Traders and quests need to be nerfed

[Roland]

5 hours ago, theFlu said:

Never have I ever scrapped an item to craft a worse version of the same thing. I don't think. Could I do it? Yeah, I know I could, I've crafted "roughly equal" main things my whole A21-SP experience, and none of the things I've done in game have required excessive cheese yet.

 

The reason for doing such a thing would be to test out the idea that the trader only gives parts. If you wanted to actually playtest that idea then you would scrap any weapons received from the trader to simulate getting parts instead and then craft the best you could.

 

So technically it is silly to scrap a better weapon for a worse weapon if you are playing the game the way it is presented but if you are pretending that traders don't give weapons to test out an idea then it makes perfect sense.

[theFlu]

7 hours ago, Roland said:

If you wanted to actually playtest that idea then

Yeh, I got that. Might be simple enough to just xpath it into a game (quest reward lists and inventory lists, seek and destroy) and not have to pretend.

 

It might be for a good reason, but the act itself is still stupid

[Rotor]

I am a minority, but I dont do traders quest, they feel out of game context for me.  I do use the traders for selling junk finding the odd anti-RNG item.  So I cant comment on the power of the quest.  Really, if they took traders out of the game I would not miss them.......until that run that keeps me from getting the one item that is gating me.

[Riamus]

3 hours ago, Rotor said:

I am a minority, but I dont do traders quest, they feel out of game context for me.

That's an interesting observation.  I've never considered them out of game context but I also don't try to treat them as being immersive - I never read the quests, for example and just complete them.  I think that there is definitely room to making the quests more immersive and more within the game context.  Right now, nothing you do is permanent in that if you repeat the same POI, it just resets and you do it again and even if you clear it and don't reset it, you'll end up with all the zombies back again after a period of time.  It would be interesting if the quests were all about trying to wipe out the zombies in each town, where what you did was permanent - once you wipe out all sleepers in a POI, it remained wiped out.  And where each quest would relate to taking back part of the town and working to completely eradicate the zombies.  Power quests could be a permanent improvement to power in the town or at least the POIs, where there are no lights at all in an POI until you complete the power quests (which would then need to be an option during the day as there are so many POI).  There could be quests between tiers where zombies mass up to try and retake completed POI and you'd have to hold them off or lose the POI and have to clear it again.

 

Of course, these ideas will never make it into the game and the closest we'll get is probably whatever happens with factions.  These are also not easy to set up and manage and not everyone would like such ideas as they limit rerunning POI that they like.  But it would definitely feel more in context with the game.

[Kyoji]

Not sure why quests even exist. I would love the game to be open-ended with you just heading to whatever POI sparked your interest. With the added difficulty skulls you can also determine where you want to explore. Traders should be just that, allowing you to simply sell your goods in exhange for different goods at varrying rates with updated supplies every 3 days. You could boost some loot values such that progression without quests doesn't take lightyears. 

 

If anything perhaps an introductory quest setup to get players to explore (like an expanded tutorial) with a bike reward at the end. After that you are on your own. I feel like 90% of the problems with the progression system stems from traders.

[Riamus]

2 hours ago, Kyoji said:

Not sure why quests even exist. I would love the game to be open-ended with you just heading to whatever POI sparked your interest. With the added difficulty skulls you can also determine where you want to explore. Traders should be just that, allowing you to simply sell your goods in exhange for different goods at varrying rates with updated supplies every 3 days. You could boost some loot values such that progression without quests doesn't take lightyears. 

 

If anything perhaps an introductory quest setup to get players to explore (like an expanded tutorial) with a bike reward at the end. After that you are on your own. I feel like 90% of the problems with the progression system stems from traders.

Probably because many players like quests.  If you don't want to quest, you don't need to.  They can leave quests there for all the people who like to quest and you can still play without them if you choose.  There's nothing stopping you from doing so.  Asking to remove something just because you don't like it even though many others do isn't a good option.

[Rotor]

6 hours ago, Riamus said:

That's an interesting observation.  I've never considered them out of game context but I also don't try to treat them as being immersive - I never read the quests, for example and just complete them.  I think that there is definitely room to making the quests more immersive and more within the game context.  Right now, nothing you do is permanent in that if you repeat the same POI, it just resets and you do it again and even if you clear it and don't reset it, you'll end up with all the zombies back again after a period of time.  It would be interesting if the quests were all about trying to wipe out the zombies in each town, where what you did was permanent - once you wipe out all sleepers in a POI, it remained wiped out.  And where each quest would relate to taking back part of the town and working to completely eradicate the zombies.  Power quests could be a permanent improvement to power in the town or at least the POIs, where there are no lights at all in an POI until you complete the power quests (which would then need to be an option during the day as there are so many POI).  There could be quests between tiers where zombies mass up to try and retake completed POI and you'd have to hold them off or lose the POI and have to clear it again.

 

That might work.

 

I use that one mod that eliminates zombies from respawning. 

 

And that is my play style, survive clean up town.  Then I feel I am accomplishing something.  Not for everybody since it makes the game slower.

[Rotor]

And btw, before someone asks, how do I know quests make the game faster if I dont do them, here is my last play through to which most of the replies were "WTF" range :).

 

 

Day: 219

Lvl:  60

Stage:  144

 

[Kyoji]

5 hours ago, Riamus said:

Probably because many players like quests.  If you don't want to quest, you don't need to.  They can leave quests there for all the people who like to quest and you can still play without them if you choose.  There's nothing stopping you from doing so.  Asking to remove something just because you don't like it even though many others do isn't a good option.

The reason to remove quests would be for balancing reasons moreso than anything else. Traders as they stand break the game because progression through them makes large portions of game content irrelevant. Remember getting a motorcycle for tier completion? It was far more efficient to get one for free than to build it. The secret stash is another example and for A21 you can see this thread as a continuation of that. Being offered considerably better items takes away from the exploration of the game IMO and speeds you past large portions of progression that is in the game but missed due to the current trader implementation. So it isn't about whether people like quests, but rather is it more beneficial to the game design. I enjoyed underground safe bases but the devs "fixed" that. That being said I suppose am not necessarily against quests, but they would need to further work on the balancing of them to be worthwhile. 

 

Would you be more amenable to the quest rewards being reduced then?

[Riamus]

12 minutes ago, Kyoji said:

Would you be more amenable to the quest rewards being reduced then?

Of course.  I've made similar comments in various threads.  Balancing does not have to remove anything.  There are plenty of options for balancing that still allow players to play the game.  They aren't going to remove questing.  It's one of the core parts of the game for them.

 

As far as underground bases, they "fixed" that because people would just stay underground and avoid the blood moon, which they didn't agree with.  I don't see any issue with that.  You can still make underground bases that work just fine as long as you understand the zombies will be able to find you and reach you.  I have done a version of an underground base myself in A20, though it was in the side of a mountain rather than below the main ground.  It worked very well.  I could have done the same thing underground as well but I don't really like driving up and down ramps because you can't make it smooth when transitioning to and from level even using the wedge and that requires a long distance for the slope to get far enough underground.  Either way, they changed that but underground bases wasn't a core part of the game.  Questing is.  So is looting and crafting.  None will get removed.  The trader isn't going anywhere either.  So balancing is what needs to be done and they've already made some balancing changes.  It'll just take more to get it in a better spot.

[meganoth]

 

Two-block AFK bases were one reason to add digging zombies back. But another reason was that zombies were intented to attack in all directions all along. They did actually dig in early alphas, but the unfinished AI of those early versions made it necessary to deactivate the digging until the AI rewrite.

 

If the faulty AI made it necessary to keep zombies out of a specific biome for a few alphas, nobody would have expected that that would stay that way for eternity, right?

 

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

[RipClaw]

19 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Two-block AFK bases were one reason to add digging zombies back.

I wonder how widespread it really was. I don't know anyone who hid underground during the horde night. On the contrary. Horde night was looting night, even if some people didn't like cleaning up after the horde.

[hiemfire]

On 7/7/2023 at 7:15 PM, Rotor said:

 

Let us pray!

 

Or Shake a fist at it.

Or burn it to ash and laugh as the thinly veiled gambling addicts mourn and scream in sorrow at their god's death.

[BFT2020]

On 7/9/2023 at 10:08 AM, theFlu said:

Yeh, I got that. Might be simple enough to just xpath it into a game (quest reward lists and inventory lists, seek and destroy) and not have to pretend.

 

It might be for a good reason, but the act itself is still stupid

 

Part of it is really just how one approaches the game itself.  For you (this is based on what I have perceived in this discussion with you and I may be way off), if you receive an item that is better than what you are currently using you want to use it right away regardless of where it comes from.  For me when I play, I don't get hung up on that, I use what I have available and go with the flow.

 

But I also never compare same Q6 weapons to see which one has the higher stats.  I just grab it and go, using it in vanilla until the end of the game.  But I know others when they get a new Q6 M60, they want to compare the stats and see if the new one is better than their current Q6 M60.  Neither playstyle is wrong, it is just what you want to do as the player that matters.

[theFlu]

28 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

if you receive an item that is better than what you are currently using you want to use it right away regardless of where it comes from.  For me when I play, I don't get hung up on that, I use what I have available and go with the flow.

These are the same picture? "I use what I have available" - isn't the better thing you told 'me' to scrap the very thing I have available?

 

I don't get hung up on where a particular piece of gear comes from, I'll use the best I have available. If I get a sidegrade but see green texts in comparison, I do swap over my mods. That's barely a difference between us.

 

But I'd also like to know what the plans are for crafting; atm I'm thinking I might do my first gameplay-mod for myself, which would be to swap each and every crafting magazine into a stack of 20 bucks worth of Old Cash, as that's what the mags sell for and it'd be a massive inventory headache to carry them around.

 

If crafting "barely keeps up with other sources" and "has no purpose in game other than one-and-done upgrades", I might save myself the time of pointlessly clicking "read" 500 times each game.

 

Might have to leave cook books in, but that's the only one that actually feels like it's working right.

[BFT2020]

14 hours ago, theFlu said:

These are the same picture? "I use what I have available" - isn't the better thing you told 'me' to scrap the very thing I have available?

 

I don't get hung up on where a particular piece of gear comes from, I'll use the best I have available. If I get a sidegrade but see green texts in comparison, I do swap over my mods. That's barely a difference between us.

 

But I'd also like to know what the plans are for crafting; atm I'm thinking I might do my first gameplay-mod for myself, which would be to swap each and every crafting magazine into a stack of 20 bucks worth of Old Cash, as that's what the mags sell for and it'd be a massive inventory headache to carry them around.

 

If crafting "barely keeps up with other sources" and "has no purpose in game other than one-and-done upgrades", I might save myself the time of pointlessly clicking "read" 500 times each game.

 

Might have to leave cook books in, but that's the only one that actually feels like it's working right.

 

The best thing available will mean either that half damaged shotgun I find while looting or crafting my own pristine weapon to use.  Remember, we already establish that I don't play vanilla 7D2D as a normal player so my play is eccentric to what I like.  I can't repair armor, tools, and weapons I find or craft.  So use that half damage shotgun until it breaks or nearly breaks, scrap it down, and then use the parts to craft a new one.

 

So for me, crafting never becomes obsolete as I never in a situation of one and done upgrades.

[theFlu]

4 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

So for me, crafting never becomes obsolete

 

Indeed, one could even argue that the fact of you modding the game is a much, much stronger vote for something being wrong in the game than anything I have or will write on this forum.

[meganoth]

26 minutes ago, theFlu said:

 

Indeed, one could even argue that the fact of you modding the game is a much, much stronger vote for something being wrong in the game than anything I have or will write on this forum.

 

And me having played a mod in Factorio means it is a vote for something being wrong with Factorio?

 

People mod games for more reasons than that the game is kaputt. Because they want variety or they simply have different tastes than the makers of the game or ...

 

 

[theFlu]

4 minutes ago, meganoth said:

And me having played a mod in Factorio means it is a vote for something being wrong with Factorio?

Kinda, yes. But as you go on to say, there's all kinds of mods. If you do a face-swap on doom guy to have your handsome mug on him, that's not much of problem with vanilla Doom. But I don't think that matters here as BFT is modding pretty much the exact thing we're discussing in this thread.

 

And my point was to make the comparison: if one spends days and weeks of their life to mod a core game feature to be better, there's really nothing I even could say in a forum that would indicate more strongly that I _think_ there's something wrong with it.

 

I mean I've whined for days about the stealth gameplay being borked both ways, but that doesn't come close to the effort BFT sounds to have taken. Voting with his labor, not with whining like me.

[meganoth]

34 minutes ago, theFlu said:

Kinda, yes. But as you go on to say, there's all kinds of mods. If you do a face-swap on doom guy to have your handsome mug on him, that's not much of problem with vanilla Doom. But I don't think that matters here as BFT is modding pretty much the exact thing we're discussing in this thread.

 

Sorry, a face-swap in doom guy is not bringing variety to that game, not how I meant it and not how you should interpret it. I also played mods in other games I was fully satisfied with, but I wanted to see a new variation eventually. For example in Slay the Spire, though I can't think of a single fault I could lob against that game.

 

 

34 minutes ago, theFlu said:

I mean I've whined for days about the stealth gameplay being borked both ways, but that doesn't come close to the effort BFT sounds to have taken. Voting with his labor, not with whining like me.

 

I am sure the maker of the old hardcore mod True Survival voted with his labor as well. But only to show his own tastes in games, since for most players True Survival was unplayably hard and grindy so I heard. On the other hand there was a mod (at the same time) that showered you with advanced weapons on day 1. Does that mean the game at that time was too easy and not grindy enough and too hard and too grindy?

 

Or is it simply the tastes of the modders that differ from the taste the game tries to satisfy?

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[theFlu]

7 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Sorry, a face-swap in doom guy is not bringing variety to that game, not how I meant it and not how you should interpret it.

Reading with a little steel-manning might help, especially with me ..

 

I invented a pointless "mod" on the spot, just to show that I fully understand there are different types of mods, ranging from absolutely pointless to literal fixes to base game, to full overhauls completely making new games. Was shorter that way, and a little funnier, but here I am explaining myself again, wasting that time-saving-measure. My bad.

 

But as I went on to say, I don't think what BFT2020 is doing with his mod is pointless to the discussion? You not saying anything about the actual point makes me ask, do you agree? Is a crafting re-write pointless to the discussion of game balance in the area?

 

Do you agree that a person spending, say 1000 hours (sorry BFT, I'm probably underselling your work) to "fix" something is a lot stronger show of actual belief of there being something wrong, than my measly 5...50 hours (however you want to measure it) of whining about stealth on the forums?

[meganoth]

15 minutes ago, theFlu said:

Reading with a little steel-manning might help, especially with me ..

 

I invented a pointless "mod" on the spot, just to show that I fully understand there are different types of mods, ranging from absolutely pointless to literal fixes to base game, to full overhauls completely making new games. Was shorter that way, and a little funnier, but here I am explaining myself again, wasting that time-saving-measure. My bad.

 

But as I went on to say, I don't think what BFT2020 is doing with his mod is pointless to the discussion? You not saying anything about the actual point makes me ask, do you agree? Is a crafting re-write pointless to the discussion of game balance in the area?

 

Do you agree that a person spending, say 1000 hours (sorry BFT, I'm probably underselling your work) to "fix" something is a lot stronger show of actual belief of there being something wrong, than my measly 5...50 hours (however you want to measure it) of whining about stealth on the forums?

 

"being something wrong" is the problem. Someone not liking or wanting to change or changing the aspect of the game is not inherently saying that something is wrong with the game. A motor that doesn't fit into a cars motor compartment does not necessarily say something about the motor compartment being wrong but it may only mean they are not compatible and are not meant to be compatible.

 

If I followed your argument it would mean there could be a game that is perfect and would be played to the end of time by everyone on the planet. Because only if that perfext game existed then nobody would ever have a reason to mod. But the reality is that even if there were a perfect game A for me and a perfect game B for you, it is very likely that A and B would be different games.

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[8_Hussars]

On 7/9/2023 at 6:31 PM, Riamus said:

Probably because many players like quests.  If you don't want to quest, you don't need to.  They can leave quests there for all the people who like to quest and you can still play without them if you choose.  There's nothing stopping you from doing so.  Asking to remove something just because you don't like it even though many others do isn't a good option.

There is room for both approaches.

I find that quests are really just a more efficient means to an end.   But lets not conflate "players like quests" with "players do quests to advance".  We need to recognize that there are players who do quests but who do not like them (probably more than we think).

 

[theFlu]

15 minutes ago, meganoth said:

"being something wrong" is the problem. Someone not liking or wanting to change or changing the aspect of the game is not inherently saying that something is wrong with the game. A motor that doesn't fit into a cars motor compartment does not necessarily say something about the motor compartment being wrong but it may only mean they are not compatible and are not meant to be compatible.

 

If I followed your argument it would mean there could be a game that is perfect and would be played to the end of time by everyone on the planet. Because only if that perfext game existed then nobody would ever have a reason to mod. But the reality is that even if there were a perfect game A for me and a perfect game B for you, it is very likely that A and B would be different games.

Not what I've argued. If you want me to reply, figure out a way to answer the questions I posed.

[BFT2020]

3 hours ago, theFlu said:

 

Indeed, one could even argue that the fact of you modding the game is a much, much stronger vote for something being wrong in the game than anything I have or will write on this forum.

 

Not really, it just means I am different.  Take for example trader rewards on quest completion.  I don't like that, so I modded it out so you only get dukes (and Daring Adventure now just boosts more dukes rather than getting two choices at max perk level).  There is nothing wrong with quest rewards as a ton of games out there do it, I just don't like its current configuration so I changed it to my vision / desires.

 

Though talking about it does give others ideas, maybe even developers who take what others are doing and applying / fixing / modifying it to work in the base game or decide, nah, does not fit their vision.