New perks part 2

[SenpaiThatIngnoresYou]

I will have to play a17 to see if i like this new system or not.

 

I can understand why they would lock recipes behind skills, because a lot of the youtubers have complained about things being locked behind rng. To drive the point home War of the Walkers has this problem with skill fragments. I suspect TFP have seen the frustration that RNG causes, and have said "Screw it, a simplified perk system it is". Looking at the video, it appears that you can get the points for a forge day one, and still get a day one forge.

 

My issue is single player. In single player you have no choice but to be Conan the MacGuyver ( which is why single player is so much fun)who leans all the skills and fights all the zombies. Now the shops may be the balance for this as: A) you can buy the things you can't craft and B)they may offer skill points as quest rewards, or you get a skill point for completing a quest on top of a reward?

 

If they really want to balance things out, then they can put comic books and mags in the bookshelfs that can give a skill point, but make those rare finds. This would reward scavenging. This would help in single player, and they can make them single player only drops if they are worried about multiplayer.

 

As for the simplifying system, I suspect that they are moving away from minecraft style resource grinds and more toward don't starve food management. Once you make a farm in minecraft and 7 days you are set. You have "food for days" as kicks says, and you just focus on bunkering down and killing the waves of bullet sponges. with the removal of fertilizer, you no longer need rancid meat, so gore blocks are not that big of a deal now( i will still miss them). The down side is bones were needed for glue, and glue was needed for making duct tape. This makes me suspect that gore blocks were removed to make the game more difficult. (did i mention that i still miss gore blocks)

 

so based on this, i suspect that we will have to really change up the play style in a17 to be not just base building and defense, but also a survival horror food and ammo management as well. I hope that they will bring back the old school gore blocks, that the zombies would use to climb up the walls, as those were really cool and made base building a challenge. With the adding of jeeps and gyro copters, i also suspect that the maps will be much bigger, and that is why they are focusing on optimization.

[Numberz]

Gazz was the one trying to make the bucking bronco bull of crafting xp fit in with the rest of the xp pathways and he didn't seem to think it was easy and I don't think he ignored all the suggestions voiced here. Gazz is a regular. They are now looking at what can be done on a limited basis for crafting xp to decide if they can put it in. The new event based buff system they have is so much more powerful and there are things they can do now that were not possible with A16. So maybe.

 

 

I thought I'd post some ideas about how this might be achieved and others could also chime in. Perhaps we could get a useful discussion started.

 

Firstly, it isn't just about crafting xp or perhaps you are using that as an umbrella term. There are several ways of generating XP in the game (and perhaps I've missed one or two here):

- crafting of items/blocks (CraftingIngredientXP)

- repairing of items

- repairing and upgrading of blocks

- using of items (ActionExp)

- harvesting of resources

- bartering

- athletics

- scavenging

- armor (leveling by being hit)

 

1. Crafting

- one thing I've been doing since A15 is rebalancing the XP of the ingredients so that easy to gather ingredients have the least XP values. In this way, something like a stone shovel has a tiny amount of XP compared to something like a steel shovel.

- secondly, how about the idea of singular or diminishing returns on crafting stacks. how about 10% less XP for each consecutive item in a stack to be crafted. after the 10th item in the stack, XP goes to zero for each subsequent one.

 

2. Repairing of items

- the amounts here are negligible and I'm not sure anything needs to be done

- I would suggest reducing the repair XP multiplier to 1 or 2, especially for cheaper items

 

3. Repairing and upgrading of blocks

- this is a big one. I see people sitting all night slightly damaging a wood block and then repairing it over and over again to grind skills. I also see people running in circles and tapping the ground with a stone axe or stone shovel doing the same.

- only thing that comes to mind for this one is for XP to only be granted when a block is fully upgraded to another block

 

4. Using of items

- this is the XP that is gained when you shoot or hit something with a weapons / gun / tool

- I guess this is where the idea of running around tapping the ground with a wooden club comes from

- for guns, melee weapons, and archery, perhaps XP should only be granted when what is stuck is a zombie or an animal

- for tools, I'm open to ideas, but I'm not sure if this is even exploitative when talking about tools

 

5. Armor

- leveling by getting hit is just a bad idea

- just get rid of this and level with perks

 

6. Bartering / Scavenging / Athletics

- the mechanics behind these are hidden, so I'm open to ideas

 

7. Harvesting

- another big XP generator in game

- like crafting, rebalance the XP granted for each resource base on how easy it is to gather

- things like grass, wood, rocks should be reduced to a fraction

[meganoth]

@Numberz: Good overview.

 

1) scavening (opening containers) still needs XP so stealthy avoidance of zombies gets you XP.

 

2) Buying and selling stuff is a way to save perk points on recipe perks. So to award XP for it is sort of a double reward. Only one reason why bartering in A16 was totally overpowered. Barter XP should go away.

[pApA^LeGBa]

Just lol at the fertilizer crafting and hoeing it in beeing realistic. Omegalul tbh. And i hate that term.

 

Regarding the long waiting for the new update: Roland is right with everything he says. But people are people sadly, most of them spoiled brats with no patience. And this long waiting is hurting the game. Just look how the ratings went down on steam, when the game didn´t even change.

 

I don´t like it, but you gotta be cautious and not take too long. Just read the comments on the steam forums beneath the latest news. It gets worse everyday. Not every kind of attention is automatically good for your product...

[Viktoriusiii]

I'll mostly quote Roland for convenience.

 

 

 

I may be wrong, but I strongly believe this could have just been fixed easily without them changing the whole system though.

 

 

Yeah there was. I gave multiple examples back in the day (because i was fighting for "spamcrafting") one of them i still remember was:

 

Every skill has a "passive xp-bar"

So now while playing, every bar filled up a certain amount, at which point it would stop. You could only get that max amount of skillxp for crafting that specific thing. The bar would then slowly grow more, until you can craft something again. Obviously quality of the crafted item was still a factor. So you wouldn't go from 99 to 100 by crafting a clothshirt.

 

That was a solution that tackled EVERYTHING, but they completly ignored.

(no spamcrafting since after you have filled that bar, you won't get xp in that skill until some time went by)

And I thought of this solution in less then an hour. How they didn't find a solution and rather completly changed the system that takes them 12+ months and most of the older fans don't like is beyond me.

[Kubikus]

no i wanted to have this post on the unnumbered perk thread