Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[bachgaman]

Im back()

On 11/13/2021 at 3:08 PM, meganoth said:

No. You say I made contradictory claim, one of them being it is not a sandbox. So again, where did I say "It is not a sandbox". 

Okay, I was wrong about the sandbox, and I'll explain to you where I was wrong.

On 11/12/2021 at 2:51 AM, meganoth said:

As a mix of lots of genres they can pick whatever they want from each genre and call it that. And there is no clearcut definition of sandbox. The obvious element of 7D2D that gets them the label sandbox is clearly the building part which many other sandbox games lack in this detail. Another sandbox element is that you can largely play as a miner or tradesman, though in earlier alphas the "sandbox" part was much bigger.

In this paragraph, you are claiming that this game is a sandbox only in terms of construction and the possibility of role-playing. 

 

Many people on this forum have assured me that this is a sandbox game, and I was clearly convinced that this was usually an excuse for having to fix XML files. In fact, this is not the case. I checked. Perhaps there were such cases, but there were not many of them.

 

But for you to understand why I have complaints about the definition of a game as a sandbox, I believe that in a sandbox we set the rules and laws ourselves. If this feature is not a strong point of the game and a priority, then this is not a sandbox. My opinion.

 

Probably you dont consider, or dont say that you consider, flexibility and freedom to customize the world as a property of a sandbox game. I was wrong. Sorry. Stop talk about this.

On 11/13/2021 at 3:08 PM, meganoth said:

Off the top of my head

1) The trader is endpoint not only for quests he gives out but quests that can be found in the wasteland. All of those have to be deactived **depending** on this option. According to an experienced modder this might not be possible yet in XML so further changes in c++ code would be necessary.

2) The trader in A20 is a neccessary ingredient of any town as it is the endpoint of the highway to it. No trader, no highway that ends in that town. It probably would need some changes in random world generation to use an alternative newly-created POI for this as well (which I think would be the easiest fix)

3) Whether you believe it or not, bandits and story and possibly a faction system will be in 7D2D in the future, with the traders assumed to be in the middle of some of the mechanisms of this. Only TFP knows the detials, but such an interconnectedness would probably need additional code to make the game work without trader.

 

Blood Moon is not part of anything else, it just makes lots of zombies spawn at a specific time. I don't see any other feature of the game touched by BM.

1) But we are talking about how the quests, that he gives out, have a very detrimental effect on the gameplay. First, they tie you to the area around the trader. Second, they force you to clear the same points of interest. Thirdly, you receive too valuable rewards, that speed up development too much, for completing quests. These are real problems, and I've come up with some simple solutions to all three. And this is not the removing of the trader.  First and second problem can be solved by adding option "All trader's quests are unique (1 POI = 1 use in quests)", third problem can be solved by adding option "manual setting of the assortment and trader's rewards in the world options menu". Simple rebalancing won't help those who want to play with 25% or 50% loot.

 

Recently i started a new game on Vanila in Navezgane at a fairly high difficulty. On the 12th day I have a auger, a grenade launcher, a truck, a concrete base, all kinds of electric traps and electricity, a lot of ammunition and grenades. On the 14th day BM will come and how do you think I will experience the pleasure overcoming the difficulties offered by the game on this day? And I would not say that I was speedrunning a lot, I was playing a very ordinary game. So trader's rewards and shop is really broken, because I bought concrete from him, from him I bought a crucible and some steel for the car, from him I bought an AK-47 level 4 and level 2 (on day 2), from him I received thousands of ammo for this AK, from him I received hundreds of grenades, from him I bought a grenade launcher and ammo for it, I bought a drill from him and much more. Not to mention the tens of thousands of experience as rewards and for items sold.

 

By the way, what kind of wasteland quests are you talking about? Those raw notes that give you 300 dukes and 500 experience and nothing else? From extreme to extreme

 

2) I did not know about this, but what prevents to dont literally remove the trader, but to make him uncommunicative, as an example? I don’t know, maybe you’re right and removing it is a more difficult thing to do than make him able to setting up.

 

3) In general, I assumed that all this future content would disappear with him, but we dont have it yet, so what are we talking about

 

4) The trader is also not part of anything else today. I proceed from what we have now and in the next few years.

[Roland]

17 minutes ago, bachgaman said:

I believe that in a sandbox we set the rules and laws ourselves.

 

With the dm mode and cm mode enabled the game is pretty much a pure sandbox experience according to the classic definition using Gary's Mod as the primary example of a Sandbox game. Disabling those modes you can still gain a sandbox experience in that you can do what you want but there are of course limits. You can't fly and you must harvest all resources and craft all blocks and experience enemies as they are randomly generated rather than spawning in what you want to fight yourself. There are a lot of open world games out these days with just a very loose story pretty much giving you the setting and barest of backstories but you are primarily setting your own goals, doing what you want, and interacting with the world at your own pace and in your own way. These types are games are often called sandbox games because there is very very little scripted about them and the player is not forced to follow a story line in order to reach a conclusion to that story. You can go and just play around and do whatever for 100 days and you can't fail at whatever the game has as winning conditions.

So 7 Days qualifies as a sandbox under both sets of categories of sandbox. Play it with cm and dm turned off and you have an open world game without specified winning conditions and nothing to really guide or force you along a story path. Play it with cm and dm turned on and you have a classic Gary's Mod style sandbox experience where you can build a base immediately and without having to craft or harvest mats and then can spawn in 25 Demolishers and 25 Screamers and 25 zombie vultures and fight for a bit and when you get bored type in the killall command and do something else.

[bachgaman]

9 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

With the dm mode and cm mode enabled the game is pretty much a pure sandbox experience according to the classic definition using Gary's Mod as the primary example of a Sandbox game. Disabling those modes you can still gain a sandbox experience in that you can do what you want but there are of course limits. You can't fly and you must harvest all resources and craft all blocks and experience enemies as they are randomly generated rather than spawning in what you want to fight yourself. There are a lot of open world games out these days with just a very loose story pretty much giving you the setting and barest of backstories but you are primarily setting your own goals, doing what you want, and interacting with the world at your own pace and in your own way. These types are games are often called sandbox games because there is very very little scripted about them and the player is not forced to follow a story line in order to reach a conclusion to that story. You can go and just play around and do whatever for 100 days and you can't fail at whatever the game has as winning conditions.

So 7 Days qualifies as a sandbox under both sets of categories of sandbox. Play it with cm and dm turned off and you have an open world game without specified winning conditions and nothing to really guide or force you along a story path. Play it with cm and dm turned on and you have a classic Gary's Mod style sandbox experience where you can build a base immediately and without having to craft or harvest mats and then can spawn in 25 Demolishers and 25 Screamers and 25 zombie vultures and fight for a bit and when you get bored type in the killall command and do something else.

Okay, this is a sandbox game. I'm not interested in arguing about this. I was wrong, call it a sandbox, please. I wanted to use your argument against you, but I failed. In fact, I don't care if it's a sandbox or not. I hope now we all understand that 7DTD is a sandbox because it has DM, CM, because you can build and play a role

Edited November 15, 2021 by bachgaman (see edit history)

[Roland]

15 minutes ago, bachgaman said:

Okay, this is a sandbox game. I'm not interested in arguing about this. I was wrong, call it a sandbox, please. 

 

Cool. I do.

 

And to your real point about trader imbalance, the devs plan to continue to balance and make adjustments. A20 will show some of those changes. Will they go far enough for you? Probably not. I think it is a good idea for there to be some options for the trader so players can adjust them more to their liking without having to remove them. Maybe those options will show up at some point.

Edited November 15, 2021 by Roland (see edit history)

[Guppycur]

I still don't use them.  Too much of an rpg aspect for my taste.  Am I as advanced as others on the server who do?  No.  Not even close. 

 

I suspect that's the argument. 

[bachgaman]

10 minutes ago, Roland said:

And to your real point about trader imbalance, the devs plan to continue to balance and make adjustments. A20 will show some of those changes. Will they go far enough for you? Probably not. I think it is a good idea for there to be some options for the trader so players can adjust them more to their liking without having to remove them. Maybe those options will show up at some point.

I have already answered about rebalance in the A20. Obviously, the rebalancing will be done for 100% loot. And to be honest, I think he will still be OP. Let's see

1 hour ago, bachgaman said:

Simple rebalancing won't help those who want to play with 25% or 50% loot.

 

[bachgaman]

On 11/12/2021 at 7:34 PM, Matt115 said:

But i agree with you: kuosimodo is a hater .

Yes he is😂dislike machine

[Blake_]

38 minutes ago, bachgaman said:

Okay, this is a sandbox game. I'm not interested in arguing about this. I was wrong, call it a sandbox, please. I wanted to use your argument against you, but I failed. In fact, I don't care if it's a sandbox or not. I hope now we all understand that 7DTD is a sandbox because it has DM, CM, because you can build and play a role

There's no way on Earth that you can argue with Roland without having a really clear, solid, valid, resilitient and even "intense" point of view. I mean he is a teacher from the depths of a place that trains highly intelligent, scared and self-ignorant little beings on their path to self discovery and adulthood. He will make you see through your own BS and discover why you do or why you don't like this game. In other words, he is like a therapist that will make you a better human being for free.

 

If you fight it with mild or weak points, if your wall of text has any holes -however tiny- or even if you by any chance have said something that can even remotely be seen like a fallacy, then you will eventually get tunned down in a bloody sandbox of your own doing. That's a metaphor for wasting time and effort, yet look at the bright side, you will improve your social skills by 500% . That's a nice option into the "continue game" that is life.

 

Thank you Roland. Plz don't bully the rooster.

[bachgaman]

2 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

There's no way on Earth that you can argue with Roland without having a really clear, solid, valid, resilitient and even "intense" point of view. I mean he is a teacher from the depths of a place that trains highly intelligent, scared and self-ignorant little beings on their path to self discovery and adulthood. He will make you see through your own BS and discover why you do or why you don't like this game. In other words, he is like a therapist that will make you a better human being for free.

 

If you fight it with mild or weak points, if your wall of text has any holes -however tiny- or even if you by any chance have said something that can even remotely be seen like a fallacy, then you will eventually get tunned down in a bloody sandbox of your own doing. That's a metaphor for wasting time and effort, yet look at the bright side, you will improve your social skills by 500% . That's a nice option into the "continue game" that is life.

 

Thank you Roland. Plz don't bully the rooster.

Yes, that's great. The problem is that he only pays attention to holes, the presence of which is not so important and at the same time ignores the essence.

[Ianua]

I just played my first Unmodded version of 7D2D since like alpha 16 or something. Hubby and I always remove the vultures and tone down the bears. (I've worn out a 3 bow trying to kill a bear once). My feedback was the vultures are still annoying, but not impossible to kill. Thanks to whoever fixed the hitbox.  I'm still terrified of the bears, but apparently they don't take 45 Iron arrows to kill one now. (might have taken that many since I am a really bad shot). I saw a cougar in the snow biome and sprinted off far away from it, so I can't say if that has changed. I love the weather effects, I kept checking the time on the ingame clock because I wasn't used to it being overcast.  I'd still like to see a FOV closer to 100, but I've been concentrating really hard on not getting motion sick and it seems to be working. (I'm also not jumping around like a fart in a skillet) Great Job Guys!

[bachgaman]

1 minute ago, Ianua said:

I just played my first Unmodded version of 7D2D since like alpha 16 or something. Hubby and I always remove the vultures and tone down the bears. (I've worn out a 3 bow trying to kill a bear once). My feedback was the vultures are still annoying, but not impossible to kill. Thanks to whoever fixed the hitbox.  I'm still terrified of the bears, but apparently they don't take 45 Iron arrows to kill one now. (might have taken that many since I am a really bad shot). I saw a cougar in the snow biome and sprinted off far away from it, so I can't say if that has changed. I love the weather effects, I kept checking the time on the ingame clock because I wasn't used to it being overcast.  I'd still like to see a FOV closer to 100, but I've been concentrating really hard on not getting motion sick and it seems to be working. (I'm also not jumping around like a fart in a skillet) Great Job Guys!

The animals in this game are really scarier than any zombie

[Blue mame]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

And to your real point about trader imbalance, the devs plan to continue to balance and make adjustments. A20 will show some of those changes. Will they go far enough for you? Probably not. I think it is a good idea for there to be some options for the trader so players can adjust them more to their liking without having to remove them. Maybe those options will show up at some point.

 

I recently adjusted the price difference of the merchant, and the player said it is very good, so that it is in line with the doomsday survival. I will give the data reference below.

 

<set xpath="/traders[@buy_markup='2']/@buy_markup">9</set> 
<set xpath="/traders[@sell_markdown='0.2']/@sell_markdown">0.05</set> 

[Roland]

2 hours ago, bachgaman said:

Yes, that's great. The problem is that he only pays attention to holes, the presence of which is not so important and at the same time ignores the essence.

 

Alright, I'm game. What's the essence I ignored?

[Astronomical]

1 hour ago, bachgaman said:

Yes he is😂dislike machine

 

To be fair @Kuosimodo is not strictly a hater as many of his reactions are positive.

 

It's possible some people just don't appreciate your posts although with such copious and sprawling walls of text I can't imagine why? 😃

[NukemDed]

3 hours ago, Blake_ said:

There's no way on Earth that you can argue with Roland without having a really clear, solid, valid, resilitient and even "intense" point of view. I mean he is a teacher

ha ha laughed at this heartily

1 i got/had a wife, sister, aunt, uncle, mother inlaw AND father inlaw who are/were teachers. i know how to deal with teachers. have done since i was about 10.

 

and more importantly

2 why the hell would you argue with anyone unless you personally witnessed it or you can prove it with recognised science. aka wikipedia 

😉

 

 

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

Alright, I'm game. What's the essence I ignored?

ha ha ha ha ha ha

i see someone else knows how to deal with teachers

[Morloc]

 

My first thought was....

 

 

(Of course this is my first thought about 44% of the time).

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc

[bachgaman]

3 hours ago, Astronomical said:

 

To be fair @Kuosimodo is not strictly a hater as many of his reactions are positive.

 

It's possible some people just don't appreciate your posts although with such copious and sprawling walls of text I can't imagine why? 😃

Do u really think all this 40+ reactions (dislikes) given to such “copious and sprawling walls of text” posts, as my lasts ones?

Edited November 15, 2021 by bachgaman (see edit history)

[Aldranon]

3 hours ago, bachgaman said:

The animals in this game are really scarier than any zombie

 

That is a solid truth in vanilla A19.  However, when I saw the "poison bubble guys" (don't know the official name), I put them in with the predator animals. 

Surrounded by them in a tight spot... that could be my first combat death in a long time (in the vanilla game anyway).

[bachgaman]

54 minutes ago, Aldranon said:

 

That is a solid truth in vanilla A19.  However, when I saw the "poison bubble guys" (don't know the official name), I put them in with the predator animals. 

Surrounded by them in a tight spot... that could be my first combat death in a long time (in the vanilla game anyway).

 

You mean zeds covered in green goo a.k.a. radiation?

I never understood from what considerations you can meet a silent and fast Dire Wolf with 750 hp on the first day of the game

2 hours ago, Astronomical said:

 

To be fair @Kuosimodo is not strictly a hater as many of his reactions are positive.

 

It's possible some people just don't appreciate your posts although with such copious and sprawling walls of text I can't imagine why? 😃

 

Well, yes, because someone is arguing with me. Therefore, at maybe half of his reactions is not dislikes.

[bachgaman]

2 hours ago, Roland said:

 

Alright, I'm game. What's the essence I ignored?

It was a huge conversation about replayability, about new game world options, and not about whether it is a sandbox. The sandbox controversy was secondary and not important. There was a rather large post, from the middle of which you pulled out the phrase about sandbox, missing the main message, the original and main topic of conversation was contained in the same post, but you drew attention to it only after two posts, adding a paragraph to your last answer. I don't care how you call this game, I care about the replayability.

[Khalagar]

Gosh dang it, I refreshed and saw 19+ new posts and was hoping A20 was confirmed to be coming out on Friday for streamers,  and I missed something. Look at what you've done

[bachgaman]

1 hour ago, Khalagar said:

Gosh dang it, I refreshed and saw 19+ new posts and was hoping A20 was confirmed to be coming out on Friday for streamers,  and I missed something. Look at what you've done

Isn't it coming out this weekend? Nobody named the date?

[Doomofman]

I mentioned it earlier in the thread but just to repeat it here, if we go by how A19 streamer weekend was announced, even if it was this weekend (which I'm doubtful of) it probably wont get announced to us regular plebs until Thursday

 

But I'd really rein in expectations that it'll hit this weekend, I know that's what Rick was hoping for but to avoid disappointment I wouldn't get your hopes up

[BFT2020]

10 hours ago, bachgaman said:

Yes he is😂dislike machine

Funny Kuosimodo likes a majority of my posts.  They disliked one or two of mine, but I see a lot more likes than thumbs down.

[meganoth]

11 hours ago, bachgaman said:

[...]

 

1) But we are talking about how the quests, that he gives out, have a very detrimental effect on the gameplay. First, they tie you to the area around the trader. Second, they force you to clear the same points of interest. Thirdly, you receive too valuable rewards, that speed up development too much, for completing quests. These are real problems, and I've come up with some simple solutions to all three. And this is not the removing of the trader.  First and second problem can be solved by adding option "All trader's quests are unique (1 POI = 1 use in quests)", third problem can be solved by adding option "manual setting of the assortment and trader's rewards in the world options menu". Simple rebalancing won't help those who want to play with 25% or 50% loot.

 

Recently i started a new game on Vanila in Navezgane at a fairly high difficulty. On the 12th day I have a auger, a grenade launcher, a truck, a concrete base, all kinds of electric traps and electricity, a lot of ammunition and grenades. On the 14th day BM will come and how do you think I will experience the pleasure overcoming the difficulties offered by the game on this day? And I would not say that I was speedrunning a lot, I was playing a very ordinary game. So trader's rewards and shop is really broken, because I bought concrete from him, from him I bought a crucible and some steel for the car, from him I bought an AK-47 level 4 and level 2 (on day 2), from him I received thousands of ammo for this AK, from him I received hundreds of grenades, from him I bought a grenade launcher and ammo for it, I bought a drill from him and much more. Not to mention the tens of thousands of experience as rewards and for items sold.

 

Yes. But this is still a balancing problem that exists whether you have loot set to 100% or 25% loot. And I am absolutely on your side here as I have said on many occasions that the trader still needs toning down. The only difference between you and me, I know how TFP operates and I can wait. I know that TFP will not simply follow random guy even if he posts a convincing argument that **HE** can't play this way. Even if that guy were Roland, a respected modder or you. Because they look at new players and their difficulties as well.

 

They have their own priorities and a feature that they think worthy might turn up in a few weeks or in a year or shortly before going gold. For outsiders to the development process it always goes too slow. Whether the outsiders are right or not, this is the speed at which TFP develops and that won't change. And they view modding (not writing but using mods) as the door to endless replayability, now with an unfinished game in EA but also eventually with a finished game with steam workshop enabled. 

 

So I heard in A20 they toned down the trader. They surely will continue to tone down the trader if they feel it necessary, at a pace that clearly won't be to everyones liking. They surely will add more options, though as few as possible (because of screen space, testing effort, ...) and probably as late as possible.

 

For me this means that A19 traders are the past and not worth discussing much about, A20 traders are the new standard and if they still should be too powerful for my taste I will say so and probably have to wait another year for more changes. But before I haven't played A20 anything you or I are saying about the traders is just theoretical musing.

 

 

11 hours ago, bachgaman said:

 

By the way, what kind of wasteland quests are you talking about? Those raw notes that give you 300 dukes and 500 experience and nothing else? From extreme to extreme

 

What is extreme about it? A polished game can't have them drop in the game when they can't be completed. These are standards a mod can violate but not a game sold in steam as AA. Reviewers of game magazines would criticize this, reviews on youtube would make sarcastic comments about it. Since this is about polish it doesn't matter that their value is very limited and they can be ignored.

 

11 hours ago, bachgaman said:

 

2) I did not know about this, but what prevents to dont literally remove the trader, but to make him uncommunicative, as an example? I don’t know, maybe you’re right and removing it is a more difficult thing to do than make him able to setting up.

 

Maybe, but that could be really weird for players to see an NPC that is just doing nothing. Some of them would even guess this is a bug (they might not be the one that turned on the option and expect this but a player in a MP game). This is just a guess, I could be totally wrong here. But adding a substitute POI for the traders might not be that much more work (as part of the work is offloaded to a POI designer) but feels much more polished so that I think they would take the alternate POI solution.

 

11 hours ago, bachgaman said:

 

3) In general, I assumed that all this future content would disappear with him, but we dont have it yet, so what are we talking about

 

When you expect something from the devs, you have to take into account what their ultimate plans are. And they have all future content in mind when they think about new stuff to add. Lets assume for a moment that the Navezgane map gets an end-game goal that is only reachable after collecting enough reputation with one of the factions and the only way to gain reputation is either with normal or special reputation quests given out by the trader. So removing the trader would make the end-game goal unreachable. And that would be unacceptable.

 

We don't know what their plans are in detail. But we can list this as a **possible** reason they might not be too keen on adding a "no-trader" option. Which should be ok since you would prefer a "trader-nerf" option anyway.

 

11 hours ago, bachgaman said:

 

4) The trader is also not part of anything else today. I proceed from what we have now and in the next few years.

 

Proceed to where? You want something from TFP and they will probably not listen to arguments that do not take the future into account (like the trader nerf in A20 which we only can fully evaluate after having played A20). Also for TFP the trader seems already to be a central element of the game, as you can see with A20 adding another dependancy to the trader in RWG.