Progression sucks

[Jaron105]

It feels like game stage rises too slowly. In past alphas you can have a much higher gamestage in a shorter amount of time making the game harder more quickly, especially the 7th day. Now since gamestage is tied to loot I've noticed it rises much more slowly, the 7th and 14th day both never seem to have anything besides normal zombies and the occasional cop on the 14th, when before if your game stage was high enough you could have some radiated zombies or much more higher tier threats. Feels like gamestage could elevate quicker, and maybe if they have to change what level you can start looting later tiers if needed to make more of a challenge imo. At this rate I'd be lucky to see special zombies by day 28 which is very unusual

[Liesel Weppen]

11 minutes ago, Jaron105 said:

Now since gamestage is tied to loot I've noticed it rises much more slowly,

Loot is now tied to the gamestage, not the other way round.

Afaik XP rewards and gamestage values haven't been changed.

You may have leveled faster in previous versions, because finding an AK-47 on day 3 allows you to kill Zs faster and so get more XP in less time. Or an iron shovel early gives more XP in shorter time when digging out burried supplies. And of course quests are done faster if you just rush through the POIs with a pumpgun than if you have to do it with a spear, bow or even melee through it.

And maybe you have headed for leveling more in general.

 

I can't confirm what you are saying. Even in multiplayer the first bloodmoon for us did not contain cops or ferrals. Even the second one might have a low occurence of ferrals, but still no radiated. The earliest we usually see radiated was the third and that was already this way in A18. So if you insist that you "normally" had radiateds on your second bloodmoon, i'd assume you are rushing the game and are a power-leveler, aka min-maxer.

 

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Onarr said:

I see a lot of talk about grinding and whether or not it is neccessary. Well as I see it its the way this game works now. 

First, there is a time constraint in the 7th day horde - you need to prepare. What do you need for horde night? Ammunition, base building materials, healing items and good weapons.

 

Ok so how can you get this? You have several basic ways

• Looting PoIs
• Gathering
• Quests
• Crafting

This then creates one half of your gameplay loop, second being building your base. The balance of those activities will determine where the player will spend most of their time. If doing quests yield the best rewards, player will do those. If focusing on looting is better, thats what he will do etc. Imho the goal here is all of those activities should have their niches in what they provide, so there are different motivations to do them. For example exploration should yield advances in tech trees, trading to fill in the gaps, questing to provide directions to various PoIs, looting materials for crafting and crafting to actually make the good stuff.

The argument that nobody forces you to play a certain way is ... well look at it like this. We human are hardwired in a certain way. We like getting stuff and hate losing stuff. But we hate loosing stuff much more that we like getting stuff. So if you have several activities, that yield same resources but different quantities and qualities, we will view doing such activity as loss. This forces us to do the alternative, because even if the less lucrative activity is more fun, we view it is as loss. This happens over time, not immediately of course. Once the novelty is gonne people will always move to the most efficient way to do things. This is only magnified by the time constraint of 7th day horde.

I understand what your saying but believe or not, not everyone plays a min/max style sort of game.

 

Some people play without using the traders for the extra challenge.

 

Some players play with bloodmoons turned off.

 

Some players play horde every night on insane difficutly.

 

And so on and so on.

 

One of the beauties of this game is its flexibility to play the game how you want it.

 

Imo, I think it's near impossible to make all tasks equal without make one or the other not fun in the process....

[dowz0r]

I'm currently on day 19 I believe on my first playthrough, while I've already made my distate for the loot system known, I definitely wouldn't say it feels like some horrible grind. I have all of my settings on default, on day 19 I'm level 30 and already have a motorcycle level 5 AK, level 6 double barrell, level 5 auger and other decent stuff. Not sure if I got lucky or if that's pretty average for day 19, but it feels fine for me. I am using a small exploit that I discovered where if you invest into trader related skills and use nerdy glasses to boost your intelligence, then you can actually give yourself access to two different secret stashes from the traders. One stash from wearing the glasses and a different one when you take them off. So yea, maybe that gave me a slight advantage. 

 

But overall the progression isn't terrible, although I agree that it's current form isn't the best, especially the "stone age" part of it. They should create an intuitive way to keep you longer in the stone age and not through some immersion breaking game mechanic that forces it on you. I still think it's ridiculous to open a military crate or a working stiffs crate to constantly get multiple stone items. 

 

Perhaps good loot should just be rarer and higher game stage could slightly increase your chance of getting them, or be very resource heavy to craft. 

[Boidster]

On 7/5/2020 at 10:33 AM, guardianangelmp said:

t6 items should be craftable again.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[Boidster]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

I understand what your saying but believe or not, not everyone plays a min/max style sort of game.

<raises hand> I pay almost no attention to the things people are complaining about. It's an open world with zombies and interesting places to explore in it, things to build or destroy! With recognition of the fact that a horde will arrive in the next 6-8 days, I just roam around doing whatever strikes my fancy. Sometimes that is spending all day mining because I need ore. Sometimes it's doing a quest or two. Sometimes I'll go look for POIs I haven't seen before and explore them. Maybe just Netflix and chill back at base.

 

This game has never felt "grindy" to me at all. There are just too many things to do - all of which advance my character - to label anything a "grind" (except in the literal sense when using the auger). I don't really pay any attention to my character's level, though, and I am always pleasantly surprised when I make a level. I can see where people who are focused on level, gamestage, and getting this or that weapon ASAP would pay much more attention to it, and would go out grinding for XP. I am much lower level than they are on the same day I'm sure!

 

It would add interesting incentives if there were biome-specific loot (or biome-specific POIs which contained POI-specific loot) to encourage people to explore farther if they are not inclined to do so otherwise. Bandit-specific loot might cover this idea pretty well.

[Roland]

4 hours ago, Onarr said:

First, there is a time constraint in the 7th day horde - you need to prepare. What do you need for horde night? Ammunition, base building materials, healing items and good weapons.

Can we all agree that the Day 7 horde is nothing to really be urgent about? The only way the Day 7 horde could be even close to scary is if the player is power leveling and inflating their gamestage well beyond what would be considered normal levels for Day 7.

 

The Day 14 horde can be something to worry about depending on how aggressively you have been leveing or if you are playing co-op and are partied up which can again inflate the gamestage. But in most cases even Day 14 is pretty manageable by most players without having to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing.

 

That really gives you to Day 21 to where you want to have a good design with plenty of traps and reinforced concrete blocks. So yes, there is a time constraint but I have always found that 20 days leaves me plenty of time to prepare for when the real blood moon hordes start arriving. And I usually play 50 minute days.

[Ranzera]

2 hours ago, Roland said:

Can we all agree that the Day 7 horde is nothing to really be urgent about? The only way the Day 7 horde could be even close to scary is if the player is power leveling and inflating their gamestage well beyond what would be considered normal levels for Day 7.

This is why I've always said the exp modifier game option is a noob trap.

[Roland]

17 minutes ago, Ranzera said:

This is why I've always said the exp modifier game option is a noob trap.

I didn’t even consider that— and you are absolutely right. I ignore that option so completely I forget it’s even possible...lol. 

[Mahnogard]

53 minutes ago, Roland said:

I didn’t even consider that— and you are absolutely right. I ignore that option so completely I forget it’s even possible...lol. 

I use it a lot. Same with day length. I play with whatever settings suit my mood at the time. I kind of love the fact that if I push the game, it pushes back. 300% with 2 hr days, the gamestage increases exponentially as the days tick by. It feels like a nice cushion, but I have to make use of the extra time and levels or I'll be getting a whoopin' sooner than I'm ready for. Also, you can still only loot so much in one day, so even though the GS is enabling you to get better stuff faster, it's still up to luck and RNG whether you'll actually get the stuff you want before you actually need to use it. 

[Onarr]

On 7/7/2020 at 3:51 PM, Laz Man said:

I understand what your saying but believe or not, not everyone plays a min/max style sort of game.

 

Some people play without using the traders for the extra challenge.

 

Some players play with bloodmoons turned off.

 

Some players play horde every night on insane difficutly.

 

And so on and so on.

 

One of the beauties of this game is its flexibility to play the game how you want it.

 

Imo, I think it's near impossible to make all tasks equal without make one or the other not fun in the process....

What do you mean by min maxing?

 

By the way, the playstyles you mentioned...I cannot imagine there are lot of people that fall into such groups. Perhaps 2-3% of playerbase?

It is near impossible to make them equal, thats why I proposed they have seperate niches.

Anyway I thought I would share my experience with my latest game.

I play on default settings on nomad, perception build to day 22 and then got bored.

 

What I liked: New zombies look dope, animations are cool to, even through its now a bit harder to hit them. New PoIs are pretty cool, and will be a desirable places to look for. The game also runs much smoother, which is big plus. I also like, that almost all the cans now have purpose in cooking. Lastly new status effect are pretty good, its just shame I almost never get them when wearing armor.

What I disliked: More or less all what I already wrote here. The game went something like this: I started and found trader. Tried the buried supplies q, because it was close. I almost died of boredom and also hunger. Luckily there was food in the cache so at least that.  All other quests were more than 1km far so screw that, I went looting PoIs. I got quite lucky and on day 3 I found house with working workbench and chemistry station, so I made it my base. There I stayed for the remained of my playthrough, because I could not find schematics for the stations. Also gathering materials for the base was pain in the @%$*#! with bad tools and just few points in miner 69. So I just built super simple horde night base where I depleted whole horde by using explosives. Most of the game I just looted, because I figured - well I am perception build, so I ought to focus on looting, because thats my strength. Unfortunately, most PoIs are very crammed so using rifles and spears really suck for this kind of playstyle. I did ocassional quest here and there if it was within the city limits and thus unlocked the location of the second trader. By day 22 I had all the best weapons for perception build - q5 steel spear and sniper rifle (both crafted).

 

My observations

• No motivation to explore PoIs outside of my city
• I got discouraged by the game to build a base - schematics for crafting stations were too rare, gathering resources with bad tools was too boring and punishing by deplating food faster.
• There was almost no threat from zombies until ferals started to appear and by that time I had T3 weapons that I crafted, so they really are not much of a challenge either
• Ammo felt a bit too abundant, but that might be because I one shotted zombies with rifles and used explosives for horde night. At day 22 I had thousands of ammunition and had no real use for it.
• As perception build I had absolutely no problems with food at the end I had plenty to go around (mostly because I avoided mining)

 

 

 

[RipClaw]

On 7/7/2020 at 2:17 PM, Jaron105 said:

It feels like game stage rises too slowly. In past alphas you can have a much higher gamestage in a shorter amount of time making the game harder more quickly, especially the 7th day.

For players who play with a higher difficulty this is indeed the case. The difficulty setting no longer has any impact on the gamestage.
 

[Kosmic Kerman]

2 hours ago, Onarr said:

What I disliked: More or less all what I already wrote here. The game went something like this: I started and found trader. Tried the buried supplies q, because it was close. I almost died of boredom and also hunger. Luckily there was food in the cache so at least that.  All other quests were more than 1km far so screw that, I went looting PoIs. I got quite lucky and on day 3 I found house with working workbench and chemistry station, so I made it my base. There I stayed for the remained of my playthrough, because I could not find schematics for the stations. Also gathering materials for the base was pain in the @%$*#! with bad tools and just few points in miner 69. So I just built super simple horde night base where I depleted whole horde by using explosives. Most of the game I just looted, because I figured - well I am perception build, so I ought to focus on looting, because thats my strength. Unfortunately, most PoIs are very crammed so using rifles and spears really suck for this kind of playstyle. I did ocassional quest here and there if it was within the city limits and thus unlocked the location of the second trader. By day 22 I had all the best weapons for perception build - q5 steel spear and sniper rifle (both crafted).

 

My observations

• No motivation to explore PoIs outside of my city
• I got discouraged by the game to build a base - schematics for crafting stations were too rare, gathering resources with bad tools was too boring and punishing by deplating food faster.
• There was almost no threat from zombies until ferals started to appear and by that time I had T3 weapons that I crafted, so they really are not much of a challenge either
• Ammo felt a bit too abundant, but that might be because I one shotted zombies with rifles and used explosives for horde night. At day 22 I had thousands of ammunition and had no real use for it.
• As perception build I had absolutely no problems with food at the end I had plenty to go around (mostly because I avoided mining)

 

 

 

It kind of sounds like you don't enjoy the early game, the mid game, or the late game. Why make the game easier if you are already bored at Day 22? Maybe you need to adjust the default settings to increase the challenge. In terms of "no motivation to explore POIs" in other cities, that's 100% on the player and not the game. It's fine if you don't enjoy exploration but that's an inherent part of the game. Not liking exploration is not the game's fault as you've described it.

[Jaron105]

15 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

For players who play with a higher difficulty this is indeed the case. The difficulty setting no longer has any impact on the gamestage.
 

Ah that explains it, I play with a group of friends on insane and we felt it was easier this patch than it had been, not even counting the increased ammo from drops and quests seemingly made it even more so. Thanks for the information!

[MechanicalLens]

22 hours ago, Roland said:

I didn’t even consider that— and you are absolutely right. I ignore that option so completely I forget it’s even possible...lol. 

Likewise. Some worlds I play on 75% EXP gain (I only play on 90 minute days so I try to match the EXP gain that one would achieve on default), others as low as 50%, some default, and on occasion I might start off at default EXP gain to acquire my mining perks as fast as possible, and then I'll drop it down to 50%. Not once have I ever considered bringing it above default, and it is true, it is a noob trap. 😛 

[Laz Man]

On 7/7/2020 at 5:28 AM, Liesel Weppen said:

Loot is now tied to the gamestage, not the other way round.

Afaik XP rewards and gamestage values haven't been changed.

You may have leveled faster in previous versions, because finding an AK-47 on day 3 allows you to kill Zs faster and so get more XP in less time. Or an iron shovel early gives more XP in shorter time when digging out burried supplies. And of course quests are done faster if you just rush through the POIs with a pumpgun than if you have to do it with a spear, bow or even melee through it.

And maybe you have headed for leveling more in general.

 

I can't confirm what you are saying. Even in multiplayer the first bloodmoon for us did not contain cops or ferrals. Even the second one might have a low occurence of ferrals, but still no radiated. The earliest we usually see radiated was the third and that was already this way in A18. So if you insist that you "normally" had radiateds on your second bloodmoon, i'd assume you are rushing the game and are a power-leveler, aka min-maxer.

 

I think I read somewhere that bloodmoon calculation changed in that game difficulty doesnt increase party GS anymore.  Could be wrong and still need to verify tho.

[Jebediah]

On 7/5/2020 at 1:27 PM, Onarr said:

Loot is tied to gamestage, which means that better loot is locked behind grinding.

To me it's extremely boring to know that i can't find anything good, or knowing that there won't be any special threat granting special rewards.

What's the point in looting now? Shouldn't you just get basic gear and grind xp?

Or is the game stage tied to looting/stockpiling stuff, making it even worse by forcing you into meaningless gameplay?

 

If not looting, especially safes or weapon boxes, until you reached a higher game stage is what you should do, that's just bad game design period.

Just putting top tier loot boxes everywhere and adjusting the loot to the player level/stage, i would argue is the most boring, immersion breaking and most lazy way of balancing this aspect of progression.

[Liesel Weppen]

27 minutes ago, Jebediah said:

Just putting top tier loot boxes everywhere and adjusting the loot to the player level/stage, i would argue is the most boring, immersion breaking and most lazy way of balancing this aspect of progression.

That's how it is done currently. However i'd say, previously i've mostly gone from a lvl1 spear to an AK-47 or DBS lvl2 or similar. With the new system i'm happy if i find a lvl4 spear oder a lvl5 bow or a blunderbus, and i use them.

 

The problem is, like said repeatedly, the game currently has no mechanics to put better lootboxes behind tougher enemies. There is not even something like a "top tier" lootbox. The game doesn't know about good or bad lootboxes. E.g. a weapon bag has weapons in it. Previously with a high chance for ANY low level weapons and lower chance for ANY high end weapon. If you been lucky, you could have found a T6 M60 on Day 1 in a simple shootgun messiah crate in a garage where not even one single zombie spawned. Every type of lootbox drops the same stuff, no matter WHERE the lootbox is placed. The weapon bag in a garage has the same loot as the weapon bag on the roof of dishong tower. The game doesn't allow you to say "this single lootbox here should always drop high level weapons, because it is the lootroom of a reallly tough POI, and those lootbox should only spawn low level loot, because it is just in a garage".

Now with A19 the loot is tied at least to the gamestage. But it still does not matter where a lootbox is. Even on dishong tower roof on day 3 you will not get something better than a bow or maybe a blunderbus.

[RipClaw]

12 hours ago, Laz Man said:

I think I read somewhere that bloodmoon calculation changed in that game difficulty doesnt increase party GS anymore.  Could be wrong and still need to verify tho.

The difficulty bonus for the Gamestage calculation is set to a fixed value of 1.2. This is equivalent to the difficulty bonus you had in A18 for Adventurer. For comparison, the difficulty bonus for Insane was 2.5and the bonus for Nomad was 1.5 in A18.

 

You can see this in the gamestages.xml file and also change it if you want to increase the gamestage progression. 

 

[Jebediah]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

The game doesn't allow you to say "this single lootbox here should always drop high level weapons, because it is the lootroom of a reallly tough POI, and those lootbox should only spawn low level loot, because it is just in a garage".

Maybe im missing something, but what exactly is the problem with placing the same objects but with different loot tables in different POI's?!

Then again why does every common house need to have several ammunition and weapon lootboxes that aren't even locked?! You could just remove 90%-99% of those or replace them with something that drops bows, arrows or spears exclusively. You could also spawn better weapons in boxes that require e.g. steel tools or specific lockpicking skills, that require a certain game progression. 

In addition there are lots of different balancing options for example several ways of making high level items less powerful early and mid game.

[Liesel Weppen]

15 minutes ago, Jebediah said:

Maybe im missing something, but what exactly is the problem with placing the same objects but with different loot tables in different POI's?!

There is no problem. It is just not implemented (yet). It CAN be implemented and what i got from some TFP members, they are already working on that (or at least something similar). But it is simply not yet possible.

15 minutes ago, Jebediah said:

or replace them with something that drops bows, arrows or spears exclusively.

There are not lootboxes that only drop stone-age items. You could do that, but you'll have to add completely new lootcrates that can be configured to just drop that.

And if e.g. with A20 the lootboxes are improved, all that changes would become obsolete again. Work wasted.

 

Quote

You could also spawn better weapons in boxes that require e.g. steel tools or specific lockpicking skills, that require a certain game progression. 

Yep, you COULD, but also no such mechanic is implemented yet.

 

Quote

In addition there are lots of different balancing options for example several ways of making high level items less powerful early and mid game.

It is already this way. What you are looking for are perks, that improve stuff, but you need to level to gain points you can put into those perks.

 

That there are weapon bags, ammunition chests, working stiff or shotgun messiah boxes in almost every POI is a result that TFP dungeonised almost every POI to or and make them trader-questable.

[Jebediah]

18 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

There is no problem. It is just not implemented (yet). It CAN be implemented and what i got from some TFP members, they are already working on that (or at least something similar). But it is simply not yet possible.

My point is that loot changing with game stage is bad game design and that the same results could be achieved in a much better way without much effort. Im not arguing to bring back the previous system or that changes won't require some work and time, or that it needs to change immediately.

If loot tied to game stage is just a temporary solution or subject to test this would be good to know. You can probably already find bad reviews mainly based on this change, that would be completely unnecessary. Without any information on that and while i don't see why they would waste time on this as a temporary solution, we have to assume that this change is ment to stay.

 

What is you point? You can't justify this by arguing that it works somehow, that it works better than before, or that other solutions would require some work and you might need to change a trader quest. It couldn't be more simple than adding and modifying existing stuff, like modifying stone tools to do zero damage to weapon safes. The actual work would be figuring out the perfect balancing for everything, but there is no way around that if your goal is a well balanced progression.

[Liesel Weppen]

Quote

What is you point?

I wrote the point at least a dozen times now. You still won't get it if i repeat it one more time.

 

That reminds of:

 

[RestInPieces]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

I wrote the point at least a dozen times now. You still won't get it if i repeat it one more time.

Quote

-I don't like this change for [reasons].

-But that's just how things work now.

-Ok, but it could work differently.

-But this has not been implemented yet.

Sorry, but what *is* your point exactly?

 

On 7/7/2020 at 10:39 PM, Ranzera said:

This is why I've always said the exp modifier game option is a noob trap.

"In case you haven't already noticed the scaling counter-intuitiveness, here's an option." 

[Liesel Weppen]

9 minutes ago, RestInPieces said:

Sorry, but what *is* your point exactly?

A system that allowes to resolves thoses issues is currently not implemented. Yes the current system is not the best, the previous was also not the best. To make it any better changes need to be made, but they are not done yet. So you can cry how much you want, it will take time to implement the required features.

All people agree that each crate need to have a specific loot table. That is simply not possible in A19. And it is not an easy quick change, that maybe made for the next experimental build. Maybe we see such a system in A20.