1.0 Experimental Feedback Please let multiplayer quest clears advance everyone's tier progress

[Riamus]

Here is a way to have quest progression the same for any number of players...

 

Right now, 10 quests per tier, so 2 days per tier for single player with max quests of 5 per day.  Make it so that you can make up to 5x your quest tier in tier points per day, regardless how many quests you complete.  That means if a group of 4 (how you play) completes 5 quests per day, they also finish each tier in 2 days just like single player.  Nice, easy.  Doesn't matter if you are doing high tier or low tier quests.  Doesn't matter how many players.  It is equal across the board.

[MechanicalLens]

20 minutes ago, Riamus said:

Ok, I didn't look at that in game yet as I only just got to tier 2 yesterday.  If that is the case, it is better but still off.  That still means 80 quests per tier for 8 players if everyone does the quests at their your level.  That is still way too much.

Like I said, quests tiers can be limited per day without requiring you to do a ton more quests to get everyone up a tier.  It doesn't have to be faster OR slower.

 

Agreed, 80 quests PER TIER is nuts. That's 480 quests until everyone gets tier 6 complete.

[Joey9Baka]

There's just no good reason this setting should be this punishing by default, no coop team will be happy having to do scaling increases of quests just to get a bike to finally start moving much less the higher tier clears. You're only actively encouraging players to not actually play together and that just makes no sense.

Arguing that co op players have it too easy because they can kill together faster is intrinsically a fools errand because that's how co op is in real life, working together with a team will be easier and faster than being solo, trying to balance coop to be slower than or equal to solo pace is crazy

 

I have been playing this game with family for so many alphas now and seen so many changes, but this is the most coop killing change yet if allowed past experimental. I really hope TFP is listening to these threads because I have known so many co op gamers over the years, and I can't see a single one liking this system. They'll all either mod it out or quit the game and leave a negative review (if they're a more normal person who's afraid of mods)

[myrkana]

This isnt needed. The advancement for tier quests is shared between all traders now, your progress at the start will be slower but it needed to be slowed. Before my day 7 I could be at tier 3 quests easily.

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, myrkana said:

This isnt needed. The advancement for tier quests is shared between all traders now, your progress at the start will be slower but it needed to be slowed. Before my day 7 I could be at tier 3 quests easily.

You still can in single player or even 2 player if you push things, and also in higher number of players if each player quests solo.  That hasn't changed.  What has changed is that instead of multiplayer progressing much faster than single player, now multiplayer progresses much slower than single player (assuming multiplayer does quests as a group).  What should have changed was to make it so progression is at the same rate trader tier regardless of the number of players.  That isn't even difficult to do as I showed in the first post on this page.  I have no idea why the swung things around 180 instead of balancing them.

Edited Thursday at 05:53 AM by Riamus (see edit history)

[Arez]

I've only played one co-op game in 1.0, for a full 7 in-game days, with a large group of people. We were all split into smaller groups. 

Within the group I was with, we each took a quest and we would go (as a group) from one quest to the next until they were all complete and then we'd go back to the trader and collect our rewards. 

 

Did we progress slower than usual? Sure, but I don't know if I see a problem with that. We took on each quest as a group. I had fun and it sounded like everyone else was having fun too. 

[meganoth]

8 hours ago, Joey9Baka said:

because that's how co op is in real life, working together with a team will be easier and faster than being solo

 

What has reality to do with game balance? Nothing.

 

To everyone: Like in all alphas before people come here complaining about features they haven't actually tried for some in-game days to have actual evidence. Experimental is done by TFP so players can play the game and give their opinion from actual game play experience. If you don't want to be test dummy, wait a month for 1.0 stable.

 

And don't say "I don't need to play to know this is dumb". I have seen that sentence hundreds of times in this forum and often it turned out to be wrong.

 

 

Edited Thursday at 12:33 PM by meganoth (see edit history)

[8_Hussars]

16 hours ago, Riamus said:

Oh, and this isn't true.  It takes 30 quests for one person to compete tier 2.  At five quests per day, that is six days to reach tier 3.  I haven't looked at the requirements for the other tiers, not even if it was still 20 points for each tier after 2 (2 is 20 additional points), that still means 4 days each tier for a single person doing 5 quests per day.  And I have a feeling the points continue to increase each tier.

Doh...

[Riamus]

7 minutes ago, 8_Hussars said:

Doh...

Yeah, ignore that.  I didn't realize the points you get per quest go up with each tier.  It was pointed out to me earlier in the thread.  It isn't as bad as I thought because of that, but number of quests per tier goes up with each player added - 10, 20, 30, ..., 80 depending on the number of players.  Even doing this with a 2 player group, it just feels frustrating.  And I *like* questing.  Besides, I showed how to balance progression regardless of number of players.  It's not difficult to do.  Not sure why they want to swing the pendulum 180 instead of balancing things.  I get that more players = faster quest completion, but you just aren't going to do enough quests at higher player counts to keep up with single player if you quest as a group.  And I feel like the goal should be to make it so that it doesn't matter how many people are in the party - you should still be able to progress at the same rate if you want.  It was too fast for multiple players before.  Now, it's too slow.

Edited Thursday at 02:55 PM by Riamus (see edit history)

[Scyris]

19 hours ago, DJDaedrik said:

Yeah, this change has made multiplayer and absolute SLOG. I can think of a dozen different ways to re-balance the co-op progression system, and this is by a good margin the laziest and most negatively impactful, especially for large group play. Now the best thing to do when playing with your friends is to... not play with your friends? 2 players already doubles the total quests needed, but with my group of 5? That'd be 50 FREAKING QUESTS were we to do what friends want to do in video games, and, you know, play them together. Regardless of TFP's stance on this one, it'll be a non-issue in no time. Such an abysmal feeling change will have a mod in a week if TFP hasn't fixed it yet. Just a bummer for those that can't be bothered with mods to have their co-op prog completely borked.

 

V1.0 is what I have nickname the tedium/slog update, as so much of it seems to be focused on making things overly tedious and feeling like your walking thru a bog and slogged down by all the crap in the water. Like I get it the game has no real content and you wanna make it so console players take a while before they figure this out, but to any older player its plain as day why its like this in 1.0. I started a game of 1.0 and was bored out of my mind by day 5 the game just had all the fun sucked out of it and whats left now is a dried out husk. This may improve with the next patch but I feel they should have waited till the entire system was done before making this change. Also random gen needs to be put back to being random, with any size city being able to spawn in any biome, and randomized traders, No one ever asked for trader progression like this, they did ask to rebalance rewards and such though, which was done, maybe too well, as its not hard to earn dukes, and quests no longer award weapons or armor anymore. Honestly alot of my drive to do quests in the game is gone in 1.0 as I used to use them to get gear for the most part, and now? all they offer for reward is pennies and a bunch of useless junk most of the time.

3 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

What has reality to do with game balance? Nothing.

 

To everyone: Like in all alphas before people come here complaining about features they haven't actually tried for some in-game days to have actual evidence. Experimental is done by TFP so players can play the game and give their opinion from actual game play experience. If you don't want to be test dummy, wait a month for 1.0 stable.

 

And don't say "I don't need to play to know this is dumb". I have seen that sentence hundreds of times in this forum and often it turned out to be wrong.

 

 

 

Except the devs never seem to listen to what the players want, if they did the game wouldn't be in the state it is now. Any one who played a16.4 generally prefers that skill system over the trash the game has now. It needed some tweaks yes, could also keep the learn by reading system with the action skill for the weapon/tool and its assoiated perk that the level you can raise it too being based on the action skill. My biggest gripe is that weapons are locked to stats, so you have to waste to many skill points to make a weapon viable, especially in 1.0 with the inflated hp zombies have. Its prob why the preacher gloves are so good, to help balance this out. They are going to be basically required in every build, or one that buffs damage of specific weapon types at least.

[meganoth]

9 minutes ago, Scyris said:

Any one who played a16.4 generally prefers that skill system over the trash the game has now.

And here we have your obviously false statement again, simply because "anyone" includes me and I definitely do not generally nor specifically prefer that skill system. Start from a false hypothesis and you reach false conclusions.

 

 

[BFT2020]

I'm the same as @meganoth, I prefer the current skill system compare to the previous system.  I never been a big fan of LBD type of progression, especially when it comes to crafting.

[Riamus]

I also don't enjoy LBD for crafting, or even for most things.  It was a chore in Morrowind and since then I have not enjoyed it.  I'm fine with LBD for fighting skills because you never have to go out of your way for those.  But when you ask me to make a bunch of stuff I don't want or need to make just to level up a skill?  No thank you.

Edited Thursday at 06:40 PM by Riamus (see edit history)

[Joey9Baka]

12 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

What has reality to do with game balance? Nothing.

 

To everyone: Like in all alphas before people come here complaining about features they haven't actually tried for some in-game days to have actual evidence. Experimental is done by TFP so players can play the game and give their opinion from actual game play experience. If you don't want to be test dummy, wait a month for 1.0 stable.

 

And don't say "I don't need to play to know this is dumb". I have seen that sentence hundreds of times in this forum and often it turned out to be wrong.

 

 

I brought up real life as comparison as it sets player's expectations, players expect games to become easier in co op than in singleplayer. I know veterans like yourself and others understand and adapt to any change TFP do and therefore don't really see any change as truly detrimental because it can't stop you, but I'm trying to tell you the perspective of more average folk you'll be bringing in with 1.0 and console releases.

Balancing the game around only how pros play in elite coop teams will only alienate the new players you'll be getting further.

 

At the absolute least this should be a configurable option (with shared progress probably being default) so the players themselves can decide if they want co op progress to be slower than solo progress. Again I know mods will fix this and players like me will just do that. But the new console players will be unable to do this and will instead just complain and leave negative reviews.

 

I'm sorry you clearly deal with rude or aggressive people very often yelling at you (As most moderators of long running games do). I am not one of them.

[Scyris]

14 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

I'm the same as @meganoth, I prefer the current skill system compare to the previous system.  I never been a big fan of LBD type of progression, especially when it comes to crafting.

 

Thats why I said with some tweaks, as in remove crafting quality from the action skill, I hated that part of it as well back in alpha 15, or was it earlier a16? I don't remember its been ages. It would have been a hell of alot less work for the devs to tweak it than completly redo it like they did. TFP tends to create unneeded work for themselves changing things that often do not need to be changed in the first place, its a big reason why the vanilla version of the game has gone basically no where in well.. since 10.2. Gameplay is well, not the same, options were taken away, Steel is still top tier, radiated still top tier zombies.  The game has gotten stale to many older players, and prettier graphics aren't going to fix it. Only thing saving it is the modding community for many players.

 

Now you may say: "Well why not just play modded then?" Well I usually do, I usually only play vanilla for a bit when a update releases. I'd play vanilla more if it had more to do, but the game has a severe lack of it. The current trader progression system is god aweful as well, because it makes rwg maps boring, every trader in a biome is the same, 0 variety, it gets stale fast. I nicknamed 1.0 the tedium update, or the slog update.

 

I do sort of like the new difficulty though, I was on day 4 on warrior doing a restore power quest and had 2 feral lumberjacks with over 1050 hp each to deal with, that took some strat, as a 30 dmg pipe machine gun is going to take a ton of ammo to kill those. Ended up kiting them with a crossbow, some wood spikes and some melee. I'd like it much better if TFP would remove the cheapshots with the rage system where they suddendly sprint, and the fact they for whatever dumb reason stagger towards you instead of back when hit, often being able to attack the player with 0 animation, you just get hit without the zombie even swinging. I've played alot of zombie games, and only seen these 2 things in 7dtd and no where else. The Rage Mode I would love to be in the advanced options like feral sense so players could choose to turn that crap off if they want to. I bet you the majority would turn it off if they could do it in game without a mod. I am guessing this is why the armor value is so high on armor. My tier 5 padded set has about 45 armor total. Stuff still hurts even with that on warrior thou.

[meganoth]

12 hours ago, Joey9Baka said:

I brought up real life as comparison as it sets player's expectations, players expect games to become easier in co op than in singleplayer.

 

Ok, a valid point. Though I see in almost every game with SP and MP play that the game tries to level the field, in most games enemies are simply harder or have at least more hit points if you go into a dungeon as a group. Ask any game designer and he will tell you that he would try to make a game so that a group has the same challenge as a single player.

 

The optimal case should be a balanced game no matter with how many players you play it. Why should I be bored to death in co-op because the game wants a challenge in single-player or vice-versa? Most players want some difficulty so they feel the satisfaction of having survived combat. Only a subset of players is happy with a game without challenge.

 

12 hours ago, Joey9Baka said:

I know veterans like yourself and others understand and adapt to any change TFP do and therefore don't really see any change as truly detrimental because it can't stop you, but I'm trying to tell you the perspective of more average folk you'll be bringing in with 1.0 and console releases.

 

Ok. But have more average folk the knowledge to increase difficulty just because they play as a group? Don't they expect to have a challenging but managable experience no matter how many they are when they start with default difficulty?

 

12 hours ago, Joey9Baka said:

Balancing the game around only how pros play in elite coop teams will only alienate the new players you'll be getting further.

 

At the absolute least this should be a configurable option (with shared progress probably being default) so the players themselves can decide if they want co op progress to be slower than solo progress. Again I know mods will fix this and players like me will just do that. But the new console players will be unable to do this and will instead just complain and leave negative reviews.

 

Don't worry about this setting. In every alpha before the experimental started like half a souls game in difficulty, every veteran player was happy and novice players were complaining. Then with every new experimental version the "worst" settings got toned down after people posted their feedback. I am just astonished how many players, even veteran players, don't even try pout the new settings but think they can evaluate the new alpha with just by thinking about it for a few minutes.

 

I might guess that the new setting we are discussing about is going too far, but I have no doubt that the general setting in A21 was too good for co-op players as well. Probably some middle ground is applicable and I at least have to play for a much longer time to know how far that setting has to go back or if it has to be replaced by something else entirely.

12 hours ago, Joey9Baka said:

I'm sorry you clearly deal with rude or aggressive people very often yelling at you (As most moderators of long running games do). I am not one of them.

 

I am sorry if I sounded too harsh. Like you I am interested in polite discussion but sometimes my sentences miss the polite fluff words 😁

 

Edited Friday at 01:05 PM by meganoth (see edit history)

[Brakiss]

How about a setting like the „Share XP“ option we have now, to make it possible to switch between shared trader progression or individual progression?

or make quests you help complete count half a point for your own progression

Edited Friday at 01:21 PM by Brakiss (see edit history)

[Javabean867]

I don't think people are thinking about this correctly.  Like everything else each activity that people can do, such as crafting/building/etc can be specialized by 1 or more people in the group.  1 person gets their quest tier up, everyone can enjoy those higher tier quests amd quest rewards. 

 

When the quest guy isn't online, you can still hit up the higher tier locations, you just don't get the(weak) quest rewards anymore.  Or you can build up your trader quest levels separately. 

 

If you have a big enough crew then you can have people split into 2, and double up on the quester's questing rank.

[meganoth]

5 minutes ago, Javabean867 said:

I don't think people are thinking about this correctly.  Like everything else each activity that people can do, such as crafting/building/etc can be specialized by 1 or more people in the group.  1 person gets their quest tier up, everyone can enjoy those higher tier quests amd quest rewards. 

 

When the quest guy isn't online, you can still hit up the higher tier locations, you just don't get the(weak) quest rewards anymore.  Or you can build up your trader quest levels separately. 

 

If you have a big enough crew then you can have people split into 2, and double up on the quester's questing rank.

 

Good argument.

 

I assume players want to get to tier1 as fast as possible because of the bicycle reward. For non-INT single-player that might be the best option by far, but in co-op games you often have an INT player who will instead be able to craft the bikes after a relatively short time.

 

[theFlu]

I play solo (99%), but it does look weird to me. Generally in gaming, I wouldn't think "questing" as a specialty, especially in recent 7dtd as it has been The Thing to do for everyone. Although INT has classically had decent buffs for it, so in the "class split" -perspective it has been a specialty. Salvaging, mining, hunting being the other areas of expertise, I don't think they're going to ever be comparable, thou. You can skip the others, but not questing, not really.

 

Doubling the questing effort for a duo already sound weird.. in my duos, we'd prolly talk about the choices at the trader for a while to get two quests close to one another, and then split into our own quests when there.. trying to be close by just for carrying the loots. It'd feel stupid, but we'd do it. Ok, my duo partner would still want to team up for them, and/or might call for help mid-quest... and from that point on we'd pointlessly do double the work to keep us even.

 

Two-manning a quest isn't twice as fast even within the POI, just some of the bigger fights might be quicker; and each quest will add travel time. Organizing the whole deal relies on comms, voice comms are fun, but having to optimize everything, vs just splitting up and doing our own things.. I dunno.

 

Any more people and it just makes no sense.. it becomes a question of "how many people we Need on this quest?" Maybe two, for some backup and less inventory issues, but a third is going to be overkill practically everywhere.

 

And while we can argue the maths behind it; it just feels wrong. The perception is important, if "this is stupid" seems to be the overarching reaction to it, it prolly should be reconsidered.

[Riamus]

5 hours ago, Javabean867 said:

I don't think people are thinking about this correctly.  Like everything else each activity that people can do, such as crafting/building/etc can be specialized by 1 or more people in the group.  1 person gets their quest tier up, everyone can enjoy those higher tier quests amd quest rewards. 

 

When the quest guy isn't online, you can still hit up the higher tier locations, you just don't get the(weak) quest rewards anymore.  Or you can build up your trader quest levels separately. 

 

If you have a big enough crew then you can have people split into 2, and double up on the quester's questing rank.

True for some people, yes.  But there are plenty of players who want to quest together.  Even in my 2 player game, we only play the game together and we only quest together, at least until late game when we might do different things sometimes.  Having to do so many extra quests just because we don't get credit for playing the game together is frustrating.  Even with just two of us, it feels so very slow.  It is definitely progressing more slowly than my single player game.  This should be optional.  There's really no reason why it can't be optional and if it's optional, then everyone should be happy.

[Riamus]

I just realized something what this new progression system has done for me personally.  I always went to other traders around the map throughout my game, mainly because you leveled up each trader separately.  It gave me a reason to travel the map.  Now that they are tied together, that reason is gone.  Now, I'll do a quick pitstop art each for the open trade route quests and return to wherever I choose to set up my base and just stay there rather than bothering with quests somewhere else.  The only difference is that now I can't do this in the forest in vanilla because there aren't large cities there anymore.  And I preferred the first for aesthetic reasons.  I might drop the horde base somewhere what but my main base would be in the forest since it looks nicer.  Now I'll have to either put the base somewhere else near a city for questing of I want to play vanilla.  Not a great thing.  But since I play maps that aren't made with RWG, I can get around this and mod out the changes as well.  I just wish I didn't have to.

[Javabean867]

2 hours ago, Riamus said:

True for some people, yes.  But there are plenty of players who want to quest together.  Even in my 2 player game, we only play the game together and we only quest together, at least until late game when we might do different things sometimes.  Having to do so many extra quests just because we don't get credit for playing the game together is frustrating.  Even with just two of us, it feels so very slow.  It is definitely progressing more slowly than my single player game.  This should be optional.  There's really no reason why it can't be optional and if it's optional, then everyone should be happy.

I get what you are saying, but you 2 can still quest together, that's where the fun is for me as well.  

 

Think of it this way.  You are both questing and getting the rewards.  Only 1 of you needs to build up the quest tier level.  I don't know how many quests you both get done in a day, but as you burn through your higher tier quests, then you can have the other person pick their tier quests to do, if they want to that is.

 

If the tier rewards were amazing, then yeah I would be more on your side.  As it is, I get where you are coming from, I just don't think it's that big of a deal.

Oh another thing, bring back the derpy dear animations. I al.ost un-installed after seeing the deer move. 🤣 

[Riamus]

6 minutes ago, Javabean867 said:

I get what you are saying, but you 2 can still quest together, that's where the fun is for me as well.  

 

Think of it this way.  You are both questing and getting the rewards.  Only 1 of you needs to build up the quest tier level.  I don't know how many quests you both get done in a day, but as you burn through your higher tier quests, then you can have the other person pick their tier quests to do, if they want to that is.

 

If the tier rewards were amazing, then yeah I would be more on your side.  As it is, I get where you are coming from, I just don't think it's that big of a deal.

Oh another thing, bring back the derpy dear animations. I al.ost un-installed after seeing the deer move. 🤣 

It is a matter of preference and how you play.  Clearly, many people here feel that removing shared credit when working together in a co-op game is wrong.  In any change or feature, there will be people who it affects and people who it doesn't.  And people who like it and people who don't.  But I think that is they could poll every player who plays co-op and quests together, they will find that the cast majority feel like removing shared credit for working together doesn't make any sense for a co-op game. 

 

And why did they remove it?  Because multiplayer advanced too quickly, right?  So now multiplayer will advance more slowly than single player.  Does that make any more sense?  Single players who care about who advances more quickly well love it, but that's all.  The real solution is to make it so that you advance at the same rate (at least for max rate) regardless of the number of players.  And I showed how that can be done easily.

[Riamus]

Look at it this way.  In a two player game (how I usually play), we both take a quest and then do both quests and return to the trader.  Doing it this way, we need to do 20 quests per tier (10 each).  Yes, doing two at once instead of one at a time is faster than doing two quests one at a time.  But it is still slower than doing one quest solo.  This means that you might complete two quests faster with two people but you won't get both player their quest point as quickly as solo and those two quests only count as one quest for each person and takes longer than doing only one quest solo.

 

Let's toss some numbers in here.  Note that these are just flat numbers to visualize things and aren't intended to be accurate (everyone's numbers will vary anyhow).

 

Solo time to complete one quest: 10 minutes

2 player group time to complete 2 quests (one each): 15 minutes including travel time between the two quests

 

Solo time per tier: 100 minutes

2 player time per tier: 150 minutes

 

Solo time to tier 6: 500 minutes

2 player time to tier 6: 750 minutes 

 

That is more than 4 hours longer real time.  And that assumes you could maintain the same speed to complete high tier quests, which you can't.  I could put in examples that scale time by tier, but I think you get the idea.  But let's say your average times to complete quests from tier 1 until tier 6 is: 

 

Solo: 20 minutes

2 player group: 30 minutes

 

That is over 8 hours longer real time.  Again, these are example numbers.  Some people will take longer and others will be faster.  Any changes will affect the difference in time.  But even with the fastest players, they are going to take longer than the same players doing quests solo. 

 

And this is just for 2 players.  This divergence in time expands with each additional player.

 

Yes, you get more rewards by doing more quests, but the rewards aren't worth much anymore, so not really a big deal.

 

Edited Friday at 10:57 PM by Riamus (see edit history)