Weekend Arguments

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

If a game mechanic is so unattractive to players wanting to experience it, especially the game machanic the game is named after, they are skipping it I see that as a major issue with the game.

 

I personally love the horde nights. I cant believe anyone skips them. I wish we had hard data on the % of players that actually skip them.

 

I can't comment on percentages - I don't think anyone can, unless it's one of the metrics that the devs collect.

 

But I'm one of the players that switches off horde nights. I exclusively play in friends-only peer-to-peer games, and my friends and I prefer to play without horde night so we switch it off in the game settings.

 

The reason we switch it off is that horde night itself is just a chore. Once per game-week we have to stop our normal night-time activities and defend our horde base for the night instead. With the base well designed, there's no danger to us; but spending the night hitting and shooting an endless parade of zombies is just boring.

 

Sure, fighting zombies while looting a POI is fun, and dealing with wandering hordes is fine. You're in immanent danger, and have to deal with what the RNG gives you and adapt to your situation; and fights are quick and then you can get back to doing what you were doing. But spending 15-20mins of real time killing the seemingly endless stream on horde night that you've prepared for is anything but interesting.

 

To make it worse, prepping for horde night means spending large periods of time breaking rocks and chopping trees making concrete. My group aren't miners. We don't enjoy spending time underground clicking on rocks. In fact we don't mine at all, just harvesting surface rocks for what we need. But even then it's a chore. Time spent repairing and building the horde base is not a fun activity, so all the time we have to spend doing that is time that we could be spending doing fun activities like scavenging and looting and adding to the home base (as opposed to the horde base - they have completely different design requirements). We can scavenge enough cobblestone and concrete to keep the home base nice without needing to mine, so that doesn't feel like work.

 

So in short, we turn horde night off because from our point of view it adds nothing to the game and it actively detracts from our fun by forcing us to devote time and effort to handling it - time and effort that we could be spending doing fun things. Until the option to turn it off was introduced, dealing with it was the "cost" of having fun in the rest of the game, but since we can now switch off that cost, we do.

[Kage848]

I can't comment on percentages - I don't think anyone can, unless it's one of the metrics that the devs collect.

 

But I'm one of the players that switches off horde nights. I exclusively play in friends-only peer-to-peer games, and my friends and I prefer to play without horde night so we switch it off in the game settings.

 

The reason we switch it off is that horde night itself is just a chore. Once per game-week we have to stop our normal night-time activities and defend our horde base for the night instead. With the base well designed, there's no danger to us; but spending the night hitting and shooting an endless parade of zombies is just boring.

 

Sure, fighting zombies while looting a POI is fun, and dealing with wandering hordes is fine. You're in immanent danger, and have to deal with what the RNG gives you and adapt to your situation; and fights are quick and then you can get back to doing what you were doing. But spending 15-20mins of real time killing the seemingly endless stream on horde night that you've prepared for is anything but interesting.

 

To make it worse, prepping for horde night means spending large periods of time breaking rocks and chopping trees making concrete. My group aren't miners. We don't enjoy spending time underground clicking on rocks. In fact we don't mine at all, just harvesting surface rocks for what we need. But even then it's a chore. Time spent repairing and building the horde base is not a fun activity, so all the time we have to spend doing that is time that we could be spending doing fun activities like scavenging and looting and adding to the home base (as opposed to the horde base - they have completely different design requirements). We can scavenge enough cobblestone and concrete to keep the home base nice without needing to mine, so that doesn't feel like work.

 

So in short, we turn horde night off because from our point of view it adds nothing to the game and it actively detracts from our fun by forcing us to devote time and effort to handling it - time and effort that we could be spending doing fun things. Until the option to turn it off was introduced, dealing with it was the "cost" of having fun in the rest of the game, but since we can now switch off that cost, we do.

 

I guess we just have played the game too much. We know how to build a base that cant be defeated. That's just the way of gaming. You play the game, learn it and beat it.

 

I choose to put limits on myself sometimes though, to give the zombies a chance. I'm guessing you dont.

 

Thats cool. If I had to bet though I'd bet your in the vast minority. But I have no way to prove that. Just a gut feeling.

 

That being said this is a problem with the game imho. We need high end settings for high end base builders. Maby a block damage bonus added to the raise in difficulty. Something to challenge people like yourself?

[Eliphas the Inheritor]

You are talking about not driving on BM. I'm talking about being able to drive but still have challenges in doing so.

 

I agree those options feel like cheating but one option is to turn BM off. If you are driving away from horde night anyway what is the difference? So if on a server you would pick a server that turned this on or off but will not pick a server that has BM turned off? Is it cheating to rent a room at the trader vs driving away all safe?

 

You keep saying we don't understand but we do. We can agree to disagree on that and leave it at that as far as that goes because it seems to us the other way around.

 

As far as options in the menu go. It has been brought up before not every little thing will have options. So try and find away to come up with something besides saying have an option to turn on and off because that isn't a guarantee to happen.

 

Already did come up with something if you look up at my recent posts, some people may have already suggested the ideas that I wrote but I don't know. Instead of stopping the engine on horde nights, why not increase the requirements of the vehicles? Why not make oil insanely hard to find (if you want a challenge). Another idea would be to add a jamming mechanic to the game where the vehicles can have a random chance to jam depending on quality parts or because of too many zombies that were killed by driving over them (too much bones and flesh that pile up and jam the car?).

 

I came up with some ideas besides having an option to turn off BM driving and I won't write them on every post. And no, it's not cheating to rent a room, but I don't want to depend on the trader to avoid dealing with a horde. I want to feel like I actually achieved something in building my vehicle, so that...the whole effort was worth. That's why I suggested to make oil harder to find if you want a challenge, fine, but let the vehicles still be useful during horde nights.

 

I don't see TFP coming up with a mechanic like in State of Decay for example where the zombies could actually jump on your vehicle and keep bashing it till they either damage it so hard that it explodes or drag you out of it, and YES, I have thought about such a feature too. So I doubt that driving during the BM with increased difficulty is a thing.

[Tin]

MM gave out a few ideas about the horde night driving thing, not all of them where about the "stormy thingy" that stop vehicles from working. So just sounded like he was throwing out ideas is all. imo at least.

[ecv]

But pressing your finger on the "W" button is a meaningful acitivity for you and not wasting time, and doesn't count as practically afk?

 

Ok, and how does driving around on BM help you with that?

 

No. As I said, I log out. I want a way to skip it.

Driving around is as silly as waiting it out, unless they implement something fun while driving.

[ecv]

If you don't want to fight the horde, then turn it off in game settings. If you play on a server with that setting on.... you made that choice. Log off or play the game.

 

Just like with underground bases it's not about discrimination against your play style, it's about balancing the game in general. Things that have no challenge make the game boring and just like underground bases, if the devs say it shouldn't be, stop using other users as strawmen when asking who says they can't play the way they want. For people who make the game, that's who.

 

Games often last for two months or longer. After a while the hordes become boring. They are fun while being low level.

So no, either, or is not the best choice here for me

[Aurelius]

If a game mechanic is so unattractive to players wanting to experience it, especially the game machanic the game is named after, they are skipping it I see that as a major issue with the game.

 

I personally love the horde nights. I cant believe anyone skips them. I wish we had hard data on the % of players that actually skip them.

 

I've never turned hordes off, but I have skipped horde nights. I find them to be a grind, and not much of a challenging one at that.

 

I agree that it's a mechanic that really needs to be revisited.

 

-A

[HalFront]

If you want to stay friends, stop this immediately. Make a rule that everyone gets to open one box in the end room of a POI you loot together. And loot, no matter how good your LL skill is. The fun of the group is more important and the LL bonus not that big.

 

Or better yet, let the highest LL open the crates but then share. A good group doesn't hog the loot they should share based on who needs what IMO.

[asmosnuts]

Horde nights are affected by the same mechanic that affects the rest of the game, numbers. So many zs crammed into cupboards means next to none outside, I mean wandering hordes of 4 really?

Lack of being able to generate sufficient numbers led to the "special" zombies that only exist to mitigate this and damage buildings quickly.wandering hordes used to be a threat with numbers.

Horde nights were fun with spiders and lil witchy girl and loads of zombies, Now as soon as you get to sickly yellow hordes its just a war of attrition that most people dont want to fight. Wheres the explanation for maps empty of zombies that suddenly appear every week? maybe its agoraphobia therapy night!

Building a horde base and defending it were fun and to an extent still are early on, even a raider horde might be a laugh until the numbers problem kicks in and you have bright blue bosses surrounding you every week! Hoping the game gets back on track but fear its too far in the wrong path now.

[beerfly]

Ahwwww.. Can I keep it? I promise to walk it twice a day!

 

Careful, it gets cranky when hungry.

[Grue]

I tested a lot wandering horde sizes to find out sweet spot for my server and found that around 130 is fine, never had any issues with no spawning zombies in POIs even while all biome spawns were multiplied by 10 so there were "wandering hordes" everywhere. But when I set hordes to 300+ the problem was that zombies got completely confused and stopped attacking players, they were uninterested in us.

Still, seeing 150 zombies coming your way and breaking through everything, also jumping over traders fence is a spectacular sight, so when you say that players can stay safe inside traders place during BM, I say - not on my server, they WILL jump over fence very easily and stay inside those walls up until player decides to leave.

Increasing biome spawns also resulted funny stuff as for some reason zombies love to hang around traders entrances, every time someone wanted to trade he had to run past 40-60 zombies and quickly close the door, obviously leaving the place was never done by using gates, only jumping from wall

Please, if you make another zombie game, make sure you can have 300+ zombie hordes, it completely changes the game, thanks!

 

What were you doing to tweak the sizes?

 

I imagine if you get too many active at one time it overwhelms the AI and they stop getting proper instructions to function.

[eXSe]

Large zombie groups? Well, that I haven't seen in a while on vanilla. Sounds interesting, but I guess it murders the FPS though

 

The OCD in me would want me to kill them all off near the trader, but that would just spiral the leveling and the game stage out of control.

[Kattla]

Perfect balance is boring.

Variety is the spice of life. I'd much rather see vehicles become a little bit more

unreliable all the time instead of just on blood moon horde nights.

[warmer]

I am sure this has been answered before, but I am not really sure how to look up the answer.

 

How long/far does a horde on bloodmoon follow you?

 

It would be interesting if you got more than 1km away if a new one would spawn 500m away in the direction you are currently going and head towards you. That would make escaping on a vehicle less viable.

[Vaeliorin]

I once had a couple zombies from a Blood Moon horde follow me a couple kilometers in A16. I wasn't so much running from the horde as running back to my new base after I accidentally stepped in front of a shotgun turret, though, so I was on foot liquored up on grain alcohol.

[RipClaw]

How long/far does a horde on bloodmoon follow you?

 

It depends on how fast you are compared to the zombies. I tested it with a bicycle once. If I keep the zombies within rendering distance, they run after me the whole night. Outside the render distance, the zombies seem to give up at some point. And since the zombies aren't dead, no new zombies spawn.

 

It would be interesting if you got more than 1km away if a new one would spawn 500m away in the direction you are currently going and head towards you. That would make escaping on a vehicle less viable.

 

500m would be way too much. The zombies in the horde night spawn less than 100m from your base. Compared to A16, the distance seems to have been shortened.

 

Malmole has written that they will probably do it in such a way that the zombies try to run in front of your vehicle and you have to dodge. I hope you don't have to be a racing professional to dodge the zombies but that an average player can do it as well.