Getting bored

[sticky]

Does anyone else run a sevrer and find that up to level 70 people love the game they loive the fact thewy can level up and enjoy the buzz but at 70+ especially over 100 people just get bored?

I can advertise and start a new server and get 10+ plyaers to come on and play but after about a week they just dont bother any more is it just me or?

 

[meganoth]

They are level 70 after a week? Are you using 200% xp setting?

 

 

[Darthjake]

I don't get bored, but also I don't used enhanced xp settings either, I tend to like mid to early late game more, not so much the day glow zombies or the specials.  Yes, cop, I'm pointing at you.

[Ti2xGr]

Long story short - Yes. There are usually only a handful of players that stick around past day 200 or so. Our last map lasted until day 350 and was down to five clients. I was originally planning on it lasting till A19 which I personally think there was plenty enough gameplay to support it. I had just reached level 300 when we reset our current map. Personally, I like decorating and detailing my base, even after I get higher level. I like exploring the map, etc. but others just like the initial rush.

[SylenThunder]

Yeah, this is why our group hosts a variety of servers increasing in difficulty. Zed Rising is pretty laid back and easy, but progressing in Dead Island or The Barrens is especially difficult because of the custom modding we have done.

 

There are also a lot of seasoned players that look at the day count and nope out of servers. Even though that literally means almost nothing now with day number not having any bearing on the difficulty you will run into, and with good servers resetting POI's and regions to ensure loot and resources are always available.

 

Shameless plug for our group.

https://mastersofchaosgaming.com/7Days

[Liesel Weppen]

I only play on private servers with friends, but it looks almost the same. Usually i'm the last one who stops playing. Most of my friends get bored around day 50 already. Basically most quit when we have a solid base, sufficient supplies, T5 quests and can build almost everything through skills or books, especially 4x4 and gyrocopter. It's extremely rare that we pass day 100 with at least two players remaining. Some even quit when it comes to building a base and grinding ressources is required, which means they are ment to mine or chop wood and can't reach the required supplies by looting/questing. Overall most of them are not really interested in crafting and building, they play 7d2d more like an action shooter. If there is no action or it flattens a little, they quit.

 

Also we play seasoned. Usually only after an major update, so next round will most likely happen when A19 comes out. Some time after that another round with the same version but modded may occur.

[pApA^LeGBa]

Private Server Day 196. Coming to an end tough. We have a big crafting/living base, a city hall, one villa per player, a small castle, a restaurant and a huge garden on 5 pillars that have a 10 block diameter and are 40 blocks high.  Now it´s the point where the limited number of interior and colours really start to get annoying. That you can´t even have a fridge that doesn´t look worn out sucks big time tbh.

 

And no we don´t play with cm on. We have a storage room with the things you can´t craft, turned it on shortly only for that. We do fight screamer hordes, we quest and explore.

 

Seen a public server these day with day 3000 something. Someone built the cathedral of cologne there. 

 

And tbh i can´t imagine that bandits will turn around the endgame in a way that people who now quit at day 50 will play much longer.

[Laz Man]

Lots of good stories here.  Our small coop group is very similar to the ones described already.

 

Alot of our players are FPS nuts and struggle with survival elements lol..

 

Many will only play until acquiring the items they are focused on and participate in a few blood moons here and there.

 

It's usually down to just my brother and I towards the end.  Until the pimps get to it, I'll be creating more quest content for our group to chew on to help extend enjoyment and engagement.

 

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Imho to reduce ressource grinding to avoid above mentioned "quit reasons", corresponding quests would be nice. They should give you huge rewards of items required for building and tell you what you get before accepting the mission. I think at least our players would more likely prefer a T5 quest that rewards you with 10.000 concrete mix instead of dukes and a random item over going into a mine with an auger and afterwards still wait hours until the crafting is finished.

 

Hmmm, when thinking about it... maybe not even hard to mod? Or are dukes as reward hardcoded? On the other hand, finally picking between some random rewards of 10.000 concrete mix, 15.000 cement or 7500 iron wouldn't be that bad either.

 

Otherwise traders may have huge offer of these items (and a reasonable price). A trader offering you to buy 300 cement is quite pointless. They should more likely offer 300.000. And the costs should be equal to the above numbers. So e.g. a average T5 quest gives you 5000 dukes and its balanced like 10.000 concrete mix as an alternative, the trader should offer concrete mix like 9.000 cement for 5000 dukes (a little more efficent to choose the cement mix as reward directly).

Would be still more efficient to mine directly as the mission costs ressources in form of amunition and takes much longer, but i guess many people would prefer the mission over grind-mining.

 

That should be available for all the base ressources. Nitrate, coal, lead, oil shale... , maybe even stone and wood. In would pick even wood from time to time. In our last game i planted a 10x10 woodfarm and it's just anoying to plant 100 trees after every harvest again and again.

[PoloPoPo]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Imho to reduce ressource grinding to avoid above mentioned "quit reasons", corresponding quests would be nice. They should give you huge rewards of items required for building and tell you what you get before accepting the mission. I think at least our players would more likely prefer a T5 quest that rewards you with 10.000 concrete mix instead of dukes and a random item over going into a mine with an auger and afterwards still wait hours until the crafting is finished.

 

Hmmm, when thinking about it... maybe not even hard to mod? Or are dukes as reward hardcoded? On the other hand, finally picking between some random rewards of 10.000 concrete mix, 15.000 cement or 7500 iron wouldn't be that bad either.

 

Otherwise traders may have huge offer of these items (and a reasonable price). A trader offering you to buy 300 cement is quite pointless. They should more likely offer 300.000. And the costs should be equal to the above numbers. So e.g. a average T5 quest gives you 5000 dukes and its balanced like 10.000 concrete mix as an alternative, the trader should offer concrete mix like 9.000 cement for 5000 dukes (a little more efficent to choose the cement mix as reward directly).

Would be still more efficient to mine directly as the mission costs ressources in form of amunition and takes much longer, but i guess many people would prefer the mission over grind-mining.

 

That should be available for all the base ressources. Nitrate, coal, lead, oil shale... , maybe even stone and wood. In would pick even wood from time to time. In our last game i planted a 10x10 woodfarm and it's just anoying to plant 100 trees after every harvest again and again.

I agree with all of your points. Awesome post! Very reasonable suggestions, much better than increasing food consumption when driving a vehicle 😂

[pApA^LeGBa]

It´s not that ressource grinding is that much of a problem. If you just go base building for crafting and horde, there isn´t that much of a grind once you reach a certain level and can go miner69er and mother lode to 4 or 5. With a decent auger plus mods, it´s pretty fast then, especially if you have all mining books. And tbh if you don´t want to even grind a little bit then you play the wrong game.

 

Also get a miner into the group. There is a surprisingly high amount of people who enjoy it.

 

I don´t see any motivation to do a quest for 10K concrete, propably can mine the ressources for it way faster. If this would be implented then as optional reward, either the usual duke/item or ressources to choose from. Could be a perk or part of daring adventurer.

[Liesel Weppen]

36 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

It´s not that ressource grinding is that much of a problem. If you just go base building for crafting and horde, there isn´t that much of a grind once you reach a certain level and can go miner69er and mother lode to 4 or 5. With a decent auger plus mods, it´s pretty fast then, especially if you have all mining books. And tbh if you don´t want to even grind a little bit than you play the wrong game.

I'm not talking about me, but about many of my friends and from the posts above it's not just my friends.

Problem is: To mine for steal/lead/coal/etc is just @%$*#!ing boring. I'm ok with this and usually i'm the "idiot" doing that, because most others won't do it.

Instead of going 10min into a mine, most people would likely prefer doing a 20min mission with half the ressource outcome. Why not offer them this possibility? As i already said above: Going into a mine would still be way more efficient. And if i want to go for ressources I would still prefer mining. 

Anyway rolling quests for the ressources is still grinding. But it is not as boring as standing in a mine with an auger.

 

On the other hand, the current skillsystem contradicts mining. People don't want to do boring mining and they will even less put skillpoints into miner69er and motherlode even if they use a strength build anyway.

 

And if the traders offer bigger stacks, you still need the dukes from anywhere to pay for the stuff. So in the end there are still three layers:

1) go mining, most efficient

2) go quest, choose ressources as reward, less efficient but not so boring

3) buy ressources from the trader for dukes, good for exchange dukes or other items through trading.

 

Doing quests for dukes and buy ressources from the trader would be possible but somewhat inefficient.

In our last game we had almost a chest full of dukes (don't even know how many they were) before day 100 even though we're melting some of them for brass/bullets constantly. There is no further use for these dukes. Traders don't have items that are interesting for us anymore and they sell resources only in homeopathic doses not even worth the way to the trader. The possibility to exchange them for building ressources would give them a use and safe us from even more grinding in mines.

 

Additionally i did not demand a change in the vanilla game but thought more about modding.

You should really read the whole posts and not ignoring 3/4 of the post in your answers. I already saw many of that answers of yours already.

[Shelgeyr]

I play solo and rarely get past the 7th or 8th Horde Night (so, day 49 or 56).
This is not out of boredom so much as it's about the sheer destructive power of the Hordes.

 

First couple of Horde Nights, I defend my home base with a couple stacks of ammunition and a strategically demolished stairwell.
By day 21, I've established an "off-site" location specifically for fighting off the Horde - one that I don't mind seeing them destroy.

Come the morning of day 36, I find myself confronted with the awareness that continued survival will require significant effort - that building, upgrading, and repairing my defenses will soon be my full-time occupation, with no time for exploring and looting new areas of the map - at which point I typically scrap the save and start a brand new one.

 

Honestly, I think what I've just realized is that I don't really enjoy the tower defense aspect of the game at all and I should probably try playing with Blood Moons disabled.

[Laz Man]

55 minutes ago, Shelgeyr said:

I play solo and rarely get past the 7th or 8th Horde Night (so, day 49 or 56).
This is not out of boredom so much as it's about the sheer destructive power of the Hordes.

 

First couple of Horde Nights, I defend my home base with a couple stacks of ammunition and a strategically demolished stairwell.
By day 21, I've established an "off-site" location specifically for fighting off the Horde - one that I don't mind seeing them destroy.

Come the morning of day 36, I find myself confronted with the awareness that continued survival will require significant effort - that building, upgrading, and repairing my defenses will soon be my full-time occupation, with no time for exploring and looting new areas of the map - at which point I typically scrap the save and start a brand new one.

 

Honestly, I think what I've just realized is that I don't really enjoy the tower defense aspect of the game at all and I should probably try playing with Blood Moons disabled.

 

Blood moons are fun for a while but diminish over time especially when COOP players dont have equal amounts of playtime together. 

 

We actually disabled blood moons on our server and only turn it on when most people can commit to being on at the same time.

 

Need other alternative activities to keep players engaged (e.g. more/different types of quests)  Will make mods to achieve this until the devs can add their own.

[Liesel Weppen]

2 hours ago, Laz Man said:

We actually disabled blood moons on our server and only turn it on when most people can commit to being on at the same time.

Is this possible ingame by console, or only with a server restart after config change?

Do you then trigger BM on a specific day manually or is it still every sunday or even completely random? Imho (and some others opinion) it is also relatively boring if bloodmoon is that predictive. On recent playthrough me and a friend played with completely random bloodmoons, that makes it a at least a bit more interesting.

 

With disabled BM for most of my (FPS) friends the game is completely pointless. They more or less play ONLY for bloodmoons. Especially since there is almost no threat at all in the last few alphas.

 

Edit: Oh, i would be really interested in your quests mods.

[Boidster]

17 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Is this possible ingame by console, or only with a server restart after config change?

I think blood moons can be enabled/disabled, and their timing/randomness set, from the console. Set BloodMoonFrequency to non-zero, and if you want to trigger a blood moon at will, set BloodMoonDay to the day you want. I have used the latter setting on my server to force a blood moon on a particular day.

 

6 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Hmmm, when thinking about it... maybe not even hard to mod? Or are dukes as reward hardcoded?

It would not be too difficult to mod. Quests.xml would allow you to add specific <reward> items to quests, and/or you could modify loot.xml to add materials to specific loot groups. Or create a new loot group "questMaterials" and load all the iron/coal/nitrate/shale/etc into that group and make it the reward for some quests. Balancing it would be the tough part - you still do want to get nice tools or weapons from quests so you can't just replace it all with iron or cement.

[Liesel Weppen]

9 minutes ago, Boidster said:

 Balancing it would be the tough part - you still do want to get nice tools or weapons from quests so you can't just replace it all with iron or cement.

That's why i ment, make it somehow visible if you get items or ressources for a mission, BEFORE accepting the mission. Or make it random, so you can get items and/or ressources, but only in T5, then you may choose between 10.000 concrete mix and a T6 auger.

I know there are tryhards out there grinding T5 mission just for T6 tools, i know they would not like that. But we don't care.

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Is this possible ingame by console, or only with a server restart after config change?

Do you then trigger BM on a specific day manually or is it still every sunday or even completely random? Imho (and some others opinion) it is also relatively boring if bloodmoon is that predictive. On recent playthrough me and a friend played with completely random bloodmoons, that makes it a at least a bit more interesting.

 

With disabled BM for most of my (FPS) friends the game is completely pointless. They more or less play ONLY for bloodmoons. Especially since there is almost no threat at all in the last few alphas.

 

Edit: Oh, i would be really interested in your quests mods.

We have our blood moon settings on the server configured to every day.  We then take down server, enable blood moon, restart.  Once blood moon is over, everyone logs out and we disable blood moon again.  Its pretty fast to do so.

 

Here is my latest.  Link in video to my modlet page.

 

 

[Boidster]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

That's why i ment, make it somehow visible if you get items or ressources for a mission, BEFORE accepting the mission.

Yep, that would be doable I'm pretty sure, by adding a new quest type like, "Tier 5 Fetch Materials" or something. It would play out like a normal fetch quest (you just get a satchel), but the rewards could be stacks of materials. Quests.xml, loot.xml, localization.txt would need to be modded, at least, from what I can tell.

 

Easier to do would be to add stacks of materials to the usual rotation of T5 rewards. So you'd have a chance at seeing a T5/T6 tool or possibly 1,000 forged iron. If you have the Daring Adventurer perk then you'd get 2 or more choices and increase the odds of getting materials into the mix.

 

That's actually a pretty neat idea for a relatively easy modlet. "Relatively easy" in this case means within my own skillset, which is composed of "can read XML pretty well" and "move fast and break things".

 

 

Since it is a thing that I think I could probably do, I am 99% certain someone else has already done it, and better. But still...I may tinker for teh lulz.

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, Boidster said:

I think blood moons can be enabled/disabled, and their timing/randomness set, from the console. Set BloodMoonFrequency to non-zero, and if you want to trigger a blood moon at will, set BloodMoonDay to the day you want. I have used the latter setting on my server to force a blood moon on a particular day.

 

It would not be too difficult to mod. Quests.xml would allow you to add specific <reward> items to quests, and/or you could modify loot.xml to add materials to specific loot groups. Or create a new loot group "questMaterials" and load all the iron/coal/nitrate/shale/etc into that group and make it the reward for some quests. Balancing it would be the tough part - you still do want to get nice tools or weapons from quests so you can't just replace it all with iron or cement.

you can do alot with modding quests.xml.  I have learned enough at this point to basically to reward anything to the player using it.  My latest mod even ties in a custom quest to a custom POI.  Hope to make much more of them as I think i have opened the door to pandora's box lol...

[Boidster]

1 minute ago, Laz Man said:

We have our blood moon settings on the server configured to every day.  We then take down server, enable blood moon, restart.  Once blood moon is over, everyone logs out and we disable blood moon again.  Its pretty fast to do so.

I only run a co-op server for me and a friend, so I dunno if it's really applicable to you, but I think you could do it without any XML setting changes or restarts. Set BM on and frequency to 999 days. So hey, good luck ever seeing the first 'normal' blood moon, eh?

 

But then when you want one, just go in with your bad @%$*#! administrator self and use 'sgs' to change GameStat.BloodMoonDay to the next day. You'll get your blood moon and then it'll revert to 999 days later i.e. never.

2 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

My latest mod even ties in a custom quest to a custom POI.  Hope to make much more of them as I think i have opened the door to pandora's box lol...

I have been working on what I expect is a lot of people's first custom POI - the "My House" POI. It's coming along actually pretty well considering I have some 45-degree doorways and my house is on a slope with a walk-out basement. Anywho, it would be awesome to also create a quest that goes to Boidster's House for some custom loot.

[Laz Man]

10 minutes ago, Boidster said:

I only run a co-op server for me and a friend, so I dunno if it's really applicable to you, but I think you could do it without any XML setting changes or restarts. Set BM on and frequency to 999 days. So hey, good luck ever seeing the first 'normal' blood moon, eh?

 

But then when you want one, just go in with your bad @%$*#! administrator self and use 'sgs' to change GameStat.BloodMoonDay to the next day. You'll get your blood moon and then it'll revert to 999 days later i.e. never.

I have been working on what I expect is a lot of people's first custom POI - the "My House" POI. It's coming along actually pretty well considering I have some 45-degree doorways and my house is on a slope with a walk-out basement. Anywho, it would be awesome to also create a quest that goes to Boidster's House for some custom loot.

Lots of different option for your house.

 

1) Make it a fetch/clear or fetch & clear POI that a player can do a quest from the trader.

2) Make a custom quest item that starts the quest that has the player obtain a custom item (e.g. letter from Boidster requesting help for someone to find a picture of his dog in his basement).   Turning in the quest at the trader rewards the player with whatever you want.

[pApA^LeGBa]

I didn´t adress anyone, generally speaking. Don´t like grinding and want things given to you? Wrong game. If i adress certain people i tag them. You basically thought of modding while writing, so yes you suggested a game change. And you said it yourself, FPS friends. Wrong game.

 

Also i don´t think that the tons of dukes will prevail in future. Pretty sure prices will be balanced for selling stuff, so buying 300K of something won´t be easy. Right now it´s riddiculous how fast and easy you can get rich. That´s nothing that should make it in the final version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Liesel Weppen]

21 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I didn´t adress anyone, generally speaking. Don´t like grinding and want things given to you? Wrong game.

Read the post again! And now read what was really written, not what you want to read!

Once again, for the third time now: It is not about removing grind.  It's about REDUCE mining. Doing quests is also grind.

 

And do you have any argument besides like a 5 year old "wrong game *cry*"?

 

Another one dislikes the tower defense aspect -> wrong game

Dislike bloodmoon as it is right now -> wrong game

Too less survival, to many fighting -> wrong game

Prefer building, not fighting -> wrong game

 

Is there even one person on earth for whom 7d2d is not the "wrong game" according to you childish opinion?

 

The game is moddable so it can be changed. Nobody here is talking about how the final version HAS to look like.

 

So you don't use any mods? You do? -> WRONG GAME!

[PoloPoPo]

I have started a new savegame on "elite" difficulty yesterday where I don't want to build a base at all but rather stay nights and horde nights in POIs I prepare more or less and explore the map like a nomade. Standard XP settings, no loot respawning, will increase blood moon zombie count every week.

 

The first few days (and nights) were much more exciting again than my day 75 savegame has been for a very long time