Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

[POCKET951]

2 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

Ehrm... fortunately, you're a gentleman, so my joke just completely passed over your head... now I feel embarrassed.

But for the sake of clarity, I'll explain.

 

POCKET951 replied to Roland like this:

So, the only way to avoid @SnowDog1942 to become "aroused", is to remove the "snow balls" from the snow dog. (ok, ok, it's a terrible joke I admit...) 

Ahh some post nut clarity

[RipClaw]

15 hours ago, Roland said:

Then it was fine tuning and balancing from there. In the first iteration the uncraftable part of the dew collector was a blue barrel but that later changed to a water filter. Other changes that followed were to change loot so that pure water could no longer be found-- only murky water and that a pot was to be required once again to boil murky water into pure water. Finally, the game was reverted once again to allow players to be able to drink water directly from water sources.

I wonder if adding a step to the water purification process would not have had the same effect?

 

For example, a workstation that filters muddy water instead of collecting clean water. You would then have muddy water, which was collected from a lake or pond and must first be filtered to get water in which there are still microorganisms that you kill by boiling the water.

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

I think that all the stack sizes for drinks are already fine. I don't think that I've ever even had to use more than 3 drinks a day and it only got that high because of occasionally needing to use painkillers etc. I assume that this is average considering where the production cap on the dew collectors has been set.

 

Ok, but then I really don't see how your proposed system can have a similar result of water being scarce at the beginning of the game than the A21 changes. As Roland said a long time ago, find a few jars and thirst in the first few days is already a non-problem. You may have to walk to a water source a bit more often than you want but with say 3 drinks per day and say 6 jars one walk to the water source keeps you hydrated for 2 days.

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

The stack sizes for jars and murky water are both 125 presently. Glue and duct tape are both 500. A stack of exploding crossbow bolts is 75. You can go through 4 stacks of crossbow bolts on a horde night. That's going to require 250 glue.  In 7 days time 6 dew collectors will produce 302 water, leaving you 50 for food and drink. One dew collector will produce 50 in that time. Which means that you'd need a minimum of 3 in order to produce a single stack of exploding bolts per week with a little left over for repair kits.

These are really tight margins when you can't even be sure that you can build 6 of them. On a large map you can get all 5 traders so you could get 5 filters as quest rewards guaranteed, but we know this isn't true for the smaller maps, that RNG is a fickle @%$#, and by the time you've mapped out that many traders it's pretty much time to restart.

 

But this game has a lot of mechanisms without guarantees, that is part of almost any survival game. If you want to be safe that anything you plan will work then you have to play a deterministic game. The task of a game developer is not to solve your problems but to put you in front of interesting problems, like "Where can I find another filter, I need one more" or "I don't have enough expl. bolts for horde night, what weapon do I use for the rest of the night or do I invest in more traps?"

 

So it isn't guaranteed that you can produce 75 expl. crossbows a week? Well, adapt. From past experiences I would guess that the game will be balanced so that new players will get hardly enough of those collectors and experienced players will complain about finding too many in the game too early, making it trivial.

 

Sure, it is possible that they botch the balance, even with a handful of testers already providing feedback, but that is where the EA players come into play and give additional feedback.

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Take those statements together and replace "best" for "only" option and you quickly realize that people won't be using those sources beyond emergency situations which reduces their value to nil after the first week since they're very rarely found near useful pois and there's still the risk of dysentery.

 

Sure, but the first few days WILL be an emergency situation (if Roland account of his play is to be believed). In the later game you might have a water purifier mod and maybe found too few filters so you want to keep most of the dew water for glue and exploding crossbows.

 

In the paragraph above you fear you get too few dew collectors for your setup, here you promise me water value will be nil after the first week. That can't be both true. Is that fear of the unexpected? 😉

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

And the same is true for any developer. This is the whole point of user feedback. 

 

Oh yes. Undoubtedly they also make mistakes and there even have been developers who objectively destroyed a game completely with wrong decisions. But normally a developer will at least do 2 things: Discuss changes in a group, more eyes spot more problems. And let it get tested, either by internal testers or in EA additionally by thousands of players.

 

What we do now is no testing. What we do is theorizing (the same that is done in the internal group meeting). It has some value, but the real testing can only start once A21 has gone experimental.

 

And at this time the developer is not looking for alternative ways to solve what he wants to be solved, as he has already implemented one solution he thinks can handle it and wants this tried out before dropping it.

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[RipClaw]

20 minutes ago, meganoth said:

What we do now is no testing. What we do is theorizing (the same that is done in the internal group meeting). It has some value, but the real testing can only start once A21 has gone experimental.

Well, that's the only thing we can do as ordinary players right now. And since we don't know what was discussed in the team meetings, and what ramifications were discussed or perhaps forgotten, all we can really do is have the exact same discussion again, even though it might be annoying for those who were at the team meetings.

 

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

I do appreciate that greatly, but we're also talking in an atmosphere where some will get super defensive when any criticisms are brought up about the game, and those with the obvious bias of "any change is good change" I mean in the first 24 hours after the announcement I watched two heavily invested modders have their concerns dismissed out of hand because 'they were just mad that it caused more work for them'

 

So lets be clear, the ones with the obvious bias have brought no arguments and just dismissed the modders?

Should the modders opinion get no scrutiny? Is their opinion better than the one of other players? Do we have to adress them as "Your Majesty" ?😉

 

Should anyone here really accept Guppycur's silly argument that this was done because of console just because he is an excellent modder? He made that argument just to provoke a reaction, by the way. 

 

Interestingly the modders are in the same place as the developers when it comes to their own mod. Have you tried to argue with one of them that his newest change isn't a good idea and proposed your own solution? I don't think he would throw away his work immediately and use a different method without any discussion about merits of the solutions. He might actually recommend to first play the mod with the new changes and then provide feedback?

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

 

 

and then when I try to continue the conversation it gets moved into an out of the way corner so as not to disturb the regular folk. Don't get me wrong, I've found very good conversation here and I feel like my thoughts have more value in that a place was made for the discussion, but it is a tacit admission of the sourness of the main thread. 

So, I guess that's me venting and also saying thanks.

And the same is true for any developer. This is the whole point of user feedback. 

 

13 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Well, that's the only thing we can do as ordinary players right now. And since we don't know what was discussed in the team meetings, and what ramifications were discussed or perhaps forgotten, all we can really do is have the exact same discussion again, even though it might be annoying for those who were at the team meetings.

 

 

Yes. It would have been much better in my opinion if some dev or Roland had immediately posted a summary of how such a change was decided and especially what the reasons were for it. (And for bonus points even some other solutions discussed and why they were not taken)

 

Imagine Roland had posted that at the time the change was revealed:

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Uncle Al]

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Now I really like those ideas.

My worry again though is that telemetry isn't going to pick up the edge cases. I mean, what percentage of the user base is even going to want that high of production? As it is you can survive just off looting and the trader for that target 60 hours. You can get an entire horde base worth of concrete blocks in a single air drop. For all the other production stations you can get by comfortably with just one of each and only use them rarely. From what I know of people, they're going to gravitate towards doing the bare minimum while a sparse few will actually attempt to scale things up and go past that first 60 hours. 
 

This is a fair point because heavy use of exploding arrows/bolts skews your glue consumption like nothing else in the game.  In playthroughs I use them, I have to actively manage my glue supplies even in late game.  In any other playstyle, glue becomes inconsequential towards the end of your early game at worst.

 

If the new paradigm is going to make water, and thus glue, consequential up to late midgame, there's a risk exploding missiles become untenable until very late game, if even then.

 

Neminsis is correct that analytics might not show what's happening as from everything I've seen explosive archery is not a very popular option, despite being an excellent way of making archery viable for hordes.

 

Frankly it's probably better to remove the duct tape requirement from explosive missiles as part of the new water paradigm.  Otherwise you're trying to balance water to make it at the desired level of scarcity for two groups of people who have insanely different water requirements.  Everyone using water at roughly comparable rates (hydration and repair kits mostly) except for dedicated archers who use about six times as much is very, very hard to balance.  The most likely outcome is regular explosive bolt/arrow use becomes unviable, and that would be a shame.

[meganoth]

31 minutes ago, Uncle Al said:

This is a fair point because heavy use of exploding arrows/bolts skews your glue consumption like nothing else in the game.  In playthroughs I use them, I have to actively manage my glue supplies even in late game.  In any other playstyle, glue becomes inconsequential towards the end of your early game at worst.

 

If the new paradigm is going to make water, and thus glue, consequential up to late midgame, there's a risk exploding missiles become untenable until very late game, if even then.

 

Neminsis is correct that analytics might not show what's happening as from everything I've seen explosive archery is not a very popular option, despite being an excellent way of making archery viable for hordes.

 

Frankly it's probably better to remove the duct tape requirement from explosive missiles as part of the new water paradigm.  Otherwise you're trying to balance water to make it at the desired level of scarcity for two groups of people who have insanely different water requirements.  Everyone using water at roughly comparable rates (hydration and repair kits mostly) except for dedicated archers who use about six times as much is very, very hard to balance.  The most likely outcome is regular explosive bolt/arrow use becomes unviable, and that would be a shame.

 

A friend of mine is heavily critizising the direction of 7D2D because he feels that (random) looting is just too central to the game now. The disadvantage being that the player ultimately has no meaningful decisions anymore. He has to take what he finds.

 

That you can find fitting magazines and parts in specific POIs is one important step to give the player some control back. I hope the same happens with the dew collector, i.e. there should be specific but maybe hard to find places where you can find filters (or just a lot of water) much more frequently. This would give anyone wanting a lot of water a strategy to follow.

 

 

 

 

[Matt115]

2 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Oh yes. Undoubtedly they also make mistakes and there even have been developers who objectively destroyed a game completely with wrong decisions. But normally a developer will at least do 2 things: Discuss changes in a group, more eyes spot more problems. And let it get tested, either by internal testers or in EA additionally by thousands of players.

 

What we do now is no testing. What we do is theorizing (the same that is done in the internal group meeting). It has some value, but the real testing can only start once A21 has gone experimental.

 

And at this time the developer is not looking for alternative ways to solve what he wants to be solved, as he has already implemented one solution he thinks can handle it and wants this tried out before dropping it.

 

Well : theorizing is good because well some decision are just bad before even testing.  Well everything depends on idea. Some of them are worthy to check some of them sounds too bad

 

5 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

A friend of mine is heavily critizising the direction of 7D2D because he feels that (random) looting is just too central to the game now. The disadvantage being that the player ultimately has no meaningful decisions anymore. He has to take what he finds.

 

That you can find fitting magazines and parts in specific POIs is one important step to give the player some control back. I hope the same happens with the dew collector, i.e. there should be specific but maybe hard to find places where you can find filters (or just a lot of water) much more frequently. This would give anyone wanting a lot of water a strategy to follow.

 

 

 

 

Because he is right. And wrong in this same time. looting is too central to the game now - because is not rewarding anymore.

Then: oh maybe in this backpack is pistol... oo nice AK.  I will check this cabin. Yep few junks maybe next time will be better

Now: i have this and this gamestage so i will get again another hunting rifle. whatever. Why i should check X if i know what i will probably get?

 

Plus

 then : i found iron! okay now i will mine a lot to make steel items

now: now i have iron... yeah at least i can make door because making tools is pointless now because i have steel parts only to find not craftable. so why i would sit in mine if i can do traders quest

 

 

[Uncle Al]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

A friend of mine is heavily critizising the direction of 7D2D because he feels that (random) looting is just too central to the game now. The disadvantage being that the player ultimately has no meaningful decisions anymore. He has to take what he finds.

 

That you can find fitting magazines and parts in specific POIs is one important step to give the player some control back. I hope the same happens with the dew collector, i.e. there should be specific but maybe hard to find places where you can find filters (or just a lot of water) much more frequently. This would give anyone wanting a lot of water a strategy to follow.

 

 

 

 

Very good point.  The ability to target looting is crucial to player agency.

 

I believe the original 'rare' part for the dew collector was going to be a plastic barrel - presumably an intact one would have been a rare drop from the water barrels scattered around.  That would have made targetting warehouses a viable 'get a lot of water' strategy.  I'm hopeful there's a logical, targettable loot container for decent water filter drop chances.  Water coolers don't really work as they're not concentrated in any particular POI type.

[RipClaw]

32 minutes ago, Uncle Al said:

I'm hopeful there's a logical, targettable loot container for decent water filter drop chances.

Well, in the real world, when I need a water filter, I go to the hardware store. The waterworks would also be a good place to look for a filter.

Or houses with swimming pools would also be a logical place for a filter.

Edited July 28, 2022 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[BFT2020]

2 hours ago, Uncle Al said:

Frankly it's probably better to remove the duct tape requirement from explosive missiles as part of the new water paradigm.  Otherwise you're trying to balance water to make it at the desired level of scarcity for two groups of people who have insanely different water requirements.  Everyone using water at roughly comparable rates (hydration and repair kits mostly) except for dedicated archers who use about six times as much is very, very hard to balance.  The most likely outcome is regular explosive bolt/arrow use becomes unviable, and that would be a shame.

 

Or even just change the ratio of duct tape for the arrows you craft.  Right now it costs 1 duct tape per exploding arrow or 60 for a bundle of 75.  What impact would making the ratio of say 1 duct tape for 10 exploding arrows and 6 when you generate a bundle of 75?

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, Matt115 said:

Well : theorizing is good because well some decision are just bad before even testing.  Well everything depends on idea. Some of them are worthy to check some of them sounds too bad

 

Would you call a decision to include a satirical nerd-armor a bad idea? 😎

 

1 hour ago, Matt115 said:

 

Because he is right. And wrong in this same time. looting is too central to the game now - because is not rewarding anymore.

Then: oh maybe in this backpack is pistol... oo nice AK.  I will check this cabin. Yep few junks maybe next time will be better

Now: i have this and this gamestage so i will get again another hunting rifle. whatever. Why i should check X if i know what i will probably get?

 

In reality: Then (A15): "I will not check this cabin and that town house, there is nothing interesting I can find there." . I remember very well that ALL normal town houses very simply ignored as soon as you left early game. There never was anything valuable in there anymore. 

Now: "Okay, I won't find a much better weapon, but I still need a better leg armor. And where is that damn silencer mod?"

 

1 hour ago, Matt115 said:

 

Plus

 then : i found iron! okay now i will mine a lot to make steel items

now: now i have iron... yeah at least i can make door because making tools is pointless now because i have steel parts only to find not craftable. so why i would sit in mine if i can do traders quest

 

 

 

Strangely my group blasts through forged iron and forged steel as fast as we can produce them, and surely not because we can or can not build steel tools. I suspect that you play this game just as a shooter and do only minimal building. Naturally you don't need much raw materials in this case.

 

[BFT2020]

18 hours ago, POCKET951 said:

I consider them very low value/not worth getting.. I usually fill them out when I am getting towards level 250+ and have nothing else to spend on

the stun baton might be good now with the tech junkies books/electrocutioner?? idk

If robotic turrets didn't set off demolishers I would consider turrets alot more.

 

I use both of those perks heavily when I run a build that leans heavily towards the Int tree

 

The turrets are used all the time (except for when a demolisher shows up, but then I just pick it up - very rarely do they set one off before I can do that).  So having the bonuses for reload  speed, fire rate, damage output, and extra ammo is very helpful.  Also having the ability to put down two active turrets at the same time is just amazing.  I still use the turrets when I don't spec into the Int side, and the loss of those benefits is very noticeable.

 

And since I am using the stun baton as my primary weapon on an Int build, having double an additional 50% the damage at max perk is nothing to sneeze about.

 

Sorry, I got block damage mixed up with entity damage.  It's the attribute levels that eventually lead up to double the damage (headshot), not the the perks.

Edited July 28, 2022 by BFT2020 (see edit history)

[BFT2020]

2 hours ago, meganoth said:

A friend of mine is heavily critizising the direction of 7D2D because he feels that (random) looting is just too central to the game now. The disadvantage being that the player ultimately has no meaningful decisions anymore. He has to take what he finds.

 

I am not a big fan myself of the looting priority or trader missions (and their expansive stock of weapons) so I can understand where your friend is coming from.

 

It's hard to strike a balance with all the various elements, but a couple of changes can swing it to the other side.  If you remove the ability to repair items and lower the probability of finding equipment (weapons, armor, tools), then crafting becomes more important.  Since I just also started throwing out empty jars, murky water becomes a valuable resource as I have to choose between drinks or glue to make items.  So if I find that Q2 wrench that is in decent shape, I will use it (even though I can craft a Q3 wrench) so that I can save my resources to build an iron fireaxe since my current one is almost broke and haven't found anything to replace it yet.

 

There are some other modifications I made that also influence this behavior - removing quest rewards from the trader (only dukes and exp now) and limiting the gear offered by the traders to Q6 only and at higher prices.

 

Now this is not to say that the developers should implement these ideas, I am sure they already get enough of that 😉  They have a vision and a goal for the game which they should be constantly striving for.  I am grateful that they made it easy to mod the game so for those of us that want to make small changes in the vanilla experience to those that want to make complete overhauls, we can do that.

 

Now one of these days I will get around of working on custom icons (instead of just using the existing ones and tinting them) and tackling the localization file (foodRawSnakeMeat and canFoodHeated just doesn't sound as nice as Chicken Soup and Fish tacos in game  😉 )

[Roland]

4 hours ago, RipClaw said:

even though it might be annoying for those who were at the team meetings.

I’m not annoyed in the least by the brainstorming of alternative ideas. I haven’t chided anyone for coming up with alt scenarios or poo-pooed ideas (other than disagreeing that simply changing stack sizes would have the same effect)

 

What annoys me is the speculation about the motives behind the changes and the assumptions of thoughtlessness and laziness just because they disagree. Some personality types automatically assume the worst in other people and can’t imagine any other explanation than that the devs are either lazy, inept, dishonest, and/or hateful of the fans. 

[pApA^LeGBa]

So is the water change in the right place here? Anyways, i actually don´t mind water beeing more scarce at all. I like that idea. However this might be not the best way to do this.

 

The dew collector should be easy to made, it´s just a bit of plastic and some sticks either made of wood or metal. That would mean you can easily have a ton of them and basically have no water issues at all. It wouldn´t make any sense to make it a late game item or hard to make, that would be bad gamedesign. 

 

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

Strangely my group blasts through forged iron and forged steel as fast as we can produce them, and surely not because we can or can not build steel tools. I suspect that you play this game just as a shooter and do only minimal building. Naturally you don't need much raw materials in this case.

 

Yeah, i know that to well. Having at least 3 forges just for iron is normal. And they run 24/7. That´s what happens if you need a garage for every vehicle that is in bdubs vehicle mod. 😛

Edited July 28, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Neminsis]

4 hours ago, meganoth said:

As Roland said a long time ago, find a few jars and thirst in the first few days is already a non-problem.

Being able to utilize murky water in the first few days requires a cooking pot and since jars no longer appear in the loot table the only jars you'd be finding would be coming from drinks you looted or purchased. If the loot frequency on drinks is set to allow you to survive, even if just barely, then your hydration problems are solved the moment you get that cooking pot anyway, and at no point is the player motivated to save those jars, after all they're an annoying item that does not stack. The mechanic only comes into play under extreme conditions.
 

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

But this game has a lot of mechanisms without guarantees

It's not that it's not a guaranteed outcome, but that it's extremely unlikely that anyone is going to able to achieve those production levels and for the average player that might maybe build two dew collectors it won't even be considered as an option. This cuts off an already underutilized and very fun playstyle.

We did a user stream a while back where we invited a bunch of people to play 20 minutes days on a prefab that I built, and just before horde night everyone was given a compound bow and a stack of exploding arrows. The reactions were unanimous to the effect of, "holy crap these are so good, I've never even tried them." Even though they've been in the game forever and the average playtime for those people was around 1000-2000 hours they'd never even discovered them. Two dew collectors as they presently stand wouldn't produce enough glue to create a single stack of them. That math is unavoidable.
 

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

Sure, but the first few days WILL be an emergency situation (if Roland account of his play is to be believed).

Again, after you've acquired a cooking pot the value of those water sources becomes meaningless. You'd just stop using them once you could make drinks.
 

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

Should the modders opinion get no scrutiny?

No, but neither should their opinions be dismissed out of hand. I personally disagree with both of them on more issues than I can list, but I do consider what they say from the perspective that they spend a lot of time thinking about this game. It's simple respect for others, no adulation required.
 

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Yes. It would have been much better in my opinion if some dev or Roland had immediately posted a summary of how such a change was decided and especially what the reasons were for it.

It would've made for better informed commentary, but it wouldn't have changed my reasoning much. 

 

[Syphon583]

4 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

So is the water change in the right place here? Anyways, i actually don´t mind water beeing more scarce at all. I like that idea. However this might be not the best way to do this.

 

The dew collector should be easy to made, it´s just a bit of plastic and some sticks either made of wood or metal. That would mean you can easily have a ton of them and basically have no water issues at all. It wouldn´t make any sense to make it a late game item or hard to make, that would be bad gamedesign. 

Maybe I'm not following you, but I'm pretty sure it's been revealed that dew collectors require a filter (which is not craftable) that can only be obtained through trader stock, reward or rare loot drop. Seems like that might make it just hard enough to make getting water hard at the beginning, but it doesn't restrict it to late-game.

[pApA^LeGBa]

Meh. More random looter shooter stuff. Great. They really try hard to make it survival and not survival at the same time.

 

And now we do need to use the traders no matter what. No more no trader playtroughs. That sucks. Did they do this because a lot of people do not use the quest system, because they are so OP and greatly shorten the playtime with all that extra XP and cash? 

 

Well, i accepted the fact that i am not gonna be happy without mods anymore.

Edited July 28, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Being able to utilize murky water in the first few days requires a cooking pot and since jars no longer appear in the loot table the only jars you'd be finding would be coming from drinks you looted or purchased. If the loot frequency on drinks is set to allow you to survive, even if just barely, then your hydration problems are solved the moment you get that cooking pot anyway, and at no point is the player motivated to save those jars, after all they're an annoying item that does not stack. The mechanic only comes into play under extreme conditions.

 

The changes in A21 will not necessarily solve your hydration problems the moment you get a cooking pot. Because you want to use some water you loot for production of food and glue you will have a motive for drinking from sewers and the like. The difference is that the only way to scale up the water production are dew collectors and those are not mass producable.

 

In your scheme the only limit is how much inventory management grind the player is prepared to do. Find or craft 3 jars and you have enough water for yourself for a day. Find or craft another 3 jars and you immediately doubled your production capacity per run to the water source.

 

What I specifically dislike about your solution is that the limiting factor is how much grind the user accepts. That is similar to the problem the LBD-stone axe-crafting had in A15.

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

It's not that it's not a guaranteed outcome, but that it's extremely unlikely that anyone is going to able to achieve those production levels and for the average player that might maybe build two dew collectors it won't even be considered as an option. This cuts off an already underutilized and very fun playstyle.

 

You don't know that yet. You are talking about 2 dew collectors but it is totally unknown how many dew collectors a player can build say on day 20 on average. 

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

We did a user stream a while back where we invited a bunch of people to play 20 minutes days on a prefab that I built, and just before horde night everyone was given a compound bow and a stack of exploding arrows. The reactions were unanimous to the effect of, "holy crap these are so good, I've never even tried them." Even though they've been in the game forever and the average playtime for those people was around 1000-2000 hours they'd never even discovered them. Two dew collectors as they presently stand wouldn't produce enough glue to create a single stack of them. That math is unavoidable.

 

I get the impression you are arguing here again that telemetry data alone can't tell TFP how many dew collectors are needed. But why are you still arguing about this? Nobody was disagreeing with you on this.

 

When I was talking about feedback, naturally written feedback from players here in the forum should be taken into account. But that must come from a position of knowledge, for example how many dew collectors a player normally can build in a game. The math you do with 2 collectors is unavoidable BUT probably useless.

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Again, after you've acquired a cooking pot the value of those water sources becomes meaningless. You'd just stop using them once you could make drinks.

 

Not having played it I can only guess. But I assume dew collectors will be scarce in the beginning, so if we talk about possesing 1 dew collector on day 3 and 4 people on the server I would say we still have a lot of water to buy at premium from a trader.

 

And my group actually buys other stuff from the trader, including books, mods and yes, even a weapon sometimes. A jar of red tea according to xml costs 48*3 = 146 dukes at the trader or vending machine. That is nearly half of what one tier1 quest gives you as monetary reward. Do 2 quests and with the reward money alone you can't even afford food and drink for the day. Let alone save money for that Urban Combat book the trader has on display.

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No, but neither should their opinions be dismissed out of hand.

 

Which is why I was asking if anybody was really dismissing them out of hand without bringing arguments. Do you have some examples? In your words it sounded like a witch hunt and many people were involved (you used the plural after all). I can only remember one person got somewhat into a heated discussion with them with a back and forth about who said what and what it meant, but even that person was bringing arguments (I just checked). Something between them as long as they don't violate forum rules.

 

5 hours ago, Neminsis said:

I personally disagree with both of them on more issues than I can list, but I do consider what they say from the perspective that they spend a lot of time thinking about this game. It's simple respect for others, no adulation required.
 

It would've made for better informed commentary, but it wouldn't have changed my reasoning much.

 

I prefer better commentary to accusations of "making changes without any reason" or wild speculations on what the reasons were (not refering to you here, but a few posters have done this)

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[NukemDed]

how about some clever cookie makes us all a mod that will emulate the water change in the current game. it would only take a few hours to then go in and get an idea of how it affected each of our game play styles, a pseudo test as it were.

 

i think it was @roland a few (no a crap ton) of pages back said something along those lines... i am too dumb to work it out, but i will bet there are heaps of you who could and i personally would try it as i prefer the early game over the late and restart often playing different builds

[BFT2020]

3 minutes ago, NukemDed said:

how about some clever cookie makes us all a mod that will emulate the water change in the current game. it would only take a few hours to then go in and get an idea of how it affected each of our game play styles, a pseudo test as it were.

 

i think it was @roland a few (no a crap ton) of pages back said something along those lines... i am too dumb to work it out, but i will bet there are heaps of you who could and i personally would try it as i prefer the early game over the late and restart often playing different builds

 

I think that was actually me talking about simulating it in A20.  However, there is a lot of things going on with this change that has an impact that we simply don't know yet - crafting magazines instead of perk / schematics, changes in the loot tables and what you get when you loot something, changes to the traders.  There are so many changes (big and small) coming in A21 that just creating something to generate 3 bottles of water a day won't give a person a sense of the changes coming.   Heck, you would even have to simulate drinking from water sources in the world.

 

On my next playthrough, I am going to pull empty jars from the loot tables / items / recipes (along with empty cans), but all that is going to do is to simulate the new conditions under A20 rules, not under A21. - relying on murky water I find while looting and drinks from the trader.

 

I can make up a modlet to do it (with obviously a placeholder for the dew collector, I am not going to model it), but it won't be a true representation of what is happening on A21.  And the concern I have is that people are going to assume what they experience with that modlet is A21 which it will not be.

 

Roland is actually playing with the A21 changes now as being one of the testers for it.

[Matt115]

4 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Would you call a decision to include a satirical nerd-armor a bad idea? 😎

 

 

In reality: Then (A15): "I will not check this cabin and that town house, there is nothing interesting I can find there." . I remember very well that ALL normal town houses very simply ignored as soon as you left early game. There never was anything valuable in there anymore. 

Now: "Okay, I won't find a much better weapon, but I still need a better leg armor. And where is that damn silencer mod?"

 

 

Strangely my group blasts through forged iron and forged steel as fast as we can produce them, and surely not because we can or can not build steel tools. I suspect that you play this game just as a shooter and do only minimal building. Naturally you don't need much raw materials in this case.

 

1. Yes it's very very bad idea. This is bad as hornet 🤪

 

2. Well that's a point - i know they spend a lot of time making houses but... that's a point. There is no reason to get into every house. Why? because most people ( well at least i think that - i don't live in USA) don't keep anything in great number in houses except early stage things like - knifes, food water, cash medicine etc.  So that's why the most important places are - shops ( smaller are safer), gas stations, abadoned military truck etc. even things like hospitals could be just dead trap. So at least POI's interesting should be : houses --> small shops --biger shops--> outpost ---> bases, hospitals, etc. Yes i know about tiers but... now there it's no chance to find wight radomly at first day so this such less risky and emotional. my friend had aversion for 7dtd because he radomly get wight in digged mine. good times. 

 

3.  Well this depends what do you mean minimal buliding. i never do anything just for " this looks good"  - i do thing to be "effective" : few block of walls usually (5 block high) tons of spikes,  small base  just simple stone/cement walls - workstations, camp fire etc. and electrical traps etc but this depends on day. I don't care too much how this looks -well this have to be safehouse not home right?

 

 

[Syphon583]

4 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

Meh. More random looter shooter stuff. Great. They really try hard to make it survival and not survival at the same time.

 

And now we do need to use the traders no matter what. No more no trader playtroughs. That sucks. Did they do this because a lot of people do not use the quest system, because they are so OP and greatly shorten the playtime with all that extra XP and cash? 

 

Well, i accepted the fact that i am not gonna be happy without mods anymore.

Re-read what I said (and keep in mind, I'm just sharing what I thought I read in previous posts) From my understanding, the filter is NOT only available through traders. It can also be found in loot. So a "no trader" playthrough will still be very much possible.

 

It's also funny to me that some people look down on the use of mods. You seem almost disappointed that you have to use them to play the way you want. Why is this a bad thing? Wouldn't it be worse if TFP made modding impossible?