PC Why are the devs screwing over agi/stealth in their POI design?

[AtomicUs5000]

Why don't they just make it so that the noises of zombies can wake up other zombies, if they want to keep things spicy?
(not to be confused with a screamer that actually spawns in additional zombies).
When a zombie sees you, perhaps a 50% chance it will yell out, drawing in close by zombies, waking sleeping zombies.
Make it so that when you stealth kill a zombie, it has something like 25% chance to groan loudly as it dies.
As you level up in stealth, this percentage goes down... but cap it so that there is always at least a 5% chance.
 
To resolve blood moon, extend Stealth into Stealth and Evasion, which can be a big help during BM.
- chance to dodge melee attacks.
- significantly reduces the player being targeted by cops.
- significantly reduces the player being targeted by vultures.
- significantly reduces the number of vultures chasing you down while driving.

 

[Roland]

heh, you could even give him the same look as that character from that old Korean War sit com!).

M.A.S.H. forgotten....It is the end times indeed. 

 

[hiemfire]

M.A.S.H. forgotten....It is the end times indeed. 

At least they didn't describe Cpl. Klinger...

 

[th3s0n1c]

Ok so now that I am aware that auto-aggro volumes are a thing, they are pretty @%$#ing annoying.

Am I going to abandon my stealth-build? No. Am I going to piss and moan about it incessantly? No. 

Speaking of, I'm at 8 agi with maxed skills. Lvl 54, so the bulk of my points are there. Do I go for 10 or put the points into other skills? We're talking another 11 points to finish it (6 for agi and 5 for skills). I am leaning towards maxing it, but 3 points per ability is painful.

If you wear the agility glasses you actually "save yourself 3 levels" from 9 to 10. Unless you really need to keep nerdy or lucky looter goggles.. I'd say thats a great trade off.

By what people are discussing, it seems going for from the shadows 5 is sort of pointless, so leaving it at 4/5 wont make that much of a difference.. using muffled connectors and stealth boots are enough.

 

[Danidas]

Sneaky Sniper is my favorite build in FPS games, with shotgun leatherneck being a close second . . . I only have about 150 hours on 7DTD and have only reached Level 22 and still doing T1 quests, but noticed the "auto-wake up" zombies.

I can agree with OP that the (apparent) inconsistency is annoying, but I can also agree with other points made in this thread (no I did not read all of it and I doubt anyone has or will) that the auto-aggro zombies (a) are not THAT common and (b) spice things up so that a sneaky type cannot go around never having any fears or surprises . . .

My take on the game is: whatever you are having your character do that is not inside the double thick walled concrete bunker protected by auto-robbot flamethrower sentinels, assume that you could die at any moment, and play accordingly. Yeah, so you are a sneak, doesn't mean your perfect so expect that occasionally you'll screw up and your sneakiness will fail.

To the developers / level designers: maybe try to be a little more . . . um . . . consistent? and/or creative in how you place those auto-aggro zeds. Right now, the trigger is nothing more than player entity location being within a particular X,Y,Z coordinate space in the game world, and THIS is what most who are irritated by the mechanic find irritating. It doesn't matter what the player was doing at the time their entity entered that space, it always works the same. Maybe if these spaces were less accessible? Maybe if these spaces had entry features which made it essentially IMPOSSIBLE to pass into them stealthily? If sneaky players were FORCED to be loud and un-sneaky in order to get inside the XYZ space where these auto-aggor things function then no one would have anything to complain about.

So maybe now you are asking yourself: What mechanics should or could be used to "force" sneaky players to be unsneaky and thus account for how the auto-aggro zombies defy the prevailing rules of the game and respond to the player? Well lots of options, and all of them seem pretty cheesy and unappealing to me

1. Encase all the Zombie Auto-Aggro zones in impenetrable concrete and give one entrance, a wooden door that cannot be lockpicked and has to be chopped into: noisy, auto aggro makes perfect sense

2. Place the zombie auto-aggro zones at the bottom of an Indian Jones vault right on top of the bedrock and make the "entrance" a slide that the player activates at random while roaming the wastelands, player loses control of their toon, goes sliding down the Temple of Doom Sluice way, splash lands with great noise and un-sneakiness in the auto-aggro zombie chamber of doom.

3. Place invisible trip wires (only visible after the fact) that activate New Years noise makers.

4. Install spring loaded dart traps that cause the player to trip out and start blathering Linda Blair style = not sneaky enough to evade the auto-aggro zombie threshold.

5. Create a new zombie type, some kinda tin-foil hat nerd in past life who shambles around with his/hear hand up to their ear socket (bloody hole where their ear used to be). This Zombie you could call "Zombie_Radar" (heh, you could even give him the same look as that character from that old Korean War sit com!). This guy (or some variant of this guy)  is always present in every one of the locations where an auto-aggro zone is laid down = he has super sensitive sensory apparatus and THAT is why there is no sneaking to be done in his/her midst.

You see, there are LOTS of viable mechanics to make your auto-aggro zombie trigers "make sense." Now granted none of them (with the possible exception of Number 5, which is brilliant AF in my opinion) are any more fun than the existing mechanic, but at least then players could NOT legitimtely complain about the inconsistency in the game rules and mechanics.

The main issues is that it has to be clear to the player that no matter what they do it will have no impact on the result.

Now I do like option 5 and proposed that my self a few times as a special infected alarm system. But the natural challenge of selling a inescapable trap in such a dynamic sandbox game that prides it self on player freedom will always be a tough sell. As players will always insist on a way to bypass it especially if they got burned by it one too many times.

 

[th3s0n1c]

You could speed run the game going with strength or you can slow down and sneak with Agility

On a sidenote... not really an issue but.. doesnt that statement sounds weird? Specifically for the fact that AGILITY will be the attribute taking a longer time to clean a POI? I'm purely talking about the word/name.

 

[Krougal]

Why should there be any clear indicator that a trap is a trap? The zombies in that room are alert for whatever reason. Some of the suggestions put forth are some of the dumbest @%$# I can imagine and would detract from the game more than it already does. If there was some kind of tripwire or other que that I still can't do anything about that would piss me off more than the current implementation. For a game that is about fighting zombies I have never seen so many complaints about being forced to fight zombies. Hell, I dislike the BM horde mechanic, but having played with the option of turning it off, the game becomes dreadfully boring once you are past early game with them turned off.

 

[Tehnomaag]

Indeed!

However I just tested it and it appears that POI XML must be loaded either at connect or as POIs come into the active chunks around a player. I set my client to 100% auto-aggro in a particular POI and the server was set to 100% passive. The zombies appeared to be passive when I entered the POI (though I'm very low level so they did wake up pretty easily when I tried to sneak).

My next test is to change the server to 100% aggro and leave the client at the default.

Edit to add: okay I cannot explain the behavior with a dedicated server. Maybe I'm missing something. Someone else may need to give it a try. Here's the behavior I've noticed so far:

Single-player game: changing XML in /prefabs changes the behavior of the POI, even between sessions (same world, same save). I set volumes to "attack" or "passive" and changed them back and every time I loaded the world they behaved as given in the XML.

Dedicated server "passive", client "attack": POI volumes appear to behave in "passive" manner. (ranger_station_05)

Dedicated server "attack", client "passive": POI volumes appear to behave in "passive" manner. (ranger_station_02)

I can't explain it, except to surmise that I am doing something wrong. The last test should have resulted in "attack" behavior, if the server is supplying the client with the POI XML.

I need to retest in a new world - not the one I'm actually using for my co-op game - where I can pop-tart my character to level 100 with max sneak. It could be that some of the behavior is just due to my level 11 self being very bad at sneaking. But "attack" should be pretty obvious regardless, and not all zombies in a volume would wake up at the same time so...seemed "passive" to me.

That is confusing. 

A hypothesis why the dedicated server test might "fail" - if the server transmitted POI files are cached client side somehow the local files, which the client believes to be the correct server-side configurations might get used resulting in passive zombie behavior while server-side they are set agressiivse, supposedly. That is quite a stretch hypothesis, though and I'd consider that to be somewhat improbable, as as far as I understand it, the zombies are, supposedly, controlled server-side. 

Another possibility might be that when a poi is visited the server somehow stores somewhere the state it was when it was visited and upon a next visit no longer loads the POI from the prefabs folder but actually picks up the stored copy of the POI with all the changes a player might have done when visiting it the previous time (all the broken walls, removed trash, looted containers, zombies already killed, etc). In that scenario, if you change the POI SleeperVolumeFlags in prefabs after the POI has been already visited by any player it might not register until someone gets a mission there and resets the POI, at which point I'd assume it would be freshly loaded from the prefabs and the new SleeperVolumeFlags register. 

By your description of what you are doing I do not believe it would be something that would be done "wrong" on your side. After-all, chaning the SleeperVolumeFlags in the POI xlm is a relatively straightforward action. It just seems to be more of a case, that the server-client interaction is a bit more complicated than one might at first assume. 

Thanx for the tests. There certainly is a fair bit of food for thought. However, I'd say that preliminary tests are promising to a degree. They show that it IS POSSIBLE to change SleeperVolumeFlags server side and these changes migrate over to the client side somehow (i.e., it would be sufficient, theoretically, to update the relevant xlm's server side). The open question is if it is possible to get these changes to register on an already running server and map or is the only sure what to do so upon a fresh map/server before any players log in. 

 

[meganoth]

I was looking for combined total from equipped gear and iirc that isn't what is shown on the left pane when modifying an item.

Edit: @Krougal Looked at the left panel this time when doing a check of what Advanced Muffled Connectors + Light Armor Perks would do to detectability with the different types of light armor. Showed every piece of padded armor getting a -8% noise increase. 40% noise reduction with all pieces having the mod if it isn't a display bug, wow. Completely blows the +5% noise that perked + mod Leather and Military have (+10% with just the mod installed on the armor piece) out of the water even if it is a display bug (0% noise increase is allot better than a 5%>10% noise increase). The certain 25% damage reduction for 5 x Padded is also allot more attractive than rolling the dice and getting armor ratings below that on mil gear ( helmet rolled a stinking 4, gloves rolled a 5 so broke even, but that does mean the rng range for mil overlaps the set value of padded). The movement penalty perked + mod is +5% with all 5 slots being leather or mil as well...

Since there is no penalty for mixing armor types, nobody knowledgeable in the game would replace a padded armor with a mil armor of the same armor rating. Late game everyone will either have a padded or mil armor at max or max-1 rating in each slot.

Padded is a veritable choice for a stealth player as long as you can guarantee that you can survive at least one hit by the zombies you might encounter. On higher difficulties even a stealth player might have to take mil armor simply because he can't avoid the occassional hit.

Base durability is the only thing I know for certain is a consistent downside to using Padded since I cannot wrap my head around what they're trying to @%$#ing say with the "Armor Crit Resistance" stat (-6% is tagged as worse than -4% and the explanation in the Armor entry of the journal doesn't really clarify it, just says chance to resist crit...) and being able to possibly take a hit better with either full mil or full leather really doesn't offset the higher chance of getting noticed for me.

Crit Resistance means resistance to getting a crit condition like broken leg. Higher values for a resistance are obviously better. So -6% is worse than -4%.

 

[Kalen]

Higher values for a resistance are obviously better. So -6% is worse than -4%.

That doesn't make sense.... either it means you have 6% less chance of being crit vs 4% less chance of being crit.... meaning that the -6% should be better (not worse like @hiemfire is seeing) or it's saying you are 6% more likely to be crit vs 4% more likely to be crit which would be a ridiculous stat for armor.

 

[meganoth]

That doesn't make sense.... either it means you have 6% less chance of being crit vs 4% less chance of being crit.... meaning that the -6% should be better (not worse like @hiemfire is seeing) or it's saying you are 6% more likely to be crit vs 4% more likely to be crit which would be a ridiculous stat for armor.

Well, mathematically -4 IS a higher number than -6 is. And we are talking about a RESISTANCE, where higher values are better.

To visualize it: Draw an axis going from left -10 to the right +10. Highlight -6 and -4 on that axis. You will see -4 is more to the right, i.e. higher. (Or, since negative values can be viewed as penalties, the penalty of 4 is lower than 6)

Probably an empty armor slot has a crit resistance value of -10%, i.e. an even lower value aka higher penalty.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

Padded is a veritable choice for a stealth player as long as you can guarantee that you can survive at least one hit by the zombies you might encounter. On higher difficulties even a stealth player might have to take mil armor simply because he can't avoid the occassional hit.

Not might. Must. Playing on survivalist and padded armor is a bad idea later in game. Also wolves, bears, pumas, dogpacks. You can´t sneak those every time. Effin bears always beeing right behind a corner.

 

[Kalen]

Well, mathematically -4 IS a higher number than -6 is. And we are talking about a RESISTANCE, where higher values are better.

True it is.   But it comes down to what it represents.   If we assume 100% crit resistance means you never get crit.... and 0% means you always get crit.   Anything that gets you close to 100 is good.   But, if the armor is giving you -4 or -6, yes the -4 is better.... but they both suck.  I'd rather have neither.   So that can't be what it means.

Unless, of course, you are right and empty armor has a base of -10.   But if thats true, that is silly.... you are more likely to be crit wearing armor?

 

[meganoth]

True it is.   But it comes down to what it represents.   If we assume 100% crit resistance means you never get crit.... and 0% means you always get crit.   Anything that gets you close to 100 is good.   But, if the armor is giving you -4 or -6, yes the -4 is better.... but they both suck.  I'd rather have neither.   So that can't be what it means.

Unless, of course, you are right and empty armor has a base of -10.   But if thats true, that is silly.... you are more likely to be crit wearing armor?

What I meant is that the empty armor slot penalty of -10% gets REPLACED by the penalty of the armor. That is the only way for it to make sense. 

EDIT: Does the journal entry to armor say anthing about this? Can't check at the moment

 

[JCrook1028]

am so sorry that no one wants a balanced game apparently

The game IS balanced. Until YOU as a player make the conscious decision to UNBALANCE it by lowering your damage and raising the zombie's damage. That is what YOU are doing when you up the difficulty. Unbalancing the game.

 

[Kalen]

What I meant is that the empty armor slot penalty of -10% gets REPLACED by the penalty of the armor. That is the only way for it to make sense. 

EDIT: Does the journal entry to armor say anthing about this? Can't check at the moment

Heh, yeah I can't either.... 

Oh, I see what you mean.... about the empty armor slot.   That might be

 

[hiemfire]

Does the journal entry to armor say anthing about this? Can't check at the moment

The "best" stat I've seen listed for it is -3%, and it also appears to be a variable stat.

 

[Kalen]

The "best" stat I've seen listed for it is -3%, and it also appears to be a variable stat.

So I would guess that the scale is 100% means you always get crit and 0% means you never do.... so the negative % get you closer to 0.   That at least makes sense based on the numbers we're seeing.   Except where you saw a -4% being "better" than a -6%.   

 

[Diche_Bach]

Why should there be any clear indicator that a trap is a trap? The zombies in that room are alert for whatever reason. Some of the suggestions put forth are some of the dumbest @%$# I can imagine and would detract from the game more than it already does. If there was some kind of tripwire or other que that I still can't do anything about that would piss me off more than the current implementation. For a game that is about fighting zombies I have never seen so many complaints about being forced to fight zombies. Hell, I dislike the BM horde mechanic, but having played with the option of turning it off, the game becomes dreadfully boring once you are past early game with them turned off.

You may or may not have been responding to the inane list of 5 suggestions I offered, and it doesn't bother me in any event. But as is often the case with Internet-based communications, it appears that my efforts to be sarcastic have failed pitifully and my suggestions have been taken seriously. Let me take a step back and make my views clear:

I. The current system (in which sleeping zombies are totally unphased by nearby noise, and only respond to player presence in an X,Y,Z volume) is dumb, clunky, crude, incongruous with the rest of the game and--in contrast with the game as a whole--textbook bad design. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of person hours were devoted to creating all the various game play dynamics which teach the player how the game functions and how they can survive. In this case, specifically: zombies react to noise and light -> be quiet and you can sneak up on them / evade them. Then the current sleeper mode system defies all that work by planting blind, and deaf sleeper zombies in hidey spots inside POIs which only respond to player presence in an X,Y,Z space, not noise, or light.

II. My suggestions were meant to be equally stupid . . . with the exception of Number 5 which . . . I only came up with by thinking through the "equally dumb, crude, clunky, incongruous" examples and which it seems is a not too bad of prospect for how the devs could have their cake and eat it too?

 

[Diche_Bach]

The main issues is that it has to be clear to the player that no matter what they do it will have no impact on the result.

Now I do like option 5 and proposed that my self a few times as a special infected alarm system. But the natural challenge of selling a inescapable trap in such a dynamic sandbox game that prides it self on player freedom will always be a tough sell. As players will always insist on a way to bypass it especially if they got burned by it one too many times.

RIGHT! It seems there are two design motives coming into conflict here and the player sparks are a result of users finding and grinding on that zone of conflict! 

Linear games like Space Invaders or Ms. Pacman are NOT "open world." Open world games like Minecraft or even Skyrim are NOT "linear." Now then, it IS true that both "types" may include ELEMENTS which are typical of the other type. There are not infinite sequences of moves a user can engage in to evade the chompers in any given level of Ms. Pacman, but it must be a very, VERY large number. So, while you cannot do something like whip out your breaching shotgun and blast through the maze walls and burn all the chompers with a hail of molotovs in Ms. Pacman, you CAN choose a non-standard pathing sequence . . . Same for Minecraft or any "Open World" game, there will be elements where you have to stick to a fairly narrow linear path to accomplish an in game goal. A good example in Minecraft might be "capturing" a mob spawner, but even there, there are probably dozens or even many scores of specific methods to capture one (so you can turn it into an xp and loot farm).

They key would seem to be: the "alternative design elements" need to be congruent with the prevailing design of the game.

"Sleeping" zombies that are completely unresponsive to sound and light and ONLY responsive to player presence within a pre-defined X,Y,Z space are NOT congruent with the rest of the game "rules" and game play dynamics in Seven Days to Die.