PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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I don't mind difference in power and convenience. +/- 15% is pretty standard for gaming both electronic and not and was established long ago with the Jedi Curve/Mana Curve from Magic the Gathering and a touch more than that is acceptable. I'm more than happy to play something cool that underperforms a little. But there is a big difference between "this is 20% less good" and "this is 50% less good AND requires you to jump through more hoops".
Back in the old Dark Age of Camelot days I played Bone Army Bone Dancer back when the go to spec was Suppression Spec. I consistently play off meta stuff and I enjoy the underdog challenge. They later buffed Bone Army and it became the new meta spec and it took away alot of the mystique for me. When I played League of Legends I was a Karma main up until they reworked her and killed the fun of that character for me. She was definitely not competitive at the top end, but for the average player playing in Platinum and dipping into Diamond on good days (and into gold on bad days lol) she was more than competitive enough.

I'm not a meta player BUT neither do I ignore the numbers either. Rather I view it as a personal challenge to make "weaker" builds work and then if those builds really do suffer and lag behind I examine why. When I say something is underpowered, it's because I've put it through the wringer and it's definitively weaker by quite a large amount. Turrets can get the job done, they can survive on nomad leaning on increasing amount of trap presence to make up for their shortfalls, but without a doubt they are significantly weaker than other options of similar investment by an order of magnitude.

Also, TBH I think your comparison of "gun I'm holding looks like a turret but performs like an AK" is highly a highly disingenuous misrepresentation of what I've said. What I've suggested for the turret is to remove SOME of it's hipfire penalty and open up mods while reducing recoil to levels that don't induce sickness. This would still leave it with poor damage, worse hip fire accuracy, no aimed fired, very short ranged damage falloff, etc when compared to the AK or indeed any firearm in the game. But it would be usable in complement to the 2 placed turrets and collectively their DPS in select situations could compete with other firearms. Meanwhile in some situations they would do far worse. It still wouldn't even be parity, I'm not asking for parity. I'm asking for them to be good enough to be within the ball park of other weapons. So I'll ask you be a bit more careful not to misrepresent what I've said, which can be reviewed in black and white. I know that it was prolly an honest mistake, this thread moves fast and the context is already buried. So I am reiterating my statements in correction of the misinterpretation.
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I can see you put a lot of thought into this and I apologize for kneejerk reacting. I just don't want things to become equivalent across the board so that it doesn't really matter which build you decide upon since they will always play the same. I'm all for doing some slight balancing through mods and perks to beef it up some but I'm really against all the attributes ending up feeling and playing the same.

 
Just finished day 42 hord. Game stage 138 and wow! Lasted till 3:45 had 19 rounds of 7.62 left out of 2100 lol. Went through 600 rounds 9mm in auto turret, 30 explosive arrows, 800 darts, and 5 grenades. They also chewed up both blade traps! Thinking I have a lot of work to do before day 49!
And that’s with 90min days
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Be glad you are using explosive arrows lol, alot of other folks don't have the luxury and have to use more bullets or molotovs/grenades. Explosive Arrows are actually really cheap for what they do.

 
Yeah 80% of my gear was degraded the other day but I'm a glue whore so I had no issue with it. But I'm using pregen so I might see some cliff walls in new spaces and need to restart.
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do we need to restart with this new build?

 
I don't mind difference in power and convenience. +/- 15% is pretty standard for gaming both electronic and not and was established long ago with the Jedi Curve/Mana Curve from Magic the Gathering and a touch more than that is acceptable. I'm more than happy to play something cool that underperforms a little. But there is a big difference between "this is 20% less good" and "this is 50% less good AND requires you to jump through more hoops".
Back in the old Dark Age of Camelot days I played Bone Army Bone Dancer back when the go to spec was Suppression Spec. I consistently play off meta stuff and I enjoy the underdog challenge. They later buffed Bone Army and it became the new meta spec and it took away alot of the mystique for me. When I played League of Legends I was a Karma main up until they reworked her and killed the fun of that character for me. She was definitely not competitive at the top end, but for the average player playing in Platinum and dipping into Diamond on good days (and into gold on bad days lol) she was more than competitive enough.

I'm not a meta player BUT neither do I ignore the numbers either. Rather I view it as a personal challenge to make "weaker" builds work and then if those builds really do suffer and lag behind I examine why. When I say something is underpowered, it's because I've put it through the wringer and it's definitively weaker by quite a large amount. Turrets can get the job done, they can survive on nomad leaning on increasing amount of trap presence to make up for their shortfalls, but without a doubt they are significantly weaker than other options of similar investment by an order of magnitude.

Also, TBH I think your comparison of "gun I'm holding looks like a turret but performs like an AK" is highly a highly disingenuous misrepresentation of what I've said. What I've suggested for the turret is to remove SOME of it's hipfire penalty and open up mods while reducing recoil to levels that don't induce sickness. This would still leave it with poor damage, worse hip fire accuracy, no aimed fired, very short ranged damage falloff, etc when compared to the AK or indeed any firearm in the game. But it would be usable in complement to the 2 placed turrets and collectively their DPS in select situations could compete with other firearms. Meanwhile in some situations they would do far worse. It still wouldn't even be parity, I'm not asking for parity. I'm asking for them to be good enough to be within the ball park of other weapons. So I'll ask you be a bit more careful not to misrepresent what I've said, which can be reviewed in black and white. I know that it was prolly an honest mistake, this thread moves fast and the context is already buried. So I am reiterating my statements in correction of the misinterpretation.
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Maybe the setting was just right as it was at streamer weekend - since then the rate of fire was reduced very much cause much people complained that it was OP. Maybe the setting was correct and it should not have been adjusted.

Lets see if MadMole and Roland and the other guys do a test like you did. Much appreciated !

 
I use the bow almost exclusively, and have so since Alpha 5. I'm pretty aware of a crappy shot, we all have those, but they aren't the ones I'm taking about.

It's the arrows that fly directly through the head.

If you don't believe me, I'm more than happy to record you a video and show you any number of times in excruciatingly slow motion exactly what I'm talking about.

Edit: it's single player as well, so network is not the issue. Perhaps it's the box not in synch with the animation, not sure exactly, I'm no programmer.

 
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I wonder if diagonal running is possible on the fastest zombie speed settings to ignore or make them miss hits. Since they should catch up to us pretty easily? Either that or perhaps 90 degree turns every couple of seconds. Now zombies take some time to adjust to sudden change of direction.

 
I can see you put a lot of thought into this and I apologize for kneejerk reacting. I just don't want things to become equivalent across the board so that it doesn't really matter which build you decide upon since they will always play the same. I'm all for doing some slight balancing through mods and perks to beef it up some but I'm really against all the attributes ending up feeling and playing the same.
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No worries mate, I'm an altaholic and the last thing I want is everything to be the same. It's one reason I loved City of Heroes so much, it gave me so much variety and I made a ton of characters :) . It does my heart good to know that some stubborn folks had like a super secret private server for years that became public this year. If NCSoft hasn't taken legal sniper shots at it by end of year I'll roll a COH account again :) .

I know that yall get alot of varied feedback from many folks who come from.....we'll call it interesting perspectives. So I don't really blame you for suspecting what you suspected :D . It's a common mentality in gaming and "make this thing more like the thing I like" has killed many a feature and game. I want new things that are roughly equally awesome all in their own way. I just wanna intellect to be just as viable and special of a spec as the others and I feel like if you have to rely on the baseline version of other spec weapons after spending so many skill points then it's really not achieving that. No doubt part of the misunderstanding is mine and I have work today on expressing myself more clearly.

That's why I'm aiming for things like making the handheld turret into a much weaker (on it's own), but usable weapon. Ideally the placed turrets would reload themselves from an onboard ammo supply (with like a 6-8 second reload, picking it up &gt; reloading &gt; putting it down again takes 6+ seconds) so long as you held an intellect weapon in your hand and you were deeply spec'd into Turrets Syndrome. Reload would cancel if you switched out of course. This woudl be both to help minimze the constant offputting maintance of spending alot of your time reloading but to allow you to play a bit more actively with intellect weapons while gating this power away from people lightly dipping into the build.

Gameplay would still revolve around proper placement of turrets and kiting or facetanking so turrets could do the work. You'd just have a ghetto ranged weapon to add to your turrets and this could become part of your kiting game too. Though I'd prolly still facetank with heavy armor and the Stun Baton alot. Goodness knows turrets use junk turret ammo fast enough I'd still be using the stun baton most of the time.

I used like 3,000 junk turret ammo on the day 26 defense in my new playthrough playing pure int from start instead of forgettin potioning into it at end game. I wanted to see/test it's power curve and day 20 was definitely the peak, day 26 was way way rougher and their ability to handle the horde already dropped off significantly. I also used 300 shotgun shells (shotgun turret) + 500 AK ammo (baseline AK alongside my turrets), my electric fences burnt out, and at the end the zombies had broken the iron bars in the middle and were breaking the final reinforced concrete block at the bottom while I desperately hit them in the face with my stun baton for about 50 zombies. I was tanking the hits in heavy armor to keep them form hitting the block with fort bites up and healing when I needed lol. I might have accidentally switched into my brown pants at the end there, that was way too close :p . I was waiting until my new play through got to this point to make a defense video, will prolly make one on the next horde. I just found a drum mod schematic so at least less reloading turrets next blood moon, felt like about 2 turret reloads for every AK clip reloaded. I'll be bringing 2 full rows of junk turret ammo (5,400 ammo, 16,200 iron in total) into the next horde along with as much shotgun ammo as I can afford for the shotgun

Also, speaking of Stun Baton, it prolly needs a little attention too to differentiate it from club and help make up for it's lower DPS vs club since club knockdown vs Baton electric stun are roughly comaprable CC wise minus visuals but club does alot more damage. If you put a gun to my head I'd say give it a special interaction with the electric charge on power attack but make it disable charge buildup for a short time because it's temporarily overloaded. There are a ton of possibilities considering electricity is involved and it's a good area to help make the weapon really feel unique mechanically as well as visually. Especially since the club also has a combo mechanic and reliable CC thresholds that happen just as quickly. Since you have turret support as int spec, can't really give Stun Baton matching DPS...but a special electric heavy attack could potentially give it the utility to be used in other builds not relying on turrets and could give it more value in more unique ways that are not just DPS

 
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Were there changes to RWG? I reused a seed to generate a fresh world but it’s different. Even the spawnpoints files are different.

 
Maybe the setting was just right as it was at streamer weekend - since then the rate of fire was reduced very much cause much people complained that it was OP. Maybe the setting was correct and it should not have been adjusted.
Lets see if MadMole and Roland and the other guys do a test like you did. Much appreciated !
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This may sound odd considering my approach in this thread, but that nerf was prolly still warranted. Baseline turret is still useful for other folks and I don't think 2 placed turrets being AK DPS would be healthy for the game. I think the player still needs to be actively involved in making the DPS happen and not just a plop and flop. That's why I lean much more heavily towards making the handheld turret more worthwhile and trying some of your turret power into you actively participating with either baton or handheld turret.

As funny as it is for someone to Benny Hill run while turrets kill things and then them reload them and repeat the process on the run I really want the player to be fighting too and supporting their turrets. Either via facetanking via heavy armor and the stun baton with turret fire support or supporting with the handheld turret while kiting, forcing the player to actively control zombie positioning and their own while being in combat with turret support :p .

 
Were there changes to RWG? I reused a seed to generate a fresh world but it’s different. Even the spawnpoints files are different.
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They presumably unmangled the terrain generation, which would have required some code changes I imagine.

@Madmole, Faatal, anyone who would know: the RWG terrain bug has been fixed for Nvidia cards at least, right?

 
Wait, didn`t you wipe or continued a safegame ?
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I am on pregen01 and went to the borders of existing generation expecting walls and seams but didn't see any. So I'm still using an old save with no problems yet.

 
"Steel knuckles are useful for gutting animals"
Would that make them bladed weapons and affected by Deep Cuts perk?
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Na, its a convenience feature for the steel knuckles. Its got knives on it, so yeah it should be able to gut an animal.

 
Maybe the setting was just right as it was at streamer weekend - since then the rate of fire was reduced very much cause much people complained that it was OP. Maybe the setting was correct and it should not have been adjusted.
Lets see if MadMole and Roland and the other guys do a test like you did. Much appreciated !
Click to expand...
We only nerfed unperked turrets, the perked ones are as good as always. The thing people forget is you can lay down two turrets and still use any firearm you find and out DPS a guy with just a firearm even if he's perked. All ammo you find during normal game play is just pure bonus for horde night since 99% of the time you are shooting scrap.

 
I use the bow almost exclusively, and have so since Alpha 5. I'm pretty aware of a crappy shot, we all have those, but they aren't the ones I'm taking about.
It's the arrows that fly directly through the head.

If you don't believe me, I'm more than happy to record you a video and show you any number of times in excruciatingly slow motion exactly what I'm talking about.

Edit: it's single player as well, so network is not the issue. Perhaps it's the box not in synch with the animation, not sure exactly, I'm no programmer.
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Is it a particular zombie? That might narrow it down.

 
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