PC Alpha 18 feedback and balancing thread

[meganoth]

Here is the thing you fail to understand. I don't give a crap about anyone's feelings. I am not participating in this thread with the agenda to disparage the fun pimps or to ingratiate them. My motive is to provide my opinion based on my experience and knowledge in order to point out a flaw to the fun pimps. One which they are already well aware of. Influence based on position in the list. Also, two more that they may not be aware of. One based on the item being loaded into memory, and the very real effects of having such long lists when we already know that the list position affects loot probability. This is not in question. The thread exists in this forum with conclusive evidence. It also not in any way a damning accusation to say that these things exist. Since they exist also in similar games and they are not that big of a problem when managed correctly.
I really don't care one way or another whether you believe me or not. I care that the fun pimps look into it. Because there are changes that can be made to compensate for this type of problem. One of which is to make the lists shorter and more contextual.

I'm just wondering and asking about how that bug can be. If you don't want to answer the plebs in the forum and see any question as an attack, well, I have to accept that.

By the way my feelings aren't hurt and I don't see how we got so fast from asking about statistical significance to accusing you of damning accusations or disparaging. If talking about bugs would be already disparaging to the fun pimps the bug section would be sort of a self-flaggelation section. :cocksure:

And again, I'm not doubting that the position in the list could affect the loot possibility. I'm having a lot more problems with the caching bug. And if I have problems believing it there is a chance that TFP might also not take it simply at face value if you don't even say how many tests you made. Just saying.

 

[Laz Man]

It already costs 40k dukes to do it. If they made it wipe the recipes you already found, no one would use it. Hell, I can't be bothered to use it now even though I could afford it and I have a few points that might serve me better elsewhere. So yea, keep going to get this nerfed. Just like power attacks are worse dps and worse stamina usage than regular attacks unless you are using knuckles or a hunting knife. That is what you get when you pander to the "Everything is OP" crowd.
Keep that in mind every time you see a youtuber power attack into a crowd of zombies with a sledge hammer. It might look cool, but they are still dumb for doing it.

Another thing is the RNG in this game simply isn't. There is nothing random about going into a book store and finding 8 copies of the same book from 24 bookshelves. That is not random. Every play through of the game I do, there is always something that I can never find after extended play time. All I have to do is go into the creative menu. Give one of that item to my player. Save the game. Then drop that item on the ground. I will find then find the item again in no time. That is not random. It is clearly being influenced by position in memory and it is also proven to be influenced by the order of the loot list it self. This problem is made way worse by the fact that the lists of things you can find in containers is far too big. It just makes it that much more unlikely that you will find the thing you are looking for in the appropriate place. I don't know about you, but I just love finding trash in refrigerators and food in the trash. The high amount of loot overlap in the various containers hurts my brain.

40k is actually not alot to earn late game for essentially an item that wipes all of the tough decisions the player had to make when Skilling up. What people would likely do is respec. out of all of their crafting skills and put their points into combat etc. only.

Sounds cheesy at 1st but perhaps that's a nice late game goal since we dont have anything else to fill our time yet.

 

[madmole]

There is a limit on how many concrete blocks a player can place?

Just patience/reward factor is the only limit. At a certain point, unless you are building a huge castle, you will feel like adding more concrete is just a waste of your own time. To me when I have 2 meter thick reinforced concrete I'm pretty safe and have no desire. I imagine some people might make them 5-10 meters thick and be safe against nearly anything. There comes a point where you would rather feel like doing other stuff.

 

[CoolJ]

40k is actually not alot to earn late game for essentially an item that wipes all of the tough decisions the player had to make when Skilling up. What people would likely do is respec. out of all of their crafting skills and put their points into combat etc. only.
Sounds cheesy at 1st but perhaps that's a nice late game goal since we dont have anything else to fill our time yet.

It's not cheesy at all. If you lost all found recipes, then any player that achieves later stages of the game would have far more to lose than to gain. I have far more invested in found schematics and even perks with the Volume perk books than I do in any skill points I spent early for QOL issues. You will have to convince me that re-rolling my stats is more important that being able to walk over land mines and bulk craft ammo. It just isn't going to happen. Seriously, taking all the time the player invested to find all of those schematics and dumping them is far too harsh a price to pay to re-roll some stats. You would have to be out of your mind to consider it.

 

[madmole]

40k is actually not alot to earn late game for essentially an item that wipes all of the tough decisions the player had to make when Skilling up. What people would likely do is respec. out of all of their crafting skills and put their points into combat etc. only.
Sounds cheesy at 1st but perhaps that's a nice late game goal since we dont have anything else to fill our time yet.

Doesn't gathering ammo mats for the next horde keep you busy?

 

[Axebeard]

What about unlocking the other 100 books? You can barely get to rank 5 of your combat perks by then. What about late game horde defense? Level 45 is when it starts to get interesting IMO.

I don't really care about the combat perks because they don't do anything spectacular. I'm level 45, GS 99, and already have basically all level 5 or 6 gear. An extra few points of damage or whatever doesn't make any difference to me at that point, I've already found ALL the items I want and now it's just sitting around twiddling my thumbs until the horde.

 

[Axebeard]

Doesn't gathering ammo mats for the next horde keep you busy?

It would if I didn't get 150 - 300 ammo for quests that take about 10 minutes to do. I'm sick of looking at the 3 Tier V POIs I have available so I've just been doing Fetch quests and storming through the building to the objective. Which reminds me, here's some feedback I actually need to test later:

Timed Charges suck. They do basically nothing to walls and are supposed to be a high tier item (I'm guessing). It SEEMS like they can knock down just about any door, which is fine, but I just discovered last night that Dynamite, which is way cheaper to make and unlocks earlier, is way more effective. It demolished like a 5m area, whereas the crappy Timed Charge only puts a ding into walls. Now if the Timed Charges are meant to only be used on doors, I didn't see any indication of that in the description, but if that's the case I'd change the name to "Breaching Charge" or something and make a note that they're specifically for doors. I am curious to see how they do against Vault Doors though.

 

[beHypE]

40k is actually not alot to earn late game for essentially an item that wipes all of the tough decisions the player had to make when Skilling up. What people would likely do is respec. out of all of their crafting skills and put their points into combat etc. only.
Sounds cheesy at 1st but perhaps that's a nice late game goal since we dont have anything else to fill our time yet.

Agreed. Even middle game it's pretty easily achievable, we're playing 90 min days with a friend on our 10th day and we have around 30K dukes. We buy all the food we find in every vendingmachine, bought some items like low level machette and steel knuckles, and have only a cigar. Granted we could have spent more freely, but it's definitely not hard to collect especially once you get decent Q3-Q4 gier to sell and Tier 3 quests. Then again we share every quest reward.

 

[CoolJ]

Agreed. Even middle game it's pretty easyly achievable, we're playing 90 min days with a friend on our 10th day and we have around 30K dukes. We buy all the food we find in every vendingmachine, bought some items like low level machette and steel knuckles, and have only a cigar. Granted we could have spent more freely, but it's definitely not hard to collect especially once you get decent Q3-Q4 gier to sell and Tier 3 quests. Then again we share every quest reward.

Have you guys even looked at the perks you get from finding all of the books in a volume? You would be crazy to throw that away just to re-roll some points. If your points are actually so misplaced that you are entertaining the idea, then you might as well just start the game over. Losing everything in this context is absurd. A better system would be to have the elixir explicitly allow you to re-roll say one or two points by giving you a remove point option in the perk menu. Then, the more jacked up your character is the more you have to pay to fix it.

 

[JamesKirk]

Adding craft xp would skew balance a lot and promote spam crafting. I wouldn't mind it on cooking and crafting of stuff that has unfarmable resources but it would just be more crap to balance and we have enough on our plate.

What about granting XP for crafting, but only once per item? Depending on the level needed for it?

Like this (to be balanced):

Tier 1 bow: 100XP

Tier 2 bow: 500 XP

Tier 3 bow: 2500 XP

So one gets a reward, but not infinitely.

 

[pregnable]

The respec potion is fine the way it is. If there are any changes it should be to increase the price only.

It is a nice option if you mistakenly wasted points early game, or decided you want to play a different play style. Especially if you are playing a long game with friends and realize you hate your build, and none of them want to start over with you, lel.

 

[hotpoon]

It already costs 40k dukes to do it. If they made it wipe the recipes you already found, no one would use it. Hell, I can't be bothered to use it now even though I could afford it and I have a few points that might serve me better elsewhere. So yea, keep going to get this nerfed. Just like power attacks are worse dps and worse stamina usage than regular attacks unless you are using knuckles or a hunting knife. That is what you get when you pander to the "Everything is OP" crowd.
Keep that in mind every time you see a youtuber power attack into a crowd of zombies with a sledge hammer. It might look cool, but they are still dumb for doing it.

...

I think you might be right about the power attack being a bit useless. I don't know if it's like this in all situations, but I was sledging a few concrete blocks and it seemed to me to be quicker to do it with a regular attack. The DPS seemed high enough on the regular attack that it wasn't worth waiting for my stamina to recover for the power swings.

Have you guys even looked at the perks you get from finding all of the books in a volume? You would be crazy to throw that away just to re-roll some points. If your points are actually so misplaced that you are entertaining the idea, then you might as well just start the game over. Losing everything in this context is absurd. A better system would be to have the elixir explicitly allow you to re-roll say one or two points by giving you a remove point option in the perk menu. Then, the more jacked up your character is the more you have to pay to fix it.

True, I wouldn't bother with the elixir if it wiped book knowledge. Honestly I probably won't anyway, but I can guarantee I wouldn't consider it if it purged book knowledge.

If the consensus is that it's OP, then, for balance purposes, I'd rather keep it at the current price, but have it award only 1 respec point - kind of like an orb or regret from Path of Exile.

 

[omegarte]

Would/Should it be possible to make a higher tier item beyond tier 1 (grey) if I find the schematic for it but don't want to invest points into the perk to make a better quality version? Perhaps if a player finds and consumes the same schematic twice, the player can then make a tier 2 version of that item. Cap it at say tier 3 (yellow) to make the perk still worth considering investing points into.

 

[dcsobral]

As far as I know the way lists work in this game is that the game tests each item with the coded probability starting at the top of the list and rolls for it and if it fails it then moves to the next item in the list and tests that. Things at the bottom of the list only show up if everything above them failed their tests. In the past this was proven true by shuffling the list of POIs. Whichever POI was at the top of the list was the most commonly spawned POI in the city.
It isn't too much of a leap to entertain the idea that CoolJ is correct. I'm not sure why taking a book from creative and dropping it and then looting and finding that book would be a thing though. Weird.

I know this testing down the list process is how it used to be and I'm not aware that it has changed. This process does indeed have a probability bias that benefits things at the top of the list vs a process that gives everything an equal chance to be pulled out of the hat so to speak.

I saw two different algorithms in past alphas. One was used for loot, and works correctly. It adds up all probabilities (num), generates one single random number (value), then, for each item in the list, it divides its probability by num, and add that to "num2", which serves as a sort of cumulative probability. Then it checks if value is less than or equal to num2, and, if it is, it chooses that. Mmmm. I think I saw a third algorithm that worked in a different way, but I verified the math and it was also correct.

The second algorithm I saw was used in ruleset, hub rule and cell rule in random world generation. It might have been used for prefabs too, for all I know. It is very similar, except that it generates a random number on each test. This is incorrect, and I reported it as a bug on alpha 17.4.

It's easy to see how one is correct, and the other isn't. Say you have three things (A, B and C) with the same probability, 1. The sum of probabilities is 3.

In the first algorithm, we generate one random number between 0 and 1. If that number is between 0 and 1/3, then A is selected. If it is between 1/3 and 2/3, B is selected, otherwise, C is selected. If the random number is on an uniform distribution, then A, B and C have all an equal chance of being selected.

But going with alpha 17.4 random world generation algorithm, we generate one number, and which has a 1 in three chance of being less than 1/3, giving A 33% chance of being selected. Then we generate another number, which has 2 chances in three of being less than 2/3, giving B a 66% chance of being selected! C has a 100% chance of being selected, but only if neither A nor B are selected. The actual chance of B is (1 - 1/3) * 2/3, or 44%, and the chance for C is 1 - (1/3 + (1 - 1/3) * 2/3), or 22%. And the more things there are to pick from, the more skewed the probability towards the things that make up the first 50% accumulated probability.

It's annoying that 7d2d has both a correct and an incorrect way of doing the same thing. I wish it would use Vose's Alias Method, which is fast and reliable, but, failing that, it really ought to centralize all these random choice selection in a single class, so that there's a single algorithm that needs to be verified. Rulesets, hubs and cells all had their own implementation of the algorithm, all of them incorrect. Fix one, the other would still be buggy. Moreover, it is pretty easy to spot problems with random choice on loot, not so much on random world generation. If they shared the random choice algorithm, the one hard to spot would benefit from experience on the one easy to spot.

 

[Blake_]

Just patience/reward factor is the only limit. At a certain point, unless you are building a huge castle, you will feel like adding more concrete is just a waste of your own time. To me when I have 2 meter thick reinforced concrete I'm pretty safe and have no desire. I imagine some people might make them 5-10 meters thick and be safe against nearly anything. There comes a point where you would rather feel like doing other stuff.

Feedback on building stuff in a18:

Honestly, I'm the kind of guy that, when I finish the base I make a 10 deep 30 tall wall of concrete spawning dozens of meters far and wide just for the xp.

It takes no more than a few real hours to get that done and I absolutely love it.

I've never done that in any of the 17 previous alphas. Why? Because now in a18 it feels rewarding to have that kind of xp and I can't stop building and putting my mixers and forges to max all day all night.

I feel like the xp balance has been achieved on the building front: more xp would be too much, any less and it won't be viable to keep up with a Zd-killer build.

Crafting xp for everything? Ok, but very little. Like 1-5 xp per ordinary item. Is it really needed? Nope.

More feedback on Ores/recipes/resources:

There's another topic that I would like to touch about resources/ores/recipes:

I loved the plant fiber to cloth recipe, it turned it into a valid and useful item once again.

Regarding ores, I really think there should be the same abundance of all Ores in every biome (except iron, which is abundant on POIS) .

While it might be cool on paper to have ore differences, their current status is confusing and difficult to transmit to the player. Biomes already have , and will have personaliced spawns/ items to tell them appart. Why make a convoluted ore distribution system that can result in a player being unable to find, say, coal for days because he spawned in the middle of 3 non coal biomes?

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Just patience/reward factor is the only limit.

So it is not a hard limit, you just assume nobody will take the effort.

But with the current XP reward for upgrading rebar frames to concrete blocks, it is a PURE XP factory, nevermind you need the building or not (besides you get additionall XP for harvesting stone and sand!). If you just want to level, it's easier to just mine the ressources for concrete and build useless stuff, instead of killing zombies or do whatever.

That was the argument for gaining XP. Not if it makes sense to build something specific. If it makes an XP factory when harvesting plants, it makes no difference on building reinfroced concrete blocks.

Let me repeat the question (no exakt numbers, but relation is that way):

Upgrading one rebar frame to concrete gives you 800XP. Repairing a 50% damaged reinforced concrete block gives you 100XP. Besids the repairing takes much longer than building a new block... thats not nearly balanced. With high enough mining skill it might be even more XP and time effective to harvest the damaged block and build a new one instead (especially because you get additionall XP for harvesting the damaged block).

Building is currently at least of factor 10 overrated in concerns of XP.

And still, i care for the food of 4 players and get almost no XP for doing that. Or is multiplayer currently out of focus? Singleplayer might be far different.

 

[madmole]

I don't really care about the combat perks because they don't do anything spectacular. I'm level 45, GS 99, and already have basically all level 5 or 6 gear. An extra few points of damage or whatever doesn't make any difference to me at that point, I've already found ALL the items I want and now it's just sitting around twiddling my thumbs until the horde.

There are a ton of great perks with the books though that have nothing to do with combat. I guess I want them all, the special unlocks are great. I don't see how you have time to twiddle your thumbs waiting for a horde. Turn up how often hordes come. I'm busy grinding mats for ammo, questing and looting for brass and better gear. You shouldn't even have any purple gear at level 45, be mostly orange and green iron, and no t3 stuff yet IMO. We'll get it balanced so its 100 hours to get mostly feeling done.

On my fort build towns were still tiny. You were lucky to get one book store in the entire map. I did a lot of traveling. I think these large towns make it too easy and we went to far with it making them larger.

 

[madmole]

What about granting XP for crafting, but only once per item? Depending on the level needed for it?Like this (to be balanced):

Tier 1 bow: 100XP

Tier 2 bow: 500 XP

Tier 3 bow: 2500 XP

So one gets a reward, but not infinitely.

Na, then you end up crafting arbitrary garbage you don't even want to use just for XP. We had that in 17, I didn't like it. I'd rather do a reasonable amount of XP for stuff that has loot mats to craft, like guns, food that requires looting, etc.

 

[madmole]

The respec potion is fine the way it is. If there are any changes it should be to increase the price only.
It is a nice option if you mistakenly wasted points early game, or decided you want to play a different play style. Especially if you are playing a long game with friends and realize you hate your build, and none of them want to start over with you, lel.

I'm leaning towards a price inflation, but then you have to grind money to restart when you could just restart.

 

[madmole]

I think you might be right about the power attack being a bit useless. I don't know if it's like this in all situations, but I was sledging a few concrete blocks and it seemed to me to be quicker to do it with a regular attack. The DPS seemed high enough on the regular attack that it wasn't worth waiting for my stamina to recover for the power swings.



True, I wouldn't bother with the elixir if it wiped book knowledge. Honestly I probably won't anyway, but I can guarantee I wouldn't consider it if it purged book knowledge.

If the consensus is that it's OP, then, for balance purposes, I'd rather keep it at the current price, but have it award only 1 respec point - kind of like an orb or regret from Path of Exile.

Power attacks are not intended for mining, but for killing stuff.