it. It got replaced by an incessant and compulsory interaction with combat if I decided I wanted to anything other than run a single campfire. Screamers are ok, but they shouldn't be spawned and heat based. They should just be out in the world, roaming the streets or hiding in the closets of POIs - not knocking down my door every 5 mins because they heard me burning wood/coal too loudly? The heat map and screamers were probably the biggest blow to my interest in the game, If I'm being honest. Gun Parts/Loot and Crafting Parity - I didn't like gun parts when they were introduced but I couldn't see their value at the time. Gun parts created a parity between crafting and looting which doesn't exist at all in today's version of the game. In fact, most of my friends don't even bother crafting anything and only loot the major containers where you can find most things worth crafting in an extraordinary abundance. We should have to loot to craft. We should need to craft to put our loot to use. It's the soul of the game and it's been locked away for several alphas now. Bring it back. I used to loot seeds. Now I loot food. No parity. Bring it back. "Smart" & "Gimmick" zombies - You are losing the arms race and have been since you decided to enter it. Please give up. Players will always outsmart your AI. No that's not a challenge. It's the reason we're the dominate species on Earth. We use tools well. We outsmart things. We outlast them. Please stop trying to make zombies smarter than us. Their danger is in their unrelenting tides and sheer numbers. Not through dynamite strapped on their chest, slapping a wood wall twice and breaking it, or pathing cleverly to you. Gore blocks were an infinitely better zombie threat than anything you've put in the game thus far and you removed them without trying to iterate on it at all. Get rid of the stupid demo zombies. Bring back gore blocks. Stop trying to make "counters" to player strategy and get back to making zombies like the irradiated or the army zombie whose head is protected, etc. Still no NPCs / Limited Game Modes - I don't really want to complain about content but I have to. Zombies being the only aspect of the game world limits the game modes severely. Without NPCs like bandits, we can't have fire fights and territory disputes. Without NPCs like doctors or farmers, we can never build an actual "base" with buildings and specializations which means we can never progress toward resolution. We can't rebuild, we can just survive until we're bored of having more of the same. There has to be more to the "point of playing" than just staying alive. The game can have so much more depth but we're too busy redesigning the trees for the 14th time. It's time to expand the scope of the game. We need more to do, and more reasons to do it. Give us an endgame to work towards. Give us more than loot to care about. That's all I came to say. I know its a long post. Few of you will read it, even fewer will agree. Like I said, I don't care. I'm just here to say it so I can tell myself I did. Good luck survivors.