PC Alpha 18 feedback and balancing thread

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Hey guys!

This is our feedback thread, please post suggestions and feedback on A18 in this thread.

For ideas outside of balancing please visit our dev diary.

For any bug reports and the latest known issues please visit our bug report thread.

Find the A18 Release notes on our official website.

We hope you guys enjoy Alpha 18!

 
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I don't know if this counts as balancing, but the harvesting animation for the knife seems extremely fast. I think it needs to be slowed down to how it used to be.

Loot feels like it's in a good place, I'm on day 10 and haven't found anything better than my yellow quality shotgun.

My apologies, this is feedback for experimental. I'll come back once I've played some stable.

 
Bows early game are not appealing due to so much guns and ammo found in loot. Consider adding flaming/exploding/AP arrows in loot

Potato's and Potato seeds are a very difficult find. The best recipe's require potato's. Consider more potato's in loot or additional recipies that do not require potato's.

Fortitude builds are a bit OP compared to other builds atm.. Strongest offense and best defense in the game.

 
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I don't know if this counts as balancing. I posted this in bugs, but not even sure if it is a bug.

I'll just post the problem, you guys can decide.

Recently, madmole discovered that the heatmap settings for a few things were messed up. He made changes and it was announced that we could use 4 times the amount of candles and torches than before.

This is true, but the torches cannot be balanced properly.

A single torch is adding 1% heat to a chunk and all neighboring chunks once per real time minute.

A single torch will call in a screamer every 1 hour and 40 minutes of real time.

For comparison, a candle will add 0.5% of heat every hour I think, and forges 3%. Most of the stations range from 1% to 3%. These seem ok. Balanced? who knows. But torches are definitely not.

 
The Crossbows, blunderbuss, and Hunting rifle (all single shot, auto reload weapons) when fired from ADS mode, lock you into ADS mode, if you dont want to be locked into that you have to cancel the animation.

It can become disorientating, and hinders normal movement and view, especially with a scope equipped.

MM had said he made a ticket to see if we could get the option to disable auto-ADS. I dont know if that worked out, but the single fire weapons I think should be tested a bit if you dont already know what I mean.

From a balancing perspective these weapons are already not the most preferred, the added awkwardness to combat this causes I believe should be looked at.

A potential fix would be either a menu option to disable all auto-ADS, or like we used to have, tap RMB to auto-ADS, hold RMB for only manual-ADS with no lock in.

 
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I like the perk system but there are same changes I would like to see. I don't like how putting points into Agility or Intelligence only affects certain weapons. A suggestion I would make would be some broad but important character improvements.

Examples:

Perception: Increased speed with aiming/range

Strength: Improved mobility in armor/encumbered

Fortitude: Improved stamina regen

Agility: Improved speed on foot

Intelligence: Improved crafting speeds

Every attribute should feel like you're getting stronger, faster, more capable of taking on the apocalypse

 
The Crossbows, blunderbuss, and Hunting rifle (all single shot, auto reload weapons) when fired from ADS mode, lock you into ADS mode, if you dont want to be locked into that you have to cancel the animation.
It can become disorientating, and hinders normal movement and view, especially with a scope equipped.

MM had said he made a ticket to see if we could get the option to disable auto-ADS. I dont know if that worked out, but the single fire weapons I think should be tested a bit if you dont already know what I mean.

From a balancing perspective these weapons are already not the most preferred, the added awkwardness to combat this causes I believe should be looked at.

A potential fix would be either a menu option to disable all auto-ADS, or like we used to have, tap RMB to auto-ADS, hold RMB for only manual-ADS with no lock in.
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Yes this is so annoying. Only complaint so far though! :D

 
I like the perk system but there are same changes I would like to see. I don't like how putting points into Agility or Intelligence only affects certain weapons. A suggestion I would make would be some broad but important character improvements.
Examples:

Perception: Increased speed with aiming/range

Strength: Improved mobility in armor/encumbered

Fortitude: Improved stamina regen

Agility: Improved speed on foot

Intelligence: Improved crafting speeds

Every attribute should feel like you're getting stronger, faster, more capable of taking on the apocalypse
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i kinda miss the level in fortitude and agility to get more stamina or Health :(

 
It looks like my armor skills are not increasing when I'm doing dirty things with cactus. Fix it, please.

Fortunately I can play with the hoe while waiting for a patch.

 
I feel that exp should be shared for all actions. Like when I play with a friend, the person who goes Strength (harvesting / mining) always has a lot more exp than the rest of the group. I don't see why this shouldn't be shared if others are around.

 
I feel that exp should be shared for all actions. Like when I play with a friend, the person who goes Strength (harvesting / mining) always has a lot more exp than the rest of the group. I don't see why this shouldn't be shared if others are around.
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I feel the exact opposite. No xp should be shared, go get your own dang xp. jk, but I really do feel that way.

 
Alright some feedback from playing through the various experimentals. My last game I decided to play by not going inside any POIs (only raid exterior, so no doors or tunnels entered) and not using any trader quests. Since these two provide so much loot there is hardly any point to crafting, which I wanted to try out too.

So what I noticed, without abundant cans and drinks, food is harder to come by. My home was the burnt biome, which provides no hunting, but the small burned buildings offer some other loot that is nice in beginning. Got lucky on a wrench on a car and then could get stuff I needed to make a forge (but still took me till day 3, since I needed to go far to hunt). So far day 11, found a shotgun, wooden bow and some weapons I do not really use (iron spears, sledges, clubs). Mods are hard to come by, but I made a workbench and got some meat for a small farm.

Anyway:

- It would be nice if the weapon/tools/armor structure would all follow the same design pattern, so T1 primitive (always craftable with basic resource you can find in trash), T2 craftable from perk or recipe, from materials you either havest or make with forge/workbench. Currently bows T2 cannot be crafted, guns T2 can also not be crafted unless you find magic parts that do not drop except in special loot containers. T3 should always need these parts and thus be hard to make, but always be better (not just damage).

Why? It does not make sense a iron spear can be crafted as T2 weapon and a wooden bow cannot.

- Check harvesting on various things. Why are birdnests 100 HP? Why does the knife have issues harvesting body bags (takes 20 stabs, axe just 2 swings). Certain stuff seems to drop massive amounts (like broken workstations), but some like file cabinets hardly anything.

- Animals are hard to find, even when traversing lot of ground you hardly see any. I also noticed at some point nothing was spawning at all anymore, so there could be some issue there (I checked with le command and there was nothing except vultures from a horde I left hours ago, somehow still there.). When I restarted my game the area I was that was empty first suddenly had zombies and animals around almost immediately. I do not except a huge amount of stuff, but the amount of animals and zombies are really low.

 
Warrior diff Day 19. Doing the shotgun messiah i fired 300+ AK47 rounds. 70% aimed headshots. The loot was completly useless. Time + Brass> LOOT

 
Bows early game are not appealing due to so much guns and ammo found in loot. Consider adding flaming/exploding/AP arrows in loot
Potato's and Potato seeds are a very difficult find. The best recipe's require potato's. Consider more potato's in loot or additional recipies that do not require potato's.

Fortitude builds are a bit OP compared to other builds atm.. Strongest offense and best defense in the game.
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I agree on the last 2, fort def feels very OP once you have iron / steel armor. I would have died so many times as agility with the situations I got myself into with fort, think Rambo + plot armor lol.Granted, on Insane difficulty that may change.

Bows not having appeal I think is a red herring; sure, you found guns and ammo, but early game you can easily rock a spear and bow to conserve what you did find. I'd rarely use a gun early game unless in very dire situations I put myself into knowing better lol.

Potatoes are definitely scarce.

It looks like my armor skills are not increasing when I'm doing dirty things with cactus. Fix it, please.Fortunately I can play with the hoe while waiting for a patch.
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*giggle*

Warrior diff Day 19. Doing the shotgun messiah i fired 300+ AK47 rounds. 70% aimed headshots. The loot was completly useless. Time + Brass> LOOT
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I agree the loot in those POIs is underwhelming unless you get a lucky RNG draw in the handful of crates. Something like Madmole talked about with codes or something you have to work for to get access to additional loot would be nice. Though I have to say, even though I spec into, say Fort, I won't be bringing my primary weapons (ak/mg) into those runs, I'll be using bow, spear and pistol -- save the ammo I use for horde nights.

 
Hey guys!
This is our feedback thread, please post suggestions and feedback on A18 in this thread.

For ideas outside of balancing please visit our dev diary.

For any bug reports and the latest known issues please visit our bug report thread.

Find the A18 Release notes on our official website.

We hope you guys enjoy Alpha 18!
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With how easy it is to craft ammo in the mid game. I think ammo found in loot needs to be a lot less. because I got a pistol day one and have never looked back.

 
With how easy it is to craft ammo in the mid game. I think ammo found in loot needs to be a lot less. because I got a pistol day one and have never looked back.
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Up your difficulty and horde spawning and that'll change. But yeah, I do think ammo should scale down with lower-difficulty maybe to change that. Since default difficulty got lowered, I can see a surplus of ammo with the drops being what they are. I can easily amass thousands of rounds by each horde night. Granted, with increased difficulty and 16 spawning on horde nights that all goes away to nothing every week.

 
With how easy it is to craft ammo in the mid game. I think ammo found in loot needs to be a lot less. because I got a pistol day one and have never looked back.
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You haven't looked forward either. Try playing a solo nomad or higher with anything higher than 16 zombie horde nights to at least day 80. You can't keep up with the ammo. Madmole couldn't even keep up at 16 zombies and I don't think he was playing nomad either. Those early day ammo finds should be reserved for late game... or you'll regret it.

On that note, ammo should be considered for balancing more for late game.

All the books and perks aren't going to help with the need for this non-renewable resource.

 
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Warrior diff Day 19. Doing the shotgun messiah i fired 300+ AK47 rounds. 70% aimed headshots. The loot was completly useless. Time + Brass> LOOT
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this doesn't really tell the whole story....

what is your char lvl? what your GS? what is your day/night settings (10 minute days)? what are your perks? are you spec into machine guns? how many books about the machine guns do you have? whats your LL at? do you use Lucky goggles?

there are so many factors as to y you spent a lot more ammo and time vs the loot you got.

 
You haven't looked forward either. Try playing a solo nomad or higher with anything higher than 16 zombie horde nights to at least day 80. You can't keep up with the ammo. Madmole couldn't even keep up at 16 zombies and I don't think he was playing nomad either. Those early day ammo finds should be reserved for late game... or you'll regret it.
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How does max alive have anything to do with ammo used? I’d use the same ammo killing 100 zombies with 16 alive at a time as I would killing 100 zombies with 24 alive at a time.

 
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