XP for zombies

[Viktoriusiii]

Well it hasn't been a topic in quite a while... but I thought I'd rekindle that old discussion, because of a recent redditthread This one.
He was making some... obvious points to us 1000+ hours diehards... but he said one thing that I had forgotten about for the longest time:
 

Quote

Finally, kill zombies

I know, duh. But when I first started playing I would sneak around, avoiding the random zombies. But those guys are walking experience points. Kill early and often and get them Eeee Peeees.

He was instinctively doing the "right" (at least when TFPs talked about it in the past they said zombies should never be sought after, thats why they don't give loot anymore... not even bones!) thing and snuck around... like you would in a dangerous world filled with zombies... until he realized that those things are not a threat and are merely XPiniatas (sorry for the pun).

This is why I am going back to this old discussion, since I don't remember if TFPs talked about it:
Will Zombie-XP stay in the gold edition? Or will it eventually be replaced by a better... more intuitive way to make zombies a nuisance again?
Or will it, because TFPs disliked the old way (the system, that shall not be named!), stay in the game for good?

Also, what do you think about this? I personally don't care anymore... since A18 is simply a looter-shooter, so it kinda fits the style. But if they were ever to go back to the old 'horror-survival' style, I would gladly welcome it with open arms! (both the genre and the zombies as a nuisance)

[Boidster]

Roland's got the overhaul you're looking for.

[Black Hat]

I would like to share with you my experience with the game

 

For me, the best times I had were in alphas 14-16.

These were just memorable.

 

I had an extreme fear for zombies, and I was feeling the need to hide and run.

Back then I was having that feeling that I should stay away from towns, move in the woods, build a base, surround it with an ocean of spikes and only leave the place when needed. Looting was like an expedition. Like something you should prepare ahead. I don’t know if that was the style the game was intended to be played, but that was what me and my friends were doing. It felt natural.

 

I also liked the idea of repetition to improve… meaning the more axes you make, the better axes you learn to craft. But that’s a thing of the past, a little nice feature, but with all the new stuff nowadays, I can’t see it fit into the game. 

 

Alpha 17 was the “visual update” for me. The POIs, the view, the vehicles, was a game changer. But… with the new POIs… suddenly that feeling of running from the towns disappeared. I would be spending most of my time in the towns, as the POIs somehow drags you into the game of looting…

 

Alpha 18 new icons, new guns, systems, visuals… But with all that.. It was probably the most boring one when talking about gameplay. Sure, the end-game was probably the same like other alphas, but the beginning… It wasn’t that frightening anymore.

 

The only things I had to do were:  trader quest, loot, buy food from vending machines, make dukes, buy whatever you want from the trader and repeat.

 

It felt robotic. Just going to POI to POI… I had tier 6 tools, guns, vehicles, all that and I not even had a base, or at least a forge of my own.

 

Horde Night?

What’s that. Run on a bike, go on the top of a building, or just make some doors and abuse an exploit.

 

If back then at 20:00 you had to be back at the base, now you are like “Oh, what POI should I loot really quick”. You don’t even care about night time anymore.

 

Now, some may say “ Yeah, but you are a rusher and that’s your gameplay “

Yes. But on this game, I always wanted to do the best to survive, the best options to get gear and so on. And this is the best way to do it in A18 ( at least the one that I know ).

 

Back then it felt more enjoyable getting gears and so on… You had a satisfaction crafting that steel pickaxe… Or when you would find something like an AK in a bag, it was like Christmas

 

A18 was a regression on building and crafting…

And a Buff in looting and trading.

What’s the point in waiting to get enough level to make a pickaxe by yourself, when you can just make some quests and buy it from the trader.

 

But…

 

I was always excited when a new Alpha was coming out.

And now I am super excited !

 

With the new skill perks redistributed, the traders having their own specific tradable items, the new food and system added, I think this might change something…

 

This is not going back to the old style that’s obvious, but at least maybe it will be something different and more exciting than A18.

[Viktoriusiii]

24 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Roland's got the overhaul you're looking for.

played it in A17. Was great fun. Bit buggy in multiplayer tho.
A18 is too fargone in the lootershooter... you just find too much ammo and guns in every poi... I don't want it to be like those zombie mmos, where oyu have to loot 200 containers to find an apple. But right now... you just shoot and will still have loads of ammo left for hordenight.

But that wasn't the topic Didn't ask how to fix it. Asked for opinion and info if it stays this way.

[Black Hat]

In my opinion they will keep zombie XP

For A18 and A19 the devs made improvements for battle stuff – To kill zeds more effectively 

And they said they wanted to make the game fit different gamestyles, meaning you get XP for whatever you want to do in the game, and some might just want to kill zombies

 

At this point of the game, no XP from zombies won’t fit in the new style

 

But, I hope their next zombie game will be super realistic and super scary.

[JCrook1028]

On 6/20/2020 at 3:11 PM, Viktoriusiii said:

A18 is too fargone in the lootershooter... you just find too much ammo and guns in every poi... I don't want it to be like those zombie mmos, where oyu have to loot 200 containers to find an apple. But right now... you just shoot and will still have loads of ammo left for hordenight.

 

You don't have to use the guns and ammo you find so early you know. That is YOUR choice. I find it funny people finding a gun D1 and immed start using it then complaining they find guns too early. Usually the first time I use a gun for anything other than hunting is around the 3rd or 4th horde night.

[RestInPieces]

3 minutes ago, JCrook1028 said:

You don't have to use the guns and ammo you find so early you know. That is YOUR choice. I find it funny people finding a gun D1 and immed start using it then complaining they find guns too early. Usually the first time I use a gun for anything other than hunting is around the 3rd or 4th horde night.

[Viktoriusiii]

1 hour ago, RestInPieces said:

I really think that says it all xD
Why haven't I thought of that? Just... not using it. It was so simple! I can simply let the ammo pile up until day 45 and have two chests full of ammo and now BAM its not a looter shooter anymore! 🙄

[iejen]

On 6/20/2020 at 9:02 PM, Black Hat said:

I would like to share with you my experience with the game

 

For me, the best times I had were in alphas 14-16.

These were just memorable.

 

I had an extreme fear for zombies, and I was feeling the need to hide and run.

Back then I was having that feeling that I should stay away from towns, move in the woods, build a base, surround it with an ocean of spikes and only leave the place when needed. Looting was like an expedition. Like something you should prepare ahead. I don’t know if that was the style the game was intended to be played, but that was what me and my friends were doing. It felt natural.

 

I also liked the idea of repetition to improve… meaning the more axes you make, the better axes you learn to craft. But that’s a thing of the past, a little nice feature, but with all the new stuff nowadays, I can’t see it fit into the game. 

 

[cropped]...

This, this, THIS!! 

 

A14-A16 are the most frightning ones. 

Building a tower in the woods and surround that @%$*#! with spikes and traps. 

 

Now, after I spawn I look for a stone house and claim it. 

From there... some small fortifying for horde night and loot all the neighbours. 

The game did change from a Zombie survival game to a Zombie shooter game with base building. 

 

Still loving the game though, but it will never be as the past again. 

Perhaps if they increase zombie spawning outside in the cities. 

Make roaming zombies more a thing! 

When you fire a weapon in a city the Z's should be coming from all over the place!

[beHypE]

I feel most of you make the fallacious assumption that they game was scarier back then, when in fact you were simply less experienced back in those days.

 

Imagine watching a horror movie and getting scared to death, and then rewatching it ? Same movie, different reactions.

[Viktoriusiii]

9 minutes ago, beHypE said:

I feel most of you make the fallacious assumption that they game was scarier back then, when in fact you were simply less experienced back in those days.

 

Imagine watching a horror movie and getting scared to death, and then rewatching it ? Same movie, different reactions.

yea... no. I thought about that too.
But back then I would not go into towns (maybe not A14-16 but more A~10) because there were dogs that mauled me, if i fired a shot, Z's from all over the city were headed my way and if I started looting they would slowly surround the place. It WAS way less predictable, therefor making it scarier.
Obviously expertise does help, but the simple fact is, that there are no zombies or dogs in town anymore. They are restricted to pois, making the city a lootfest.

*edit* also guns were SUPER scarce, so you couldn't simply shoot the dogs either because weapons were mostly in cities. So you had to loot small buildings and hope for a shotgun messiah outside the city or craft a really good crossbow to take them down.
Now I go into a town day 1 with just a bow and clear a poi and have a weapon...

[Outlaw_187]

30 minutes ago, beHypE said:

I feel most of you make the fallacious assumption that they game was scarier back then, when in fact you were simply less experienced back in those days.

 

Imagine watching a horror movie and getting scared to death, and then rewatching it ? Same movie, different reactions.

Man you hit the nail on the head with this. I remember when I 1st played this game, I didn't know my 🅰️ $ $ from a hole in the ground. 

This game was terrifying! It definitely gets less so when you actually know what you're doing.

[Black Hat]

The purpose of the game is to get the most and best done in a short period of time. That’s a mentality of a survivor. That was the magic back then… you were doing your best to survive…

 

I’ve kept that mentality of squeezing every single bit of goodness from everything I can find. If the best thing to do in this game is not to be afraid of zeds and go looting, that’s what I am going to do. I just can't put all the guns I find in a chest and forget about them, pretending that the game is scary and I have to be precocious. That’s artificial.

 

Fun Pimps are intending to make the game easy for new, unfamiliar players. They want the game to be easy.

 

This reminds me that they need a new trailer for the game.

 

This one started to become irrelevant...

 

 

Of course, that doesn't mean that I will quit playing the game. I like the game... it's just different.

[Liesel Weppen]

1 hour ago, Black Hat said:

Fun Pimps are intending to make the game easy for new, unfamiliar players. They want the game to be easy.

Yep, but that is exactly what makes it boring for advanced players.

If you want to change this, you need to enable or disable whole "mechanics" by the difficulty level, not just increase zombiedamage and decrease playerdamage.

Like more Zs spawning in the free wild or as said above random dog spawns in cities. Or different spawn amounts for different zones. More Z spawns in cities, less on the land.

 

So in previous alphas (a15) there always were Zs coming up to you even if you stood in the middle of nowhere. During first night we were quiet, because there were always some Zs around and we didn't want to draw attention. Now you can basically stand around anywhere and go for lunch break and still have good chances that not even one single Z finds you. During the first night, there almost all the time are no random Zs in range you could draw attention from. Maybe with bad luck there comes one. In earlier versions if you made noise there were some of them coming. And after you fought them off you needed to be quiet again, as there were spawning new ones.

We also did not go into a city soon in A15/16, not just because of the dogs, but because there spawned way more Zs. Back then we looked for a POI or built a base NEAR a town. At least since A18 we build base or occupy a POI preferably in the center of a city on day 1. There is no difference left, WHERE to play. City is not more dangerous than anywhere else, so you of course go where you can find the most loot.

 

I like the sleepers, but it feels like random Zs were almost completely removed for them. That makes everything out of POIs feel empty and almost secure.

[beHypE]

2 hours ago, Viktoriusiii said:

yea... no. I thought about that too.
But back then I would not go into towns (maybe not A14-16 but more A~10) because there were dogs that mauled me, if i fired a shot, Z's from all over the city were headed my way and if I started looting they would slowly surround the place. It WAS way less predictable, therefor making it scarier.
Obviously expertise does help, but the simple fact is, that there are no zombies or dogs in town anymore. They are restricted to pois, making the city a lootfest.

This I agree on. I started playing at the very end of Alpha 11, and I remember my first trip to the 0,0 central hub city, with dogs and cops and bees everywhere. Damn, I miss those days, I really do. If you check my post history it's the one thing I push for the most. Right now a city is nothing but a cluster of POIs, there's 0 reason to loot the odd lone house in the wild compared to just going to a city on day 1 and have dozens of houses to loot for weeks. It's funny they emphasize so much on slow progression yet basically allow for the "end game locations" to be the perfect base spot right after you start a fresh game.

 

Overall I agree that the world feels emptier and easier to travel than previously. That being said I still think most of the "hard times" came from our lack of knowledge as to how to deal with situations thrown at us.

[Viktoriusiii]

21 minutes ago, beHypE said:

[...] That being said I still think most of the "hard times" came from our lack of knowledge as to how to deal with situations thrown at us.

obviously Expertise always helps. I mean if you replay a resident evil game, you also already know the jumpscares.
But as we agree on, early game was way more restrictive because the best lootspots were also behind a barrier of dogs cops and BEES!
Vultures are... @%$*#!ed (they are so quick that you cant run from them even with motorcycles, but are super slow when divebombing)... but they would have made a nice replacement... but they are only out in the deserts... it is safer to stay inside a city rather than outside.
And it would be such an easy way to fix this:
Make 1 zombie per POI spawn outside of the poi with the immediate command to go wander around once the player gets into reach. Yes that would be a lot of zombies, but that is the point. If there are 20 zombies in alleyways they are much harder to deal with than a conga-line of Z's randomly passing by and just throwing one molotov.

[RestInPieces]

3 hours ago, beHypE said:

I feel most of you make the fallacious assumption that they game was scarier back then, when in fact you were simply less experienced back in those days.

 

Imagine watching a horror movie and getting scared to death, and then rewatching it ? Same movie, different reactions.

 

3 hours ago, Outlaw_187 said:

Man you hit the nail on the head with this. I remember when I 1st played this game, I didn't know my 🅰️ $ $ from a hole in the ground. 

This game was terrifying! It definitely gets less so when you actually know what you're doing.

 

Yeah, it's not like anyone on this thread mentions actual arguments and reasons why this may be happening. So let's just dismiss them as "fallacious assumptions" and then follow up with our own and elaborate and factual (above all else) argument which is: "the game hasn't changed, you have".

 

 

First of all, it is clear as day that by "scary", none is referring to the novel fear of seeing things for the first time or not knowing what to do. That fear goes away in the first few dozens of hours of gameplay. It's about the fear that the game produces through adversity, incentives and randomness.

 

Even in static worlds like The Forest's or Subnautica's, where you know exactly what to expect in every corner after having played these games a few times, you are well aware that you must struggle and take caution as the games aren't rewarding you with abundance or motivating you to farm your sources of fear. Don't even need to mention dynamic worlds like in Don't Starve or Project Zomboid etc. No game is "perfect", but these games offer a smooth, carefully designed progression, keeping incentives relevant throughout their progression curve and rewarding you at specific times. 

 

It's not that this is completely missing in 7DTD and a (disappointingly) few of the incoming changes are pretty interesting and do work towards this goal. This game though, is perfectly capable of awe-inspiring replayability, more so than the games I mentioned before, but instead of working towards a more dynamic world since years ago, they seem to be more focused on introducing, now and then, a new toy for players to play with. No amount of toys will have a real impact, as long as the playground itself is lacking.

 

1 hour ago, beHypE said:

This I agree on. I started playing at the very end of Alpha 11, and I remember my first trip to the 0,0 central hub city, with dogs and cops and bees everywhere. Damn, I miss those days, I really do. If you check my post history it's the one thing I push for the most. Right now a city is nothing but a cluster of POIs, there's 0 reason to loot the odd lone house in the wild compared to just going to a city on day 1 and have dozens of houses to loot for weeks. It's funny they emphasize so much on slow progression yet basically allow for the "end game locations" to be the perfect base spot right after you started a fresh game.

Now that's what we are talking about.

[RipClaw]

31 minutes ago, RestInPieces said:

Even in static worlds like The Forest's or Subnautica's, where you know exactly what to expect in every corner after having played these games a few times, you are well aware that you must struggle and take caution as the games aren't rewarding you with abundance or motivating you to farm your sources of fear.

The most frightening thing about Subnautica are the sounds. The deep roar of a reaper will make you think twice about driving your seamoth into the dunes to search for wrecks. Besides, there are no guns in Subnautica. This is a very important point. Imagine how much scarier 7 Days to die would be without guns.
 

[RestInPieces]

31 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

The most frightening thing about Subnautica are the sounds. The deep roar of a reaper will make you think twice about driving your moth into the dunes to search for wrecks. Besides, there are no guns in Subnautica. This is a very important point. Imagine how much scarier 7 Days to die would be without guns.

True, the game does a good job of instilling awe into you. You just get some defensive tools like the stasis rifle and repulsion cannon early-ish, and only much later torpedoes as well. If that game had easily accessible guns for example, and prompted you to farm Leviathans for rewards, players would quickly be desensitized to them.

 

It's not a perfect comparison, but the same thing happens in 7DTD. Don't have to abolish weapons but it would be great if they didn't grow on trees. Furthermore drones, mobile auto-target turrets and the like, work towards desensitizing the player to any kind of intensity in exploration that the game can produce. List goes on with dungeon POIs, which in their current form, feel repetitive, predictable and are pretty much everywhere, excessive use of sleepers which could be used more sparingly as surprise elements and overall difficulty homogenization of zones and loot lists. All that coupled with rewarding the act of killing zombies, transforming a zombie encounter, to a rather neutral or even positive event.

 

 

[FileMachete]

To the original point/question: maybe not? I haven't played Rolands mod. I'd be more inclined to play a mod where there wasn't xp but also common sense little blue dress progression for toon healthyness, maybe +25% skilling of tool/weapon use, and another ~25-50?% improvements via looted Books. Combined with more involved crafting where player crafted items would always be the best you could do. And Traders nerfed all to hell if not just removed.

 

Reason for maybe just leave zombie xp as is, is due to the current game, which to me is quite a lot different than earlier alphas.

Seems -much- more built to encourage 'fast' aggressive play and cater to the first person shooter crowd than a 'survivalist' inclined player.

 

In A15 & 16 I'd occasionally do a 'golf game' playthrough where I'd try to kill as _few_ zeds as possible.

Build a deep underground base, break through house walls to sneak out loot, that kind of thing.

Would also bang on the walls to lure out the zeds then kite them away to run in and grab more loot.

Basically try to do in-game what you might do if a zompoc actually happened, heh.

 

I found it a nice change of pace, and as Little Blue Dress existed you could still progress, and crafting was still king so you could keep improving there to.

 

Haven't bothered to try one of these in A17-18 as there seems little point.

There are so few zeds out wandering around, even in the cities, that it'd be trivial to avoid them.

So while you could easily get to juicy pois without incident, once there the 'sleeper volumes' & triggers mean you'd need to seriously suspend disbelief to wake them up & lure them away.

Add to that the lack of Blue Dress progression, so only way to craft higher Tier items is via XP, and then looted items are commonly better than what the player can craft, and the whole concept falls apart. (it wasn't intended as a 'masochist' playthrough)

 

The one crucial bit I find myself thinking about over and over is, "why so few zombies?"

 

If the ai pathing takes so much cpu inside POIs that the rest of the world is basically deserted, then maybe there might be a way to have the POIs include pre-pathing plotted routes that the zeds can link onto.

Or maybe something like 'scout' zombies. Not visually different to players, just marked by the game, higher lvl ai applied and that zed path finds for a few other zeds. Not all other zeds, that'd lead to long conga lines, but instead of every zed being 'smart' just say 1 out of 4-5.

 

And sometimes I wonder why SP is so empty yet in MP it's apparently possible for the game to handle 8 times as many zeds.

Is SP zed count nerfed so that MP worlds don't look empty in comparison?

Edit: guess this is/would-be more about SP & MP sharing config bits. So likely not an intentional nerf, but an unintended one?

[RestInPieces]

5 minutes ago, FileMachete said:

I found it a nice change of pace, and as Little Blue Dress existed you could still progress, and crafting was still king so you could keep improving there to.

 

If the ai pathing takes so much cpu inside POIs that the rest of the world is basically deserted, then maybe there might be a way to have the POIs include pre-pathing plotted routes that the zeds can link onto.

The AI scripts should pale in comparison to collision detection calculations. Don't know what magicks they are using, layered, compound colliders or whatever, but there has to be more things they can do. 

 

"Little Blue Dress" -- we should make that term official

 

 

[FileMachete]

"LBD" always translates to 'Little Blue Dress' in my mind.. long ago magical summer spent with a goddess who's favorite was a sky blue cotton dress with white lilys. She wore it on our second date and a couple weeks later on when I suggested she wear her 'little blue dress' out to dinner, she laughed and said, "oh you mean the Lear, Bumble & Drool one?" Turned out that I hadn't been nearly as cool as I'd thought on that second date, lol.

[eXSe]

I think that the "sleepers" and dungeon POI's are the thing that crippled the game. Yes, it may run a little better, but it killed the towns and cities and the dread that came with them.

[Roland]

Some of you seem to be pointing at A18 as the intended design for the game. It was simply a stepping stone and in about 4 days A18 will be completely irrelevant except as a nostalgic memory for whoever hates the changes going into A19 and above...

 

Can we all please stop with the arguments that are based upon finding endgame weaponry in loot on Day 1? That is over. It was never intended as the final version of the game. The whole looter shooter vibe is much less apparent and there is now lots of space for crafting things that are better than what you can find. Even once non-primitive weaponry shows up you will definitely be scrapping the ones you've perked into for parts so you can craft much better versions of them.

 

XP is never going to go away. The current perk system based on a central xp pool is what will be in the gold version of the game. Might they adjust amount of xp earned from different activities as part of continual balancing? Sure. But killing zombies is always going to net you an xp reward that will give you the incentive to kill zombies. For variations on the current system like 0xp, or more outdoor spawns, or LBD you will need to look to mods.

[Laz Man]

On 6/22/2020 at 2:08 AM, Viktoriusiii said:

yea... no. I thought about that too.
But back then I would not go into towns (maybe not A14-16 but more A~10) because there were dogs that mauled me, if i fired a shot, Z's from all over the city were headed my way and if I started looting they would slowly surround the place. It WAS way less predictable, therefor making it scarier.
Obviously expertise does help, but the simple fact is, that there are no zombies or dogs in town anymore. They are restricted to pois, making the city a lootfest.

*edit* also guns were SUPER scarce, so you couldn't simply shoot the dogs either because weapons were mostly in cities. So you had to loot small buildings and hope for a shotgun messiah outside the city or craft a really good crossbow to take them down.
Now I go into a town day 1 with just a bow and clear a poi and have a weapon...

I think it's a mix of alot of variables.

 

For those that remember the hub cities, the biome spawns were relentless so you had to really be efficient with your looting which gave alot of tension. 

 

The feeling eventually goes away tho when you reach the spawning limitations of the game and the spawns stop happening because there are two many already wandering around.

 

Vanilla 18s biomes are significantly less because of the design decision not to overwhelm players while in POI dungeons and to not waste spawns on zeds the players dont see.

 

Thank goodness biome spawns can be increased pretty easily to add some of that tension back in.  Hopefully it's enough to entertain us vets until that new event management system the devs are touting gets implemented....