Is ignoring game content the only option?

[meganoth]

5 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Tying the rewards to the loot stage would not be a bad idea. Maybe with a bonus based on quest level and quest type.

 

Crafting skills are independent of player level or game stage. It solely depends on how many magazines you have read for each skill. Therefore, it is difficult to balance this with the trader level or the loot level.

 

 

I can't be sure of that but my impression is that crafting skills and looting are somewhat balanced right now. There are some problems with magazines not dropping at the same frequency but that is an "internal" problem of the magazine setup, once that is fixed I think the balance between crafting and looting will just work.

 

 

[theFlu]

22 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Tying the rewards to the loot stage would not be a bad idea.

Wasteland traders, tier one quests, here I come! When taken to the extreme, of course. It's a hard thing to get right.

 

25 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Crafting skills are independent of player level or game stage.

Hmm, I'm not optimistic for vanilla, but could it be separated entirely into its own branch, somehow? As in, you would actually have to work towards crafting separate from the quest loop. Something that would give crafters the option to pursue their craft, and leave the trader-spamming for those who enjoy it. LBD is a simple example, but no-one liked really liked the tool-spamming parts of it..

 

Separate tradesmen with craft-quests? Lots of work for the feature for sure, but .. hmm. Might also roll nicely with normal questing being mostly about dukes, and then maybe having specific quests with item rewards; preferably rewards shown on start, so you can choose to do the grind or not and have a known reward in the end.

[RipClaw]

7 minutes ago, theFlu said:

Wasteland traders, tier one quests, here I come! When taken to the extreme, of course. It's a hard thing to get right.

Since the gamestage is also higher in the Wasteland in A21 and not only the lootstage, this shouldn't be a problem.

At least as long as the T1 quests are also in the Wasteland.

 

 

[Viktoriusiii]

18 hours ago, Fox said:

I think this new system is terrible and not fun at all. It just feels way too linear and controlled.

Its learning by doing, but without any of the positives and all of the negatives. I have no idea who thought this would be a good idea.

[RipClaw]

57 minutes ago, meganoth said:

I can't be sure of that but my impression is that crafting skills and looting are somewhat balanced right now. There are some problems with magazines not dropping at the same frequency but that is an "internal" problem of the magazine setup, once that is fixed I think the balance between crafting and looting will just work.

That just means you'll find enough magazines to keep up with the lootstage.

 

But let's say you stopped looting for a while and started building a big base instead, you would still level up and your lootstage would increase, but your crafting skills would stay the same.

 

Or you might get lucky and get multiple Crack a Book POIs as quests. Then your crafting skills will increase quickly, but your lootstage will not increase as quickly.

 

That's what I mean by independent. If you play roughly the way the developers intended, it may seem balanced, but if you don't, the crafting skills and the loot stage drift apart.

 

 

Edited July 20, 2023 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[Kattla]

19 hours ago, Slingblade2040 said:

There has to be a better solution than being told play 40 minutes and ignore most of the game content otherwise you make crafting gear, weapons and tools pointless.

 

There is.

Uninstall and play something else. And give feedback on why, as you already have.

 

On the trader, i share your opinion.

On mods, no, i am not going to touch them until The Fun Pimps decide to add in steam workshop support , even though i belive some of the mods

are quite good, but that's another topic entirely. But that is for you to decide, not me.

 

Games are entertainment, and if they are not entertaining, no reason to play them.

 

I call it burned out when every little detail feels like a reason to not play a game. And instead of wasting time thinking about negative aspects, i suggest uninstall.

Can always reinstall if needed.

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, RipClaw said:

That just means you'll find enough magazines to keep up with the lootstage.

 

But let's say you stopped looting for a while and started building a big base instead, you would still level up and your lootstage would increase, but your crafting skills would stay the same.

 

Or you might get lucky and get multiple Crack a Book POIs as quests. Then your crafting skills will increase quickly, but your lootstage will not increase as quickly.

 

That's what I mean by independent. If you play roughly the way the developers intended, it may seem balanced, but if you don't, the crafting skills and the loot stage drift apart.

 

 

 

So sometimes (big base build) your crafting will get behind, sometimes your crafting will be in front of looting (multiple crack a book). Add to this that there is also the randomness of what magazines you find many or few of and that you have ways to search for specific magazines or places with many magazines. In short, sometimes looting is ahead and sometimes crafting is ahead. Perfect. As perfect as it can get in this game of many degrees of freedom generally.

 

 

Edited July 20, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[BFT2020]

3 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

How about putting some of the rewards "wealth" into chests of a tier5 instead of the trader reward? I mean if a tier5 is say 5 times as long as a tier1 why are there not 5 times as many valuable boxes lying around on the way through the POI?

 

Interesting approach.  Right now, this is what you can expect when comparing the T1  chest to the T5 hardened chest:

 

• Ammo - T1 gets 1 pick (small ammo group), T5 gets 5 picks from large ammo group
• Weapon / Armor - T1 gets 1 pick, T5 gets 2 picks
• Medical - T1 picks between First Aid bandages, kits, or food, T5 picks only from Kits
• Mods -T1 has a pick from either mods or early Books / Schematics, while T5 gets a guaranteed pick
• Books / Schematics - T1 has a pick from either mods or early Books / Schematics, while T5 gets a guaranteed pick scaled on player level
• Bonus Items group - T1 has no bonus groups, while T5 has two bonus groups - one is a bundle
• Cash and Prizes (Prizes being silver, gold, or diamonds) -Only the T5 in this example has this pick

 

Also, don't T5's normally have more of the crate / bags / safes lootable containers as compared to a T1?  

 

 

2 hours ago, Viktoriusiii said:

Its learning by doing, but without any of the positives and all of the negatives. I have no idea who thought this would be a good idea.

 

I been enjoying the new crafting system, personally.  Even taking it further by adding in the unlocks for the mods into the various crafting branches along with removing the unlocks from Perk books and rolling them into those.

[meilodasreh]

Maybe it could work like this:

 

The first trader offers you tier1 quests (obviously).

When you have completed enough, you get to tier 2 and have the first open trade routes,

both traders will give you tier 2 quests.

Then you have to complete enough tier2 quests for both traders, to get the third trader...then everybody gives you tier 3s, and you have to complete enough for all of them to get to tier 4...and so on.

 

This would slow down tier progression, and therefore also you will get the good stuff later.

It also would somewhat add to immersion (like the traders all have to "agree" that you're ready for the next step)

 

And it would end the "I have to start over at tier1 for every new trader" thing, which I think is a bad concept anyway. 

[Greymantle]

That is the crux of the issue for me. I have to skip more and more content that I don't like. I do this with mods to fix and or cut out said content. The problem is it's taking more and more mods to fix the game for me, to the point I have given up.

[IrishManJMo]

21 hours ago, Slingblade2040 said:

Slow down questing, slow down resource gathering, ignore traders. Basically the feed back from people is ignore game content, stop playing like a normal player would. What normal player doesn't do more than 1 quest per day until they reach tier 4 or 5s which can easily take 30+ minutes to do and by that time the rewards outpace anything you can craft not to mention the loot you can find. 

 

So far each alpha has put more emphasis into the traders and their quests. While the whole nerf to secret stash helped out some it seems that instead it was moved into quests and negates the entire progression system of the magazines. 

I have 4200 hours in this game and have never seen tier 5 of trader quests personally. I've never enjoyed the quest grinding system of this game personally. The changes this alpha have made the rewards way too OP imo. I think I would be happier if the only reward from quests were dukes and then the traders themselves just had better inventory.

[meganoth]

19 minutes ago, IrishManJMo said:

I have 4200 hours in this game and have never seen tier 5 of trader quests personally. I've never enjoyed the quest grinding system of this game personally. The changes this alpha have made the rewards way too OP imo. I think I would be happier if the only reward from quests were dukes and then the traders themselves just had better inventory.

 

Count me in on this scheme. I would be perfectly happy if quest reward would simply be coins. Much easier to balance as well. But I doubt TFP will want to "downgrade" the quest reward system that far.

 

While we are at it this inspired me to an idea that definitely won't be adopted, but may be worthy of a mod sometime: Once you reached a specific sum (say 7000 dukes) the trader doesn't give you any coins anymore because he is short of them but I.O.U.s from a different trader. You can only collect the money by visiting the right trader and getting the money from him. Same for all other traders. Instead of the 7000 dukes this could alternatively simply replace the rather artifical open trade route quests.

 

Edited July 20, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Vaeliorin]

10 hours ago, Riamus said:

This is actually the opposite that just about everyone here is asking for, which shows very well that people have very different expectations of the game and not everyone can be pleased with any choices the devs make.  You want more from the quest rewards, while most people posting want less.  Though most who want less are focused more on the earlier game so might not care about tier 4+ rewards.

You misunderstand me.  I was brainstorming what may be viable quest rewards if they nerfed/removed weapons and tools from quest rewards, and ways to make T5+ quest rewards worth the time.  I wouldn't mind seeing farming bundles/food bundles/ammo crafting bundles (maybe add a dew collector bundle?) as quest rewards instead of the tools and weapons until maybe you hit T5, and then have Q1-3 for T5 and Q4-6 for tier 6, with it being like 60%/30%/10% for Q1/Q2/Q3 from T5s and similarly for T6.

 

They'd probably have to nerf the loot in general (why do a T6 when you can just loot a half dozen cars in the wasteland and get a bunch of Q6 gear?) for that to make T5+ quests worth the time, though.

[AtomicUs5000]

I like the coins only reward as the best idea so far.
 

If the loot within a quest's POI was influenced by some variable that a quest is active, that could be used to increase the chance of providing better loot rewards (but within the quest) while also reducing the benefits of double-dipping.

 

 

Edited July 20, 2023 by AtomicUs5000 (see edit history)

[Archael]

I felt in love and bought the survival horror sandbox game.
Its a shame it went the looter shooter way.
I hate traders and i always tried to ignore them... now its almost impossible

[Roland]

17 hours ago, Fox said:

Seems to me like the ones who don't like the way things are right now in this particular thread are a majority, not a minority.

Woah, we’re keeping track?

 

In that case I’ll post to say I like A21 and after going back recently to  retry alphas 9-13 I have to say the recent versions have been so much better. 

[BFT2020]

I will post my trader mod tonight, I think it is good enough at this stage for general release.

4 hours ago, Skaarphy said:

That sounds excellent. Have you considered doing it in a kind of modular way? Like, giving options to not removing quest rewards, adjusting the time for restocking according to your preferences, etc., and being able to do that in the menu? Is that possible?

 

 

It probably is possible, but I don't want to go down that rabbit trail at this point:

• The game is still in development, which includes the UI
• I haven't start looking into what this would require in terms of coding and UI changes
• I have a lot of work to do on my mods just to get them working in A21

😏

I will be including a readme file for the mod along with comments in the xml files to help people figure out what each section does.

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, meilodasreh said:

Maybe it could work like this:

 

The first trader offers you tier1 quests (obviously).

When you have completed enough, you get to tier 2 and have the first open trade routes,

both traders will give you tier 2 quests.

Then you have to complete enough tier2 quests for both traders, to get the third trader...then everybody gives you tier 3s, and you have to complete enough for all of them to get to tier 4...and so on.

 

This would slow down tier progression, and therefore also you will get the good stuff later.

It also would somewhat add to immersion (like the traders all have to "agree" that you're ready for the next step)

 

And it would end the "I have to start over at tier1 for every new trader" thing, which I think is a bad concept anyway. 

The issue I have with this is that you are requiring a lot more questing to go up in tier with each tier, while each tier has fewer different POI to choose from, so you are getting more repetition.  You are also doing far less low tier quests and so you see very few of the many low tier POI.  I'd rather just see more quests required for each tier.

 

Also, I don't mind staying over at tier 1 for each trader.  It shows that you need to prove yourself to them.  I would actually like to be able to do the tier completions at all traders, including duplicate traders.

 

What I could see is having more quests needed for each tier but each time to complete a tier at a trader, the number of quests required for that same tier at the next trader is decreased by 1.  That would slow down initial progression while not making it so much of a grind to complete later traders.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Riamus]

51 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:

You misunderstand me.  I was brainstorming what may be viable quest rewards if they nerfed/removed weapons and tools from quest rewards, and ways to make T5+ quest rewards worth the time.  I wouldn't mind seeing farming bundles/food bundles/ammo crafting bundles (maybe add a dew collector bundle?) as quest rewards instead of the tools and weapons until maybe you hit T5, and then have Q1-3 for T5 and Q4-6 for tier 6, with it being like 60%/30%/10% for Q1/Q2/Q3 from T5s and similarly for T6.

 

They'd probably have to nerf the loot in general (why do a T6 when you can just loot a half dozen cars in the wasteland and get a bunch of Q6 gear?) for that to make T5+ quests worth the time, though.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.  That could work okay.  But regarding nerfing loot even more, I don't really agree with that.  I would be fine with nerfing car loot, though.  That would make it harder to get good stuff by just looting cars in the wasteland on day 1.  I don't think cars need to offer any tools or weapons, except perhaps the cop car.

[meilodasreh]

1 hour ago, Riamus said:

The issue I have with this is that you are requiring a lot more questing to go up in tier with each tier, while each tier has fewer different POI to choose from, so you are getting more repetition.

Well requiring more questing to go up in tier, to slow down progression, was the whole point of that suggestion, so...yes.

Repetition, especially for lower tier quests, more depends on where exactly the traders are located (lots of low tier questable pois in the vicinity or not), so maybe yes, maybe not. But why would the number of pois to choose from decrease? I don't get what you mean there. When you have to move around between all traders, you should get more variety in pois overall, even if one trader is placed badly with very few options.

 

But you're right, just raising the number of necessary quest successes to tier up would do just fine I guess.

 

 

[Vaeliorin]

1 hour ago, Riamus said:

But regarding nerfing loot even more, I don't really agree with that.  I would be fine with nerfing car loot, though.  That would make it harder to get good stuff by just looting cars in the wasteland on day 1.  I don't think cars need to offer any tools or weapons, except perhaps the cop car.

Yeah, I'm not saying I'm necessarily in favor of nerfing loot, I'm just saying it's way too easy to get good stuff without any effort if you just run/ride along the wasteland roads so doing high tier quests to get good loot would be kinda pointless.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Vaeliorin (see edit history)

[meilodasreh]

suggestion to rule out repetitive quest pois:

 

traders couldn't give you individual quests and send you to a specific poi,

but instead kind of a bundled quest like "clear 5 tier1 pois".

Then all questable pois are highlighted on the map, and you choose the 5 different ones you like.

...or there's no such option when receiving the quest, but you just travel around, and when approach a poi you get a little "choice icon" if you want to take this poi as part of your questline or not.

[Riamus]

39 minutes ago, meilodasreh said:

Well requiring more questing to go up in tier, to slow down progression, was the whole point of that suggestion, so...yes.

Repetition, especially for lower tier quests, more depends on where exactly the traders are located (lots of low tier questable pois in the vicinity or not), so maybe yes, maybe not. But why would the number of pois to choose from decrease? I don't get what you mean there. When you have to move around between all traders, you should get more variety in pois overall, even if one trader is placed badly with very few options.

 

But you're right, just raising the number of necessary quest successes to tier up would do just fine I guess.

 

 

Okay, to clarify...

 

The thing I replied to basically made it so you complete tier 1 at trader 1.  At trader 2, you don't do any tier 1 quests and instead do more tier 2 to complete the tier.  At trader 3, you do no tier 1 or 2 quests but more tier 3.  Etc.  Unless I misread it.  So you will barely do any tier 1 or even tier 2 quests.  Considering that lower tier POI are more plentiful, you are cutting out a lot of content of you do quests but don't really go loot low tier POI otherwise.

 

What I was suggesting is that you so more tier 1 quests to complete tier 1 at the first trader.  At the second trader, you do one less tier 1 quest to complete tier 1.  At the third trader, it is another 1 less, etc.  So by trader 5, you do 5 less than the first trader.  This let's you avoid having to do a ton more quests while still showing progression because there are more quests to complete for the first trader.

 

For now clarification, traders aren't done in a specific order.  You can complete tier 1 at one trader at max quests then go to another trader and complete tier 1 quests at one less quest.  If you do tier 2 quests to completion from the second trader, it will be at max number of quests.  If you go back to the first trader and complete tier 2 after completing tier 2 at the second trader, it would be at one less quest.  Think of it as reputation gained that lets you do fewer quests, maybe.

 

Anyhow, that was just an alternative to the original suggestion that increases quests while not making it take forever to complete quests at all 5 traders and doesn't make it so you don't have to do many low tier quests.  After all, by the time you are doing tier 1 quests at trader 5, you really don't need tier 1 rewards, so you don't need to show the progression at that point of the game.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[meilodasreh]

3 minutes ago, Riamus said:

After all, by the time you are doing tier 1 quests at trader 5, you really don't need tier 1 rewards, so you don't need to show the progression at that point of the game.

Yes this is the main reason for me saying this is a bad concept.

When you're at tier 3 for one trader, you're basically geared up well enough to make it rather unattractive to spend time in doing tier ones for another trader. Even if they're close by and short duration, they're still somewhat a waste cause you don't get anything worth the time.

[Riamus]

2 minutes ago, meilodasreh said:

Yes this is the main reason for me saying this is a bad concept.

When you're at tier 3 for one trader, you're basically geared up well enough to make it rather unattractive to spend time in doing tier ones for another trader. Even if they're close by and short duration, they're still somewhat a waste cause you don't get anything worth the time.

That probably depends on the player.  I would not mind being able to do the tier completions at every trader on the map, including duplicates.  But I enjoy questing and the loot or rewards aren't my only incentives.  The quests get me exploring the POI.  Without them, I have little incentive to explore different POI.

 

I don't know any way to make it worthwhile to do low tier POI for players who don't enjoy questing.  You can't raise the loot rewards because the quests can be completed so easily at higher levels.  Removing the quests just means you have a ton of POI that the player has no reason to ever check out, so that isn't a great option.  The POI don't have room to increase their tier artificially by adding more zombies (infestation is already pushing the limits on many smaller POI), so that isn't really an option.  You aren't required to do quests at multiple traders, so I think that may just have to be enough.  If you want to do them, go for it.  If not, you don't need to.  It isn't ideal but probably the best possible option with how the game is designed.  Personally, I'll do tier 1 quests sometimes just for chance of getting the easy ammo rewards. So there is some incentive there, at least for me.