Pernicious

When it's indoors, we call it condensation instead. So, every day?

But... they're dew collectors, not rain collectors!

Pretty sure any game stage penalties from deaths are "permanent" in the sense that you only catch them up by living extra days. However, the penalty isn't applied to the cap. I.e two otherwise equal players, if one dies the other doesn't, they both have the same cap, but the one who died will reach their cap a few days later. That info was from several versions ago, I have no idea if it has changed. Likewise, Screamers can't spawn during horde. I went through thr XML files to confirm that back in A19, may have changed since. It wouldn't really be an effective game mechanic anyway, since once you get late game, you really need a very powerful single thread CPU, tune the game settings, and have a base that lets you kill very, very fast (think multipath traps and a lot of explosives) to even have the chance of having most of them spawn in time. Otherwise, once you have hit the maximum zombie count, every zombie you kill spawns 50 blocks out. It takes time to run to you, and no more will spawn until you kill that one, no matter what the game stage says should be spawning.

I'm guessing you're hitting end game vehicles. Man, the 4x4, Gyro and Drone all need so much duct tape, and hence glue, and hence water! Can't believe We had all the steel, wheels and acid, all things meant to be a bit hard to get, before we had enough water, something meant to be easy to get.

Yeah! Everyone knows you just download Stable Diffussion for free, and... oh, wait.

Reminds me of Roko's Basilisk: Sorry, now you know of the Basilisk, if you don't help bring it into being, you will be tortured. Try searching for anything pregnancy or baby related just once. The stats on the amount mums to be spend, and how susceptible they are to being influenced (both because everyone wants best for their baby, and also since giving birth is such a "one off" experience, nobody has brand loyalty) means that one sniff that you might be expecting a child and advertisers selling baby goods will outbid any other advertisers bidding for your attention.

Gamestage is also affected by the number (and level) of other players in the your group. I believe there is also a difficulty multiplier. There was a per-player cap a few alphas ago, not sure if that is still present or has changed. So those really high game stages are for full groups on higher difficulties. It might not be achievable by solo players.

There's two conflated issues here. First, that information is collected about you, with no relation to generative AI. That's been going on for ages, and is nothing new. Everything you search for, or click from search engines is associated with you. Even your favourite websites which have Google Analytics and social media engagements buttons are tracking where you go, and what topics you're engaging with. The power of inference from these large datasets is amazing - you can infer very accurate from a couple months of browsing history, IP address, and devices they use, gender, age, political leaning, religion, all sorts of things you would have never directly searched for or engaged with. Companies sell this info not just to advertisers selling stuff, but also selling ideas... both from domestic politics (and not just the voting kind - just targeting people to change their mind about things like climate change and vaccination) to more insidious foreign interference. The other concern, I think is less of a concern to every day humans - that their data is used for machine learning. It's over simplifying it by stating it this way, but essentially, unless your topic is really obscure, all you're doing is very slightly changing a statistical weight for Gen AI to produce responses. For example, if you asked Gen AI "What is the consensus of 7D2D"? It's training material wouldn't have the exact phrasing you've typed. But if you (and lots of other people said "It's really fun but unbalanced", then Gen AI will reconstruct sentences with the words "fun" and "unbalanced" possibly using synonyms as well. If you're the only person to ever have said "The game is fantabulous!" Gen AI is not very likely to repeat that unless a lot of other sources said the same thing. So will Jen AI be used to train Gen AI? Possibly. Will you flirting with her build a profile on you for advertisers and political influence? Better read the EULA more carefully next time it changes.

Definitely seen that within the fully auto class of weapons. When the rpm goes up, the damage per round goes down so that the overall DPS is fairly similar. It's a real pity, because they have so many other variables to play with. Aside from the obvious clip size and recoil, there is reload speed, sway (movement of reticle while running/not crouched/prone), recoil recovery (how quickly reticle returns to normal), grouping bloom (how much variation bullets vary from centre of cross hair), bloom recovery, turn speed (how fast you can re-aim a machine pistol vs a squad automatic weapon), run speed, run stamina, armour/barrier penetration, weapon over heat, weapon jamming, usability as melee weapon (pistol whip, bayonet and rifle butt stroke vs damaging an SMG/misaligning a marksmans rifle, or unable to swing a squad automatic weapon). I'm sure there are dozens more I haven't thought of. Unfortunately it is people like OP who seem to insist all weapons have to be viable for their play style, so devs do tend to design that way.

100%. It has its uses, but solo clearing most POIs is not it. I find it curious that there are some who insist on an open sandbox game, every weapon must be equal for their play style and refuse to recognise that their play style isn't the only one. It'd be interesting to see TFP's stat's on how many people play with each weapon. Recently, Arrowhead really copped a public beating from their player base for nerfing a shotgun they claimed 30% of users using because they insisted that meant it was too OP. Player base insisted its popularity meant that it was the most fun. Kinda hard to argue with that.

Haha, early game, I was opposite. I cringed every time I heard his AK go off. Like, I could have taken out the Zombie with one round, you used a short burst! Now mid game, there's less friction. He gets all the standard 7.62 we find, and it's more than he needs. I make a very small amount of 7.62 AP - as in less than one stack for a full week, including horde night. We're not far off being able to make HP/AP for everyone.

Most often screamer packs. My friend and I were playing last night - we'd set aside the day to cook, craft, sort, etc. Of course, with forges and fires, and chemistry sets going, we got a couple rounds of screamers. I got most of the resulting pack of zombies before they even got to 10 blocks. The handful of irradiated that ran fast and couldn't be one shot, he got, but if they had got to melee range, I probably would have switched to spear. That's probably the ideal. If I only used that example, you could equally accuse me of contriving a comparison. But there are others: 1. Normal wandering packs, it's not even close. There are no irradiated there and fewer ferals. I usually wipe out the rest of the pack while he's still working on his first. 2. In some bigger POIs, where we know that waking the room causes a mass rush, we usually agree that I'll sneak in, clear the easily visible ones first, then either everyone else comes in and we take on the rest noisy. Or if I wake the room, everyone just runs in to bail me out while I switch to my spear. One of the things I love about this game is how flexible it is, and how it lets people do what they want, in innovative ways. There is no rigid roles, one "meta". I've seen people follow the torches and clear a POI as intended. I've seen others use timed charges blow holes on the outside of walls then throw down barbed wire to clear the worst part of POIs. I've seen people carry damn iron doors and hatches around as a way to chokepoint POIs. Everything has a purpose. Maybe not in a specific player's play style, and maybe not in every situation, but I love the fact the game is so open

Sure, but first tell me how useful that bone knife is for mining, you know, that one thing the game encourages you to do. Good job, just miss the point I made about you setting up a contrived situation for comparison and then making the sane contrived comparison in the reply.

You just know that someone is here to vent rather discuss/learn when they say "tell me why this is any good, and don't say <reason it is good>". It's a bit like coming in here and saying "What's the worst game on the market, and why did you say it was 7d2d?" Rifles are great in all stages of the game, not just late. @Misamor set up one scenario where the pistol shines, how about I have a go? 51 block range - Rifle damage 58 - Pistol damage? 0 A bit too contrived? (As if somehow comparing a side arm and long arm at point blank wasn't, but anyhow) Let's try another one. Say, at around 30 blocks. Assuming you have your aimbot on and hitting every shot, due to effective range, you're still doing about half damage of a lower damage gun, or needing about 4 hits to do the same damage as one round from a rifle. That means you're chewing through the party's resources pretty fast compared to a rifle user. Balance is both an art and a science. The only time I think you can conclusively say that balance is out, is if either nobody is using a weapon, or everyone is. Shy of that, preferences will come into play. Not everything has to be perfectly equal in all situations, or there might as well be no variations at all. We all just get one firearm called "gun".

That just reminded me... are those cop cars still in 1.0? Have 22 days in Navezgane and not seen one. Not sure if it's because of 1.0, or because I went back to a pregen.