PC A17's design is bad - learn from Sony

[chinothepony]

A17 becomes Kiddie Happy meal around level 100 (day 30) when you have top tier of all weapons and a ton of mods in each. Same with armour. And all the key perks maxed too. You are basically maxed in terms of firepower. And this being maxed occurs much earlier than it did in A16, sadly. And being maxed in A17 is much more OP than being maxed in A16 was. 3 sniper rifle head shots for an irradiated cop....
Now many players are reaching level 100+ the cracks in the overall progression design are beginning to show.

This is just my opinion but I find any zombie ability and habit comparisons to A16 to be pretty moot. A16 had serious issues with how easy it was from the get go to get around zombies both in day and night. Their pathing was terrible and would have them sending themselves at a door even from the inside over you. They were drunk, sometimes, never even hearing or bothering with you even though you were right there with them. So maybe it's because I've been playing a while? But I found A16 kiddie Happy Meal to be around 7 days on up.

A17 is making me feel powerful at level 90ish which is around the time you have described. but A17 still manages to throw me off guard with some of the crazy spawns in the POIs. And this is with 200 health. So all in all, I find A17 much more challenging altogether. Having an irradiated spider zombie be the first to smack me right at the start of the blood moon by leaping 4 rows of my metal pikes up to my face on the second floor railing I've built is amazing.

 

[Pizzalicious]

I wouldnt compare TFP to SoE. SWG was dying a slow death because of WoW. The NGE and combat upgrade hastened the downfall.

 

[Krougal]

It's been a lot of eggs so far. I've strayed away from bacon and eggs because of the cost of meat now. 5 raw to 1 cooked is a bit OTT.
I don't food to be another thing I need to micromanage but it should have a meaningful bearing.

However, I don't want this food analogy to take over the OPs thread.

As you were.

Don't worry about the OPs thread; he starts a new rant every day, sometimes multiples. Negative feedback is 1 thing, nonstop bitching like a broken record is another.

So we had a discussion about this recently. If it was 1:1 on cooking, then meat from animals would get reduced 5:1 , same net effect.

So why not do it? The granularity leaves room for tweaking and also for modding.

You and others that get upset over this are letting an abstract # bother you, we don't even know what 5 meat is, it's a generic unit. Maybe it's an ounce, so 5 ounces of meat goes into 1 meal. I joked that if you had less than 5 pieces of bacon and 2 eggs it just wasn't worth bothering to fire up the grill.

 

[PoppaTot]

Don't worry about the OPs thread; he starts a new rant every day, sometimes multiples. Negative feedback is 1 thing, nonstop bitching like a broken record is another.
So we had a discussion about this recently. If it was 1:1 on cooking, then meat from animals would get reduced 5:1 , same net effect.

So why not do it? The granularity leaves room for tweaking and also for modding.

You and others that get upset over this are letting an abstract # bother you, we don't even know what 5 meat is, it's a generic unit. Maybe it's an ounce, so 5 ounces of meat goes into 1 meal. I joked that if you had less than 5 pieces of bacon and 2 eggs it just wasn't worth bothering to fire up the grill.

It was explained to me that it is a 5:1 ratio because there is now a new perk that will allow for reduced meat in cooking. IE: 20% less meat needed, so now your ratio would be 4:1 if you have this perk.

At least that is what I gathered. Perks, again, are the reason for the change.

 

[OzHawkeye]

I've deleted multiple posts from this thread. Please keep it civil.

 

[meganoth]

A17 becomes Kiddie Happy meal around level 100 (day 30) when you have top tier of all weapons and a ton of mods in each. Same with armour. And all the key perks maxed too. You are basically maxed in terms of firepower. And this being maxed occurs much earlier than it did in A16, sadly.

What is your definition of being maxed out?

I think you said elsewhere that you are a completionist that isn't satisfied until he has every gun, even the elusive magnun at quality 600. Is that your definition? For non-completionists A16 was usually finished somewhere around lvl 80 or 100 (? Not sure, I played A16 vanilla a looong time ago, after that lots of mods. Maybe I'm even mixing it up with days, that would be embarrassing :cocksure: ). There is no relevant difference between a magnum at q 560 and one at q 600. Only for people with OCD.

 

[Vlyse]

Yo sorry TFP, I don't like being mediocre at everything for 50 something levels. I don't like putting 1/5 or 2/5 into everything and nothing being good until 3/5 and I arbitrarily can't get to 3/5 until lvl 50 is it? Right. The progression sucks.

 

[SBCHavoc]

There is a LOT of shallow b!tching going on here, with very little productive feedback.

Personally, I am thrilled with the changes from a16 to a17. There is an actual level of danger and difficulty.

That said, I do think the skill / leveling system needs some work, and I agree that the skills that leveling the more you used them were a great feature.

My biggest complaint is the way that 'schematics' are used up after you craft them? I mean, that is just silly. Say that I am playing with my friends, and I find a sweet schematic for +50% damage to trees, OR a Silencer even. Now being that I am the INT focused character, and I tend to do the crafting for our group - I can now craft ONE of these for us... And now I forgot how to craft them, even though I just did it...? I think that schematics should be learned - if you want to make it a bit harder, maybe make the crafter craft 2 or 3 of them from schematics then they learn it?

 

[Thunderfrog]

There is a LOT of shallow b!tching going on here, with very little productive feedback.
Personally, I am thrilled with the changes from a16 to a17. There is an actual level of danger and difficulty.

That said, I do think the skill / leveling system needs some work, and I agree that the skills that leveling the more you used them were a great feature.

My biggest complaint is the way that 'schematics' are used up after you craft them? I mean, that is just silly. Say that I am playing with my friends, and I find a sweet schematic for +50% damage to trees, OR a Silencer even. Now being that I am the INT focused character, and I tend to do the crafting for our group - I can now craft ONE of these for us... And now I forgot how to craft them, even though I just did it...? I think that schematics should be learned - if you want to make it a bit harder, maybe make the crafter craft 2 or 3 of them from schematics then they learn it?

There's also a lot of TFP apologists popping in too, dismissing productive feedback with either "learn 2 play" or "it isn't A16 anymore.", which seems to be a blanket arguement for any complaint.

How long has this game been in Alpha? How long will it be in Alpha? How much money has it made as an alpha?

I can forgive younger alphas more readily because they are only usually a year or so into development or because the devs are running off donations and shoe string budgets.

7 Days has been a for sale Alpha for what seems like an eon, and as I've said before, will probably never be what they consider market ready. The time will come when people aren't paying for endless reboots of the same gameplay, and they slap a final patch on it and give it over to the modding community so they can start the next project.

There's a LOT to defend about 7 days, it's one of my favorite games precisely because of the full voxel environs, but there will come a day where someone offers the same concept but does it better, and like Sony's online RPG division, they will be left wishing they had been less stubborn and paid more attention.

@OP - I loved me some bureaucrat Xp and creature handling!

 

[InuYasha]

Why I dont like A17...

First off:

Calling this an Alpha is a 100% get out of jail free card. This game has NOT been released yet. It is still in development. The developers have every right to try something new and see what THEY think about it. Any problems or issues with the game are understandable, since it's an alpha.

I know that and the following is just my opinion to the changes in A17.

___________________________________________________________

There are some reasons why I prefer to play A16.

[...]In A15 you are what you want, as fast as you want, but you have to work for it. In A16 it actually improved by giving me the choice of spending points in attributes (focusing early game) or only buying perks and levelling attributes the slow way. And while some parts were flawed, most of it was alright, just waiting to be balanced and enriched.A17 threw all that away and now we have a bland perk system, nothing I do influences my character, so even if im only out there farming grass 24/7, I can still be a master ninja/smith/fighter/deadshot out there. Because everyone unlocks the same perks at the same time.[...]

That´s why I don´t like the new pork-System. Err, perk...

My biggest complaint is the way that 'schematics' are used up after you craft them? I mean, that is just silly. Say that I am playing with my friends, and I find a sweet schematic for +50% damage to trees, OR a Silencer even. Now being that I am the INT focused character, and I tend to do the crafting for our group - I can now craft ONE of these for us... And now I forgot how to craft them, even though I just did it...? I think that schematics should be learned - if you want to make it a bit harder, maybe make the crafter craft 2 or 3 of them from schematics then they learn it?

Maybe a feature that can be turned on/off in the game settings? ON -> Player will forget it, OFF -> Player will learn it...

There are some minor things, but all in all I will continue playing A16 for now.

(sorry for my english, I´m german)

 

[Bubbahotetp]

What's kinda funny about that article is that it specifies the main objection being that the powerful Jedi profession was changed to being able to be chosen at the very beginning of the game. So if SONY makes powerful abilities available from Day 1 but TFP gates powerful abilities until later in the game aren't they being the opposite of SONY?

Nice to know that I'm not the only one who likes to ask pointy questions. I have nothing to fear. ;P

 

[ricp]

Not going to get involved in this particular bun fight, but I do love people who come out with explicit claims like "A17's design is bad" then throws in a comparison to a AAA title that has endless resources and finances thrown at it.

These games are not comparable, neither is the development process, and the Engadget piece is nothing more than 2 paragraphs that roughly translates as "already annoyed and volatile playerbase gets just that little more annoyed and volatile".

 

[Greymantle]

Well, I was there when the NGE hit and I have no idea why you feel this way. The NGE gutted what SWG was about while 7 days to die plays pretty much the same with some gated content to slow down progression. With modlets you can make the game easier with no gated content if that is what you want. With modlets you can pretty much make the game how you want to play give it a try.

IMHO this version takes the game to a new level of awesome and with some polish and more content were talking best game ever.

 

[lazyknob]

Here is the counterargument to that point: I am one single person and in about ten restarts I have not unlocked the same perks in the same way in each of those ten restarts. And that's just me comparing myself to myself. Now if you look at the 24,000 people who returned to play this weekend there have got to be thousands of those who played A17 and played it differently from each other because what you say ONLY applies to people who insist on playing the game optimally and for them it doesn't matter whether there are different progression pathways because as soon as they find The One True Path they will forevermore play the game that way.
I have no doubt you unlock the same perks every single time and that it perfectly matches the same exact algorithm chosen by your friends. You all probably had fun exactly once as you discussed and figured out the most efficient order to play and since then it's always been the same. Not everyone plays like that and the game does support choosing different player builds by spending your points in different areas and it is a lot of fun for me and I suppose those like me.

And people like me are thankful that the Kiddie Happy Meal known as A16 has been replaced by the 4* grown up meal we are now digesting.

It's just preferences, man. The designs are different and one is not objectively better than another. One is better for you and another is better for him and another is better for me. Do I like everything about A17? No. But overall it is the best update yet and I can't wait for mods to get fleshed out and for balancing to bring the current design to an even higher level.

I find this set of perks pretty fun. It fills the purpose of 'classes' if.... you're able to specialize in it soon enough to feel the investment.

Thing is, in the first 20 or 30 levels, putting aside perks which unlock certain crafts, every other perk doesn't feel impactful in the sense that, though you can place points differently at the start on every playthrough, it doesn't matter all that much. Aside from the sneak attack bonus which helps a lot with sleeper headshots.

Now if we could somehow balance out access to level 5 perks sooner without the level gates with less perk points or higher costs in unlocking the perk, personally, I'd feel that to be very fulfilling as I'd feel more specialized in the path I'm to choose.

Otherwise 'a little bit of this and that' though the permutation can be different, doesn't make the experience significantly different from my point of view. When you get lvl 4 or 5s too late, with the current perk budget, it's often at the point in gameplay where even if you started off different, you pretty much end up the same.

 

[Maynard69]

It's been a lot of eggs so far. I've strayed away from bacon and eggs because of the cost of meat now. 5 raw to 1 cooked is a bit OTT.
I don't food to be another thing I need to micromanage but it should have a meaningful bearing.

However, I don't want this food analogy to take over the OPs thread.

As you were.

day5 on my current playthrough and I have 18 bacon and eggs minus the ones i have been eating and 308 meat without purposefully trying to hunt. There is tons of animals, and the opposite of a shortage of meat in this iteration. (thats with 0 points into huntsman and using a bone shiv)