PC 2 Features that Alpha 17 has broken the game with

Start with the minor one:
Crafting firearms. It's now far too easy to obtain firearms, and it just makes the game into a shooter. I really enjoyed taking risks and exploring far and wide to obtain rare components - especially the weapon parts needed for turrets. Now, as soon as I have the perks needed to craft firearms, I feel like I'm in God Mode. No more fun.
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Unless you play on creative and give yourself exp, its impossible to craft literally ANY firearm before obtaining it through loot, quest reward or from trader at quality 5 or 6 at least 20 levels before you actually have enough resources/can craft steel, so yeah, nah.

In addition, Q6 or Q5 gives you nothing over Q1 or Q2 unless you have mods and they are rather rare.There is also matter of perks and required attributes, so if you can craft firearms and use them effectively without mods, you can't do literally anything else well, you're not a god, you're a nerd with a gun who is fragile like a girl.

The Zombie AI is both improved and has broken the game completely. I'm talking about the zombies' psychic-sapper ability. "Sapper" is an old-fashioned term for a military engineer; an expert in detecting weaknesses in defenses and exploiting them. In Alpha 17, ALL the Z have a PhD in military engineering, and they all target the same weakness instantly. The result of this is that there is no more fun in defending. None whatsoever. All you have to do is set up a base where there's an obvious, highly accessible weakness, and they all go for it. There's no longer any risk of being flanked or surprised. Add to this the fact that the Z no longer lose their legs (which was funny) and do crazy amounts of block damage, and you remove all the fun that had otherwise been added by their much better ability to jump - especially jumping on top of each other to get over walls - love that, and of course, the new ragdoll effects.
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Oh there is fun in defending and its as effective as it was - you simply fail at it, because you refuse to understand new mechanics and adjust your building/defenses. Easy mode bunkers or walls work no longer, if you will not adapt, you will not have fun time, I have a blast with new AI together with my friends.

You are no longer able to build exploitive bases, boo hoo.

No single place is safe and no, exploiting is not "building smart", its exploiting.

You want to build smart, then adjust your building to new AI and use traps and active defense to succeed or fail miserable crying that your old exploits got fixed.

The game is now fun until you build a base, and that makes it kinda pointless. Which is a pity. I enjoyed it up to now.
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Speak for yourself.

Your old base is not working and you're refusing to adapt.

 
Unless you play on creative and give yourself exp, its impossible to craft literally ANY firearm before obtaining it through loot, quest reward or from trader at quality 5 or 6 at least 20 levels before you actually have enough resources/can craft steel, so yeah, nah.In addition, Q6 or Q5 gives you nothing over Q1 or Q2 unless you have mods and they are rather rare.There is also matter of perks and required attributes, so if you can craft firearms and use them effectively without mods, you can't do literally anything else well, you're not a god, you're a nerd with a gun who is fragile like a girl.

Oh there is fun in defending and its as effective as it was - you simply fail at it, because you refuse to understand new mechanics and adjust your building/defenses. Easy mode bunkers or walls work no longer, if you will not adapt, you will not have fun time, I have a blast with new AI together with my friends.

You are no longer able to build exploitive bases, boo hoo.

No single place is safe and no, exploiting is not "building smart", its exploiting.

You want to build smart, then adjust your building to new AI and use traps and active defense to succeed or fail miserable crying that your old exploits got fixed.

Speak for yourself.

Your old base is not working and you're refusing to adapt.
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I dont understand why you always write so much text, all you say is same, its always

- you dont want to adapt

- you dont want to learn

- you refuse to understand

the current AI is not smart its just cheating until you do something you think is smart and adpating , and thats using this cheating AI to win.

it is easy mode bunker building if you can make zombies attack only the one location you want, it is stupid AI cheating if zombies know the entire base layout before they are inside and run around to "learn" the layout of the base.

So speak for yourself.

You want easy bunker building with a really not smart but cheating AI and that is what you got with alpha 17 so i can understand why you are happy.

 
Unless you play on creative and give yourself exp, its impossible to craft literally ANY firearm before obtaining it through loot, quest reward or from trader at quality 5 or 6 at least 20 levels before you actually have enough resources/can craft steel, so yeah, nah.In addition, Q6 or Q5 gives you nothing over Q1 or Q2 unless you have mods and they are rather rare.There is also matter of perks and required attributes, so if you can craft firearms and use them effectively without mods, you can't do literally anything else well, you're not a god, you're a nerd with a gun who is fragile like a girl.

Oh there is fun in defending and its as effective as it was - you simply fail at it, because you refuse to understand new mechanics and adjust your building/defenses. Easy mode bunkers or walls work no longer, if you will not adapt, you will not have fun time, I have a blast with new AI together with my friends.

You are no longer able to build exploitive bases, boo hoo.

No single place is safe and no, exploiting is not "building smart", its exploiting.

You want to build smart, then adjust your building to new AI and use traps and active defense to succeed or fail miserable crying that your old exploits got fixed.

Speak for yourself.

Your old base is not working and you're refusing to adapt.
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You do have to admit though that regardless of how you defend that the zombies do just too much dmg to blocks too fast. Adapting is one thing but when concrete walls may as just well be paper mache, then it becomes a game of abusing their pathfinding and skill points spent to make stronger blocks for your base are basically wasted points.

 
Yup, both points are very true. But somehow saying this means we want the game easier/cant adapt, as you will see if you read many other posts saying the same things you do :?
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And here comes a prime example of what your said.

Oh there is fun in defending and its as effective as it was - you simply fail at it, because you refuse to understand new mechanics and adjust your building/defenses. Easy mode bunkers or walls work no longer, if you will not adapt, you will not have fun time, I have a blast with new AI together with my friends.You are no longer able to build exploitive bases, boo hoo.

No single place is safe and no, exploiting is not "building smart", its exploiting.

You want to build smart, then adjust your building to new AI and use traps and active defense to succeed or fail miserable crying that your old exploits got fixed.

Speak for yourself.

Your old base is not working and you're refusing to adapt.
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You missed the OPs point entirely. Once the mechanics are understood and defenses are built with the mechanics in mind it is easier to build a safe base in many ways than it was before. Sure, old easy bases are gone, but it is actually cheaper and easier to build a safe base that exploits the current AI than it was to exploit the prior AI. Just a different tactic required.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Old AI, with maybe some jumping would be perfect for Zombies. Any structural engineering checks should be reserved or placed with bandits and removed from animals and zombies. However, this opinion is colored by the tint of our reality, and the media in our reality related to zombies.

 
Start with the minor one:
Crafting firearms. It's now far too easy to obtain firearms, and it just makes the game into a shooter. I really enjoyed taking risks and exploring far and wide to obtain rare components - especially the weapon parts needed for turrets. Now, as soon as I have the perks needed to craft firearms, I feel like I'm in God Mode. No more fun.

The Zombie AI is both improved and has broken the game completely. I'm talking about the zombies' psychic-sapper ability. "Sapper" is an old-fashioned term for a military engineer; an expert in detecting weaknesses in defenses and exploiting them. In Alpha 17, ALL the Z have a PhD in military engineering, and they all target the same weakness instantly. The result of this is that there is no more fun in defending. None whatsoever. All you have to do is set up a base where there's an obvious, highly accessible weakness, and they all go for it. There's no longer any risk of being flanked or surprised. Add to this the fact that the Z no longer lose their legs (which was funny) and do crazy amounts of block damage, and you remove all the fun that had otherwise been added by their much better ability to jump - especially jumping on top of each other to get over walls - love that, and of course, the new ragdoll effects.

The game is now fun until you build a base, and that makes it kinda pointless. Which is a pity. I enjoyed it up to now.
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I agree to a degree... But... Are we all forgetting the past?!?

Wasn't everyone complaining that A17 was taking too long?!? Yes!

What did TFP say? "Its a complete re-write" or something to that effect.

Therefore if it was a complete re-write then what they probably would have done is to get the AI working good, get everything 'as best as they can' for the time they had... Then release it... As they did. Then we get to B240 knowing full well that a lot of things need to be tweaked. As for the AI its been noted something to the effect that it needs to be dumb down, but this AI that we are indeed seeing 'is the best' they could get to in the time alotted. Now they can make modifications and/or tweaks to their hearts content. I'm 99.3417502 percent sure that this isn't going to be the final Ai.

In Summary: So its been completely re-written and now needs tweaking, albeit we've had only a little time to B240... TFP will get to it as soon as they can or have planed to get to it. I would presume that the POI issue is their next issue, before others.

 
I just hope they drop A17.1 quickly because they already changed some numbers on some things players complain about, but the changes did not make it into B240.

 
Funny how everyone accuse each other of easy mode lover but in reality in 16 if you knew which blocks to use and how to build it was easy mode and in 17 if you know how to work the AI is easy mode. Once you understand the rules and mechanics there's no challenge unless you shoot your own foot using sub optimal tactics or builds, that's why the game needs more flexibility, this gaming Darwinism of adapt or die is going to kill the playerbase and transform this great game into a dayz

 
You do have to admit though that regardless of how you defend that the zombies do just too much dmg to blocks too fast. Adapting is one thing but when concrete walls may as just well be paper mache, then it becomes a game of abusing their pathfinding and skill points spent to make stronger blocks for your base are basically wasted points.
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I honestly can't tell, because I haven't used walls to stop them in A17 yet, only to funnel them into traps and firing range.

Since A16 I build 2 bases.

Main one, where I do everything and secondary horde night base, which is specifically designed to succesfully fend off horde, new AI allows to run them through all the traps without a single wall block being ever threaten.

My combat base still uses cobblestone walls and not a single one was even damaged so far and I'm only going to expand it to have easier time.

As I have said, old designs do not work, what I used in A16 doesn't function in A17, so I came up with a new way to use the new AI without actually exploiting it in any way.

And yes, using their pathing against them is currently the intended way to deal with them.

Redesign of spikes and barbed wire fences and removal of log spikes screams at you to change your ways and so I did.

In A16 and before you had to build strong.

In A17 you just need to build smart and not in "exploiting bedrock" kind.

Learn new AI and use it against itself, it will eat some iron in early game and by mid and late game traps will replace spikes and with little help from player to finish off strugglers who make it through, defense while not easy, is definitely possible and resource light compared to try to just wall them off of yourself.

 
Crafting firearms: The thing is, weapons are useless right now unless you have all levels of perception. The quality level doesn't affect the weapon's damage anymore, just the durability. This means that a level 1 (grey) shotgun is just as efficient as a level 6 (purple) shotgun.
There's no need to craft firearms if this is the case, and to be honest, with the amount of firearms you can just find while exploring, it really isn't that big of a deal.

Zombie AI: I disagree wholeheartedly. One of the great things this alpha has been the much needed improvement of zombie AI. Now zombies are actually fun and somewhat challenging.

You say that all they do is attack the weak points of the base. I mean, that's what they should do, otherwise they just smack at random places of the house like before, which isn't fun or challenging, just annoying since you know you'll have to repair it next morning.
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Not really, the AI's pathing system is very easy to exploit, take that big church POI, make a base up the cieling, on the floor use barbed wire fences, and wooden frames upgrade once to make a zig-zag path, and make sure to have a ladder at the back of the church to lead up to you, knock out the back stairs, zombies now all come in from the front, and will now walk thru the zigzag of barbed wire fences, while you shoot them from above thru iron bars, to get to the ladder in the back to get up to you. They will 100% all follow this same path every horde night. ALl you need for a base now is a 4-5 high base, with 3-4 high walls, and barbed wire fences in a zigzag pattern leading to a way to get up to you thats unobstructed, and now the ai is bascally lambs to the slaughter as they will literally go single file down the path, as it "costs" less to walk thru air than busting blocks.

When I build this in the big church POI, I get thru horde night with virtually 0 block damage, in fact I probally do more damage to the blocks than the zombies do due to missed shots, or if I use molotovs tossed at the door they all come in. Ideally, I'd want some dart shooters, and a fan trap or 2 right by that door, since its the only way in for them.

In a later alpha or an update to a17 this will be fixed though, as they are going to add a random chance or something simmlar of a zombie being a "dumb" zombie where it acts more like a a16.4 zombie and just tries to beeline it to you no matter what blocks are in its way. So its not as predictable.

As for the gun issue, it doesn't bother me much. If anything they shouldn't be craftable and should be loot/trader only but thats me as well as have chances of guns lower a fair bit in loot. Think about it a gun is a precision machined tool, I doubt you can make a ak47, or something out of scrap iron, yeah it uses forged steel in game, but you can still make that from scrap iron so point still stands. I don't mind the guns so much as I bascally never use guns like ever, make too much noise, and ammo is a pain to make, why use a gun when a compound bow can do the job silently. I do however always keep a shotgun on my hotbar, in A17, the shotgun is finally a decent gun again, hits like a truck but near pointblank for max damage as it should be, so its my "oh crap!" gun. The Pistol is actually a fairly decent gun as well with a magazine extender on it. ak47 is good, marksman rifle/hunting rifle are crap though imo.

The devs also need to make the silencer actually work, and remove its massive damage penalty, even on a pistol with a silencer firing a shot ot 2 still brings the entire poi down on you, making the mod virtually useless.

 
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And here comes a prime example of what your said.

You missed the OPs point entirely. Once the mechanics are understood and defenses are built with the mechanics in mind it is easier to build a safe base in many ways than it was before. Sure, old easy bases are gone, but it is actually cheaper and easier to build a safe base that exploits the current AI than it was to exploit the prior AI. Just a different tactic required.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Old AI, with maybe some jumping would be perfect for Zombies. Any structural engineering checks should be reserved or placed with bandits and removed from animals and zombies. However, this opinion is colored by the tint of our reality, and the media in our reality related to zombies.
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I fail to see how have I misunderstood it.

Yes, if mechanics are understood, its not bad.

That's the very point I've made.

However understanding mechanics does not equal to abusing broken AI that can't navigate properly if you're deep under or having 10 layers of walls, OP tries to apply old solutions to new game, fails at that and complains.

I completely welcome zombies having ability to tear your stuff down if you build it wrong as it forces you to rethink your defenive building and come up with new stuff and I couldn't be more happy of the new AI, because some of my previously A16 failed designs are now perfectly viable.

At the moment it is just as easy as it used to be, you simply have to build different for it.

 
I fail to see how have I misunderstood it.Yes, if mechanics are understood, its not bad.

That's the very point I've made.

However understanding mechanics does not equal to abusing broken AI that can't navigate properly if you're deep under or having 10 layers of walls, OP tries to apply old solutions to new game, fails at that and complains.

I completely welcome zombies having ability to tear your stuff down if you build it wrong as it forces you to rethink your defenive building and come up with new stuff and I couldn't be more happy of the new AI, because some of my previously A16 failed designs are now perfectly viable.

At the moment it is just as easy as it used to be, you simply have to build different for it.
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Yep, if anything its easier now, as you can pretty much have a set path you want the zombies to take everytime. If yoru base is a big swuare, they will go to the one entrance you happen to leave open for em. Like my big brown church poi example.

 
I fail to see how have I misunderstood it.Yes, if mechanics are understood, its not bad.

That's the very point I've made.

However understanding mechanics does not equal to abusing broken AI that can't navigate properly if you're deep under or having 10 layers of walls, OP tries to apply old solutions to new game, fails at that and complains.

I completely welcome zombies having ability to tear your stuff down if you build it wrong as it forces you to rethink your defenive building and come up with new stuff and I couldn't be more happy of the new AI, because some of my previously A16 failed designs are now perfectly viable.

At the moment it is just as easy as it used to be, you simply have to build different for it.
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In not one spot do I see your claims of the ops tactics. Maybe I'm just getting blind in my old age?

 
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Yep, if anything its easier now, as you can pretty much have a set path you want the zombies to take everytime. If yoru base is a big swuare, they will go to the one entrance you happen to leave open for em. Like my big brown church poi example.
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In A16 you wouldn't have needed to even make the maze of traps, you could have just broken a rung of the ladder and stood above them. Anyone claiming A17 is "easier" for hordes wasn't even trying in A16.

 
Z does not recognise spike as threat. spikes are like every other block with value to break or go around. i saw today twice, when z walked in to spikes, because wall around was too strong. i like smart z. old ones (a16) was too dumb and too easy to defend with spikes
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That's what I'm getting at. Go to any POI, axe open the door, throw down a spike and shoot a zed inside. They'll break down the adjacent wall rather than walk through the spike. It's been pretty aggravating to me.

 
Start with the minor one:
Crafting firearms. It's now far too easy to obtain firearms, and it just makes the game into a shooter. I really enjoyed taking risks and exploring far and wide to obtain rare components - especially the weapon parts needed for turrets. Now, as soon as I have the perks needed to craft firearms, I feel like I'm in God Mode. No more fun.

The Zombie AI is both improved and has broken the game completely. I'm talking about the zombies' psychic-sapper ability. "Sapper" is an old-fashioned term for a military engineer; an expert in detecting weaknesses in defenses and exploiting them. In Alpha 17, ALL the Z have a PhD in military engineering, and they all target the same weakness instantly. The result of this is that there is no more fun in defending. None whatsoever. All you have to do is set up a base where there's an obvious, highly accessible weakness, and they all go for it. There's no longer any risk of being flanked or surprised. Add to this the fact that the Z no longer lose their legs (which was funny) and do crazy amounts of block damage, and you remove all the fun that had otherwise been added by their much better ability to jump - especially jumping on top of each other to get over walls - love that, and of course, the new ragdoll effects.

The game is now fun until you build a base, and that makes it kinda pointless. Which is a pity. I enjoyed it up to now.
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They have repeatedly stated that this is the first iteration of the AI and that it, in its current state, has no random factors in it. It determines what it believes to be the best path to you and takes it. It should be expected that an update for it will happen rather quickly.

 
As I have said, old designs do not work, what I used in A16 doesn't function in A17, so I came up with a new way to use the new AI without actually exploiting it in any way.
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This may come as a news flash to you, but what you are doing is exploiting the AI. Calling it something else doesn't change the facts. If you are still confused I would look up "exploit" in a dictionary.

The fact of the matter is the AI is highly exploitable. You just can't dig to bedrock and be safe anymore. Now you can build UP and be just as safe. Until zombies can recognize SI and demo a building properly, they will never be more than a nuisance.

 
This may come as a news flash to you, but what you are doing is exploiting the AI. Calling it something else doesn't change the facts. If you are still confused I would look up "exploit" in a dictionary.
The fact of the matter is the AI is highly exploitable. You just can't dig to bedrock and be safe anymore. Now you can build UP and be just as safe. Until zombies can recognize SI and demo a building properly, they will never be more than a nuisance.
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And this might come as a surprise to you, but I'm using it in the intended way, as MM was suggesting in the A17 preview vids talking about AI, mixing spikes and barbed wires + active defense in early game and traps in late game, I'm not using actual pathing exploits to make them think there is a block where it isn't, creating looping conga line you are 100% free to kill with a bow as long as there are no spiders or cops mixed in.

Using AI in an exact way not only a developer, but actual dude who came up with this game directly said to =! exploit.

 
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