Everything is purposely slowed down in A18

[Hollowprime]

I know I know. Another A18 dislike thread. But hear me out! This alpha has a lot of interesting things to show but they are hindered by how slow paced the game feels.

 

What this alpha does right:

 

1. It provides stacks of ammo for weapons/utilities
   
2. Quests provide infinite resources for base building
   
3. Weapons have amazing graphics
   

 

What this alpha does wrong:

 

1. It adds many loot gates on items (steel items)
   
2. Weapons and tools are scattered randomly in perk trees
   
3. Weapons and tools require more resources to build but those resources do not scale with the improvement of the weapon/tool (200~500% more materials needed for a measle ~25% damage increase)
   
4. The game does not focus on a zombie apocalypse world rather it focuses on a sleeper experience
   
5. Everything from building to mining to leveling is purposely slowed down
   

 

Now I can't fix the loot gates, the weapon perks, the material multipliers or the sleepers because that requires modding.

 

However after playing on many PVE and PVP servers with different settings like 300% experience gain or 300% player block damage I've come to the conclusion that the entire game is pretty much the same in terms of balance (exception are the demolishers) ,and disregarding loot gates, progress or the pace of the game is dramatically slowed down:

 

1. The experience growth changed from 1.01 to 1.05
   
2. Tier V quests can be unlocked by level 40. However, Tier V quests require around level 60 to even begin to fight endless irradiated zombies. Example: There are not enough perk points to help even a level 6 sledge hammer/ level 5 turret build both with hunter mods (+100% wooping damage). Tyrannosaurus is not maxed, junk turret perk is still level 2~3.
   
3. Mining tools and wrenches increase their damage very, very slowly. Mining tools destroy stone blocks/rare ores one hit faster every level but it's not the same with the wrench. This could very easily be fixed by adding attack speed instead of damage on the perk. And it gives a very nice feeling of power too.
   
4. Cement build times became ridiculously slow. It's much easier to just go to a POI and shovel a few dozen of cement bags instead of forging stone into cement mix. I've stopped forging stone for some time now as I see tier V quests contain thousands of cement mix which would normally take hours for a couple of forges to make.
   
5. And finally the building interval of stone axe, claw hammer and nailgun need to go back to A16 intervals. I want to build stuff faster and the slow building animation and build time is killing it. Again it doesn't really affect the difficulty of the game, since cement takes a lot of time to dry out so you can't really use it as an offensive-defense strategy. It's only for aesthetics. What would change the difficulty of the game is upgrading the repairing done by the nailgun.