Traders: why to diminish them and how

[Matt115]

2 minutes ago, Maharin said:

 

You can survive a blood moon without gun or ammo by hiding in a tougher POI.  Sit on the top floor of a hotel with some head cover and you can survive.  Killing every last zombie is another matter entirely, but survival is easy if you can be patient.

Well one time after we destroyed stairs they and everything on lower floor in skyscraper they just... collapsed buliding at least highter floors 

[doughphunghus]

41 minutes ago, Matt115 said:

Well one time after we destroyed stairs they and everything on lower floor in skyscraper they just... collapsed buliding at least highter floors 

I’ve had this happen to me, sort of. The “solution” was to run along the edges of the building to keep them running and/or taking down subsections of the building. BasicLly “move around a lot”. The other partial answer to this is finding a building with enough square footage/area to be able to do this. 

[FA_Q2]

3 hours ago, Roland said:

That’s not true though. The game is balanced around your gamestage and the timer ticks according to the pace you choose. Maybe it’s counter-intuitive but the more efficiently you try to play the more you are going to feel like you are falling behind. 
 

The game used to ramp up in difficulty based mostly on the game day but that is no longer true. Now it ramps up in difficulty based on your gamestage which increased as quickly or slowly as you choose to play. 
 

Speed run the game and that timer is going to fly. Play at a leisurely pace and the timer slows way down. 
 

By spamming quests you are not just keeping up with the timer, you are also accelerating it. 

True or not, the game incentivizes play around the trader by both the mechanics of the trader itself and the fact that the game gives very little direction except the trader where it is telling you where to go.

 

IOW, from the very first quest you get when you start a new character, the game is pushing you to the trader.  You can avoid it and have good reasons to as you understand the game mechanics.  In general though, I think most players are just going to go along with the flow of the game.

[Roland]

22 minutes ago, FA_Q2 said:

True or not, the game incentivizes play around the trader by both the mechanics of the trader itself and the fact that the game gives very little direction except the trader where it is telling you where to go.

 

IOW, from the very first quest you get when you start a new character, the game is pushing you to the trader.  You can avoid it and have good reasons to as you understand the game mechanics.  In general though, I think most players are just going to go along with the flow of the game.

That is a great point and I very much agree with this assessment. But if they remove those incentives and force players to just one quest per day then it will feel artificial and nobody will like that either...

 

The way it is now you can choose to be casual with quests or hardcore with quests. If one way is turning out to not be fun for you then choose the other way.

Edited April 26, 2021 by Roland (see edit history)

[Matt115]

5 minutes ago, Roland said:

That is a great point and I very much agree with this assessment. But if they remove those incentives and force players to just one quest per day then it will feel artificial and nobody will like that either...

Yeah limit is stupid too, but i would left this quest but change "place " in ladder  like : Did you make a fiber clothes? good now you target is to make forge . You made  it ? good 1000 exp for you! Now make a worbench. Great job +1 perk point for you. Now find a gun and 10 bullets . Nice, now do bicycle! YEAH! now go to trader. You find him!  another point is goint to you account! And now do whatevere you want i don;t care XD

[Crater Creator]

On 4/17/2021 at 11:22 AM, Roland said:

...Upping the prices by quite a bit could also work to lessen their impact....

 

I do like the idea of having expensive items that are out of reach now, but that the player can aspire to obtain later.  It gives the player a goal - something to work towards - beyond an explicit quest to go here and do this.  And to be fair, the game has this to a fair degree now.  It's somewhat dampened by the 3-day loot refresh, though.  Still, I think the sheer number of items for sale is worth addressing in its own right.  A trader shouldn't have more than a dozen melee weapons to choose from (keeping in mind it's rolled separately for each player).  As I've said before in other contexts, too much luxury of choice tends to work against the sense of it being a survival game.

[FA_Q2]

8 hours ago, Roland said:

That is a great point and I very much agree with this assessment. But if they remove those incentives and force players to just one quest per day then it will feel artificial and nobody will like that either...

 

The way it is now you can choose to be casual with quests or hardcore with quests. If one way is turning out to not be fun for you then choose the other way.

Artificial limits are bad, yes.  But limits do not have to be artificial.  Should the trader be mobile, you are likely to only get one completed a day anyway by the time you locate the trader, acquire the quest and complete it.  Time is also a barrier and it is one that is in play right now, just a little more liberal because the trader is always at the same place safe and sound waiting for you to return.

[Crater Creator]

 

On 4/17/2021 at 1:01 PM, Jost Amman said:

@Crater Creator

I like your idea, but to be honest, you just described what "wandering merchants" (already planned) should be.

Already planned?  Could you elaborate and/or hook me up with a source?

 

On 4/17/2021 at 1:01 PM, Jost Amman said:

Edit: I've just had this weird idea, where the current traders could be the "neutral" traders that work for Traitor's Joel, while your wandering traders could be the ones working for the two opposed factions (White River and The Duke). So basically the only way to get quests/gear for each faction would be from them. 

Interesting idea.  However they'd be implemented, the idea of different traders being affiliated with different factions is very appealing.  I mean if all traders worked for a Traitor Joel faction, every player would want to maintain a good reputation with Joel, since as discussed the traders present advantages that are hard to ignore.  So I concur that splitting them among factions would be more interesting.

[FA_Q2]

15 minutes ago, Crater Creator said:

 

Already planned?  Could you elaborate and/or hook me up with a source?

 

Interesting idea.  However they'd be implemented, the idea of different traders being affiliated with different factions is very appealing.  I mean if all traders worked for a Traitor Joel faction, every player would want to maintain a good reputation with Joel, since as discussed the traders present advantages that are hard to ignore.  So I concur that splitting them among factions would be more interesting.

Not to mention how much you can do with such a system like faction reputation and/or opposing missions.

 

But that is all a pipe dream, game is to close for something that involved.  Likely to close for traders to shift significantly as well tbh though I am confident the pimps will balance them in the end one way or another.

 

 

 

[Jost Amman]

3 hours ago, Crater Creator said:

Already planned?  Could you elaborate and/or hook me up with a source?

Well, more like "Madmole said" he would like to have wandering merchants added as a sort of NPC type... 

[Crater Creator]

On 4/17/2021 at 4:51 PM, Darthjake said:

Maybe also like treasure hunter lowers search radius for buried treasure you could have a "reputation" stat or skill with the traders, that would make them set up nearer to where you are.

 

That could work.  From what I can tell, they originally intended to have a trader reputation system.  They wrote good reputation and bad reputation VO lines.  Then they gave all the bad lines to Rekt, as a way to utilize more of the lines they had (or maybe just for the lulz) before they could implement a system to use all the lines more conditionally.

Edited April 27, 2021 by Crater Creator (see edit history)

[Crater Creator]

On 4/18/2021 at 3:05 AM, Fox said:

...Realistically, the trader would be walking around, doing normal daily things like harvesting, crafting, etc to stay productive while he waits for that ever elusive player to show up to trade with him/her....

 

If we do ever get friendly NPCs, that's certainly the kind of stuff I picture them doing.  Even the non-friendly bandits, which are expected to make it into the game, will probably need some things to do other than walking patrol routes 100% of the time.  I could see a homebody kind of trader that wanders around but stays within a trader compound.  But if the compound is made destructible, that could get weird, with them trying to do AI tasks they can no longer complete.  So I think I'd still prefer an itinerant style trader, that stays in one spot at a time but changes among many different spots from one day to the next.

On 4/24/2021 at 2:00 PM, VegetarianZombie said:

...burnt out at all the endless driving back and forth between traders and poi for the quests over and over and over and over and over. This game doesn't have that great of a driving system and wasn't initially built for it so it works horribly as a heavy-driving amount game. This is not at all GTA5 to put it very kindly, I don't want to spend that much time driving.

 

I get what you're saying.  Vehicles are a feature, but not a core feature like survival, hordes, and crafting.  If they're successful in optimizing the game, it could help out here in a couple of ways.  One, they could turn up the maximum vehicle speed, which is kept annoyingly low for the sake of not driving out of the world before it can load.  And two, with enough optimization they could increase the population density, meaning there would be more towns/cities with more POIs, and thus the trader would have more POIs to choose from and the average round trip distance could be lower.

[Crater Creator]

On 4/25/2021 at 2:39 PM, Gamida said:

...The quest could be to over time repair the base. When it is finally finished... then a trader could move in....

 

If they ever implement the blueprints system they've talked about, this would be a great application of it.  The roaming food truck traders could provide a baseline: a way to have traders before any would-be trader bases are ready for them to move in.

 

On 4/25/2021 at 2:39 PM, Gamida said:

There could also be quests that risk your own money. He will give you $X amount of goods that you have to get to his brother (sister) trader. You pay the $X amount and if you successfully get the goods there then the trader pays you 2X, 3X or whatever an appropriate amount is. If you get killed then there goes your investment. Maybe multiple choice quests with variable risk vs reward amounts.

In my head it sounds ok but may be a nightmare to add.

 

It does seem boring that the "special missions" don't have you running goods from one trader to the other.  I mean, relaying the message that "Our Dukes are shiny" really sounds like a placeholder.  Surely that'll be replaced with, say, delivering White River supplies from one trader to the other.  Those are already implemented in a way that you don't have to worry about the player stealing them to re-sell or use themselves.

[Crater Creator]

On 4/25/2021 at 5:09 PM, Matt115 said:

I think it is a terrible idea and I will write some reasons why : 

1. Traders can't be destructible, because zombies will attack them thanks to their AI programming.  It will be frustrating if a trader just dies because a screamer spawned somewhere near them, right? 

 

It could be frustrating if a trader dies, sure.  But it would be a temporary frustration, akin to when you don't reach the trader before they close, or when you can't get enough money to buy that one item before they restock.  The trader can respawn the next day, creating the illusion that another truck drove in overnight.  And, the easier way to implement these food truck-style traders would be to not have a walking talking human at all, but to just spawn the truck and interact with that.  In that case, while the truck is technically destructible, zombies have no reason to attack vehicles.  So you'd worry about the trader truck being destroyed by zombies about as much as you worry about your 4x4 being destroyed by zombies, which is to say hardly at all.

 

On 4/25/2021 at 5:09 PM, Matt115 said:

2. Do you know S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Sidrovicz sits in his bunker.  Docs have bunkers, too.  The rest sit in faction bases. It would be really hard to create "protection" against zombies using NPCs. Traders in 7DTD work like in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or an MMO, and it's totally logical. They have a place to keep stuff, a field where they grow food, etc. Just add a few guard NPCs (I made a topic about how I see this).

 

So this is logical, that they sit in a safe place and just send their men to get stuff and sell to others. It's stupid that zombies can destroy stone, bricks etc....  Zombies destroying everything is less immersive but it's a logical mechanic. Trader's bases are immersive but not a logical mechanic.... Zombies should only destroy windows, doors, meshes, and everything that normal people can destroy with their bare hands and time.  But then players will just making stone or bricks everywhere, "exploiting" the system. 

 

Tracks are an even stupider idea.  Of course cars like in "Dawn of the Dead" make sense... for a while. They just wanted to get into ships. In the near term, they have a lot of fuel, right? But in the long term, it is just stupid, as in the Resident Evil films.  Trucks burn a lot of fuel, and they can be easily stopped by wrecks, land mines, zombies, or bandits. So fuel will run out really soon, or something will stop them. So "stationary" bases are more logical. Just put guards on the walls and near the gate. So yeah teleportation is stupid and can be made better, like with a guard shooting at you when you attack a base, or they start shouting to go away at night and if you don't do this, they will start shooting.

 

I'm doing my best to understand you.  I don't see how the whole 'logically zombies shouldn't destroy hard materials' argument is relevant here.  Traders in trucks is a way to do traders that accepts the logic used in the rest of the game: that zombies can destroy anything that's not bedrock.  I don't accept that traders need to be protected.  The loose end you have to tie up if they're not protected, is what to do if they're destroyed.  And traders that respawn somewhere else on a road the next day addresses that problem.

 

You argue that roaming the apocalypse in a truck is less logical than a sedentary lifestyle with a base and a farm etc.  I'd say that's highly subjective.  There are whole cultures of nomadic/itinerant peoples active today, including some that make their living through trade, and such groups have survived stretching back into pre-history.  I see no reason to think it wouldn't work as a strategy in this post-apocalyptic world.  What's one of the easiest ways to avoid all but one type of zombie in 7DtD?  Get on a vehicle and drive away.  Is fuel a problem?  Sure, but does it stop you from using vehicles?  No.  You scavenge gas from gas stations and fuel barrels, you mine a little oil shale and throw it in a chemistry station you find... it's a challenge but you deal with it.  The trader can do the same.

 

Besides which, this is all theoretical lore stuff.  You don't have to see the trader dealing with the problems of acquiring fuel and avoiding obstacles on the highway.  You can use your imagination for how he or she deals with those problems on their way to parking and setting up shop in the morning.  But you do have to see the artificial protection the trader gets in the current implementation.  You have to hear the zombies banging on the walls, making the 'no damage' sound, constantly reminding you that these traders only survive because they get to break the rules of the game.  You can suspend disbelief a lot better when the trader deals with their existential threats 'off screen'.

 

On 4/25/2021 at 5:09 PM, Matt115 said:

3. If you want to make them respawn sometimes on the map it can... crash a server with collisions. XD Yep, bugs. Respawning on brick? Crash. In water? Crash. On grass? Crash. So you have two options. 1) The trader truck is something like a truck or bike. This is a good idea, because it will not spawn in something (in 75% cases) but what if you respawn it in air? Well it can fall on something, the physics gets crazy and booom! Crash. 2) It respawns like in Terraria, a "meteor" or "corruption". That will be safer, but it will be programming hell.

4. Okay. You manage to figure out how to make them without blowing up your PC? Cool. Now will be the problem with "where". It will be stupid if they respawn on the edge of a bridge or minefield, right?  Or in cities, too, because there are zombies everywhere so the truck goes boom.  Desert? Vultures = boom.  Wasteland? Dogs = boom.

 

Okay, I have a plan on how to do all this, which is easier to talk about now that this screenshot of A20 RWG is public.

 

Note how, unlike in past versions of the game, the cars, street lights, crosswalk etc. are 'aware' of the street: they're positioned and rotated correctly relative to the street.  The ability to do that is very powerful, and it means you can effectively put a prefab on the road itself instead of on a lot adjacent to the road.

 

So what you do is, you make a tiny trader prefab.  Really, the only essential part is the panel truck, but you can add a barracks chair under a little awning, with a cooler... let the world builder have fun with it.  As part of the random world generation, you put lots of these prefabs all over the roads: say, one every 100 blocks.  And then the trick is, when the game begins, these prefabs aren't active.  They're just invisible, with no collision, like a quest start node.

 

When it's time for a trader to 'drive in', the game picks one of these precomputed nodes to 'spawn' the prefab.  It's like resetting a POI for a quest: all the blocks in the small prefab override whatever blocks were already there.  It doesn't pick a node that's been disturbed, so it doesn't delete your base in the middle of the road or whatever weird thing is in the way there.  And this works, because it has lots and lots of nodes to choose from.  It'd be practically impossible to screw up every node in the world, and if you do, fine, no trader for you.

 

So it's all block replacement, like resetting a POI for a quest.  No collisions, no spawning in air, no landmines going off, no falling, no crazy physics.  And zombies attacking the truck?  That's not a thing.  Zombies won't target a vehicle in the road.  They never have.  I don't know where you got that idea.  And even if they did, it would be simple to make them not do that.  So the trader can spawn in any biome.  Heck, maybe a trader in the wasteland offers better stuff due to the heightened risk of meeting them out there.  Location, location, location.

 

On 4/25/2021 at 5:09 PM, Matt115 said:

5. Okay. You manage to make the "rules" where they can respawn.  Cool, but it can break quests. Like - you are going somewhere 2 km and back. You have to bring a quest item back those 2 km. You are going back, 250 meters left and... poof! The trader despawns. Now you go 4 km to the snow biome, hoping this time he will not despawn again and something won't kill you to make the quest a failure.

 

This probably has the biggest gameplay significance among the points I've seen raised.  There would be two ways to lose a trader: they pack up for the night and leave, or their truck is destroyed.  Packing up and leaving would be most like what we have now.  We're used to the trader closing shop and being inaccessible at night, with a warning shortly before they do.  It'd be the same with a traveling trader.

 

If the trader is destroyed - which wouldn't happen often in practice, outside of PvP - then I'd say any missions with that trader would fail.  This seems sensible. You see it in other games, where a mission fails if a character critical to that mission dies.  I mean, I have to stress that the zombies don't target vehicles, they target players.  And you wouldn't even need to raise the HP of the panel truck in the game (even though that's a 5 minute change).  It already takes quite a beating at 2500 HP.  What to do if the truck goes boom is almost more of a technicality, to not leave edge cases unaddressed.

 

Also, as previously mentioned traders don't have to be the quest givers in the first place.  I think they only are because, as the only NPCs, they're the only option.  If the game has factions, then maybe all you have to do is turn the quest in to someone, anyone, representing that faction.

 

[Crater Creator]

22 hours ago, Roland said:

That’s not true though. The game is balanced around your gamestage and the timer ticks according to the pace you choose. Maybe it’s counter-intuitive but the more efficiently you try to play the more you are going to feel like you are falling behind. 
 

The game used to ramp up in difficulty based mostly on the game day but that is no longer true. Now it ramps up in difficulty based on your gamestage which increased as quickly or slowly as you choose to play. 
 

Speed run the game and that timer is going to fly. Play at a leisurely pace and the timer slows way down. 
 

By spamming quests you are not just keeping up with the timer, you are also accelerating it. 

 

That's well worth pointing out.  But I also feel like @wizard puke has a point.  Under default options, that horde is coming on the seventh day whether you prepare for it or not.  Plus your survival needs, e.g. hunger and thirst, are always draining.  So in that sense you are always on a timer, and you need to do things to get out ahead of the threat.  Further, you hope to do things efficiently, because if you do things wastefully you'll raise your gamestage more than you raise your survivability with useful output.  So there is a driving force of sorts, pressuring you to seek efficient ways to success, like getting quest rewards on top of the stuff you'd get from a POI without the quest.

[Crater Creator]

18 hours ago, FA_Q2 said:

True or not, the game incentivizes play around the trader by both the mechanics of the trader itself and the fact that the game gives very little direction except the trader where it is telling you where to go.

 

IOW, from the very first quest you get when you start a new character, the game is pushing you to the trader.  You can avoid it and have good reasons to as you understand the game mechanics.  In general though, I think most players are just going to go along with the flow of the game.

 

That's certainly true.  And I think it's another case where traders are the only NPCs in the game right now, therefore they have to be where Noah sends you.  If we get the foundations needed to support non-trader NPCs, then the starting narrative could swiftly diverge to, say, two different non-trader personalities, each with their own headquarters, with each pulling you to visit them first.

[Crater Creator]

9 hours ago, FA_Q2 said:

Not to mention how much you can do with such a system like faction reputation and/or opposing missions.

 

But that is all a pipe dream, game is to close for something that involved.  Likely to close for traders to shift significantly as well tbh though I am confident the pimps will balance them in the end one way or another.

 

I guess we'll see.  It seems obligatory at this point that the game will have bandits and a story before it goes gold.  If they renege on those things, I'd think the fallout would be astoundingly bad.  Most of the other stuff, like faction reputation, is seen as a logical outgrowth of how they'd do bandits and a story.

 

I can't overstate how encouraged I am by the implications of that screenshot I reposted.  First, on a technical level it makes my idea for these food truck-style traders more feasible.  It can be built mostly on existing art and programming.  Secondly, it's an example of something TFP are still massively overhauling/improving, despite fears that the game was getting too close to completion and RWG would be finalized as 'good enough'.  That gives me hope that traders, too, could still get a proper revision to deal with their deeper shortcomings, and not just a balance pass.

[Matt115]

1 hour ago, Crater Creator said:

 

It could be frustrating if a trader dies, sure.  But it would be a temporary frustration, akin to when you don't reach the trader before they close, or when you can't get enough money to buy that one item before they restock.  The trader can respawn the next day, creating the illusion that another truck drove in overnight.  And, the easier way to implement these food truck-style traders would be to not have a walking talking human at all, but to just spawn the truck and interact with that.  In that case, while the truck is technically destructible, zombies have no reason to attack vehicles.  So you'd worry about the trader truck being destroyed by zombies about as much as you worry about your 4x4 being destroyed by zombies, which is to say hardly at all.

 

 

I'm doing my best to understand you.  I don't see how the whole 'logically zombies shouldn't destroy hard materials' argument is relevant here.  Traders in trucks is a way to do traders that accepts the logic used in the rest of the game: that zombies can destroy anything that's not bedrock.  I don't accept that traders need to be protected.  The loose end you have to tie up if they're not protected, is what to do if they're destroyed.  And traders that respawn somewhere else on a road the next day addresses that problem.

 

You argue that roaming the apocalypse in a truck is less logical than a sedentary lifestyle with a base and a farm etc.  I'd say that's highly subjective.  There are whole cultures of nomadic/itinerant peoples active today, including some that make their living through trade, and such groups have survived stretching back into pre-history.  I see no reason to think it wouldn't work as a strategy in this post-apocalyptic world.  What's one of the easiest ways to avoid all but one type of zombie in 7DtD?  Get on a vehicle and drive away.  Is fuel a problem?  Sure, but does it stop you from using vehicles?  No.  You scavenge gas from gas stations and fuel barrels, you mine a little oil shale and throw it in a chemistry station you find... it's a challenge but you deal with it.  The trader can do the same.

 

Besides which, this is all theoretical lore stuff.  You don't have to see the trader dealing with the problems of acquiring fuel and avoiding obstacles on the highway.  You can use your imagination for how he or she deals with those problems on their way to parking and setting up shop in the morning.  But you do have to see the artificial protection the trader gets in the current implementation.  You have to hear the zombies banging on the walls, making the 'no damage' sound, constantly reminding you that these traders only survive because they get to break the rules of the game.  You can suspend disbelief a lot better when the trader deals with their existential threats 'off screen'.

 

 

Okay, I have a plan on how to do all this, which is easier to talk about now that this screenshot of A20 RWG is public.

 

Note how, unlike in past versions of the game, the cars, street lights, crosswalk etc. are 'aware' of the street: they're positioned and rotated correctly relative to the street.  The ability to do that is very powerful, and it means you can effectively put a prefab on the road itself instead of on a lot adjacent to the road.

 

So what you do is, you make a tiny trader prefab.  Really, the only essential part is the panel truck, but you can add a barracks chair under a little awning, with a cooler... let the world builder have fun with it.  As part of the random world generation, you put lots of these prefabs all over the roads: say, one every 100 blocks.  And then the trick is, when the game begins, these prefabs aren't active.  They're just invisible, with no collision, like a quest start node.

 

When it's time for a trader to 'drive in', the game picks one of these precomputed nodes to 'spawn' the prefab.  It's like resetting a POI for a quest: all the blocks in the small prefab override whatever blocks were already there.  It doesn't pick a node that's been disturbed, so it doesn't delete your base in the middle of the road or whatever weird thing is in the way there.  And this works, because it has lots and lots of nodes to choose from.  It'd be practically impossible to screw up every node in the world, and if you do, fine, no trader for you.

 

So it's all block replacement, like resetting a POI for a quest.  No collisions, no spawning in air, no landmines going off, no falling, no crazy physics.  And zombies attacking the truck?  That's not a thing.  Zombies won't target a vehicle in the road.  They never have.  I don't know where you got that idea.  And even if they did, it would be simple to make them not do that.  So the trader can spawn in any biome.  Heck, maybe a trader in the wasteland offers better stuff due to the heightened risk of meeting them out there.  Location, location, location.

 

 

This probably has the biggest gameplay significance among the points I've seen raised.  There would be two ways to lose a trader: they pack up for the night and leave, or their truck is destroyed.  Packing up and leaving would be most like what we have now.  We're used to the trader closing shop and being inaccessible at night, with a warning shortly before they do.  It'd be the same with a traveling trader.

 

If the trader is destroyed - which wouldn't happen often in practice, outside of PvP - then I'd say any missions with that trader would fail.  This seems sensible. You see it in other games, where a mission fails if a character critical to that mission dies.  I mean, I have to stress that the zombies don't target vehicles, they target players.  And you wouldn't even need to raise the HP of the panel truck in the game (even though that's a 5 minute change).  It already takes quite a beating at 2500 HP.  What to do if the truck goes boom is almost more of a technicality, to not leave edge cases unaddressed.

 

Also, as previously mentioned traders don't have to be the quest givers in the first place.  I think they only are because, as the only NPCs, they're the only option.  If the game has factions, then maybe all you have to do is turn the quest in to someone, anyone, representing that faction.

 

 

Respawning will be even less immersive and zombie could have reasons like " this is making a noise" Something like pipe bomb or events from l4d2 . And it pretty logical ( I love l4d2 so i will give example using it )

 I found how to make a compromise . You want 100% destuctible world? But it is something which can't be destoyed no mater how long you will be hitting it or shooting on it. Water. So my idea is to make bigger rivers ( i thinking it will be not so hard and add bigger bridges like in  L4d2  on The Parish or the sacrifise ).  And put traders on boat. They put draw bridge at day and in night guards forcing you to go away. Just let zombies drown in water (maybe exception give drowned zombies like dead island) and they will be safe . You want they travell from point to point like bus stop? Just make some ports when they stop there. I thing it the truck is less immersive that boat . Well i know there is not military outpost or  traffic but i suggest to add this because it will be just immersive. For example in walking dead , days gone or world war z  military tried to cut zombies down by creating barricades on road with barbered wire  etc so i thinking in some places it could looks rly cool. well i will do How might it  look like later. In l4d2 survivors were forced to left their car because they stuck in traffic. This same problem was i walking dead S2. Well in my opinion more road in 7dtd should have road bariers , tunnels and traffic . Easy to avoid by bike and minibike but you want to go by truck you need to clean road first ( they do it sometimes in walking dead) . And another point : if traders have their "stops" if you are late you can just waite untill they come back or go  near the river and you will find it after 1-2 km. And this solution will fix problem with quests. So you can have base near it and have access to it only for some time . When you are far from trader's boat , it will just reset localisation 

[Kattla]

12 hours ago, Crater Creator said:

 

I do like the idea of having expensive items that are out of reach now, but that the player can aspire to obtain later.  It gives the player a goal - something to work towards - beyond an explicit quest to go here and do this.  And to be fair, the game has this to a fair degree now.  It's somewhat dampened by the 3-day loot refresh, though.  Still, I think the sheer number of items for sale is worth addressing in its own right.  A trader shouldn't have more than a dozen melee weapons to choose from (keeping in mind it's rolled separately for each player).  As I've said before in other contexts, too much luxury of choice tends to work against the sense of it being a survival game.

 

As long as those items can be obtained by other means, it should be fine. I was thinking about solar cells, but there could be other items i forgot about.

[Maharin]

I still like the idea of trade only items.  For instance, there could be a really nice item that can only be bought with "demolisher hearts" that drop from demolishers.  You get the idea.

[Roland]

4 hours ago, Crater Creator said:

 

That's well worth pointing out.  But I also feel like @wizard puke has a point.  Under default options, that horde is coming on the seventh day whether you prepare for it or not.  Plus your survival needs, e.g. hunger and thirst, are always draining.  So in that sense you are always on a timer, and you need to do things to get out ahead of the threat.  Further, you hope to do things efficiently, because if you do things wastefully you'll raise your gamestage more than you raise your survivability with useful output.  So there is a driving force of sorts, pressuring you to seek efficient ways to success, like getting quest rewards on top of the stuff you'd get from a POI without the quest.

 

There are xp rich activities that if spammed will propel your gamestage faster than you can keep up. Killing every zombie you encounter and triggering screamer hordes to kill as many zombies as you can is an example of xp-rich activities that will cause the gamestage to possibly outpace you. I'd say that spamming quests as opposed to simply scavenging POIs on your own is also towards that end of the spectrum. Remember that your bonus reward is not just cash and gear but it is also XP on top of what you earned as you did the quest. Speed running quests is going to ratchet up your gamestage-- possibly faster than you may be comfortable with on horde night or if ferals and radiated start popping up before you are prepared for them.

 

Getting back to topic...How would you solve the problem of spammed quests? Even if the trader travels you will still have a marker to return to him to gain your reward. What's to stop you from taking a new quest right away? Would you not get a location to return for that quest and have to find the trader to turn in your package for your reward? I don' think that would go over very well. The only way to stop quest spamming is to limit how many can be done per day. Some people will not like that restriction.

Edited April 27, 2021 by Roland (see edit history)

[Maharin]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

Getting back to topic...How would you solve the problem of spammed quests? Even if the trader travels you will still have a marker to return to him to gain your reward. What's to stop you from taking a new quest right away? Would you not get a location to return for that quest and have to find the trader to turn in your package for your reward? I don' think that would go over very well. The only way to stop quest spamming is to limit how many can be done per day. Some people will not like that restriction.

 

What if quests were only available during certain times of the day?  Other times the trader may be busy with other duties.

 

Or maybe have a system that regenerates "quest points" that you can spend on quests (all in the background, nothing the player could see).  Maybe that regeneration happens randomly every 1/2 of a day allowing you to do at most 3 to 4 quests per day assuming you get lucky enough to regenerate a point every time.

 

Just a couple options. 

[Weazelsun]

I wonder if quest rewards should be nerfed, specifically the xp rewards. Especially, since doing quests or a single quest rewards quite a hefty amount of xp. Possibly, tying the amount of xp rewarded at the end based on type of quest x  tier level. 

 

 

[Jost Amman]

2 hours ago, Roland said:

Getting back to topic...How would you solve the problem of spammed quests? Even if the trader travels you will still have a marker to return to him to gain your reward. What's to stop you from taking a new quest right away? Would you not get a location to return for that quest and have to find the trader to turn in your package for your reward? I don' think that would go over very well. The only way to stop quest spamming is to limit how many can be done per day. Some people will not like that restriction.

Spammed quests are not a problem in my eyes, they're a choice.

Hard work needs to be rewarded and if you want to earn more XP in less time, why would you stop that?

 

As for the marker, I think that when the trader moves, the player should keep the quest, but the marker should be removed. 

You'll need to find him/her again at the new location to get your reward. 

[Roland]

17 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Spammed quests are not a problem in my eyes, they're a choice.

Hard work needs to be rewarded and if you want to earn more XP in less time, why would you stop that?

 

I agree. As long as the person who spams and speed runs the quests is happy about the way they are playing and having fun with their choices, it's great. The problem is for those who do that and then don't understand the ramifications, and then complain about how soon the game is over or how it gets too hard too fast and then they want the balance changed so that the game works best when you spam the quests because, no matter what, they are going to continue to spam and speed run the quests even if the end result is a game state they aren't satisfied with.

 

Like I said, I like CC's idea primarily as a means of getting rid of the land protection and adding variety. I'm perfectly happy with the frequency and rewards of the quests because I use them in moderation and am very pleased with the outcome of my choice to not spam them.