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

[Solomon]

Yeah, that sounds fun.... you enter a room and there are several bandits with AP rounds.   Sure, I could see that as a challenge that makes perfect sense!  Good idea!

Yeah but thats not what would happen, it would be a room of bandits and your armor would be set to zero while you are in that room.

Not AP weapons what ignore a armor but a line of code what only happens in a specific place. People will gonna complain about it because at first they will think that the bandits have a better AP round than what they can craft then someone later on reveals thats not the case because this is yet another "You fail because you exist" room setup.

 

[Kalen]

Yeah but thats not what would happen, it would be a room of bandits and your armor would be set to zero while you are in that room.

Not AP weapons what ignore a armor but a line of code what only happens in a specific place. People will gonna complain about it because at first they will think that the bandits have a better AP round than what they can craft then someone later on reveals thats not the case because this is yet another "You fail because you exist" room setup.

So?  If you want to get technical I'm not actually entering a room either... its just some code that says I am.   Such a room would not bother me in the slightest.... I would equally welcome a room that encourages stealth as I would a room that encourages a straight up fight.   The game needs more diversity, not less.

 

[Aldranon]

yeah but same science also proves that  zombies would get quickly inflated by own bacterias and  and explode

Well, who knows how zombies would react to bacteria... its not science unless it can be repeated, so science-fiction would be a more accurate term.

However, this could be good lore for the puking zombies: They need to puke or they will explode!

 

[Aldranon]

It isn't a challenge. It's just bad design.

The example I gave as a comparison is if some rooms set your armor value to zero. Do you think that would be a challenge to plan ahead for, or just nonsensical? 

It certainly better than having the players head explode in some rooms!

But seriously, you are trying to make a passive "All or nothing" attribute (hidden-not hidden), the same as a active "Always on" attribute (there-still there). 

I'm sure you can see the flaw in your example now.

 

[Yark]

It certainly better than having the players head explode in some rooms!

But seriously, you are trying to make a passive "All or nothing" attribute (hidden-not hidden), the same as a active "Always on" attribute (there-still there). 

I'm sure you can see the flaw in your example now.

It basically comes down to your perks working 99% of the time, but not 100% of the time. I suspect what happened with some of the rooms is that it was just a developer mistake later justified by, "Enjoy the challenge."

 

[Solomon]

So?  If you want to get technical I'm not actually entering a room either... its just some code that says I am.   Such a room would not bother me in the slightest.... I would equally welcome a room that encourages stealth as I would a room that encourages a straight up fight.   The game needs more diversity, not less.

Let me point out something important what you too have said right here:

The game needs more diversity, not less.

Now please explain how it adds more diversity to the game when an arbitary failure script turns off a gameplay element? Or let me simplicate it even further, if your game is based on matching up same colored tiles atleast 3 in a line or column how does it increase the diversity when you remove one color from the palette?

We have a ton of combat approaches from throwing in grenades, shooting in a rocket to going melee or go full stealth and you say that removing one of the elements will somehow make it more diverse?

Lets just make a set of zombies what are healing from fire damage from the player, surely making molotovs and anything burning less useful is adds somekind of diversity to the game because it somehow increases your choice of throwables and mods to use?

Auto-trigger rooms do one thing precisely, they decrease the diversity of the game because there are much less ways to approach a problem than before.

 

[Kalen]

Now please explain how it adds more diversity to the game when an arbitary failure script turns off a gameplay element? Or let me simplicate it even further, if your game is based on matching up same colored tiles atleast 3 in a line or column how does it increase the diversity when you remove one color from the palette?

How does having a room where stealth doesn't work without a little effort promote diversity?   Um, by making it so that stealth doesn't work without a little effort in some places.  Without auto agro rooms you could pretty much creep your way through every POI dropping zombies with headshots and little to no risk to yourself.

Having rooms where a straight up fight is less effective than stealth (like the mentioned 0 armor scenario) would be another way to do it.   

I'm in favor of almost anything that promotes a player using different strategies to clear a POI.

 

[Aldranon]

It basically comes down to your perks working 99% of the time, but not 100% of the time. I suspect what happened with some of the rooms is that it was just a developer mistake later justified by, "Enjoy the challenge."

You must be new to the game, so a little history for you and other who are new.

I might have the order wrong but here are the zombie POI behaviors TFP have tried:

1) In POI's zombies run, but if you get them outside they stop running and you can kill them all easily.

2) In POI's zombie sleep, but if you hit the wall/door they all wake up and you can kill them all outside, easily.

3) Now we have each room as separate where sound no longer travels between most rooms.

#3 Is not as easy as #1 or #2, but its not as realistic as well.  Moral if the story?  Dev who makes a game, find out that game balance wins over realism.

 

[Danidas]

How about Bloodmoons as they disable stealth as well and do so to a far greater degree then these rooms. As unlike auto aggro rooms it is actually impossible to use stealth at all during them. So in effect these rooms prepare you for the inevitable fact that this isn't a stealth game as confirmed extensively by the devs themselves. Stealth is nothing more then a situational tool to safely take out unaware targets of opportunity and nothing more. Now these auto aggro rooms are designed specifically to not fall into that category. However you can still deal with them via stealth but in a indirect way by breaking aggro with them first via running away and swinging back around to sneak attack them.

Note before you go on and on about then why do we have stealth perks it was proven that From the Shadows is one of the most over rated perks in the game. As it really does very little if anything for direct stealth game play and instead its most important benefit is speeding up the time it takes zombies to forget about you to break aggro faster. As it's fully possible to stealth every single POI in the game even while literally using a shotgun for all sneak attacks only with out a single point in From the Shadows.

Edit - For more clarification the shotgun stealth runs were done via shooting zombies in the face while sneaking and very few would ever wake up. Which when they did rarely wake up all the tester did was run away a few rooms till they broke aggro to allow them to restealth and continue blasting unaware zombies in the face with a shotgun. Sure it took longer then it would of if they just blasted them in the face regardless of if they knew what was coming or not but that was expected.

 

[Kandrathe]

Let me point out something important what you too have said right here:

The game needs more diversity, not less.

Now please explain how it adds more diversity to the game when an arbitary failure script turns off a gameplay element? Or let me simplicate it even further, if your game is based on matching up same colored tiles atleast 3 in a line or column how does it increase the diversity when you remove one color from the palette?

We have a ton of combat approaches from throwing in grenades, shooting in a rocket to going melee or go full stealth and you say that removing one of the elements will somehow make it more diverse?

Lets just make a set of zombies what are healing from fire damage from the player, surely making molotovs and anything burning less useful is adds somekind of diversity to the game because it somehow increases your choice of throwables and mods to use?

Auto-trigger rooms do one thing precisely, they decrease the diversity of the game because there are much less ways to approach a problem than before.

As a life long hunter, I stalk my prey, but their senses are very keen.  Even moving upwind on quiet ground and masking scent I am never 100% successful, and not even close.  Investing in stealth would give you an advantage on unwary prey, but it sounds like some folks here are looking for certainty.  An alerted adversary is impossible to surprise.

Game theory in a complex multiplayer game involves scenarios that require skill diversity.  In the "simplicated" metaphor, there are multiple ways to clear a room.  Good POI design would bring all the play styles some love, but not in every room.  If I'm a H2H strength build, I will occasionally face feral irradiated tough opponent.  I don't get the x9 times damage bonus verses bikers perk.  Maybe the smart move is to let the stealthy player take out the biker.  But, in the next room they are alerted, so the intellect build with turrets or tank with a club gets the love while the stealth player participates.

Balancing PVE and PVP in a game like this is tough.   You don't want to over or under advantage one play style or everyone chooses the exact same build.

 

[Kandrathe]

How about Bloodmoons as they disable stealth as well and do so to a far greater degree then these rooms. As unlike auto aggro rooms it is actually impossible to use stealth at all during them. So in effect these rooms prepare you for the inevitable fact that this isn't a stealth game as confirmed extensively by the devs themselves. Stealth is nothing more then a situational tool to safely take out unaware targets of opportunity and nothing more. Now these auto aggro rooms are designed specifically to not fall into that category. However you can still deal with them via stealth but in a indirect way by breaking aggro with them first via running away and swinging back around to sneak attack them.

Note before you go on and on about then why do we have stealth perks it was proven that From the Shadows is one of the most over rated perks in the game. As it really does very little if anything for direct stealth game play and instead its most important benefit is speeding up the time it takes zombies to forget about you to break aggro faster. As it's fully possible to stealth every single POI in the game even while literally using a shotgun for all sneak attacks only with out a single point in From the Shadows.

Edit - For more clarification the shotgun stealth runs were done via shooting zombies in the face while sneaking and very few would ever wake up. Which when they did rarely wake up all the tester did was run away a few rooms till they broke aggro to allow them to restealth and continue blasting unaware zombies in the face with a shotgun. Sure it took longer then it would of if they just blasted them in the face regardless of if they knew what was coming or not but that was expected.

I do my blood moons multiplayer.  I do see that if I am crouched and shoot at a zombie aggro'd on someone else I will get stealth bonus damage.

 

[Yark]

You must be new to the game, so a little history for you and other who are new.

I might have the order wrong but here are the zombie POI behaviors TFP have tried:

1) In POI's zombies run, but if you get them outside they stop running and you can kill them all easily.

2) In POI's zombie sleep, but if you hit the wall/door they all wake up and you can kill them all outside, easily.

3) Now we have each room as separate where sound no longer travels between most rooms.

#3 Is not as easy as #1 or #2, but its not as realistic as well.  Moral if the story?  Dev who makes a game, find out that game balance wins over realism.

This has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. 

And by the way, for everyone contending that auto-aggro makes the game more interesting or challenging, it doesn't. I have a significant amount of play time with a stealth build and I already know every room where it doesn't work. That doesn't make the game harder for me; just makes me shake my head at developer incompetence while I clear the room anyway. 

 

[meganoth]

Yeah but thats not what would happen, it would be a room of bandits and your armor would be set to zero while you are in that room.

Not AP weapons what ignore a armor but a line of code what only happens in a specific place. People will gonna complain about it because at first they will think that the bandits have a better AP round than what they can craft then someone later on reveals thats not the case because this is yet another "You fail because you exist" room setup.

SciFi explanation: The bandits found a machine from a secret military lab that produces supersonic sound at just the right frequency to make the AP rounds of the bandits vibrate in flight and that makes them pass through armor like it was butter.

This is just a random justification because the people you are speaking for seem to need it.

Your "You fail because you exist" sentence assumes that you automatically die because of this. This is a strawman, nobody here wants anything in the game that makes everyone die automatically. People in this thread have listed numerous strategies to cope with such rooms, even when you are surprised by it. If you want to work with a no-armor room as an analogy then it should have similar properties not some hyperbole "You automatically die".

EDIT: Just to be clear, there is a huge difference between "You fail" and "your armor/stealth fails". If you just meant the latter you should not make it sound like it is game over.

 

[Yark]

Yeah, that sounds fun.... you enter a room and there are several bandits with AP rounds.   Sure, I could see that as a challenge that makes perfect sense!  Good idea!

You're being disingenuous because this is not at all what I said. 

 

[meganoth]

This has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. 

And by the way, for everyone contending that auto-aggro makes the game more interesting or challenging, it doesn't. I have a significant amount of play time with a stealth build and I already know every room where it doesn't work. That doesn't make the game harder for me; just makes me shake my head at developer incompetence while I clear the room anyway. 

Tell that to Solomon who seems to think it is an auto-die situation (EDIT: or she is using hyperbole or very ambiguous language). There are a lot of things in this game that don't work anymore if you have seen everything and done everything. Sad fact, without mods any game will eventually get stale. Sad fact 2, as long as someone has weapon perks up and unlimited ammo, no existing poi in vanilla has the slightest chance to kill a player. Vanilla is not designed to humor players with more than 500 hours playtime and can't be.

I do my blood moons multiplayer.  I do see that if I am crouched and shoot at a zombie aggro'd on someone else I will get stealth bonus damage.

If I remember correctly Fataal said the opposite, you can't get stealth bonus on alert zombies, no matter who alerted it.

 

[Yark]

Tell that to Solomon who seems to think it is an auto-die situation. There are a lot of things in this game that don't work anymore if you have seen everything and done everything. Sad fact, without mods any game will eventually get stale. Sad fact 2, as long as someone has weapon perks up and unlimited ammo, no existing poi in vanilla has the slightest chance to kill a player. Vanilla is not designed to humor players with more than 500 hours playtime and can't be.

It's inappropriate for a moderator to attempt to pit me against another member of the community for the sake of argument. But as far as I can tell, Solomon has been talking about auto-failure systems, which might be what is confusing to you. An auto-failure system is one where, because of game design, an element of your character is disabled and you have no recourse. Examples of this would be rooms where stealth is disabled, or rooms where your armor value is set to zero. The latter of these doesn't exist of course, but is something I'm using to draw a comparison.

In a previous post, you said that an auto-failure system for your stealth level would just be a "special challenge." I'm telling you that it isn't challenging, and is simply nonsensical. In fact, just now you have said that no POI in vanilla has a chance to kill a prepared player.

 

[stample]

If I remember correctly Fataal said the opposite, you can't get stealth bonus on alert zombies, no matter who alerted it.

That's supposed to be correct, but it does still happen.  I typically stay crouched on BM night for the additional accuracy, and I occasionally get stealth bonus.  It's rare, never more than 1 or 2 / night, and frequently none at all.  But it happens.

 

[Kalen]

You're being disingenuous because this is not at all what I said. 

You saw right through me.... however, its almost exactly what you said.   You mentioned a room where armor didn't work, thinking it was a ridiculous notion.... trying to get us to agree that rooms where stealth doesn't work is a bad idea.   I, however, thought about it and decided a room where armor didn't work would actually be kind of cool and came up with my own head canon about how such a room could exist.   So, in the end, yeah, I think it is a cool idea.

 

[meganoth]

It's inappropriate for a moderator to attempt to pit me against another member of the community for the sake of argument. But as far as I can tell, Solomon has been talking about auto-failure systems, which might be what is confusing to you. An auto-failure system is one where, because of game design, an element of your character is disabled and you have no recourse. Examples of this would be rooms where stealth is disabled, or rooms where your armor value is set to zero. The latter of these doesn't exist of course, but is something I'm using to draw a comparison.

In a previous post, you said that an auto-failure system for your stealth level would just be a "special challenge." I'm telling you that it isn't challenging, and is simply nonsensical. In fact, just now you have said that no POI in vanilla has a chance to kill a prepared player.

Yes, I made an edit because it might just be inaccurate language or hyperbole in Solomons statement. But "You fail" is definitely different than "your stealth fails".

AP ammo makes your armor auto-fail (in this game only to a percentage and only if and once bandits with AP-ammo are in). I have played games where AP-ammo ignores 100% ammo. Is that not auto-fail as well by your definiton ?

I specifically said "for players >500 hours playtime". If you succeed to remember every room and corner of the POIs in the game there is (outside of making POIs procedurally generated) no way for the developers to surprise you. If you complain loudly about this fact of life, please study philosophy instead of wasting our time . Auto-aggro rooms probably are a challenge for players who haven't played the game to extinction. I can't speak for them though, and you sound like neither can you.

It's inappropriate for a moderator to attempt to pit me against another member of the community for the sake of argument.

Pit you? Are we at war? Is this a combat situation? I was under the impression this is a discussion.

If both of you criticise auto-aggro but Solomon thinks it makes the game unfairly hard but you think it doesn't make it more difficult at all and base your argument on it, why shouldn't I bring this up as a problem in YOUR argument?

 

[Yark]

I haven't seen any indication that Solomon thinks the game is harder because of auto-aggro rooms, and I certainly don't. They're just nonsensical, and most likely a product of developer oversight in the first place. 

The existence of AP ammo is not an apt comparison to having your stats disabled, by the way.