Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[faatal]

1 hour ago, Archer said:

My group is still playing - still not liking this magazine thing. 
We've halted work on the base for now as the highest tier item I can craft at this point is the damn workbench and literally none of us are reading any magazines at all, there's a whole 8 human beings out scouring for them and there's just *not* enough to go around for everybody. The ratios are off, loot tables, whatever you want to call it but to sustain a group of more than just 2 or 3 people and make the rate of progression not be a complete snoozefest of just digging through trash piles all day pretty much every thing we loot would need to give us 2 or 3 magazines or more. It's tedious as hell.

I'd turn up Loot Abundance.

[Old Crow]

16 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

What does this point have to do with the feature of a shrinking crosshair? Where does the "and yet" part of your sentence make sense with Joel's description of the crosshair area getting smaller when you pause to aim rather than shooting from the hip?

 

I could see your quip making sense if Joel was explaining that the food and water bars were made super thin to reduce screen presence but I don't get it in this context.

 

Joel basically said "we didn't think we needed to explain the bow reticle shrinking to show where it'll hit, because it "should be obvious" but we've been told we can we can't turn off the danger meter. Shouldn't looking at the size of a POI also make the level of danger obvious? Why give a sarcastic "ShOuLdN'T iT Be ObViOuS" for one feature but use another feature to still treat players like we're dumb?

[DOAM]

10 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

I don't know how long they want the stone age to last but they do want it to last beyond a few days. They want players to fully explore at least some of the tiers of quality within each tech stage. If players are skipping from brown stone to blue stone to yellow iron all in 2-3 days then all the intermediate tiers are irrelevant. The ideal would be crafting up through all the quality stages because you're spending time in each one.

 

That said, it does get tougher to get to the top levels later on and I worry that a nerf to stop primitive level rushing might cause some mid game stalling. I'm betting they will likely adjust it back to a bit more generous again once more players get to the midgame and start complaining they can't get their chemistry station unlocked and that they've been stuck on a minibike forever.

 

Personally, I'd like to see another magazine or two added to each primitive stage advancement and leave the availability of books alone. 

My group is looking like they'll skip iron all together. We just chilled on stone for a while long because we didn't wanna bother with glue collectors. Stun baton and 9mm for me, stone sledge and pipe shotty for 2 others, and idk what the other 2 have but it ain't iron. Padded/scrap armor all around. lol I'll be making the crucible when I log in then its on to steel. Should have looted enough water to handle glue needs by now. Maybe someone will take on the tedious task of a massive dew collector farm, and actually collect from it, but it won't be me. I'd rather bash a zombie in the head with stone weapons and padded armor instead.

[Amanitasec]

22 hours ago, Riamus said:

I have never tried voice through the game, which it sounds like you are going?  I use voice through Steam.  If you create a group voice chat, everyone can hear everyone and distance doesn't affect anything as it isn't tired to the game at all.  Of course, if you aren't using Steam, that isn't an option.

Thank you for that tip. We have tested that today and it worked perfectly  

[Riamus]

43 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

2 hours ago, madmole said:

Didn't think we needed to? Every game with a shrinking crosshair over the years does it this way, I thought it was common shooter knowledge.  Did you never notice the crosshair shrink as you aimed? You didn't think anything of it? You can aim at a wall and see impacts and tell the rays do not hit dead center but somewhere inside the crosshair.

I think anyone who plays such games will understand and a few will figure it out but those who don't play that kind of game will most likely assume that you shoot where you aim.  With how easy it is to add a loading screen tip, it might be worth adding a tip about how arrows work.  If it only helps one person, I'd still call that a win since it is so easy to update the tips.

 

Besides, if we aren't going to explain how arrows work in the game because it is "obvious" then why are we explaining how to build all these things in the starter quest.  Beyond a note on how to open the crafting screen, everything else is "obvious" as well. 😀. Btw, I'm glad we at least got rid of the shirt crafting.  Just wish we could get rid of the block upgrading and campfire placement since you'll rarely ever put your base where you are doing the starter quests.

 

42 minutes ago, Wulf said:

-Lowered the availability of crafting magazines. (book bundle appears less often, the bundle contains less books, and randomly found magazines have their loot chance reduced. Oh boy, looks like we're still progressing too fast guys. What's intended here, stone age tools through the first week? First 3 days? Honest question, because I'm curious.

 

I'm fine with whatever really, although i would prefer a more prolonged game experience which it seems you guys are aiming for. Not sure i'm in the majority though.

This is a little concerning in one way and good in another.  There are definitely way more magazines than makes sense.  However, if you want crafting to progress fast enough to be of use instead of being easily outpaced by looting and quest rewards, you either have to lower the number off magazines needed to progress or else have a lot of magazines.  Even in single player, I'm often only keeping close to even in progression compared to looting and questing, if that.  With the reduction, I think I'll not be crafting anymore just like in A20 because it won't progress quickly enough to compare.  Well see, though.

 

44 minutes ago, Roland said:

What does this point have to do with the feature of a shrinking crosshair? Where does the "and yet" part of your sentence make sense with Joel's description of the crosshair area getting smaller when you pause to aim rather than shooting from the hip?

 

I could see your quip making sense if Joel was explaining that the food and water bars were made super thin to reduce screen presence but I don't get it in this context.

I think this was related to madmole saying that gigging an explanation for something that he thinks is obvious isn't needed and yet we got a danger meter to tell us what is pretty obvious.  In both cases, obvious is for veterans but not for new players.

[Kosmic Kerman]

40 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

I don't know how long they want the stone age to last but they do want it to last beyond a few days. They want players to fully explore at least some of the tiers of quality within each tech stage. If players are skipping from brown stone to blue stone to yellow iron all in 2-3 days then all the intermediate tiers are irrelevant. The ideal would be crafting up through all the quality stages because you're spending time in each one.

 

That said, it does get tougher to get to the top levels later on and I worry that a nerf to stop primitive level rushing might cause some mid game stalling. I'm betting they will likely adjust it back to a bit more generous again once more players get to the midgame and start complaining they can't get their chemistry station unlocked and that they've been stuck on a minibike forever.

 

Personally, I'd like to see another magazine or two added to each primitive stage advancement and leave the availability of books alone. 

I think they may be looking at the wrong players. I've been playing since A15 and am reasonably experienced.  I'm on Day 5 (60 min days) and still on stone tools. I hit tier 2 quests on about Day 4.  The best item I have is a blue stone axe which I found in a car in the parking lot of a tier 5 building.  Other than that I have a green club and a Quality 2 pipe machine gun.  And I took the crafting magazine bundle for each reward. I'd tell you where my crafting skills were but can't because the recent update reset my character to 0 skills and perk points.

 

The biggest progression issue I've run into is a lack of mechanical parts to be able to craft a wrench. Neither of the two traders had mech parts in their inventories and you need a wrench in order to get mechanical parts from anything (save for some odd ball things like Wild West Coaches and Church Bells).

 

I think Riamus is right that if they slow down progression, trader rewards will outstrip crafting again.

Edited June 15, 2023 by Kosmic Kerman (see edit history)

[Blake_]

37 minutes ago, faatal said:

I'd turn up Loot Abundance.

I find the default abundance crazy high. 25% loot is already quite enough in a21. I would like to ask for less abundance in the  options, kind sir, like 10% or 12 % or stuff like that. I mean, for those who play alone is understandable, but we are 3 and still swimming in loot with 25%. There can be 500% loot too for the hoarders.

 

Water survival is awesome, magazine progression is amazing (though they are a bit too abundant) , congrats to @madmole and the team for this jewel of a design and execution, simple yet incredibly engaging.

 

What I find lacking: the UI. The aging parts of it paired with new but weird "POI title boxes" makes for a mixed feeling while they pop up or in general. status effects are better.

Edited June 15, 2023 by Blake_ (see edit history)

[Riamus]

For me, I'll skip quality 1 and 2  (maybe 3) for iron and steel every time when crafting.  It doesn't matter what is fine with the magazines.  First, a quality 1 is most likely worse than the previous tier quality 5 or at most only slightly better and the stamina costs are much worse.  Second, there just aren't enough parts to warrant crafting multiple versions.

 

I also think some magazines need to be combined.  Having a magazine only teach you two things even with different levels of quality just feels bad and increases the number of different magazines we have to deal with for no good reason.  There is no reason some can't be combined to reduce the number of different magazines.  Also, these should all attack to 100.  No reason if we want to wait to use them that they need to take up so much space.  Just having all the different magazines is a space hog as it is without having multiple stacks of each.

[meganoth]

27 minutes ago, Riamus said:

This is a little concerning in one way and good in another.  There are definitely way more magazines than makes sense.  However, if you want crafting to progress fast enough to be of use instead of being easily outpaced by looting and quest rewards, you either have to lower the number off magazines needed to progress or else have a lot of magazines.  Even in single player, I'm often only keeping close to even in progression compared to looting and questing, if that.  With the reduction, I think I'll not be crafting anymore just like in A20 because it won't progress quickly enough to compare.  Well see, though.

 

 

The game is setup for 1 to 8 players. If the players actually cooperate then 8 players will probably be ~5 times faster at crafting progression than a single player. And a major reason is that 8 players get 8 times the quest rewards for a quest than a single player and in each quest reward is a guaranteed magazine pack. While the amount of magazines they found in the POI is fixed no matter how many players there are.

 

I am playing in a group of 4 and we hardly had any time in the game. We are just on day 4 or 5 and I can craft tier 1 quality 5 weapons while loot is somewhere at tier0 quality 3.  Though the progress is very random, it seems I was lucky with the drops.

 

So for me the conclusion is that TFPs decision to put less magazines into the quest reward is absolutely correct and severly needed. And I except they need to reduce it even further.

My suggestion would be to change the magazine reward into showing the specific magazines you get, because then players in large groups will more often select a different reward that benefits them directly instead of picking the magazines that someone else wants.

 

Edited June 15, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Dtfauss]

4 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

 

The game is setup for 1 to 8 players. If the players actually cooperate then 8 players will probably be ~5 times faster at crafting progression than a single player. And a major reason is that 8 players get 8 times the quest rewards for a quest than a single player and in each quest reward is a guaranteed magazine pack. While the amount of magazines they found in the POI is fixed no matter how many players there are.

 

I am playing in a group of 4 and we hardly had any time in the game. We are just on day 4 or 5 and I can craft tier 1 quality 5 weapons while loot is somewhere at tier0 quality 3.  Though the progress is very random, it seems I was lucky with the drops.

 

So for me the conclusion is that TFPs decision to put less magazines into the quest reward is absolutely correct and severly needed. And I except they need to reduce it even further.

My suggestion would be to change the magazine reward into showing the specific magazines you get, because then players in large groups will more often select a different reward that benefits them directly instead of picking the magazines that someone else wants.

 

I like the idea of showing the magazines. I suspect the reason people are taking them from quest rewards isn't just the quantity, but it's  also because they are exploring this 'new' learn by magazine system and getting a feel for it. I suspect after the learning curve and newness wears off people will go back to selecting other quest rewards more often.

[falloutcloud]

It takes 70 workbench magazines to craft a crucible. Steel craftables start becoming available much earlier. And now you nerfed the magazine finds with today's patch. I'm good with everything taking longer to reach but now you are making the level 70 workbench goal negligible as players are far more likely to either find it or buy it off the trader before ever coming close to 70 magazines.

[JaJe]

Guys, what the hell?

• Increased the price of water filters 

This is already difficult for to have a susteinable water source for glue farming, drinking water and food and harder in multiplayer while playing with friends, why make it even difficult?? 

• Reduced the quantity of crafting magazines in quest reward bundle from 3/3 to 3/2 
• Reduced the quantity of crafting magazines found in mailboxes, file cabinets, book piles, and crackabook shelves 

The problem is not the aboundance of magazines, but the kind of books to receive. I keep receive books about vehicles, robotics and explosives when I am at day 5 and unable to build a forge yet because I didn't found the right book. Now it's even hard and I fear that I have to grind and explore everything and wasting time instead of preparing for the horde in day 7, not fun at all.

 

• Reduced attack range and damage of short zombies 
• Reduced attack range of crawler and spider zombies 

At least this is a good fix, can we also please fix the zombies that hit your legs when they're downed by a club but they insta teleport into prone position on the other side of the door and hit you through that door? That's really annoying.

 

Personally I despise the dew farming thing and the book system. I don't like it at all. Makes the game a lot less fun to play but more grinding while leaving less time to prepare for horde.

 

Edited June 15, 2023 by JaJe (see edit history)

[Belgarion32]

Not too sure what happened but uh, I guess good bye to that save with today's patch, spawned in to a death and after doing a quest I realized that the character itself is entirely reset progression-wise and has only 1 skill point after leveling up once from the quest.

[Old Crow]

9 minutes ago, JaJe said:

Guys, what the hell?

• Increased the price of water filters 

 

 

 

I haven't been able to log in yet, what was the price increased to? 1500 was pretty cheap and reasonable for the filters prior to the change.

[Dtfauss]

2 minutes ago, Old Crow said:

 

I haven't been able to log in yet, what was the price increased to? 1500 was pretty cheap and reasonable for the filters prior to the change.

I'm confident that milage will vary dramatically with regards to having the cash. I usually can afford one, even buying food and water, before I have the plastics to make the collector. However, I quest a decent amount, while I can image folks who don't quest as much and take things at a more casual pace could find it pricey.

[Old Crow]

6 minutes ago, Dtfauss said:

I'm confident that milage will vary dramatically with regards to having the cash. I usually can afford one, even buying food and water, before I have the plastics to make the collector. However, I quest a decent amount, while I can image folks who don't quest as much and take things at a more casual pace could find it pricey.

 

That's a good point. I had around 1500 dukes or so just doing T1 quests, but I forgot not everyone enjoys questing.

[aleos]

Hi guys. Just Registered after a loooong time reading only.  Just a Short feedback about a21:

Pros

Nice new items, pois, traders

Shorter loading time

Water survival feels a bit weird without bottles but kinda challenging at times

Rebalancing bioms and their difficulties + loot. high reward for high risk is amazing.

 

Contra

I really miss the skills. Skills should be linked to the actions the player does. It feels way off with the magazines. I just loot for days to progress without mining, building, don't care much about specializing in certain weapon/class. After the second feral night I feel quite powerful in several weapons without having used such a lot, powerful in mining tool without mining at all, powerful in salvaging without actually salvage a lot... I guess you get the idea...

Maybe my playstyle is wrong or old fashioned (sticking to previous alphas)

 

I think I would have to wait for undead legacy then. Please, subquake, keep the skills in!

Besides that a nice alpha so far. Thanks for your effort. Will try out the building aspect now with  new blocks.

 

 

[Roland]

34 minutes ago, Belgarion32 said:

Not too sure what happened but uh, I guess good bye to that save with today's patch, spawned in to a death and after doing a quest I realized that the character itself is entirely reset progression-wise and has only 1 skill point after leveling up once from the quest.

 

This is often the case during experimental. Often mistake the term "stable" to mean bug free but what it really means is that your save game is stable and won't break with each new update. There is no guarantee of that with experimental. I've had to restart the game countless times over the past year as new builds break previous ones. They usually do give warning and if they didn't it was simply because they overlooked the skill reset on characters.

[Khissi]

Okay, so I got to do my GS75 horde and it was fun as heck... then we got the update so, wiped everything, cleaned everything, made a new random world and started fresh.  I love this part of the game.  However, may I say that, though I agree magazine reduction was necessary, I really, REALLY miss that option to choose the magazine bundle for EACH quest reward.  For the folks that don't want them, fine, take something else.  After all, you have quite a few more choices than in a20.  The sheer number of magazines needed to gain significant proficiency in any one area cannot be downplayed.  Yes, you were getting several magazines for each quest.  However, you never knew WHICH magazines you were going to get since the weighting didn't always carry through for that reward.  I mean, why on earth would I have wanted 46 magazines of a type I wasn't going to use until possibly late game?  It's a crap shoot, and a good one!  Sometimes you get the good stuff, sometimes you don't.  I would like to have them back as guaranteed rewards.  

 

Thank you very much for the adjustment to zombie smackdowns.  That was so annoying and I sure do hope the constant bleeds are repaired.  I've not gotten a significant one yet, so... maybe?  LOVING THIS ALPHA!

[Roland]

If you want more magazines you can also increase the frequency of airdrops. 

[ZehMatt]

21 hours ago, faatal said:

Possibly. What and when entity network data is sent has been optimized. Data is sent less often when farther away. More when close. Player outfits and anims are being redone for A22, which they are already working on.

 

Sounds great, one thing I was hoping to get an answer to is does it currently network the velocity and do the animations use that for the walk animations, if this is the case then to me that would be an relatively easy fix to just have the velocity calculated client side based on the position alone which would make it look a lot better already. Assuming it doesn't make it to A21 I will consider to just mod this myself, however this requires EAC to be disabled and the mod would only make sense for multiplayer so thats a bit unfortunate if we have to actually wait for the next release to have somewhat reasonable player animations and the update rate wouldn't even matter then.

Edited June 16, 2023 by ZehMatt (see edit history)

[DrunkZombie]

Is the remade Navezgane map supposed to always spawn you in the middle of nowhere and the trader is always Joel who is also in the middle of nowhere?

 

Tried six games with various spawn locations but always the result I mentioned above.  I thought I would try out the new and improved Navezgane but if this is intended I will go back to a random map.

[Riamus]

10 hours ago, meganoth said:

The game is setup for 1 to 8 players. If the players actually cooperate then 8 players will probably be ~5 times faster at crafting progression than a single player. And a major reason is that 8 players get 8 times the quest rewards for a quest than a single player and in each quest reward is a guaranteed magazine pack. While the amount of magazines they found in the POI is fixed no matter how many players there are.

 

I am playing in a group of 4 and we hardly had any time in the game. We are just on day 4 or 5 and I can craft tier 1 quality 5 weapons while loot is somewhere at tier0 quality 3.  Though the progress is very random, it seems I was lucky with the drops.

 

So for me the conclusion is that TFPs decision to put less magazines into the quest reward is absolutely correct and severly needed. And I except they need to reduce it even further.

My suggestion would be to change the magazine reward into showing the specific magazines you get, because then players in large groups will more often select a different reward that benefits them directly instead of picking the magazines that someone else wants.

 

Ok, so it works for the larger groups but not for smaller?  The original way worked for both but benefited the larger groups more.  I think this shows a clear imbalance in the system that needs to be addressed.  For one, I don't really think magazines should be a reward at all because it greatly pushes the game toward questing rather than being more open to doing what you want and progressing in a relatively similar rate.  And I quest a lot, so I'm not saying that as someone who doesn't want to quest.  It also helps to unbalance the game by putting too many magazines in the player's hands too quickly, imo.  But let's skip that for now... the thing we're talking about is quantity in the world.  As it was initially, it was just barely keeping up with loot progression.  I could loot stuff slightly faster than I could craft in, on average, in a 2 player game with default loot settings.  By reducing magazines, it means that I'll be crafting even more slowly and so I will loot weapons, tools, armor faster than I can craft them, putting me in the same situation as A20, where I might end up not crafting again because I find everything before I can craft it.  As I had said in what you quoted, we'll see.  I have obviously not tested it yet to know and am making an assumption based on the rate of crafting skill compared to loot/quest rewards for weapons/armor/tools in the original numbers of magazines and less magazines would suggest crafting will progress more slowly without any change to loot/quest reward progression.

 

Now, this comes down to a couple of things and this is a major reason why balance is an issue.  We do not go out trying to hit all the mailboxes right away or loot crack a books regularly.  We loot these as we come across them but do not seek them out.  As such, crafting will progress more slowly than those who seek them out.  So, in regards to balance, do you balance it so those who rush to get magazines will only be able to craft a little better than what they are looting and getting as quest rewards, which in turn makes it so those who do not are easily outpacing crafting with loot/quest rewards?  Or do you balance it so those who do not rush to get magazines are able to craft a little better than what they are looting and getting as quest rewards, which in turn means those who rush to get magazines will craft things much faster than they loot and quest rewards progress?  The question there is which do you consider the "normal" way to play or the "recommended" way to play?  You should balance for that and not for those who play in other ways.  To me, the rush method is a min/max method and not what you'd balance for.

 

So we are left with trying to balance this based on number of players as more players means it's faster to gain crafting skill as well as balancing based on whether or not people rush magazines (min/max method) or play in a more "normal" way.  And you'll never get a real balance between these.  It would be better for magazines to scale based on number of players but they game isn't designed for that.  I think that, in the end, you need to balance it based on not rushing magazines and on a 3-4 player game as that is likely your average number of players per game over all games (check actual data and use whatever is the average) because then you're at least balanced for the average game even if not for everyone.  No way to balance it for everyone with this system.  To be clear, I do like this system.  But it has clear drawbacks for balancing it.

 

Edited June 16, 2023 by meganoth
Removed flaming quote (see edit history)

[Grolbu]

8 hours ago, Robbing Zombie said:

Probably been said, but I'll say it anyway. The dew collector could speed thing up a bit, or several, when it rains, no?

 

 

No. If it did that you could stand next to a dew collector when it rained and collect more or less infinite water.  What they could do though, which would be a nod to collecting rain without being massively OP, is leave the dew collectors ticking along at their usual pace while it's raining then set them to full when it stops raining.

[JayzenFreeze]

Now I am @%$#ed. The update today reset my level and all my read books to 0 I got all my stuff but cant make stuff now.