Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[Roland]

8 hours ago, Forgotten Memes said:

I don't say all because I've studied how intellectually dishonest people such as yourself work.  We ALL know there are exceptions to every rule, but you'll pretend you've won an argument by identifying an exception where everyone else merely assumed it and focused on the larger trend.

I didn't pretend to win an argument. I simply joked about how you are speaking for nearly all the players in the world. I also put forth a different narrative than you were suggesting. In your narrative the blood moon horde is the whole reason for playing the game. If a build doesn't work well for surviving the blood moon horde in the specific manner that you are thinking it should be survived then you declare that that build is not worth investing into and declare that nearly all people are going to disregard that build. I'm pointing out that there are those who see the bloodmoon horde as one event that takes place during one night out of seven full days and nights of other activities.

 

Now if you want to be intellectually honest, yourself, you will stop trying to aggrandize your point of view by adding the tag "most all players" and to marginalize my point of view by tagging it with "exceptions to the rule" and simply state your case as being your own preference and experience. I'm also not sabotaging anything. I'm offering an alternative view and it obviously so unsettles your agenda that instead of discussing the point I brought up you have to resort to an ad hominem route against me (and people such as myself) and to claim the unknown majority as being on your side.

 

I am all for improvements to all of the perks but I am also very much in favor of asymmetrical builds that have pros and cons and strengths and weaknesses. I have no idead if most other players are with me or not on that but I'm not trying to be their spokesman either. 

[Roland]

2 hours ago, madmole said:

Says the guy who might not have tried it fully?

Run and gun, who needs a base? Go run through a crowd slitting throats and watch them bleed out or smg them and laugh while running and reloading. As long as you have coffee or cardio you are fine. Jump 3 meters onto ledges you make to catch your breath, etc. Is it the most DPS beast build? Hell no, but it is a breath of fresh air.

 

Okay, but doing those things is somewhat out of character for someone who is playing stealth. You even brainstormed on the forums in the past that the stealth player once fully perked might be able to remain undetected on the blood moon night if they so desired. That has as of yet never materialized and may never end up happening. I was simply giving an example of how that can be accomplished with current game mechanics for someone wanting to always be stealthy. Sitting at the top of a large building is going to keep you safe during blood moon. Also digging down to bedrock under a large mountain so that you are beyond the vertical detection range will work. Not saying I would do these things or that a stealth player can't switch things up and go non-stealthy on horde night as you described. I'm just pointing out that for people who like stealth but don't enjoy head on confrontation with the blood moon horde there are options that go along thematically with the build they chose which lets them have a lot of fun for all the other days.

 

Now if you plan to close those particular blood moon avoidance techniques then Stealth players will have to switch up their methodology as long as their perks don't give them stealthy options for blood moon.

[faatal]

9 hours ago, Forgotten Memes said:

 

You're exaggerating.   A significant percentage of zombies in any given POI are in closets, ceilings or otherwise impossible to stealth kill.

 

The reason this play style is eschewed by nearly all players is because it offers no benefit to the actual challenges of the game.   A nurse sleeping in the middle of a living room isn't a threat.  It's the trap room where the floor collapses and you're surrounded by 6 big mommas, the wandering dog packs and the horde nights that kill people.  Stealth are wasted points in these situations.

 

Stealth kills are satisfying and we all use them on occasion, but it's not a legitimate primary play style for a horde defense game.

Not exaggerating. That is exactly what I did in that POI, which was a typical house. Closets? Stabbed with knife to break, then stab zombie. Ceilings? Don't remember any up there in that POI, but would shoot with bow.

If a trap happened and they heard/saw you or sleepers jumped out of the wall or whatever, then you deal with it. No one said you could play the game 100% stealth. If you don't like stealth, then don't put points in it.

 

Legitimate? What does that even mean? We should be playing games for fun. "Strength is the best, so if you don't play that you are dumb.....". I'll play the game however I think is fun, not based on some min/maxer nightmare.

[Adam the Waster]

50 minutes ago, wolfbain5 said:

ah, you want the precursor to the gatling. watch some old clint eastwood westerns. he liked using preload revolvers. they are slow reloads, so he just carried extra cylinders that were also preloaded. they were breach loaded cylinders.

 

edit: as far as I can tell. there can't be an immersive stone age version for intel or fortitiude ranged weapons. or even the stun baton. those 3 are specifically technically advanced. I think it allows most players to focus on the trees that add to more survivability early on.

Kinda but not super crazy! just a "simple" 6 barreled Muzzle loader that you have to turn the barrel manually. the best Example i can give is the Hydra revolver from Atlas, is it real? no does it make sense? Kinda? could someone make it? sure!  

 

and with the stun baton. again it does not have to be that advanced! just a rebar Rod with some wires and a old battery and Boom you have some "shocky thingy"

 

 

35 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

🤨 Puckle, not pickle. You're also forgetting volley guns (which were multi-barreled muzzle loaders that fired one barrel after the other till all of them were fired when they the trigger was pulled, some were huge and some were rifle sized) in your hyper focus on the cattleman revolver rifle. Flintlock is an action type which was used for rifles, muskets, pistols, volley guns, and a few smaller cannon designs.

 

The blunderbuss in game is a cap lock (uses percussion caps, part of the reloading animation includes the seating of a new percussion cap on the nipple).

thats the GUN i was looking for! i just did not know the name! thank you! but they could make something like that but it fires one round at a time.

 

 

 

and i can call it what ever i want! the Pickle gun©

 

[faatal]

8 hours ago, Forgotten Memes said:

It's both fun and rewarding.

To you.

As my wife likes to point out, she does not think like me. She recently discovered enneagram personality types and indeed we, our children and friends are all different types, so we all think and operate differently in life.

[Roland]

8 hours ago, FileMachete said:

Hard to argue against tagging a few perks as 'noob traps'. Would be interesting to see what the analytics show about their use.

 

Well, TFP's philosophy has been to provide different avenues for progression.

 

You can use skill points to perk into a recipe or

You can loot and find the recipe or

You can go to the trader and purchase the recipe.

 

It is understandable that people will feel they wasted their skill point if five minutes later they loot the recipe for whatever it is they spent their skillpoint on or see it in the store and they have the funds to purchase it. Does that make it a flaw in the game design? I don't know. Because....in other cases you find a schematic for something you never would have perked into because of other decisions you made and now you have access to that part of the game.

 

We have a potion to respec points if your luck as too closely mirrored your skillpoint purchases. If you feel you must have something now and can't leave it up to luck then that is a skillpoint well spent even if you get the schematic later. 

 

I think the more important criticism is not that you might find a chili dog recipe moments after spending a skillpoint in cooking but that if you find schematics for weapons outside of your chosen attributes you can only ever craft those weapons at the lowest brown level which isn't very exciting. That's why I'd like to see reading duplicate schematics progressing you up a quality level for each duplicate. It isn't going to happen so often you will be able to craft blues in everything but through some luck and some bartering with all the traders you eventually find, you might be able to craft one or two other high quality weapons that you'll never spend the skillpoints to unlock. It will also make finding a duplicate schematic more exciting.

[faatal]

4 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

I also think the new telemetry thing will help you further more, it was a smart move to add it.

You just have to be careful to not read "too much" from it. 😉

We probably missed some things we need to record and not easy interpreting what we are getting. Being experimental the data is skewed by more experienced players.

[Khalagar]

6 hours ago, Gazz said:

No worries.

Feedback that perk A or B is the one must-have perk in the game while perk or attribute D and E are completely useless to anyone - that kind of nonsense can safely be ignored because we know for a fact that this is false.

 

I'm sorry, but this is just not true lol

 

I don't think there's a single person who's put any thought into it, that would say the Charismatic Nature in Int tree is a good perk, especially in solo since, y'know it doesn't even work solo.

 

There's always going to be tier lists in games, it's inevitable no matter how much people want to claim "All weapons are viable in Monster Hunter". I don't think some perks being better than others is a world ender, and I don't really want the top perks nerfed, I just prefer the bad perks to be a bit less niche

 

Perks like stealth are bad because Stealth is bad currently. Charismatic nature is bad because the stats it offers are super weird and pointless and the range is not large as best I can tell. Certain weapons like the machete and knife are bad because bleed is completely pointless.

 

That's not to say you can't make a weird bleed focused support build that provides an aura that buffs allies, it's just saying that those perks are bad in far, far more situations than they are good in. The perks aren't actually useless to every single possible player in every single possible situation they are just bad more often than they should be

 

 

I have to agree with this poster below

 

8 hours ago, Forgotten Memes said:

We ALL know there are exceptions to every rule, but you'll pretend you've won an argument by identifying an exception where everyone else merely assumed it and focused on the larger trend.

 

This is why we have to use "weasel words" because if I say "Nobody picks Charismatic Nature" I'll get 10 posts saying "This guy who has 0.000124 minutes in the game picked it one time!!!!" and it's like "Uh okay yeah I didn't literally mean nobody, I mean so few people that the  few people who pick it don't matter statistically"

 

9 hours ago, beHypE said:

That being said you need to get together and discuss Run n Gun, because one of you thinks the game can't be played without it and the other one thinks it's a waste. Who's boss? 

 

I don't think I ever mentioned run and gun. I think it's an okay average perk. I put a single point in it this play through but don't normally because it's normally not that impactful, but it's nice to have. Depends on your play style, junk turrets or melee play styles don't really need it, and even gun focused builds don't really need it that badly, but it's decent

 

 

 

But yeah, people will RP. I do too. I pick a cool new play style and then make an optimal build for that play style. Like in Skyrim, unarmed is not very good, but I'll figure out how to make the best unarmed character and then play through using unarmed. It's not about min maxxing the most efficient possible build over all, it's just about picking the abilities that are actually good

 

I play Junk Turrets in this game lol, only people who've never used them think they are OP. I can pull out my unperked M60 or an Auto shottie and easily put out twice the damage for half the resource expenditure (in the case of the shotgun) of my Junk Turrets. Junk Turrets are not the most optimal build, but I play them because they are fun. I just make sure I have an optimal junk turret build ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

 

 

Speaking of Junk Turrets, what do you guys think about the new Junk Ammo types? I've been trying them out a bit and I'm kind of iffy on them. The AP ammo can only be made at a work bench which hurts it a lot in my book, because I usually craft hundreds of Junk ammo while I'm going through houses breaking down metal stuff. The shotgun ammo takes buckshot and it's damage doesn't seem very good compared to just using a level 1 unperked shotgun

 

On the upside, Junk Turret actually seems less terribad in handheld form, I've actually found myself using it handheld sometimes which is something I would have NEVER done in A18. The shotgun ammo for it could be a role play gimmick to replace a real shotgun, it's just a bit too costly and cumbersome to make I think. Still testing though

 

Anyone used either new ammo?

[MechanicalLens]

57 minutes ago, Roland said:

I didn't pretend to win an argument. I simply joked about how you are speaking for nearly all the players in the world. I also put forth a different narrative than you were suggesting. In your narrative the blood moon horde is the whole reason for playing the game. If a build doesn't work well for surviving the blood moon horde in the specific manner that you are thinking it should be survived then you declare that that build is not worth investing into and declare that nearly all people are going to disregard that build. I'm pointing out that there are those who see the bloodmoon horde as one event that takes place during one night out of seven full days and nights of other activities.

 

Now if you want to be intellectually honest, yourself, you will stop trying to aggrandize your point of view by adding the tag "most all players" and to marginalize my point of view by tagging it with "exceptions to the rule" and simply state your case as being your own preference and experience. I'm also not sabotaging anything. I'm offering an alternative view and it obviously so unsettles your agenda that instead of discussing the point I brought up you have to resort to an ad hominem route against me (and people such as myself) and to claim the unknown majority as being on your side.

 

I am all for improvements to all of the perks but I am also very much in favor of asymmetrical builds that have pros and cons and strengths and weaknesses. I have no idead if most other players are with me or not on that but I'm not trying to be their spokesman either. 

And for some of us, it can go both ways.  From my experience, sometimes the 6 days leading up to the next horde is a countdown. My base needs to be upgraded further, my ammo topped off, and if I can, I'll sneak in a loot raid here and there to hopefully acquire some better gear. Other times, I've done everything I've needed to accomplish and more, and I can slack off for a few days. For the entirety of this current in-game day in my world, I've done nothing but craft and place furniture blocks, decorating a room to my imagination's content while getting nothing productive done. Sometimes, time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

[faatal]

1 hour ago, Adam the Waster said:

i just settled in the burnt forest and when night comes it's scary!

 

a zombie ran at me and that scared me! very nice job there 

It will be scarier next experimental, since it will be darker when less than a full moon.

[Roland]

5 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

For the entirety of this current in-game day in my world, I've done nothing but craft and place furniture blocks, decorating a room to my imagination's content

 

"If it doesn't directly contribute to increasing your dps on horde night it should be changed so that it does!"

                                                                   -- nearly all people

 

That settles it.... placing furniture in accordance to feng shui should give your base a 20% durability boost and all weapons fired within the LCB of that base a 10% damage boost. Otherwise it is clearly an activity not worth doing.

[MechanicalLens]

20 minutes ago, Roland said:

think the more important criticism is not that you might find a chili dog recipe moments after spending a skillpoint in cooking but that if you find schematics for weapons outside of your chosen attributes you can only ever craft those weapons at the lowest brown level which isn't very exciting. That's why I'd like to see reading duplicate schematics progressing you up a quality level for each duplicate. It isn't going to happen so often you will be able to craft blues in everything but through some luck and some bartering with all the traders you eventually find, you might be able to craft one or two other high quality weapons that you'll never spend the skillpoints to unlock. It will also make finding a duplicate schematic more exciting.

But then I ask, why craft them in the first place? You already claimed that it would take quite a while before you had found more than one schematic of a particular weapon. By that point, I argue, you would have already found that weapon, and probably at a better quality. The relevancy of it cancels itself out; if you are a stay-at-home worker and you want to craft better quality tiers of weapons that you'll never invest into (the perk), then you'll need the weapon schematics. By the time they have looted or purchased several particular weapon schematics from a trader, the purpose of crafting that weapon would probably have been rendered obsolete anyway. Just food for thought.

[Jarod_Silverstar]

1 minute ago, faatal said:

It will be scarier next experimental, since it will be darker when less than a full moon.

What is the lean on the next exp build? Before the weekend or after?

[Roland]

2 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

But then I ask, why craft them in the first place? You already claimed that it would take quite a while before you had found more than one schematic of a particular weapon. By that point, I argue, you would have already found that weapon, and probably at a better quality. The relevancy of it cancels itself out; if you are a stay-at-home worker and you want to craft better quality tiers of weapons that you'll never invest into (the perk), then you'll need the weapon schematics. By the time they have looted or purchased several particular weapon schematics from a trader, the purpose of crafting that weapon would probably have been rendered obsolete anyway. Just food for thought.

Possibly...but if you perked into Shotguns and like using your shotgun but also have lots of ammo not used by a shotgun  and can craft a blue M60 then that has some relevance. As of now you can be pretty assured that you will find one in loot or as a quest reward or in secret stash but as Madmole continues to work with the rarity of things it may not always be such a sure thing.

 

Mainly it gives finding a duplicate schematic some more oomph. Right now you can scrap it for a pitiful amount of paper or sell it for some dukes or read it again for some xp. This would add some extra reward to reading it again-- even if you did not end up using it thanks to luck. For MP it could give greater incentives to trading with other players and you may even get to a high quality craft before you can find such a gun if a number of others in your party are finding them and handing them over.

[Adam the Waster]

10 minutes ago, faatal said:

It will be scarier next experimental, since it will be darker when less than a full moon.

Sweet but what about the wasteland?

 

 

 

i know this is another can of worms but the wasteland just feels like "burnt forest but with rocks and trash everywhere!" 

 

back in A18. the wasteland had its own feeling, the green fog/hue and that area feels radioactive! while now it just burnt forest but with rocks!

 

any plans of changing thing? 

[MechanicalLens]

4 minutes ago, Roland said:

Possibly...but if you perked into Shotguns and like using your shotgun but also have lots of ammo not used by a shotgun  and can craft a blue M60 then that has some relevance. As of now you can be pretty assured that you will find one in loot or as a quest reward or in secret stash but as Madmole continues to work with the rarity of things it may not always be such a sure thing.

 

Mainly it gives finding a duplicate schematic some more oomph. Right now you can scrap it for a pitiful amount of paper or sell it for some dukes or read it again for some xp. This would add some extra reward to reading it again-- even if you did not end up using it thanks to luck. For MP it could give greater incentives to trading with other players and you may even get to a high quality craft before you can find such a gun if a number of others in your party are finding them and handing them over.

Agreed, it's a fine balance between people never getting the opportunity to craft their own weapons via the schematic upgrades, vs what we had in A17 where everyone was crafting their own weapons, purples aside. Why go searching for the better pistol or AK-47 when you can just craft them at home, even without perks spent into them? Balancing on eggshells here.

[Roland]

28 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

This is why we have to use "weasel words" because if I say "Nobody picks Charismatic Nature" I'll get 10 posts saying "This guy who has 0.000124 minutes in the game picked it one time!!!!" and it's like "Uh okay yeah I didn't literally mean nobody, I mean so few people that the  few people who pick it don't matter statistically"

That was the point of my joke. It doesn't matter whether you say "all players" or "nearly all players" because that is all just exageration anyway for wanting to claim the majority of players regardless of whether that is 70% or 80% or 99.9876%.  The ploy is to bolster your weak argument by claiming the support of the majority. At best you are simply naive in actually believing that most everyone is just like you and you just cannot imagine that anyone could have fun playing in a different manner than you find fun.

 

Just use "I" statements and let your viewpoint stand on it's own merits without trying to borrow strength from some majority of players. Not even TFP is trusting what they see in hard data as true majorities until the build is stable and goes public. If the analytics can't be fully trusted yet then random dude posting on the internet's gut feeling about the majority being right in line with his own preferences isn't going to fly either.

 

I like asymmetric design and I appreciate completely different strengths and weaknesses in different builds. I am less interested in symmetric design where all the attributes are going to be equally strong on horde night. I am not concerned with always choosing the most efficient and highest dps strategy. Therefore I don't want the game "improved" in the ways some are suggesting it needs to be "improved".

[madmole]

5 hours ago, meilodasreh said:

This. Exactly.

Where can I vote for this post alone become a sticky. With tag "please read this before complaining about aspect XYZ of the game is too *insert lamentation here* considering my playstyle"

Don't worry I can't even hear squeaky wheels in my old age
Especially when we simply know otherwise. The perks are fine for average players. Opinions will always vary. I laugh at all the critics about Skyrim, to me it was perfect. When one oddball out of a thousand makes a big stink about something, he just needs a mod is all. You can't please everyone, that is what mods are for.

I still read as much as I can, put it in a mental catalogue, think about it, etc. Nothing big is happening, but I can agree that stealth isn't finished and doesn't quite feel how I want it to feel. I cannot even elaborate on that yet until I do another stealth build and sink at least 40 hours into it.

Not everything needs to be balanced. But everything needs to be rewarding in some way and make you feel like a badass in a way that reflects the archtype you are going for.

To me Perception, Agility and INT still need some love and are not shippable.

2 hours ago, Vintorez said:

Any plans to change the current blunderbuss model? Considering it's supposed to be a "look, it's technically a gun!" weapon, it seems strange to have an actual forged-for-purpose pirate boomstick model.

 

It'd feel more suitable if it was literally like an iron pipe banded to a stick, with a match on a tension spring swinging against the matchbox into a flash pan.

No not really. But once we get the pipe weapons in for the other classes that could change and suddenly it feels out of place.

[beHypE]

But then I ask, why craft them in the first place? You already claimed that it would take quite a while before you had found more than one schematic of a particular weapon. By that point, I argue, you would have already found that weapon, and probably at a better quality. The relevancy of it cancels itself out; if you are a stay-at-home worker and you want to craft better quality tiers of weapons that you'll never invest into (the perk), then you'll need the weapon schematics. By the time they have looted or purchased several particular weapon schematics from a trader, the purpose of crafting that weapon would probably have been rendered obsolete anyway. Just food for thought.

 

 

Maybe the solution to that could be to totally untie the weapon quality from crafting from the governing perk, while making the schematic way more common, each read unlocking the next level of quality until your reach level 5. Unless I totally forgot to think about some weird side effect, I think I would totally like that feature. 

[MechanicalLens]

6 minutes ago, beHypE said:

 

 

 

Maybe the solution to that could be to totally untie the weapon quality from crafting from the governing perk, while making the schematic way more common, each read unlocking the next level of quality until your reach level 5. Unless I totally forgot to think about some weird side effect, I think I would totally like that feature. 

Playing Devil's Advocate here, I ask, why? All that would be doing would be moving a perk-based system into an RNG one. Again, maybe I'm missing something here. It's always going to be a constant arm's race between crafting what you need and finding that equivalent item or greater later on or before. It seems that TFP have decided that looting is more engaging than crafting and should be placed on a taller pedestal (not arguing against that here, just making an observation).

[madmole]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

Now if you want to be intellectually honest, yourself, you will stop trying to aggrandize your point of view by adding the tag "most all players" and to marginalize my point of view by tagging it with "exceptions to the rule" and simply state your case as being your own preference and experience. I'm also not sabotaging anything. I'm offering an alternative view and it obviously so unsettles your agenda that instead of discussing the point I brought up you have to resort to an ad hominem route against me (and people such as myself) and to claim the unknown majority as being on your side.

Yeah it is rather annoying when people subjectively read what they want to read and hear what they want to hear, then say "the community" or "the player base". Truth is 99.9% of the player base does not get on reddit or forums. So it is just better to present your argument and why you feel it is important and don't try to falsely add weight to it with numbers or groups that simply don't mean anything. It just waters down your argument. The only thing that means anything to me is an argument that makes sense. Sometimes a question is more impressive than a statement.

[Jarod_Silverstar]

4 minutes ago, beHypE said:

Maybe the solution to that could be to totally untie the weapon quality from crafting from the governing perk, while making the schematic way more common, each read unlocking the next level of quality until your reach level 5. Unless I totally forgot to think about some weird side effect, I think I would totally like that feature. 

Nah - It would leave you completely at the mercy of the loot tables. If you don't find the books for your weapon of choice, you would have no recourse. The Pimps learned this a few alphas ago with the forge and steel books. If you didn't find the book, you were unable to make iron or steel.

There needs to be an alternate method rather than looting for the nessicary stuffs, like tools, weapons, crafting stations and armor.

 

But mods for all those items I think leaving them found items/schematics is perfect.

[Roland]

 

2 minutes ago, madmole said:

Sometimes a question is more impressive than a statement.

Zip Lines????????????????

[Adam the Waster]

Just now, Roland said:

 

Zip Lines????????????????

no......

3 minutes ago, madmole said:

Sometimes a question is more impressive than a statement.

my questions are like mud then

 

 

[SnowDog1942]

6 minutes ago, madmole said:

Sometimes a question is more impressive than a statement.

Why?

 

 

Can anyone see wut I did there?