PC Sleepers even worse now.

Found the time to give that room a test or two... gotta say, the Design of it took the wind out of my sails entirely.

You're designed to walk in thru the front door. Coming in you _might_ not check both sides of the entrance, but you WILL see one of the sides at least. It's clear, obviously empty for miles.

You trigger that trap, and the game spawns zeds right outside the vision thru the windows. In actual formation; to fit as many as possible, as close as possible. On their feet so they won't even stumble, they'll just run to you.

Just spawn the things honestly on top of me; at this point, it's no different.

You can't check your escape routes if you spawn in a column of enemies to already cleared areas. Makes no difference.

 
That looks quite impressive, but when we say overpowered then we should note that you actually got killed 😉 (if we substract god mode)

Would you expect to clear the whole building with a high probability without getting killed? It seems for that you probably would have to do a perfect stealth rehide in each trigger location,  maybe 5 of them in this building alone. In the video I don't see you have any indication to determine whether your stealth worked until they are actually stepping on your shoes. So if it fails you are totally surrounded and I'd say you have to endure at least 5 hits and multiple conditions before you can jump out, if at all. Normal low ceiling and you are simply done for.  Stunned and it is guaranteed death as well.


Well I wouldn't have gotten killed if I wasn't demonstrating the breadcrumb style and actually playing for real lol, so that's rather false :p

I was wearing no armor and didn't have any meds or anything either: p

 
Well I wouldn't have gotten killed if I wasn't demonstrating the breadcrumb style and actually playing for real lol, so that's rather false :p

I was wearing no armor and didn't have any meds or anything either: p


Fair enough. How about showing a real playthrough of the hospital then? 😉.

At the moment the forum seems full of prospective stealth players (mostly veterans) who seem rather mystified about how to tackle those ambushes. Naturally I will have to test it myself as well to get to some conclusion of my own. 

 
On 6/18/2023 at 1:39 PM, david01228 said:

I made a video to explain what is happening. This is not the zombies making a stealth check, but the zombies being awake. Here is the YT link for the video so you can see.

Holy @%$#, so this is what happened to me and my friends when we were doing this PoI. We had one on the snow biome and we had pretty decent gamestage. The first horde completely erradicated us because we got like 2 radiated cops, a bunch of radiated zombies and feral wights out of nowhere. Really scummy they spawn behind as well.

Man I'm fairly certain, the performance hit would be less if they just spawned 5 sleepers ahead normally. Especially when you reach the cells, I dropped to like 10FPS with the amount of radiated feral wights that spawned down there, not even joking.

 
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On 6/25/2023 at 1:30 AM, Jugginator said:



Here ya go. I was lazy and just kinda showing how the breadcrumb works and just used god mode to clear out debuffs at that one point, I made an effort to show how that system works with stealth toying with the zombies a bit. But, as you can see, it does indeed work. You just can't go crouch and expect the zombies to lose you in these cases. 

IMO stealth is almost at the point of being broken and needing a nerf.

Didn't know this was possible lmao, I always assumed the zombie sprinting dead on towards me knew where I was.

 
david01228 said:
So, I on lower tier POI's, yes the stealth system works as designed. I am also not talking about zombies not spawning because they are to far away, I understand this. I am talking about hordes spawning in only after you cross a threshold point, already awake, and NOT being on the map at all until you do. Go to the Navezgane county jail, and you will see what I mean by this. it is about every 3rd room it feels like you cannot enter without triggering one of these spawn points. put on the debug mode, press numpad 0 to get the zombie stats displayed, then just walk in the front door. when you get to the end of the lobby, you will see what I mean about it spawning in a horde, and this is super fast to do. This mechanic is why stealth is dead.


Hi David, some encounters are designed not to be played stealthable as you have experienced.  The jail you mentioned in particular has several large encounters that spawns several large groups which will be very difficult to run / hide / stealth from.

Edit: as Jugg mentioned, it's possible to stealth, but light/noise plays a big factor.

 
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Hi David, some encounters are designed not to be played stealthable as you have experienced.  The jail you mentioned in particular has several large encounters that spawns several large groups which will be very difficult to run / hide / stealth from.

Edit: as Jugg mentioned, it's possible to stealth, but light/noise plays a big factor.


Now we are getting somewhere. Agi players have "run and gun" but not the firepower to take a stand when there are so many zombies, so I suppose this should be the solution.

I can see in the big room of the video a player could run around evading zombies for a while and do "run and gun" until he can actually run out or the situation is under control (though run stamina could be a big problem). I'll have to test if I can actually do this without getting killed every time.

Can I assume that encounters where run-and-gun is obviously not possible (like say a small corridor with zombies on both sides immediately blocking the way) will be fixed when reported?

 
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I don't mind there being scripted z spawns in POI's, in fact I actually find them fun as they mix things up a bit, even if I am playing stealth.

What I do think is something that should be looked at though, is that it seems pretty much every POI loot room now has a scripted spawn, and then mostly they will drop in through the ceiling. It has reached the point where it has become a joke within my group where people will be making guesses on the number of "roof zombies" we will encounter, which tiles they will fall through this time, etc.

I know there are limited ways to do these things, especially in lower and mid tier POI's, but IMO, when this particular trick is being used so often that people not only expect it, but it becomes a bit of a meme, it may be time to start switching things up a bit.

 
Hi David, some encounters are designed not to be played stealthable as you have experienced.  The jail you mentioned in particular has several large encounters that spawns several large groups which will be very difficult to run / hide / stealth from.

Edit: as Jugg mentioned, it's possible to stealth, but light/noise plays a big factor.
I understand this, and I do not mind having zombies that are nearly impossible to kill from stealth. The Navezgane Hospital is actually a great example of this system working as designed, the zombies spawn in areas where you have to do something that will wake them up before killing them, but having them spawn in only after the trigger point is reached is not a good design. if the hordes spawned in, but were in an area where you could not reach all of them without hitting the trigger point it would still be fine but a stealth player is not going to be carrying large stacks of ammo usually, because it negates the feeling of the stealth to just spray and pray every 10 seconds. Another POI that works well with the "wake up" triggers is shotgun messiah, there are 3-4 points in there where you open a door, which wakes up a horde ahead of you. but no zombies spawned in the cleared area behind you. I get a tier 5 should not be 100% stealthable but the number of ambush points that you have to be fully prepared to sprint backwards to avoid being cornered is out of control. Also, it leads to an increase in bugged spawns where a zombie might reset when you put enough distance and time between you and the zombie, but not respawn in because the trigger needed had already been tripped. Also had this happen in the shotgun messiah factory where a zombie dropped and couldn't find me after my stealth kicked back in, and reset to default position, but I could not respawn it because the flag had been tripped once.

 
Fair enough. How about showing a real playthrough of the hospital then? 😉.

At the moment the forum seems full of prospective stealth players (mostly veterans) who seem rather mystified about how to tackle those ambushes. Naturally I will have to test it myself as well to get to some conclusion of my own. 
Sure, just subscribe to my only fans for it.

Lol but yeah, that demonstration should provide enough information to utilize. It would be the same thing through any encounter with enough preparation. Maybe though, but I am rather busy atm so may be a while yet

Didn't know this was possible lmao, I always assumed the zombie sprinting dead on towards me knew where I was.
Yup lol, hence the part where I said it sometimes requires nerves of steel :p

 
some encounters are designed not to be played stealthable as you have experienced. 
Then why is it in the game?

Agi players have "run and gun" but not the firepower to take a stand when there are so many zombies, so I suppose this should be the solution.
Like Str running shotguns, just with much lower damage and more bouncing off of the ceilings due to parkour being full power at all times?

vs

These statements sound a little contradictory to my non-native-english brain.. :)
They are.

Yup lol, hence the part where I said it sometimes requires nerves of steel
More like learn by dying or meta-knowledge of how the game works thanks to being on the dev team.

 
Then why is it in the game?

Like Str running shotguns, just with much lower damage and more bouncing off of the ceilings due to parkour being full power at all times?

They are.

More like learn by dying or meta-knowledge of how the game works thanks to being on the dev team.


I think we can all agree neither the stealth nor the sleeper behavior is intuitive atm and they need a rework sometime in the future. Just yesterday I stood literally in front of a standing sleeper, and got him silently, as well as missing shots on sleepers laying down and none of them waking up. But I might be 10 blocks away from a sleeper group, and all it takes is an invisible trigger that I would never know its there until I replay that PoI, that sends the zombies raging into my exact location. Which is, by all means, meta-knowledge.

Alas, let's not all pretend that this is a big priority atm, I'm really only forced to go guns blazing like 25% of a PoI, anything else is just me not having enough damage to clear out a specific spawn and end up having to mag dump it. And generally I would get bored stealthing every PoI from start to finish, and I would never expect a t4-5 one to not have something screwed up in the middle. 

Exploration has never been more fun and interactive, I was skeptical about the new hazards when I saw the switch literally next to one on my first encounter, but all it took was that one PoI where you have 3 of them that lead to different pipelines to make me realize just how great of an idea it was to add those interactibles to the map. New buttons to open doors and trigger events and all these reworked PoIs are nothing short of a really good level design. (Shoutout to the dance floor on the lake wedding PoI).

Seriously hope they double down on this in the future and add like toxic spores, blocks that require you to break them, event explosions. triggered hordes like the prison one but something that makes sense. It's all very reminiscent of left 4 dead events and I absolutely love it.

 
I think we can all agree neither the stealth nor the sleeper behavior is intuitive atm and they need a rework sometime in the future. Just yesterday I stood literally in front of a standing sleeper, and got him silently, as well as missing shots on sleepers laying down and none of them waking up. But I might be 10 blocks away from a sleeper group, and all it takes is an invisible trigger that I would never know its there until I replay that PoI, that sends the zombies raging into my exact location. Which is, by all means, meta-knowledge.
Yep, there is something really wonky with how sneaking "works" in general, and completely separate from how it interacts with their poi design philosophy, that probably needs a look at by them.

Actually it's knowledge I acquired before being on the team lol.
Then the former (underlined in following for ease) and not the latter.

More like learn by dying or meta-knowledge of how the game works thanks to being on the dev team.


The system hasn't changed.
The game sure as hell has.

Am I being shamed for trying to help stealth users out that don't know this?
Any "shame" is self inflicted, all I'm doing is calling out what I see as bull@%$#.

 
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On 6/24/2023 at 5:30 PM, Jugginator said:

IMO stealth is almost at the point of being broken and needing a nerf.

Okay, setting aside my issue with how the triggers and ambush volumes are set up, I can agree with you that there is definitely an issue with stealth. They should not be remaining oblivious to the player while colliding with them and, even with the silencer, those shots you took inside that close of proximity, aimed off so as not to hit, should have gotten you hit, killed in the case of the horde that the trigger summoned.

 
There we go, productive discussion :)

Yeah I agree, there are a lot of weird things to be worked out. It would be a system change and a lot of work, so that would be in the future before gold. Also has to be worked around with bandits, so be a good time to go have a look when those are more done.

But, for now, this is what we have; so, this was mostly showing how you can still use stealth in trigger/attack volumes, a bit of solid nerves and tactics can allow you to sneak those zombies even in the same room. 

 
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There we go, productive discussion :)
We were talking about parallel but related issues with me assuming that your position was just more dismissiveness and down playing of mine.

Yeah I agree, there are a lot of weird things to be worked out. It would be a system change and a lot of work, so that would be in the future before gold. Also has to be worked around with bandits, so be a good time to go have a look when those are more done.
Honestly I'm not getting a good feeling about how bandits are going to pan out initially unless the POI designers heavily back off of, preferably completely stop putting in, the ambush spawning for the bandit POIs. Especially the triggered spawn ins with pincering or fully surrounding of the player out of nowhere. Leaving a cleared room or entering an empty one only to have one or more spawn in and pump a shot, dump a mag, or introduce the head of a melee weapon into your back, sneaking or not, is going to be a whole other level of hell no.

 
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