Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Riamus]

8 minutes ago, Sephiroth87xz said:

You not understand how game design work.

 

Every part of the game need to be balanced with the overall progression and difficulty of the game.

 

Traders/loot/quests aren't balanced with the actual progression and difficulty of the game.

 

And they are all main parts of the gameplay.

 

Choicing to use something because is not balanced isn't an option, only show lack of balance.

 

Developers will fix it, they already confirmed the game need more balance few pages behind.

You make assumptions again.  You seem to think that you understand more about game development than anyone else.  Are you a professional game developer?  If so, then maybe you can make such a statement about game design but I have a feeling you are not.  Even if you are, you have no idea what other people know or don't know so making assumptions is still not appropriate.

 

I and many others already pointed out that there needs to be balancing done and no one disagrees with that from what I've seen.  Some think it needs more and some think it needs less but I think at least almost everyone agrees that balancing needs to be done.  They are also giving suggestions for how that balancing can be done.  You aren't.  You just keep repeating that everyone is wrong and the game needs to be balanced and don't offer any suggestions.  That's far different from the many people who have given suggestions and ideas for how to balance the game.  Are they all great suggestions?  Maybe not, but at least they are suggestions.  Maybe you should stop trying to act like no one else knows what they are talking about and give some suggestions to improve balancing yourself.  Then maybe people will have something they can actually agree with you about (if the suggestions are good).

Edited July 10, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Sephiroth87xz]

12 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

To spam craft you need easy to get materials and something that is really worth much more after crafting out of only easy to get materials. I seem to remember TFP balanced the value of items because of this. So there might or might not be such items left. I want a practical example so I can test if it really works with A21.

 

One tier1 quest  gives a single player about 1800 dukes if he sells everything he gets from the POI (did a test game to check this out a few days ago). If he doesn't want to waste time shoveling all the resource piles I would guess it would be more like 1500 dukes but the quest plus travel and trader-interaction would be done in about 10 minutes(?) real-time by a normal player. Now show me for this case how that same player can acquire materials, craft something with them, sell them and reach anything in the vicinity of 1500 dukes in about 10 minutes.

 

 

Quest rewards are part of the trader balance (for me). Naturally the trader can't give out steel stuff as quest rewards for higher tier quests. See this older post from me in this thread where item 2) is about the item rewards of quests:

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28129-alpha-21-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=529609

 

And I'm not sure that loot is unbalanced compared to crafting. It may still need some fine-tuning but really not that much.

 

The fact is reducing only the reward duke is a bandaid solution.

 

Is better plan to solve the principal problem, not the money, but the presence of item itself.

 

Is impossible to reduce the way to earn dukes(quest rewards or sell crafting/looted things) in a way to keep a good progression of traders list if you can find iron tools or magnum in 2/3 weeks with no perks and quest rank 2.

 

 

Actually crafting have an enough slowed progression to keep with the difficulty progression.

 

For example i have get the magnum after around 15/20 days with crafting than trader quest rewards.

 

The magnum offered by the traders would have breaked the difficulty progression.

 

I agree on the ammunition too, i get 100 ammo pistol on one of the first quests i played i think the second or the third, really too soon.

 

But i see you talk of high tier quests, but until now i always talked of max rank 3 quests, which make the balance situation even worse.

 

Add to this i'm talking of warrior/insane difficulty and with crafting the difficulty is barely adeguated(i kill "normal" zombies with 2-4 hunting knife hit to head on days 60+)

 

When instead the game should balanced around normal difficulty.

 

If the difficulty is easily breaked on max difficulty, i can't even imagine how much is breaked on normal difficulty.

2 minutes ago, Riamus said:

You make assumptions again.  You seem to think that you understand more about game development than anyone else.  Are you a professional game developer?  If so, then maybe you can make such a statement about game design but I have a feeling you are not.  Even if you are, you have no idea what other people know or don't know so making assumptions is still not appropriate.

 

I and many others already pointed out that there needs to be balancing done and no one disagrees with that from what I've seen.  Some think it needs more and some think it needs less but I think at least almost everyone agrees that balancing needs to be done.  They are also giving suggestions for how that balancing can be done.  You aren't.  You just keep repeating that everyone is wrong and the game needs to be balanced and don't offer any suggestions.  That's far different from the many people who have given suggestions and ideas for how to balance the game.  Are they all great suggestions?  Maybe not, but at least they are suggestions.  Maybe you should stop trying to act like no one else knows what they are talking about and give some suggestions to improve balancing yourself.  Then maybe people will have something they can actually agree with you about (if the suggestions are good).

 

Is over 25 years i playing videogames and various times developers talked with us of how they balance games.

 

And developers of this game actual talked of balance too.

 

One of the reason of magazine system was to reduce/remove the overlap of tiers and the slot fix to reduce the overlap of quality.

 

All problems we can find in traders/loot/quests.

Like i said, Developers have sayed they will do more balance when we was talking of progression differences between crafting and traders/loot/quests.

 

So Developers will fix the balance problem situation.

[Riamus]

47 minutes ago, Sephiroth87xz said:

Is over 25 years i playing videogames and various times developers talked with us of how they balance games.

 

And developers of this game actual talked of balance too.

 

One of the reason of magazine system was to reduce/remove the overlap of tiers and the slot fix to reduce the overlap of quality.

 

All problems we can find in traders/loot/quests.

Like i said, Developers have sayed they will do more balance when we was talking of progression differences between crafting and traders/loot/quests.

 

So Developers will fix the balance problem situation.

Reading what devs say doesn't make you more of an expert that every other gamer out there with similar experience.  I can say that I have over a decade more gaming time than that but it really doesn't matter.

 

Everyone here is talking about balance.  No one that I've noticed is saying they shouldn't balance the game.  They are offering possible ways to balance the game.  You don't like their suggestions and are repeating that the devs will balance it.  But what happens if the devs balance it in a way similar to what someone here suggested?  You're not going to be happy about that.  You are assuming that how the devs balance the game will be correct and that any suggestions from anyone else are wrong.  TFP has been very good at making decisions that many people disagree with, so assuming they'll balance in a way you like is probably not going to work out well for you. 

[icehot]

I've been gaming since the 1980s (showing my age now), does that count for knowing more about game design? 😛

[Annihilatorza]

@faatal Are you guys to rework the network code at some point as it's quite bad currently, loads of people are having issues with it

 

Floating zombies, items or objects.

Performance gets worse the longer the server is up.

Stuttering

 

It's fine for the most part with 1 or 2 people but it take to your supported max of 8 it's becomes unplayable after a while.

 

I knows it's Alpha and all that but it's had these issues for a long time.

 

Maybe in Beta as I know the current push is to get A22 done.

[Uncle Al]

There's a lot of good commentary above on the issues with quest reward vs. bought items vs. looted items vs. crafted items above. 

 

I thought I'd chip in with some thoughts, which also summarise some of the stuff that's been raised.

 

First observation is the four different methods of loot acquisition scale off different things:

 

Quest reward appears to scale solely off quest tier

Bought items scale off level, quests completed and daring adventurer ranks. The key scale factor is level as DA is a flat bonus and trader stage is a multiple of level.

Looted items scale off level, biome and POI difficulty but the key driver is level

Crafting scales off magazines found

 

In order to achieve better balance, you really want all four loot sources scaling, to at least some degree, off the same thing, which realistically is level.

 

The suggestion that quest rewards, at least for levelled items, should be far more dependent on trader stage seems like a good one. Quantities of unlevelled items, ammo and resources etc. could still just scale straight off quest tier. My own feeling is quest rewards at the maximum tier you have unlocked should give rewards slightly better than what that trader has for sale. I.e. the trader stage used for rewards should be equivalent to the trader stage you're going to unlock when you finish that tier, if you're questing at the highest tier you've unlocked for that trader.

 

I do feel quest tier has too little impact on trader stage, and daring adventurer way too much. For a level 100 character, 3 ranks in daring adventurer gives the same benefit as unlocking quest tier 6. It's way more dramatic at lower levels. That seems totally out of whack. Something like +0.1 (player level) trader stage per quest tier (not the current 0.05) and an extra 0.1 (player level) per point in DA (rather than flat +10 per point) looks a lot more sensible to me. DA would still be a huge benefit for INT players, but it wouldn't have the insane impact it does currently at lower levels. 

 

Equally the impact of levelling up a particular trader is currently rather small. Until you reach very high levels, where level gain rate has slowed right down, the rate you're gaining levels is going to have a much bigger effect on ALL traders than raising your quest tier level with individual traders.

 

Level impacting crafting skill has some merits, but that's a fairly radical change. It would ensure crafting stays more in alignment with other loot sources though. 

 

It definitely seems like the current systems work and give players meaningful choices regarding how to gear up. We just need some fine tuning to ensure those choices are meaningful and there's not one single strategy that always performs better than the others.

Edited July 10, 2023 by Uncle Al (see edit history)

[Andy Red]

1 hour ago, Annihilatorza said:

@faatal Are you guys to rework the network code at some point as it's quite bad currently, loads of people are having issues with it

 

Floating zombies, items or objects.

Performance gets worse the longer the server is up.

Stuttering

 

It's fine for the most part with 1 or 2 people but it take to your supported max of 8 it's becomes unplayable after a while.

 

I knows it's Alpha and all that but it's had these issues for a long time.

 

Maybe in Beta as I know the current push is to get A22 done.

Using a decent host, with auto restart set to once or twice a day pretty much fixes this.
Don't go for one of those cheap $11.99 / month game sever hosts to run a 10k map, they're just not sufficient.

[Annihilatorza]

2 hours ago, Andy Red said:

Using a decent host, with auto restart set to once or twice a day pretty much fixes this.
Don't go for one of those cheap $11.99 / month game sever hosts to run a 10k map, they're just not sufficient.

Thanks for the reply but this happens on the best hosts available, it's not an isolated issue and has been an issue for years now, but as I said game is in Alpha and network does need help.

[Laz Man]

10 minutes ago, Annihilatorza said:

Thanks for the reply but this happens on the best hosts available, it's not an isolated issue and has been an issue for years now, but as I said game is in Alpha and network does need help.

 

The network code saw some improvements in A21 so it should be better then A20 at the least.  If possible, please submit a detailed bug report so we can take a closer look at your specific case.

 

As a side note, the QA team often has a long term dedicated server they use to test out multiple different issues, group play and stability being just a couple.

[the_envenom]

I hope next alpha, they bring in a whole new variety of quests. They have tons of poi's, they just have to use them.
Ideas:
1. Establish some type of Communication between settlements (Some poi's have a radio tower, repair it?)

2. Rescue a stranded survivor... (they have the ai for the drone, couldn't they just fiddle with that a little bit)
3. Take out a bandit camp (that's interfering with the trader's business?)
4. Clear out an infested/abandoned trader base (for new a trader to make business there?)
5. Repair a water pumping station (Water is very IMPORTANT!!)

6. They could have bounties in the game (Find that target and eliminate him for your reward) 

[Old Crow]

10 minutes ago, the_envenom said:

I hope next alpha, they bring in a whole new variety of quests. They have tons of poi's, they just have to use them.
Ideas:
1. Establish some type of Communication between settlements (Some poi's have a radio tower, repair it?)

2. Rescue a stranded survivor... (they have the ai for the drone, couldn't they just fiddle with that a little bit)
3. Take out a bandit camp (that's interfering with the trader's business?)
4. Clear out an infested/abandoned trader base (for new a trader to make business there?)
5. Repair a water pumping station (Water is very IMPORTANT!!)

6. They could have bounties in the game (Find that target and eliminate him for your reward) 

 

These would be awesome. We did used to have bounties in the form of random notes you could find, though they were more along the lines of "Go here and kill X amount of Y zombie."

[ThePewter]

56 minutes ago, the_envenom said:

2. Rescue a stranded survivor... (they have the ai for the drone, couldn't they just fiddle with that a little bit)

Having someone follow you on foot might be more difficult to code... How about changing this to be a crashed drone?  It was delivering supplies between traders and failed/crashed somewhere. You'll need to find the drone, repair it and bring it back to the trader.

[Makaroni95]

What happened to Door Crafting? We have tons of new doors, but We cant craft them? Why? 

Also im hoping new furnitures for A22 to custom our base more. 

Aaaand also, Hello everyone! 

[Aldranon]

Once the bear rug at Joel's place is craft able, I'd say 7D2D went Gold!

 

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Aldranon said:

Once the bear rug at Joel's place is craft able, I'd say 7D2D went Gold!

 

You of all people want a bear rug?!?  Next you’ll be asking for a deflated blimp to drape across your wall. Oh the betrayal…

[Sephiroth87xz]

On 7/10/2023 at 9:35 AM, Riamus said:

Reading what devs say doesn't make you more of an expert that every other gamer out there with similar experience.  I can say that I have over a decade more gaming time than that but it really doesn't matter.

 

Everyone here is talking about balance.  No one that I've noticed is saying they shouldn't balance the game.  They are offering possible ways to balance the game.  You don't like their suggestions and are repeating that the devs will balance it.  But what happens if the devs balance it in a way similar to what someone here suggested?  You're not going to be happy about that.  You are assuming that how the devs balance the game will be correct and that any suggestions from anyone else are wrong.  TFP has been very good at making decisions that many people disagree with, so assuming they'll balance in a way you like is probably not going to work out well for you. 

 

You seems to not understand a thing.

 

Developers already choiced a line of balancing with magazines.

 

Crafting system progression is overall in line with the difficulty progression of the game.

 

This is what they want for the game.

 

Now Developers will need to apply this same line of balance to all the other parts of the game traders, loot and quest rewards for fix the unbalanced situation which is breaking the progression and making game too easy breaking the difficulty progression.

 

 

Edited July 11, 2023 by Sephiroth87xz (see edit history)

[Jost Amman]

Just wanted to post this for the dev who worked on dismemberment... I think he'll appreciate it. 

https://steamcommunity.com/app/251570/discussions/0/3800525036426767099/

[RipClaw]

23 minutes ago, Sephiroth87xz said:

Crafting system progression is overall in line with the difficulty progression of the game.

It depends on which biome you are in and where your first trader is. In A21, the gamestage depends on the biome. The gamestage increases much faster in the desert, snow or wasteland but your crafting progress remains pretty much the same.

 

23 minutes ago, Sephiroth87xz said:

This is what they want for the game.

Have you asked the developers what they want? It is rather presumptuous to assume that you know what the desired end goal is.

 

23 minutes ago, Sephiroth87xz said:

Now Developers will need to apply this same line of balance to all the other parts of the game traders, loot and quest rewards for fix the unbalanced situation which is breaking the progression and making game too easy breaking the difficulty progression.

In my case, that would be to speed up the progress for looting and what the trader is selling. I did a T5 infestation quest in the pine forest this morning and found a Q2 Pump Shotgun but I can already craft a Q5 Auto Shotgun. My lootstage and traderstage is way behind my crafting skills.

 

[Riamus]

18 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

In my case, that would be to speed up the progress for looting and what the trader is selling. I did a T5 infestation quest in the pine forest this morning and found a Q2 Pump Shotgun but I can already craft a Q5 Auto Shotgun. My lootstage and traderstage is way behind my crafting skills.

 

How'd you manage that?  Crafting is far slower than game progression for me.  At least after the first week or so.  But I also go up in gamestage very quickly.  Crafting definitely doesn't come close to keeping up for me.  Loot is okay even with the nerf to looting, though it can take a while to find things at times but I'm fine with that.  Quest rewards are too fast.  Trader inventory just varies so greatly that I can't even really say if it's too fast or slow.  By the time am maxed out on crafting and have a high gamestage, I'm still only seeing Q3-4 items for sale with only a rare Q5.  I'm not even sure that I've seen a Q6 yet from the trader.  Not that I'd buy those in most cases but I still look.  In the early game, the trader inventory is too high, though.  It seems like it starts too high and then progresses too slowly so you reach a point where it's even and then instead of being too much it becomes too little.

 

The biggest problem with trying to balance for game progression is that game progression varies greatly depending on what you do.  If you quest constantly, it'll go up far faster than if you almost never quest, for example.  Any progression method that isn't tied to game progression (or at least your level) is going to be unbalanced no matter how much they try to balance it.  It'll be balanced for some people who play in a way that allows it to be balanced but not for people who play in other ways. If you balance it to align with a player who does 5 quests a day, it'll be way too fast for the player who does 1 quest a week and too slow for the MP group that does 10 quests a day.  For the progression types tied to gamestage (or at least your level), those will at least have a chance to be balanced.

 

Let's say you want to have everything align with your crafting speed.  Sounds great.  But then you have people who want to craft and those who don't or rarely do so.  Not being able to progress well because you're not crafting (learning to craft) at a fast rate isn't balanced.  Not to mention that it creates even more problems for MP groups who would all want to read every magazine just to get their progression up for things like looting and questing.

 

Things like that are just not easy to work around unless every progression method is tied to the same things.  I'm not saying it's a bad thing to tie different progression styles to different things in the game to provide variety... just that it is very hard to get a true balance that way.  All you can really hope for is "good enough."  Still, as far as I'm concerned, these different progression methods don't have to be perfectly balanced anyhow.  As long as none are too far off from the others, I don't mind if one way is faster than the others or slower than the others.

Edited July 11, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[RipClaw]

9 minutes ago, Riamus said:

How'd you manage that?  Crafting is far slower than game progression for me.  At least after the first week or so. 

The question is difficult to answer since I don't know how you play.

 

I was lucky that my initial city is already very big with two Crack a Book POIs for which I even got some quests. I also didn't spread my points very far. I invested my points mainly in Pummel Pete, Miner69er and Shotgun Messiah. One point at the beginning in Advanced Engineering. No Points in Lucky Looter or Daring Adventurer and I limited myself to one quest per day.

 

You have to keep in mind that the lootstage is mainly defined by the biome and the POI difficulty. Accordingly, it is not surprising that I will not find particularly good loot in the pine forest. In the desert, the snow or the Wasteland, the lootstage is of course significantly higher. That is the point of the discussion. People do not take this into account when they complain about "too good loot".

 

For me, gamestage, crafting skills, lootstage, and traderstage are 4 different values that can match under certain conditions but can differ greatly depending on how you play.

To me, matching the progress of crafting, the trader's inventory, and what you find while looting is like trying to synchronize different clocks. No matter how precise the clocks are, the time displayed will differ sooner or later. And with various multipliers and bonuses in the game, crafting, looting and the trader usually diverge very quickly.

 

[Kalex]

3 hours ago, RipClaw said:

It depends on which biome you are in and where your first trader is. In A21, the gamestage depends on the biome. The gamestage increases much faster in the desert, snow or wasteland but your crafting progress remains pretty much the same.

 

Have you asked the developers what they want? It is rather presumptuous to assume that you know what the desired end goal is.

 

In my case, that would be to speed up the progress for looting and what the trader is selling. I did a T5 infestation quest in the pine forest this morning and found a Q2 Pump Shotgun but I can already craft a Q5 Auto Shotgun. My lootstage and traderstage is way behind my crafting skills.

 

Our game has all of our crafting WAY below what the trader is selling/giving as quest rewards.

[RipClaw]

52 minutes ago, Kalex said:

Our game has all of our crafting WAY below what the trader is selling/giving as quest rewards.

I exclude the trader's quest rewards from consideration as they are solely based on the quest tier. A T1 quest will give the same reward regardless of your level, the gamestage or the traderstage. Quest rewards are about risk and reward. The higher the risk the better the reward.

 

As for the trader inventory, that's based on the traderstage and you can manipulate that by either doing a lot of quests or putting points into Daring Adventurer.

If you compare a trader where you have done many quests with one where you have not done any quests, you will see the difference.

 

One mistake many make is to spread points into too many perks. This dilutes the magazine boost of the perks.

 

Edited July 11, 2023 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[Javabean867]

6 hours ago, Kalex said:

Our game has all of our crafting WAY below what the trader is selling/giving as quest rewards.

Is your team reading all of the books they find, or giving them to specialists?  We have 2 people playing on our server, and the crafting is about the same as questing/trader.

 

I had to insist on us specializing though lol.  But we agreed.  

 

 

[AtomicUs5000]

6 hours ago, Kalex said:

Our game has all of our crafting WAY below what the trader is selling/giving as quest rewards.

 
Maybe the game needs just a simple check if this is the case when completing a quest of a given tier, and if the difference is too great, then increase the chance of another crafting mag as a reward choice.
I have no idea if that would screw something up or create something exploitable as I have not given it thought.

 

I guess I just don't understand how this can be unless you are always accepting something else.

 

Edited July 11, 2023 by AtomicUs5000 (see edit history)

[Dtfauss]

Summary - RNG, Subjective, Playstyle, Expectation, Settings