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11 hours ago, elwooood said:

I often hear from players that stealth don't work. I don't know why but I don't have any problem with it. since T3 to T5, all my POI are made in stealth and no zombie move (except the one set to jumpscare or some room that zombie are hidden on roof without hole to see them, but if I sneak back enough, I can kill it/them without wake up the next ones). Just finish hospital this evening, only one z wake up by mistake of me. I notice a thing, when I enter a large room, no red dot are showed but by looking around they are here. (by the way; I think you all do it but, I remove all things on floor, using no armor, insane difficulty, only 3 in stealth and slow progression, so, dunno why it won't works on several players)

So the old POIs for the most part are still stealthable for now. They put in a few wake up trigger points in the factories but at least they are points that make 100% sense, and do not spawn in zombies behind you. the NEW tier 5 POIs like the county jail have several points where the zombies are not even existing until you hit the wake up trigger, then they are spawning in behind you as well.

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14 hours ago, RhinoW said:

I remember that one, but that one is just a trigger that "happens". I meant like the player pressing the button connecting to TNT or igniting a fire hazard to blow up a gas tank.

They do have some... at least one in shotgun messiah (not that it did anything OTHER than blow something up, but was still interesting the first time i hit it)

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1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

 

Hi David, some encounters are designed not to be played stealthable as you have experienced.  The jail you mentioned in particular has several large encounters that spawns several large groups which will be very difficult to run / hide / stealth from.

 

Edit: as Jugg mentioned, it's possible to stealth, but light/noise plays a big factor.

 

 

 

I understand this, and I do not mind having zombies that are nearly impossible to kill from stealth. The Navezgane Hospital is actually a great example of this system working as designed, the zombies spawn in areas where you have to do something that will wake them up before killing them, but having them spawn in only after the trigger point is reached is not a good design. if the hordes spawned in, but were in an area where you could not reach all of them without hitting the trigger point it would still be fine but a stealth player is not going to be carrying large stacks of ammo usually, because it negates the feeling of the stealth to just spray and pray every 10 seconds. Another POI that works well with the "wake up" triggers is shotgun messiah, there are 3-4 points in there where you open a door, which wakes up a horde ahead of you. but no zombies spawned in the cleared area behind you. I get a tier 5 should not be 100% stealthable but the number of ambush points that you have to be fully prepared to sprint backwards to avoid being cornered is out of control. Also, it leads to an increase in bugged spawns where a zombie might reset when you put enough distance and time between you and the zombie, but not respawn in because the trigger needed had already been tripped. Also had this happen in the shotgun messiah factory where a zombie dropped and couldn't find me after my stealth kicked back in, and reset to default position, but I could not respawn it because the flag had been tripped once.

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8 hours ago, Javabean867 said:

So i have tested out my stealth build a little more thoroughly.  Stealth boots, padded armor everywhere else.  and 3 points into the stealth improvement perk.

 

I went through the  apartment complex with basically 0 issues.  There are 2 places that had zambees attack without them 'noticing me'  1 when you go down those stairs on the outside, i had a bunch of zambees, but not all of them become aware of me.  and the other time in the construction level a bunch activated.  Again not all of them.  i was careful, looked in everyplace i zambee could be hiding, and knew where the trick ceilings were, so i broke those out ahead of time.

 

The roof was boring honestly.  i did it during the day time and killed all of the zambees without waking them up.  I was bit cavalier with the ones by the radio tower section of the roof.  i killed them out of stealth, but i have no doubt i could have done it in stealth.

My personal head cannon is that sometimes you turn a corner and a zambee is staring you in the face, like any good horror movie.  you have a jump scare, you a frantic skirmish and then you move on.

So, if it was a POI from A20, they really didnt add any extra triggers in the normal clears and you will only hit the "insta-wake" triggers when doing infested clears on those ones. but if you go into new T4 and T5 POIS, you will see it

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19 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

It is the same exact rendition of the mechanic as A20, a rng check to detect on spawn in. If the check results in them failing to detect you when they are spawned in they seek out the trigger point, the point where you crossed into the volume, and muddle around there. If they gain LOS to you while enroute to the trigger point then they detect you regardless. A few seconds after they reach the trigger point they revert back to the detection rules for normal sleeping/wandering zombies.

 

The POI designer setup the first and third trigger points shown in your vid so that you had no escape option. The first one dropped a swarm tracking in from outside of the entrance to the building and going for the trigger point in addition to the ones in "front" of you through the door you opened and behind the door in adjacent wall (with the door you opened left closed instead and without the swarm of ferals coming in from outside you might have been able to evade). The second trigger point you might have been able to duck back down around the stairs. The third dumped them effectively right on top of you with direct los... 1 and 3 completely  bypassed the "dice roll" to detect you on spawn that was implemented in A20.

If the zombies spawn in awake and seeking a "target point" then they are not sleepers, and it is not a dice roll anymore. Furthermore if you cannot spawn them in this new awakened state without them INSTANTLY having LOS on you, it still proves my point that stealth is greatly diminished. For the record, at no point in A20 did I have a trigger point where the zombes would awake that I could not in some way kill them PRIOR to crossing that point. If you want to see how the "dice roll" system DID work in A20, go to Dishong Tower, go up to the pool level (6 i think?) and clear it from the elevator shaft to the stairwell like you are supposed to while being stealthed. There are 2 decent dice roll points on that floor, so it is a good show. then go up 1 more floor to see how the trap system made sense before, by having an OBVIOUS trap room that still could kill you by triggering the trap (almost impossible to actually kill all the zombies without triggering some of them awake because of the noise made by breaking floors, but in theory still possible because the zombies are in the world asleep).

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1 hour ago, hiemfire said:

 

It is governed by "dice roll" against the players stealth with the spawned in sleepers moving towards the point where the player tripped the trigger. 

This was how it was in A20. in 21, as my video shows, there is no dice roll. I have hit those 2 spawn points 10 times now, trying different ways to get them to not wake up, and they are always spawned in awake and seeking, no dice roll involved.

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23 minutes ago, Javabean867 said:

So weird, so far 0 points in stealth, and padded armor, and I stealth kill nearly every zambee I come across.  Why are people having issues?

It is not an issue in the lower end POI's but the bigger ones (for sure ALL the new tier 5's and probably 4's) they are adding in extra spawn points that zombies do not even spawn until the player crosses a threshold, and when they do spawn they are awake and seeking NOT spawning as sleepers as they used to.

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4 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

All zombies in POIs spawn in only after you cross a threshold line. If it is done correctly you will just not see it happen because you have no view into the room at the moment.

 

But I know what you are talking about, the "trigger rooms". In theory every zombie makes a stealth skill check the moment you cross the line and if distance and stealth is high enough the zombie will spawn but not detect you.

 

Also in theory any such situation can be "stealthed" even if you are detected by some zombies. Just run back a distance, hide behind a corner and wait for the zombies losing your scent (which happens faster with higher stealth). That you can't go undetected as a stealther all the time is AFAIK intended. But it is surely possible that the POI designers are overusing the trigger effect.

 

 

 

I made a video to explain what is happening. This is not the zombies making a stealth check, but the zombies being awake. Here is the YT link for the video so you can see.

 

 

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2 hours ago, meganoth said:

Possibly. I have experienced such a situation once or twice in my SP agility game as well where zombies seemed to come from nowhere. If it is an exception it is ok. But if POI designers have switched to making all new POIs full with such surprises then this might eventually make stealth unplayable or at least undesireable.

 

On the other hand: I had a fight in a warehouse that was difficult but perfectly stealthable. A zombie did drop on my head, but I had heard him before so he had obviously spawned. I just couldn't locate him because I couldn't see over a balcony. And then I got careless while trying to climb the balcony. I survived, narrowly.

 

 

Please remember that the zombie spawning is done this way because of performance. It is not what anyone wants, least of all TFP themselves, but they need to keep FPS up and there is no easy solution. Many many compromises in the game are only there for performance reasons. A voxel game with a fully destructible world can not use many of the tricks used by games with a static world. 

 

So, I on lower tier POI's, yes the stealth system works as designed. I am also not talking about zombies not spawning because they are to far away, I understand this. I am talking about hordes spawning in only after you cross a threshold point, already awake, and NOT being on the map at all until you do. Go to the Navezgane county jail, and you will see what I mean by this. it is about every 3rd room it feels like you cannot enter without triggering one of these spawn points. put on the debug mode, press numpad 0 to get the zombie stats displayed, then just walk in the front door. when you get to the end of the lobby, you will see what I mean about it spawning in a horde, and this is super fast to do. This mechanic is why stealth is dead.

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1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

Wasn't that always the case? I remember that I had to do tricks in the bear den for years to get the bears to spawn. The mechanism works well when the threshold is horizontal, but when you have to drop down it always was a problem triggering it without losing stealth.

 

Just for completeness sake, what I did was put a ladder so I could go down slowly and even when I fall off could exit again. I did do this on all occasion when I had to drop down somewhere, not only in the bear den

 

I never had an issue with the bears in the bear den, just went to the balcony on the second floor and broke in. I never once in A18-20 had an issue with zombies not having spawned in if I was close enough to their sleep position (I didn't really focus that much on it in 17 and of course 16 and earlier was a different game entirely). Now though, as another person has said, you can clear a room completely, be walking out the door and suddenly 5 zombies that were not there before just spawn in and start beating on you. it makes 0 sense from any perspective except the fun pimps want to stop people from "cheesing" certain mob rooms, but it means that stealth is largely pointless as you get 1-2 zombies with it sure, but the rest aren't spawning as sleepers but actively seeking you. it makes t5 poi's a lot less fun IMO because now I can't play stealth assassin when every other room has one of these trap spawns in it.

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So I have been playing in A21, and have made it to the Tier 5 quests, and I can confirm, stealth is worthless to complete ANY tier 4 or 5 POI. The problem with what the Fun Pimps have done is they have taken the mechanic that did exist in A20, where there were "trap points" that would wake up the sleepers no matter what when you hit a threshold, and made it even worse in that the zombies DO NOT SPAWN IN until you hit that specific trigger point. If you want proof of this, go to the Drive in tier 4 POI, clear out all the zombies, put on debug mode so you can verify that all zombies are dead. then jump through the roof into the loot room and watch as a new horde randomly spawns in awake and seeking, as part of the POI. Stealth was already only useful for raiding POI's, and now it is not even that as you cannot work around to kill them while still sleeping in higher tiers as they do not even spawn in. Fun Pimps needs to correct this I feel, as the stealth mechanics were fun puzzles to solve around.