C'mon what happened to the brilliant ideas?
Alpha 16 is the best. All downhill from there.
- Thread starter Batman
- Start date
zztong
Hunter
Yes, I'm not a "must-have" LBD person, but I recognize those promoting LBD don't necessarily want to just revert.
A16 didn't have crafting lots of axes to learn crafting. I didn't go back and play A15 or A14 to see LBD then, but since folks talk of crafting lots of axes, doesn't that mean LBD was evolved over some period of time?
Kalen
Survivor
Well, not so much evolved as removed piece by piece.
SylenThunder
Community Moderator / IT Guru
Didn't like having to craft and shoot ten thousand arrows into the sky to get better at archery either.
And then there were the really stupid things to exploit the system like raising armor and medical by making a bunch of med kits, and then running around on spike and using bandages to raise the skills.
Way too much of LBD required a wasteful amount of resource gathering for the sake of raising the skills. You didn't actually play the game.
EvilPolygons
Survivor
But you have to understand that powergamers enjoy grinding, meta, and exploitation. For them, that's what gaming is all about. So for you and me it's being forced into a situation where we can't actually play the game -- but for a powergamer that stuff literally IS the game.
theFlu
Hunter
Most of exploiting an LBD might be fixed by copy-pasting the current drinking mechanic.
In the background, hidden:
Have a pool that is ready to receive "learning water" to 100. When you do an LBD action, fill that bar by 30, and visibly give a progress point.
Have the fullness of the bar decay slowly.
Once full, have some notification to point out that "learning is wasted" for a while. Like the overhydrated buff. That state might work as temporary boost in you "actual ability", say 5% more damage for clubs when swinging them enough. So it's a buff you want, but also a warning of overdoing it "for learning".
Complex? Sure. But no more than water...
Exploitable? Yeah, but you'd then "optimize" to try and max out "everything" ... that doesn't seem too inviting.
In the background, hidden:
Have a pool that is ready to receive "learning water" to 100. When you do an LBD action, fill that bar by 30, and visibly give a progress point.
Have the fullness of the bar decay slowly.
Once full, have some notification to point out that "learning is wasted" for a while. Like the overhydrated buff. That state might work as temporary boost in you "actual ability", say 5% more damage for clubs when swinging them enough. So it's a buff you want, but also a warning of overdoing it "for learning".
Complex? Sure. But no more than water...
Exploitable? Yeah, but you'd then "optimize" to try and max out "everything" ... that doesn't seem too inviting.
I think it would have been possible to rework the old system to be more enjoyable. You could earn points in tools by doing actions such as chopping trees or wrenching cars and each would provide varying amounts of experience. There is no base crafting skill so you wouldn't craft 100 clubs but rather get exp from killing zombies with your respective weapon. Each weapon would have it's own modifier for example a M60 would give less exp per kill than a wooden club. You could then make each zombie provide different exp value amounts on kill. You can also control the progress a bit better than magazines as you don't have to worry about being lucky or unlucky in loot.
Now that would be a lot of work which is why I said I am fine with the current system but with a little imagination it wouldn't be any harder to fix than the current skill implementation IMO.
Some things like vehicles, etc would need some thoughts on or perhaps make those into perks/books as I still think a LBD in conjunction with a perk system would be the best.
InfiniteWarrior
Scavenger
Exactly. "Power gamers," speed runners, etc., don't have to do it, but they do. And the rest of the gaming community pays the price for what they do. No one had to smith hundreds of iron daggers to raise their smithing skill in Skyrim. I never did, but some did. So, learn by doing has come to mean something that has to be avoided at all costs among developers. I don't get that, but it has despite the huge audience that is going to play games organically as opposed to mechanically because they're in it for the aesthetics and not the math.
EvilPolygons
Survivor
EvilPolygons
Survivor
Yep. Developers feel that they need to balance their games against powergamers, even if those kinds of players are a relatively small minority. And honestly -- outside of MMOs -- they don't even have that much effect on the way other people play. Especially when you're talking about single player or co-op games.
And as you said, the rest of us pay the price for that.
theFlu
Hunter
What's the price? You don't seem too keen on having an LBD, or am I reading you all wrong?
If you want one, but can't have it "due to minmaxing nerds", then there's somewhat of a point; but there's no need to to design it minmax-proof, just playable (ignore the people who destroy their own fun, like Roland always suggests). So the point is kinda "but TFP doesn't dare to do it for .. reputational reasons?"
If you don't want an LBD in the first place, what's this price you're paying?
zztong
Hunter
The realist in me sees the appeal. You get better at harvesting something you've been trained to do, like cut down trees or mine. So the perks that influence how much damage you do to trees or terrain, or how many resources you get, could be replaced with a LBD equivalent. The "PRO" is you have to actually do it to get better.
But isn't there a "CON"? Wouldn't you stop getting experience from harvesting resources? Once you've mastered mining, there's nothing more to learn, right? Or are you double-dipping... getting something from both approaches by improving your LBD skill and earning XP to spend on other Perks?
InfiniteWarrior
Scavenger
I'll let EvilPolygons speak to your misunderstanding, but the price paid by the rest of the gaming community is the loss of enjoyment they derive(d) from playing a different way than the power gamers and speed runners, etc. Developers who say they want to support as many playstyles as possible probably do, but don't in practice because the power gamers and speed runners, etc., are setting the tone.
By way of analogy, you've heard the lamentful cry of RPG lovers everywhere who can rarely find an actual RPG anymore because...Todd and Emil, et alia, have decided the vast majority of players just run around saying, "shut up, shut up, shut up" to NPCs (in Todd's words) and "spend 20 hours hunting for bobbleheads...30 hours building settlements," ignoring the story and dialogue (according to Emil). Well, they came by their delusions honestly because their supposed (but not) RPGs still do very well financially and, of course, publishers have no clue how much more financially successful their games would be if so many segments of their natural audiences weren't being left out in the cold.
EvilPolygons
Survivor
I was speaking generally, of course. The price we pay is that game designers make certain types of game systems/mechanics either unnecessarily obtuse or overly simple in their battle against exploiters and powergamers. I remember back in City of Heroes days that a number of severe nerfs got applied to the Mission Architect system because the powergamers were exploiting it in order to power level their way to 50. So everybody who used the Mission Architect was punished because a group of knuckleheads couldn't resist exploiting the system.
Yes. That would be the case. But I don't think that to be a problem because you still get the needed resources from it. It's not like people will stop gathering wood just because they maxed out their skills. Though if you maxed out shotguns and still used them you wouldn't generate exp for pistols as an example whereas with magazines you will still eventually get enough to craft your pistols.
Unless you put a limit on how much skill you could earn in a day it would be hard to 100% balance progression between someone who just focuses on leveling one thing at a time versus someone who just plays the game naturally, but skill magazines are similar in that points spent increase the chance for you to get similar books thus artificially increasing your ability to craft specific higher level items all the same.
theFlu
Hunter
They're not, the devs are. TFP is proud of it; or at least used to be, before the town hall ... dunno if their tone has shifted; unlikely. Disaster management and back to doing their own thing.
No idea of that game/situation, but again, the devs are the ones doing the dev ...
Optimizers will always exist, that's not a bad thing, nor a bad hobby. Letting them get in the way of game design, that's up to the dev. Sure, broken "optimizations" need to be weeded out, like the empty-handed consumable use that was fixed here (I think?). In there, optimizers are basically free QA. Assigning malice to people who like to optimize things is assigning malice on your GPU devs.
Like IW's RPG example, some devs will cater to a mass of action players, but even paperback RPGs are still being printed. That audience isn't even small. A complaint about an aRPG title not being a pure RPG is just basically "this world might be so nice for great storytelling, sad it isn't." Well, "this world would be a nice fit for LBD, sad it isn't." I might be in a tiny minority, being an optimizer and an LBD fan; but I take no blame for TFP's actions
EvilPolygons
Survivor
Yes, and the players have to deal with whatever the devs decide to do in order to curtail cheating and exploiting. That's literally the whole point. Innocent gamers get caught in the crossfire. It's the exact same principle you see in Real Life that causes the eternal, never-ending battle between liberty and authoritarianism.
"Someone might do a bad thing, which would be bad, so we have to curtail everyone's rights in some regard to make it harder for anyone to ever do this bad thing. Even if hardly anyone ever does this bad thing."
Kalen
Survivor
But there were, IMO, easy solutions to these problems that would've made LBD work the way it was intended
InfiniteWarrior
Scavenger
Which often isn't even cheating and exploiting. What's exploitative about outrunning a bird on a bicycle on a normal day in the desert? Nothing, but vulture speed has been changed to match vehicle speed in this latest update regardless. They literally sit atop your head until you decide to stop and swat them off and heal up the few points of health you've lost. How annoying.
Can't build underground bases anymore? Well, that's because a few people decided to AFK an event that can actually be toggled off in the settings.
Please. Make it make sense.
theFlu
Hunter
Funny enough, two things came to my mind from that description. First the "ultimate" bad, itself. And then the stupid way people are "trying to reduce that". I'd be protesting against significantly changing either, both in favor of liberty.
EvilPolygons
Survivor
And don't forget zombie fall damage. The reason a zombie can fall off a skyscraper now and not take a lick of damage is because players were exploiting gravity (in the dev's minds anyway) for base defense.
These are all great examples of why normal gamers always lose in the metagame that the game development industry is always playing against powergamers.