Default Difficulty is too hard

[Dabeeto]

Before you bash me, please understand,  DEFAULT difficulty.

So I've been playing every alpha since A14, and I have to say, the latest Alpha, at default difficulty settings, with 4 people was very difficult.  As one of the two best players, I often found it *very* challenging on blood moon nights, and the two worser players were getting so frustrated that they've essentially quit (no longer show up to play, especially if they know blood moon is happening).  Overall, I'm happy that the game is much more difficult, without being unfair.  But myself and the other "good player" are the ones who beat Dark Souls, and the others are the ones that wouldn't even have a chance of beating it. 

However, default difficulty is supposed to be set for newer players and average players.  Currently, I feel the default is more suitable to default+1.   While I'd love it if games like "Dark Souls" were more the norm, the reality is, they aren't.  You can't assume that people have been playing games or FPS's their whole life, like I have been. 

As far as official server difficulty goes... I'm not sure what the "correct" difficulty would be, except maybe have several different ones available?   I haven't touched public servers since like A16 though, so I can't really talk about that.  

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

You do realize that the current default difficulty is one stage lower than it used to be? So default is easier than ever. It´s now Adventurer instead of Nomad. There is only one lower difficulty than adventurer.

 

And tbh on adventurer they die pretty quick already. You sure you play on adventurer?

[Laz Man]

You mentioned blood moons specifically.  Those can be pretty punishing in MP especially for more casual players who dont play as often.  Is that the main frustration for your other 2 guys?

 

 

[Ramethzer0]

Even at a low difficulty, if you have massive horde spawns you can still be overwhelmed when you burst through all of your ammo.

 

I learned this when I was toggling my 'Romero' settings for my own personal game.  Lots of easy to kill zombies, but very slow moving, and low loot %.  But, if you don't take care of your ammo supply and base construction, you can still be overwhelmed.

[Boidster]

Maybe lower your Blood Moon Enemy Count (in game Advanced settings) to 6 or 4? That would make the Blood Moons a bit easier - still the same total (possible) horde size, but fewer at once. And teach the n00bs how to build a base (or take over a POI) that can pretty easily withstand the horde even if your team isn't terribly effective at killing them. A building with concrete walls, surrounded by 2 rows of wood spikes and some barbed wire, for example. The first couple of horde nights can be about learning the rhythm and becoming a better shot and not just frustrating, certain death.

 

Are you coming together for blood moon, or each player is trying to defend his/her own base?

[ElCabong]

Make them always walk

[unholyjoe]

for the record, a19 is as follows:

 

difficulty: 1=easiest
1. scavenger
2. adventurer (default)
3. nomad
4. warrior
5. survivalist
6. insane

 

then there is a multitude of separate settings that can make it even easier.

[FileMachete]

Personally I can see how @Dabeeto likey has a valid point, at least related to the first couple Horde nights.

 

I handle the first two blood moons (SP) by using one of the partially collapsed buildings. Just remove a few access stairs/rubble, make a couple jumpable gaps to other portions of the building and let the zeds tear things up. I basically don't bother trying to kill them all, just the slower easier targets if I get bored.

 

Point is I'd say early game blood moon hordes are quite a bit too op'd. Looked at from a total new-persons pov.

And they'll likely try to build/reinforce something, and try to kill all incoming, resulting in a lot of wasted resources & frustration.

 

A15 & A16 had it right for early hordes (and mostly for later hordes too imo).

Decent design w Cobblestone was enough & a players damage output was enough to actively defend without it being hopeless.

For those who didn't start playing 7dtd till A17/18, you might be entertained by watching some old A15/16 youtube playthroughs.

[Ramethzer0]

I'm still kinda shaking my head that I have to be stupidly careful that I dont run into ferals on the first night or two.  I got overwhelmed by three of them on a test world I was messing with last night.  I was blown away that's a thing even on low settings.  Edit: This is also pre first horde night.

 

I asked about this months ago and Roland confirmed, but didn't say what the percentage was.  In experience its been 100% first night ferals, but it could be that I just suffer from unfortunate RNG.  I've had two packs of ferals out of all my tries within the first two nights, as well.   I have to force myself not to fight them when im playing on survival mode.

[meganoth]

Maybe I was greener then, but in A15 I never went out at night in the first few days. Too dangerous. And seriously, that is as it should be. You should have to improve your skills and gear before you have a chance to be the predator at night and not the hunted

 

 

[Cernwn]

6 hours ago, Dabeeto said:

But myself and the other "good player" are the ones who beat Dark Souls, and the others are the ones that wouldn't even have a chance of beating it.

The above is the root of your friend's problem. Correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK right now, gamestage is cumulative (individual gamestages added together for determining spawns) in groups. Even if it was averaged between all of you, grouping would significantly increase the difficulty for your friend. The only advice I can give is for the "good players" to eat glass daily to reset their gamestage, and possibly look at lowering other server setting to non-defaults, like disabling blood moon all together, or setting all zombies to always walk.

 

The terrific thing about 7 Days to Die is that there are so many options (non-default) to granularly adjust difficulty up or down. Personally, I prefer warrior difficulty, nightmare zombie speed at night, blood moons disabled, with mods for increased wandering horde size, 50% health and headshot-only damage. It keeps the threat constant and a lot less predictable, while reducing the bullet sponge effect.

[Gazz]

I'm balancing the game for Nomad, the "old" default.

All values such as damage are zeroed on Nomad.

 

In what... A18? We changed the localisation text so that "Adventurer" says Default.

So the Default you are getting is already "easy" compared to base level balancing.

 

Going from Adventurer to Scavenger, your incoming damage is 66% and your outgoing damage is 133%.

Is this not easy enough? (actually a serious question)

[Worrun]

I now consider myself quite an adept at this game, I can manage solo or MP play on Insane difficulty, I have perfected the tricks to survive, and do it well. I have gotten to gamestage 500+ on insane difficulty with my friend, it wans't EASY but it is easy for us.

 

I wish more people understood the difference between what is easy/hard, and what they find easy/hard, there is a massive difference.

 

Also @Gazz I'm quite new around these forums and have no idea who you or anyone else is, but my suggestion for the difficulties would be to increase zombie numbers, zombie damage and zombie speed for each difficulty, and keep their health pools relatively the same.

 

when I first started the game in early A18, I went 1 difficulty above the default, and me and a friend almost quit because we didn't find hitting a single zombie 10+ times each in the head with a wooden club to be challenging, just annoying.

Since then though, I have added at least 500 more in-game hours to my Steam library, and while it's easy for me with my sledge hammer, maxxed strength and perks + mods, I still believe that tanky zombies =/= a difficult game

 

 

[meganoth]

Obviously I can't speak from experience as experience is detrimental for this, but there is the combat difficulty and there are difficulties with horde base building and knowing how to efficiently get food and better stuff for yourself. The first depends on your reaction skills, the latter is purely knowledge. But the latter, especially base building knowledge influences how easy the combat in the horde night eventually is. Many beginners might struggle with the combat, but other beginners might struggle with acquiring the knowledge instead.

 

The crux is, much of the appeal of the game is finding out this stuff for yourself. Other games solve this by only giving some general hints in ways even reading-averse players see them. Especially in the loading screen I would give out general hints like "If you starve, make a farm. Build farm plots. <link to the farming info screen>" or "Spike traps and barbed wire are very useful on horde night". (Also lots of GUI hints could be shown here)

 

Maybe it would be even advisable to give beginners the hint to start out with a POI and remove the stairs for their first horde night. They have a hard time learning zombie behaviour when they are overrrun in the first few minutes because they rely on a wooden box with 1 deep walls.

 

The second change I would propose is that lower difficulty levels should also make problems like food scrounging juuust a little easier. Simply setting default loot-abundancy to 125% at adventurer level might make a difference, or slowing down their metabolism. 

 

 

[FileMachete]

@Gazz, just my read on OP, & personal exp in A17/18, but 'normal' wandering/looting/etc is quite a bit different than Horde Nights.

 

20 hours ago, Dabeeto said:

I often found it *very* challenging on blood moon nights, and the two worser players were getting so frustrated that they've essentially quit (no longer show up to play, especially if they know blood moon is happening).

Prior to A17 I really enjoyed the first week, lots of anticipation & pressure to be ready for that first Blood Moon.

That first tiny cobblestone base with a basement crafting area, defending it frantically with just a club and some arrows. It was great.

 

A17 brought the group additive block damage & zeds flocking to weak points so there's little or no chance of kiting them away from a damaged section.

Magnifying that is the balance between how much DPS the player/s can put out, early on, vs how fast the zeds can tear through blocks.

 

Just my .02 cents, and I know MM doesn't agree, but if what a mythical, pretty good but newish player can put together in half the first week, base wise (without cheese like fall paths), has little chance of surviving that first horde, then the game isn't providing as good an experiance as it could.

 

Current early horde night balance -discourages- taking part. It's a far better player strategy to minimize early blood moon participation, and that's a sad thing imo.

 

Early non-BM play can be tough, but it's not unfair, as OP said & I agree.

Yet it's easy for vets to forget that there are far fewer zeds wandering the world, resulting in a new players first experiances seldom exposing them to significant numbers of zs.

So while that first BM & the, "Holy sh*t! Look at all them f'ing zombies!", would be a kick in the pants win, game-play/experiance wise, the resulting, very rapid, base destruction I can see leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Like how the h3ll were we supposed to have any idea of how to prepare for -that-!?

 

I'm trying to think way back to when I first started playing 7dtd, and what kind of starter bases I used to make...

I recall trying to use doors and windows. How hilarious is -that-??

Yet for newer players, where in the game is there _any_ indication of just how quickly zeds can chew through reinforced -concrete-?

Or that even attempting to build a "base" out of starter strength blocks is simply laughable?

 

I'm a big fan of Horde Nights, and really enjoy base building & coming up w new designs, yet I've adapted to early BMs in A17+ by simply saying, "nah, not worth the time. I'll just cheese the first couple and save the resources for something that's fun & stands a chance."

[canadianbluebeer]

Try this:  zeds walk, ferals jog,  BM is run.  8 per player.  set zombie block dmg to 25%.

 

That gives you a chance to get things going.

 

Spiders still leap a HUGE distance, so that isn't affected.

 

The block damage just slows down how fast they plow through things. Doesn't seem to affect the damage to YOU though.

 

I crank the speeds/settings up as I progress, until it's insane and 64.

 

Block dmg stays at 25%.  I don't like or agree with 10+ zeds stacked into 1 spot pounding a block.

(and demo dudes need to be turned down a bit. you get a couple go boom in the same spot, and steel blocks are toast.

anything less than steel vaporizes.  even at 25%, if you blow up a few in the same place (bad aim), then it's still gonna mess things up)

 

But the walk day/night  jog for ferals, does help while yer still weak.

(and yes, a random wolf/cat/bear can still eat your face on day 1)

 

 

[quyxkh]

18 hours ago, FileMachete said:

Point is I'd say early game blood moon hordes are quite a bit too op'd. Looked at from a total new-persons pov.

And they'll likely try to build/reinforce something, and try to kill all incoming, resulting in a lot of wasted resources & frustration.

Reinforce a POI and kill them all is plan A. 

 

Cobblestone walls, a half-perked melee weapon and a hidey-hole perch in case you lose focus at a bad time is all you need to clear the first horde night. I remember horde night being a death sentence until I figured out how to construct a decent defense. I watched a military perimeter-defense training video. The first month, you don't even need spikes. "total new-persons" who quit rather than step up their game are, wait for it, quitters. Their choice, but not every game must be made easy enough for them.

 

[FileMachete]

@quyxkh, based on your forum date you've been playing 7dtd since at least A14 right? If so then you'll likely recall what I was trying to point out; that in earlier Alphas 'newbies' had a significantly higher chance of muddling through their first couple of horde nights. Still easy to fail them, but, at least in my memories, a much better chance to live long enough to see _what_ wasn't working, so they could improve for night 14-21.

 

Again, my .02 cents, but A17 onward seriously changed that so only pretty experianced players stood an honest chance of either surviving or lasting long enough to learn something useful.

 

No question that any total noob can watch a JaWoodle vid and skate through their first horde night.

But that doesn't seem to be what MM wants for the 'new player experiance', at least as I read his posts.

Just in the last couple days MM made it clear, again, that those of us with many hundreds or thousands of hours in-game are not the target audience.

And I was attempting to keep that in mind when writing my posts.

 

As to general difficulty, for a vet, I'd like things to be much tougher (and adjust/mod to make them so) but that's not what the OP was speaking to.

[Liesel Weppen]

How do you 4 play the bloodmoons? Most common is imho building a horde base, bars on the side and basically you just stand over there and shoot down at the zombies? How could that be to hard for beginners? I made good experience with this, as we had some beginner players on a LAN party, where basically 3 "experts" played with up to 7 beginners.

Early in the game we tell them what is the best they can do right now and we give them ranged weapons and ammunitions, because melee is a little tricky.

 

If you do the bloodmoons without a base and just fight the Zs in an open field then, yes, that might be not good for beginners.

[Ti2xGr]

Just a reminder - this is still Alpha. Developers are still just bringing in content and doing experiments with balance. All settings in regard to difficulty, damage, and such are only an XML away. Change a number and get a drastically different experience. Make the game with the exact settings you want. You can change pretty much any setting to your liking anytime you want. We have daytime set at walk, night set on jog, with default damage and such. However, we have too numerous other settings tweaked in all sorts of ways from adding recipes, modlets galore (27 at last count), and how many of which type of zombies spawn in different biomes. 

 

Personally, we expect to die. I died 10 times on day one on our current map and I've got 6,000+ hours in the game. We like our map loaded with zombies in some areas and quiet in others. In the beginning, we have to stay out of the wastelands as there is a constant stream of zombies. We have to go in groups to cover our backs. Same thing goes for Burnt biome at night - extra zombies and plenty of them with some custom Snukin's Zombies thrown in for good measure to different groups/biomes. 

 

Start at the Serverconfig.xml and work your way out from there. Check out the Spawning.xml to directly affect your zombie counts in different biomes and for bloodmoon. Entityclasses.xml and entitygroups.xml also allows you some more easy tweaks. They are all done server-side so they will affect all users. We make tweaks to our server every few days as we try to create the perfect balance for our clients. Heck, I was just in this morning adding a slightly higher chance to loot lettuce in specific containers from the More Cooked Foods modlet. Make it the game you want. Do you want to specifically make Bloodmoons more easy? It's in the XMLs. You can adjust what attacks you at each gamestage if you have the time/motivation to do it. 

[Marinxar]

Another thing to consider is GameStage.

 

If you are playing in a group, on a easy 'Normal' setting, it is likely that none of you died once leading up to the Horde Night. 4 Players with no deaths in same cell can give you a surprisingly tough Horde Night. Even on Day 7.

[RantingMonkey]

On 5/16/2020 at 1:29 PM, Dabeeto said:

 

 

On 5/16/2020 at 1:29 PM, Dabeeto said:

However, default difficulty is supposed to be set for newer players and average players.  
 

For average players, sure but not new players. Most games I've played with difficulty settings will tell you normal difficulty is for those with experience with the game or games like it and recommend new players start at a lower setting. 

Even with 2000+ hours in when it began, Alpha 18 was still a huge PITA when I started it. 18 is harder, especially since zombies are apparently bullet sponge psychic architects who can tear through steel with ridiculous ease. I wouldn't recommend normal difficulty for anyone who hasn't played this a lot or is playing with someone who has played a lot and helps them understand what's happening. 

 

A tip that may help you and your less experienced friends, raid POIs and get the loot. Don't use guns at the beginning, you should be able to kite the zombies with bows or melee when you first start looting. Save the ammo you get from the loot piles for horde night. Use different weapons so you can split the ammo. Even with 4 of you, your first 2 horde nights shouldn't be that hard on default if you aren't wasting ammo. 

[Laz Man]

21 hours ago, ElCabong said:

Make them always walk

Yep, make your 2 friends always walk for even a greater survival challenge...😂

[JCrook1028]

I think the OP's major problem is the broken MP Horde nights.

[Liesel Weppen]

Quote

Even with 2000+ hours in when it began, Alpha 18 was still a huge PITA when I started it. 18 is harder, especially since zombies are apparently bullet sponge psychic architects who can tear through steel with ridiculous ease. I wouldn't recommend normal difficulty for anyone who hasn't played this a lot or is playing with someone who has played a lot and helps them understand what's happening. 

So with 2000+ hours in the game you're telling, that A18 was difficult on normal difficulty?

So either you didn't get how the game works or you just complain that the gameplay has changed somehow with A18.

 

Quote

A tip that may help you and your less experienced friends, raid POIs and get the loot. Don't use guns at the beginning, you should be able to kite the zombies with bows or melee when you first start looting. Save the ammo you get from the loot piles for horde night. Use different weapons so you can split the ammo. Even with 4 of you, your first 2 horde nights shouldn't be that hard on default if you aren't wasting ammo. 

Use a mix of everything. Especially if you are looting, kiting Zs around and killing them with cotton balls (nothing else are the beginner bows with stone arrows) costs far to much time. Use a bow for the first shot, maybe second. If you have ammunition use them to kill them faster and therefore progress way quicker.

The first one to two bloodmoons can be easily survived by either choosing a robust building (with no way up) and just letting them hit everything and/or putting up spikes. Especially if you progress slower because you are a beginner, bloodmoons won't escalate quickly. They consist of few and low level Zs.

 

Without knowing anything the game may seem unbeatable but just knowing that Zs can't jump higher then 2 blocks (excluding spider Zs, but they don't appear that early) is all you need to know about how to setup a base for the first few nights or even the first bloodmoon.

Or to tell it different: Zombies can't do anything you are also not able to do. If you can't jump across 4 blocks, zombies can't do it either. Use that information.

If spider zombies occur, you will notice the exception, but there won't spawn dozens of spider zombies out of nothing, so you should be able to deal with 1-2 of them surprising you.

 

Difficulty is somehow even broken. We are playing on completely random bloodmoon and recently a bloodmoon somehow surprised us, there was no thunder until 21:00 and we were both inside buildings so didn't see the sky turning red. Because of that we had to spend the bloodmoon by driving around on our motorcycles... well we thought we have to do that. However driving around seems not to make the Zs respawn but you can quickly drive that far away that the Zs won't find you anymore. Result: I started harvesting car wrecks, looting garbage and birds nets. DURING BLOODMOON!