Feedback for The Fun Pimps on Alpha 17

[AtomicUs5000]

I'm curious, how is your underground base doing now? Is the challenge sufficient?

 

Never tried it. I’m assuming it isn’t instant win anymore.

[AtomicUs5000]

What I meant was that that A16.4, for all its flaws in the AI, presented a more challenging horde night than A17 does. You stated you did want to go back to a version where the AI was no challenge, so I pointed out that that in the current version, the AI is even less challenging.

What I meant was going back to digging 3 blocks down and placing a frame over your head and calling it horde night. Perhaps there is something else that lessens the challenge more in A17, but it doesn’t matter... I don’t want to go back to a game where the 3-block grave insta-win exists.

[xXBadDreamXx]

doesnt matter what they do there are always ways to cheese the AI

[AtomicUs5000]

doesnt matter what they do there are always ways to cheese the AI

 

I suppose depending on your cheese definition. Of course there will always be a way to outsmart it... at least in this day and age. That doesn’t justify allowing full-blown exploits. Chess games would suck... but they don’t. They are rather good... but even the best is beatable. That doesn’t quantify as cheese.

 

Frankly, I hate that little phrase. Someone said it in these forum like 5 years ago and it gets passed around like its a commandment to this day. I thought it was wrong the first time I saw it posted. If this statement were in any way true, games would just stop being made.

 

Let's look at Pac-Man... one of the first games to have AI. Can that be cheesed? If you consider spending months studying its AI until every pattern of every ghost, even with its occasional randomness, is easily avoided and reacted to with split-second decision-making "cheese", then the phrase is correct. But it isn't and the phrase is wrong, and AI continues to be developed successfully for games to this day.

[hiigaran]

Every move TFP makes to push the game towards more meaningful survival choices they get major pushback from the "why are you punishing us?!?!?!" crowd. True survival games are a niche genre that many players cannot seem to stomach. I don't blame TFP for moving a bit more towards the mainstream genre of zombie shooter when every single time over the past several alphas whenever they do anything that makes it so that the player can actually starve to death (for example) they are met by waves of complaints that the game is a tedious food eating simulator.

 

People like Vic here in this thread only want rewards and label negative consequences for bad decisions as "punishing the player" and call it "bad game design". The worst possible result in a survival game is death and yet thread after thread after thread fights against TFP for instituting any kind of a death penalty. Recently, people have again been asking for a "drop nothing" on death option because going back to get your dropped gear is seen as too much of a punishment for dying.

 

Very few players seem to want to play if they have disadvantages. They want to be strong in all categories and never have to suffer consequences or fight back up to full strength when a setback happens. This is not new to A17. It has existed since the early days of the game.

 

This is why in a17.. Zombies are XP piٌatas. Ammo,medicines And food are everywere.in a few days we can build a super uber castle..with auto turrets..7dtd is mainly a tower defense /shooter Game.

There is no reason to call this a survival Game.

[Pr00ch]

FOV can be an accessibility issue for some users which is why it's disappointing for TFP to be talking about removing the ability to change it entirely.

 

Even though rendering a voxel world makes FOV more complicated, they should still be putting in the effort to make some amount of FOV adjustment available for those users who have vertigo issues and can be unable to play at the standard/current FOV setting.

 

Yeah I mean, I change it per console. If it weren't for that, the game would just be straight up unplayable as fov 65 makes me nauseous.

 

Let me rephrase. Fallout 4 doesn't have a slider and that is a great game.

 

That doesn't really connect. FOV isn't a game feature, it's a question of accessibility, like Aerial said in the post quoted above. Whether a game is great or not doesn't matter if you can't viably play it.

Suppose there's a fantastic shooter on steam, but it doesn't support a keyboard, mouse, or controller. It doesn't really make the core game bad, it's just that you can't "access" it because it supports no peripherals. It's a similar thing with FOV. A 65 FOV makes some people nauseous. They're not gonna play a video game that makes them vomit. Might as well not have a input peripheral.

[Roland]

btw, what is the console command for changing FOV? I think I used to play on 80 but haven't had any problems with the current setting. But I'm curious to change it back to 80 and see the difference.

[AtomicUs5000]

btw, what is the console command for changing FOV? I think I used to play on 80 but haven't had any problems with the current setting. But I'm curious to change it back to 80 and see the difference.

 

I think someone told me that it’s on_the_bubble

[Pr00ch]

btw, what is the console command for changing FOV? I think I used to play on 80 but haven't had any problems with the current setting. But I'm curious to change it back to 80 and see the difference.

 

It's:

sg OptionsFieldOfViewNew #

 

Where # is the FOV setting you want. I always play on 82 as well. Some people aren't bothered by a small FOV, but others are. It's like sea sickness, some people just have it.

[SylenThunder]

It's:

sg OptionsFieldOfViewNew #

 

Where # is the FOV setting you want. I always play on 82 as well. Some people aren't bothered by a small FOV, but others are. It's like sea sickness, some people just have it.

Yeah, for me I need 90 or 95. Lower and it gives me some pretty bad headaches. I'm playing on a 23 inch monitor, 3 feet away, with 1920x1080 resolution.

The current default FOV is ok for VR, though I still feel sick after about an hour of play.

[Roland]

I think someone told me that it’s on_the_bubble

 

That’s why there’s some urgency if I want to be able to satisfy my curiosity.

[xXBadDreamXx]

AtomicUS5000 i guess if i could perform a set of actions to make all the ghosts in pacman follow a set path making it easy for me to kill them then it would be called cheesy and an exploit. Hiding in a hole 3 blocks deep with a wood frame over your head to avoid horde nights was cheesy but at least it didnt make the zombies easier to kill which gave you tons of EXP for little work. Thats where were at now, an obvious way to cheese the AI to give yourself unfair advantage over other players by allowing you to kill the zombies more easily and get more EXP. call it whatever you want. I call it cheezyyyy

[thePankakeManne]

Beer/moonshine buff doesn't last for nearly long enough - it's like 30 seconds or something? I like the mechanic but it's just too complicated/expensive to produce for the duration it lasts. Certainly needs to go for longer (I presume fortbites/steroids are no different, but haven't tested personally).

 

Even so, getting "punch drunk" and going 1960s Batman on a minihorde is hilariously fun.

[Pr00ch]

Beer/moonshine buff doesn't last for nearly long enough - it's like 30 seconds or something? I like the mechanic but it's just too complicated/expensive to produce for the duration it lasts. Certainly needs to go for longer (I presume fortbites/steroids are no different, but haven't tested personally).

 

Even so, getting "punch drunk" and going 1960s Batman on a minihorde is hilariously fun.

 

Honestly the Pimps might want to look at Minecraft's alchemy system for inspiration. I think it got it down just right, not too simplistic but also not needlessly complicated.

[AtomicUs5000]

AtomicUS5000 i guess if i could perform a set of actions to make all the ghosts in pacman follow a set path making it easy for me to kill them then it would be called cheesy and an exploit. Hiding in a hole 3 blocks deep with a wood frame over your head to avoid horde nights was cheesy but at least it didnt make the zombies easier to kill which gave you tons of EXP for little work. Thats where were at now, an obvious way to cheese the AI to give yourself unfair advantage over other players by allowing you to kill the zombies more easily and get more EXP. call it whatever you want. I call it cheezyyyy

 

The hypothetical set of movements you speak of doesn't exist though. I am not understanding why you are imagining such actions. I brought up Pac-Man as a very simple example of a game with AI to not only show how long AI has been used in games successfully, but also that "there are always ways to cheese the AI" is a false statement. Something made up doesn't counter my presentation.

Regarding A16.4 horde night AI. Change the block above your head to iron bars and then you have a no-challenge XP grinder. The simplest possible XP grinder. A17 is at least a step up. You have to work to make those paths and ramps. My statement stands. I do not want to go back to A16.4.

[xXBadDreamXx]

no ones suggesting a step back to a16 but lets be honest about the way people make their base in a17 and its a downright cheat. not an exploit but a cheat. if you use a system to gain unfair advantage over other players its cheating. this is not better its actually worse. justify it however you need to but its still cheezy like an old brick of blue cheese

[Roland]

no ones suggesting a step back to a16 but lets be honest about the way people make their base in a17 and its a downright cheat. not an exploit but a cheat. if you use a system to gain unfair advantage over other players its cheating. this is not better its actually worse. justify it however you need to but its still cheezy like an old brick of blue cheese

 

I guess I missed your post where you outlined exactly how one player's base design gives them an unfair advantage over other players on the server. I'm trying to think of what base design one player could do that others couldn't and why that design would then give that one player an unfair advantage. Could you please describe what you are talking about?

[Pr00ch]

I just really wish I could disable zombies digging in the game options, i like comfy underground bases

 

also zombies are mountain goats lol I wish they couldn't climb and stand on very steep hills, they're even better at it than the player

[AtomicUs5000]

no ones suggesting a step back to a16 but lets be honest about the way people make their base in a17 and its a downright cheat. not an exploit but a cheat. if you use a system to gain unfair advantage over other players its cheating. this is not better its actually worse. justify it however you need to but its still cheezy like an old brick of blue cheese

Yes, somebody did suggest it. Not only in this thread, but in many since A17 came out.

 

I'm not disagreeing that most A17 bases "cheese" the AI. I believe I mentioned this on my own only a few posts ago in this very thread. What I am disagreeing with you on is that the way you "cheese" AI in A17 is worse than in A16. You are claiming it is worse, and I have presented how A16 is worse. You are saying it is worse because everybody can build a base with ramps and pathing. Am I saying A16 is worse because you don't even need to do that to get the same cheese.

 

Furthermore, we can extend this beyond bases and horde night. Previously, even with bigger roaming hordes, you could kite a group of zombies and suddenly all of them would forget what they were doing and wander away for easy picking. That doesn't happen now. You could put the game on always run and it wouldn't matter because at some point the zombies would stop and begin hitting a boulder or start running in circles, also making for easy picking. This also does not happen now.

 

I think what might be going on here is that maybe you either ignored these things in A16 or were not fully aware of them... but you are fully aware of all the A17 problems, so you are assuming A17 is worse based on this unbalanced experience.

 

The statement that this makes an unfair advantage or cheating is incorrect though... for both alphas. Roland already pointed out why. Unless perhaps you have some example that we are unaware of.

[xXBadDreamXx]

my bad i guess im wrong. it isnt cheating or exploiting at all . its just awesome and so much better yayyy

[AtomicUs5000]

That doesn't really connect. FOV isn't a game feature, it's a question of accessibility, like Aerial said in the post quoted above. Whether a game is great or not doesn't matter if you can't viably play it..

 

It was a joke. There exists a fascination with Fallout among the devs (or at least madmole)

[mr.natural]

I just really wish I could disable zombies digging in the game options, i like comfy underground bases

 

also zombies are mountain goats lol I wish they couldn't climb and stand on very steep hills, they're even better at it than the player

 

Use an entrance with blade traps, electric fences and a remote sensor.

 

For steep climbing you jump all the time, I outjump Z's easily.

[RipClaw]

Use an entrance with blade traps, electric fences and a remote sensor.

 

A pressure plate is better suited for this purpose. It does not consume electricity as long as nothing is activated. Therefore a generator can run forever. I wouldn't use solar panels for power supply at the moment because they would cause a lot of lag when charging the batteries.

[Krakadoom]

Warning: Wall of text inc.

 

New player’s take on A17.2. I had never played this game before this alpha.

 

- I started playing with a friend until about day 45, where he got bored and quit (level 65ish). At that point we had a farm going, adequate water supply, good defenses, etc. So no challenge left.

- Initially I was super scared to go toe to toe with anything, but getting the hang of the controls, most zombies are pretty easy to deal with.

- The fire axe is by far my favorite item/tool in the game.

- Coal feels REALLY scarce in Navezgane. I’ve mined just about everything else in abundance but zero coal anywhere.

 

Skill trees:

- I specced up in intelligence first because I love crafting in any game, but:

o It is not satisfying the way item quality works, where only really the amount of mod slots change (durability is a non issue by the time you can make high quality stuff anyway). Higher quality items should have either higher damage, faster swing speed or whatever else that can differentiate them in a useful manner.

o The massive amount of level gating is annoying and feels unnecessary. The whole point is you spend the skill points to do what you feel is worthwhile at the time. I would rather the most powerful perks cost more skill points instead, such as steel worker for instance (that one probably needs a level requirement too, to be honest, but you get my drift).

o The upper tiers of advanced engineering, cooking, etc. don’t seem useful at all really. Most skills that don’t give a percentage increase of some sort are better left alone after level 3 is reached more or less.

o Getting barter 5 and intelligence 10 is awesome. The trader is my main source of ammo, I go loot a few houses, sell all the junk to him and buy enough ammo for the next horde night.

- Sex Rex sounds much less useful than it is. I don’t know if there’s some weird stacking thing going on, but the low percentage bonus in the tooltip seems deceptive somehow.

 

Food and drink:

- Cooking was fun, getting new recipes and stuff, but now I find I just make a whole lot of steak and potatoes and that’s it. There could be more variety in the sorts of benefits different types of meals give.

- All the basic drinks suffer from the same thing. Making tea, coffee, yucca juice etc. all feels very same’y. Either there needs to be more variety in main effects or there should be more defined secondary effects, such as heat/cold resistance. And for coffee actually maybe addiction. I don’t know. Any variety is just welcome.

- “Recog” is cool and all, but the effect is SO short lived and the side effects are SO bad, that I would never in a million years use it for anything serious. I tested it once and stashed the rest. I would suggest a smaller damage bonus for a longer duration and a lower chance and lower duration of the side effect. Downside is too great.

- Grandpas recipes need better descriptions of what they actually do imo.

 

Trading:

- I have relied a lot on trading, which I LIKE is a viable strategy in this game. Please don’t tone that down, it’s where it needs to be barring exploits for dukes.

o The trader really favors high quality items, which is good I guess, but the price difference between low and high tier with more expensive base items does seems a little over the top sometimes.

o I make money making tier 6 iron clubs, sledgehammers and leather armor for the most part, then I make a run to all 4 traders in a day making 12-18.000 dukes, and spend it all on ammo, gunpowder and whatever else I need for the week. No complaints.

o The price for acid at the trader is WAY too high. At barter 5 it’s like 111 dukes, and military fiber is 39. So you need a 111 duke item to craft a 39 duke one – does not make sense.

o The price for mining helmets is high, I get almost 2k for each tier 6 helmet I make. This is probably a little too high, but considering you need two random drop items to make them, it probably should be expensive (maybe like 25% less so though).

 

Tools, crafting and building:

- The steel tools feel underwhelming when you come from fully modded iron tools. Like I had a tier 6 iron shovel and found a tier 3 steel shovel which was actually way worse. That’s not great.

- I don’t see the point of the nail gun compared to the already excellent clawhammer.

- The auger is something I had waited the entire game to try, but with a shovel that clears dirt in one swing, a pick that clears rock in two, etc. it did not feel worthwhile. Especially since it breaks super fast, takes a ton of fuel, and makes mining more chaotic. I no longer use it.

- Military armor salvages to too many fibers (9) compared to what it takes to make (12). This makes taking low grade military drops, salvaging them and crafting high tier stuff too easy.

- It took me until like day 60 to find any beaker at all. Then on that day I found 3. FML

- Farming. I like that you don’t destroy crops when you harvest them, but sometimes seeds just randomly disappear. Is this intended?? I can clear a row of corn, then go to the other side of my field and clear coffee or whatever, and when I come back there will be one or two corn seeds missing. It’s weird.

- Harvesting coffee especially is annoying because the hitbox is that 2d image the plant consists of. It’s hard to hit when next to other bulkier plants. The opposite goes for Yucca which is all over the place.

- Repairing barbed wire fences is a nightmare, because the hitbox is so limited. You have to hit the slender wooden legs of them, so it’s way too fiddly.

- Repairing iron spike traps is bugged. The first time you repair them, they will go to 100 %, but still look damaged. This will let you repair them again for no durability increase, so it’s only cosmetic. This means they essentially cost 2x the materials to repair fully of what they should. Also the hitboxes again are fiddly.

- I like the building system in general, however, as a new player the learning curve is quite steep. Like which materials can you use horizontally for how far, what upgrades to what, and how do you rotate properly. I was lucky to play with someone who knew a lot of this.

- Crafting is for the most part pretty satisfying. I like that you need schematics for more exotic items, but it’s just plain weird that they are one-use. Increase the material cost instead, please.

- I love reinforced concrete. It looks really nice. It took me a while to notice that rebar frames upgrade straight to that though, so I have wasted a LOT of materials upgrading all the way from wood over iron, to concrete to reinforced.

- I think glass should be a recipe you make with sand instead of just melting sand in the forge (which is not intuitive btw and took me ages to find out).

 

Biomes:

- I appreciate the concept of the biomes, but in practice it’s not working for me at all. The weather effects being local to a biome is one thing, but the block to block border thing just kills it. I know it’s a challenge to do anything more gradual, but perhaps for instance let each biomes placeables (litter, plants and monsters etc.) spawn up to 30 blocks into the neighboring zone so you get a sort of mixed flora and fauna on the borders. It would make it less jarring to go from one to the other, I think.

- I just stay away from the wasteland. I don’t like the aesthetic, there are vultures everywhere and there is no upside. I like forest and snow in general both in look and feel. More zombie variety in snow would be good.

- Desert looks cool, but the way heat works and with how hard it is to prep yourself for it, it’s not worth it. I go there for the trader, for my initial aloe farming setup and that’s it. There are not enough clothes appropriate for it in the game (with high enough heat resists), whereas there are plenty for cold.

 

Vehicles:

- I like the bicycle and the motorbike the best.

o The minibike doesn’t actually feel faster than the bike (by any margin that matters), so it felt a bit pointless except for storage.

o The motorbike feels GREAT, mostly because of the sound probably and that it feels heavy to drive.

o The 4x4 is pointless. Not much faster, a little more inventory but by this point in the game that doesn’t matter much, and it uses a TON more fuel.

o Generally, fuel consumption goes up too fast with vehicle tier I think for not much of an advantage to the higher tier vehicles.

 

Other stuff:

- I set my friend on fire accidentally by using the flaming hilt mod for my axe. Zombie caught fire, friend caught fire, friend panicked and died. Friend was not happy. It’s weird that I had to watch YouTube videos to find out that drinking water puts the fire out.

- The FPS in this game is poor, and I absolutely understand the engineering challenge involved since everything is destructible and surfaces depend on how much durability a block has etc. But it must be possible to optimize rendering further still. The game doesn’t seem very CPU dependent, though, so maybe something could be offloaded from the GPU. What do I know. On a GTX 1070 I should not be getting 40-50 FPS on a regular basis (with a lot of stuff turned down or off), however, if you want to give people a good experience come release time.

- The number of screamers I get poking around my base in a day is a little much. Hard to craft in peace (and it gets a little repetitive with the same mobs always poking around)

- The HUD is too limited I feel. It’s very simple, which is good, but a lot of need to know data is "hidden" in your character sheet when it doesn’t need to be. A better balance would be towards the more informative I feel.

- I don’t understand people bothering with ramp exploits etc. Horde nights aren’t that hard to begin with if you just play the game like it’s meant to.

 

I could go on for days probably, but I’ll stop before every one of you loses the will to live.

[Tok]

I have finally got a new PC and have been playing A17 for a few days now. Absolutely loving it so far! The new vehicles and weapon mods are amazing. I do miss the old recipe books for learning new armour/weapon recipes, but on the other hand it is also good having more stuff to work toward and make it worth while gaining xp. Every time I get a new xp point it takes me ages to decide where to use it and that is a good sign.

 

Also whoever does the work on the pois is a genius! I have had so much fun exploring them and always have a fresh pair of pants at the ready for when I walk into a room and suddenly it starts raining feral zombies.

 

One thing I did notice last night was the motorbike is a tad slower than I was hoping. I really love the look and sound of it, just wish it was a little bit faster. Is there any plan to add mods to vehicles? It would be so cool to find some performance parts in the pit stop garage crates that improve performance of the vehicles.

 

Edit: Just looked at the A18 thread and seen there are plans to add new books/recipes to find. I love you guys!