PC Alpha 18 feedback and balancing thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
What are you even talking about ?
By they, I mean developers. Arguing against their plans, according your personal gamestyle (trust me, I respect your, every single one of us here have it`s own) is off topic.

 

Perk/skill system has improved a lot. Now people can actually have classes. Intellect class is extremely tempting due to crafting skills, however, big push-off due to junk turrets as main ranged weapon. So no one in team wants to waste skills on intellect to craft few goodies.


 


I felt the same way with early, non-perked junk turrets.


 


But when you get a few perks, Junk Turrets are actually pretty amazing. And when you can drop two, I can just stand behind my turrets while they take on a walking horde and pick off the really mean ones with a gun.


 


That said, I play on default+1 (whatever it's called); so that may not apply on Survivalist.


 


:: shrug ::


 
Just wanted to chime in and say this:

1) WE NEED UNDERGROUND GAS (meaning that while you're mining there's a chance you hit gas and get a nasty explosion with cave-ins)

2) We'll then need a new perk called "The Canary" which warns us when we're going to hit gas or completely prevents the explosion.

There's no need to actually "see" gas, it's just a chance for explosions while mining underground.

Edit: I was thinking about this because someone gave feedback on A18 saying mining has become too easy/abundant.

 
No it will look just like a normal pickaxe. We will have a LOT of legendary items we can't justify new meshes for all this stuff. Think Diablo, a cool name and attribute, but still the same look so we can get really creative and add a lot of content without feeling art bound.
A little disappointed, but understandable. I was thinking something cool like his name engraved onto it or something.

 
Is it possible to add advanced rotation for some doors and blocks? For example for a garage door.

Give the choice to the player how to put blocks.

watch the video

 
Madmole has stated repeatedly that your option 1 is not happening. The horse is dead.
Adding brass to trader quest rewards, scaled to tier, sounds like a good idea. But, then, we already have that in the form of dukes rewards. There's just the interim smelting step.

Besides, servers with 100s of days and 10-40 players are the 1% case. TFP has made it pretty clear they're not concerned about that segment until/unless they get the vast majority's experience well balanced. PoI reset via quests and brass from dukes smelting give a never-ending trickle of brass even when all the easier sources are depleted. This situation is also pretty much why loot respawn options are a thing.

I'm wondering how many late game busy server types still check the trash piles. I'm guessing not many. They're another often-overlooked source of brass. Not a lot, and not guaranteed, but it's out there.
Eventually we want to do chunk reset of unvisited chunks as a server option. A lot of server owners do this manually already.

 
Just wanted to chime in and say this:
1) WE NEED UNDERGROUND GAS (meaning that while you're mining there's a chance you hit gas and get a nasty explosion with cave-ins)

2) We'll then need a new perk called "The Canary" which warns us when we're going to hit gas or completely prevents the explosion.

There's no need to actually "see" gas, it's just a chance for explosions while mining underground.

Edit: I was thinking about this because someone gave feedback on A18 saying mining has become too easy/abundant.
Nope, don't need any of that. Not everything has to be designed to kill you unfairly.

 
No it will look just like a normal pickaxe. We will have a LOT of legendary items we can't justify new meshes for all this stuff. Think Diablo, a cool name and attribute, but still the same look so we can get really creative and add a lot of content without feeling art bound.
Will legendaries have their own tier color? So, as soon as you unlock the crate you know if there's a legendary inside.

 
There is some rare pimp stuff planned.

Sweet

ccdf44b8d74aabdd9a70ae4ec8990360.jpg
 
A little disappointed, but understandable. I was thinking something cool like his name engraved onto it or something.
Well we can do half a dozen cool mods with a neat model, or 100's or 1000's of cool text driven mods or even procedural ones as long as we don't pigeonhole ourselves into thinking you have to have a cool 3d model for every legendary.

 
Is it possible to add advanced rotation for some doors and blocks? For example for a garage door.Give the choice to the player how to put blocks.

watch the video

Maybe, it depends if we can successfully block the stupid rotations that don't look good or have any use.

 
Alright, I will let this ONE cat out of the legendary loot bag:
Herb's Pickaxe Legend has it this pickaxe belonged to Herb "Cackler" Dugall. One shots all ore but uses twice the stamina.
I'd also give it very low durability so it needs to be repaired often, to balance out it'll 1 shot ore regardless of your miner 69'er skill and anything else.

 
Nope, don't need any of that. Not everything has to be designed to kill you unfairly.
Well, it wouldn't be much different than a landmine in some way... but you're right, you can't see gas so it would be unfair being killed by something you can't try to avoid by being alert.

So what if there was a way to actually see a gas leak before it explodes?

Example: a mild particle effect which you can see (like yellow smoke) so that you get a couple seconds to run for your life.

We/you have talked for years about making the underground more dangerous and now that finally the A18 framework is ready you could add some underground danger and the corresponding perk to help surviving better underground. I'm not a game dev, but I guess adding a random chance for a particle effect while mining shouldn't be the end of the world... am I right?

 
Last edited by a moderator:
The Gamestage is determined by 3 factors. Your level, the number of days you have played and the level of difficulty.
As you wrote yourself, you can turn up the XP so that you are very fast on a high level. Or you can reduce the length of the day so that the days go by faster. The third possibility would be to increase the difficulty factor in the gamestages.xml file.

[...]

For example, to have the first feral zombies on day 5, the gamestage would have to be over 50 at this point. If I assume that you already have a level of 10 on day 5 then the multiplier would have to be 3.5 to have the first feral zombies by day 5.
I get that gamestage has multipliers, and that multipliers can be adjusted. But what I'm looking for is not to multiply the gamestage, but to accelerate its rate of growth. I'm not just looking to make the game harder overall, but to make it accelerate to an "impossible" point. Make it so the difficulty *will* overtake you, with settings so it can happen fairly quickly.

With a difficulty multiplier, the gamestage will only ever be 3.5x what it would normally be. The system I would instead want would be say grow by x per day. So 1x on day one, 1.5 on day two, 2 on day 3, by day 7 it would be 4.5x more advanced than it would normally be, by day 14 8x more advanced than it would normally be. So it creates an endpoint. The game will get to the point that you *can not* keep up - and you can adjust where that endpoint would occur, then try to beat it - try to survive that "impossible" night.

An adjustable growth rate would allow me to play out a scenario where I can still gather early, but the difficulty is going to ramp to the point where I have to decide with my playstyle should I be spending time trying to make a more defensible base (because *maybe* with 100% investment I could get to concrete in time), or should i spend time trying to get ammo, spend time trying to retrofit a PoI, what's the most efficient base design I can make with the resources I can gather. Should I try to get a cobblestone base, or multiple disposable wood bases and I hop from one to another.

Right now with progression, once you get past the first horde night, it's just about making a fortress. You're not really pressed for design or material choices because you've already passed the first check of the first horde night. the game is going to keep going in a linear style so that your progression will keep at least matching the horde.

So again, not a base multiplier, but an "accelerator", or "growth" option where difficulty keeps going up faster and faster.

Setting it to a horde every night doesn't work either, as you don't get the early gathering stage, and the horde is still linear.

I just started a new world with a horde every night, no xp bonus (since nightly hordes should provide tons of xp), and reduced loot to try to create a more limited world. But a growth option would be so much nicer.

 
Well we can do half a dozen cool mods with a neat model, or 100's or 1000's of cool text driven mods or even procedural ones as long as we don't pigeonhole ourselves into thinking you have to have a cool 3d model for every legendary.
I dont think there needs to be 100s or 1000s of different variations for legendary items. Having too many legendary items kinda takes away from the appeal. Legendaries should be limited.

Maybe 10 to 20 traits are considered lengendary, while all the rest are considered epic/pink...

 
Well, it wouldn't be much different than a landmine in some way... but you're right, you can't see gas so it would be unfair being killed by something you can't try to avoid by being alert.
I'd be happier if cave-ins were a more imminent threat, forcing you to erect supports as you mine. I usually do this anyway, somewhat for aesthetics, but I was actually killed by a cavein in my last game. Wife was mining nearby so I blamer her for getting a 5x5 area to collapse on me lol, but other than that I haven't seen very many caveins.

 
I'd be happier if cave-ins were a more imminent threat, forcing you to erect supports as you mine. I usually do this anyway, somewhat for aesthetics, but I was actually killed by a cavein in my last game. Wife was mining nearby so I blamer her for getting a 5x5 area to collapse on me lol, but other than that I haven't seen very many caveins.
Problem there is many players already hate having to mine, this will just make them hate it even more. I'm not a big fan of mining its extremly boring to do but nesscary sadly, I adapt and do it, but I don't really like it. Though when I get a t6 auger modded out with lv 5 miner 69'er/motherload I tend to laugh like a maniac as my auger just chews thru ore like its paper, then its a bit fun.

Its kinda like me in bases, I hate building a base as half the time it collapses on me, with no indication whatsoever its about to happen, and when it happens, instead of just the most recent block placed only falling off, the entire thing goes down, even stuff on the way otherside of the structure. Placing 1 block more than I should, should not result in the entire thing coming down, it should just be that one block while the rest are fine. Which then tells you that you need to build a support pillar there, to correct it. I had a 3 floor base right, I was building the roof, well I ended up placing 1 to many blocks, and it literally tore all 3 floors apart, all that stayed standing were my support pillars. All 3 of the floors completly collpased. Which is silly when I was on the top of the 3rd floor, and the 1st/2nd floors were fine and stable.

TL: DR I hate the Si system, and probally always will. Thankfully there are some good poi's I can use for bases, that are pretty soild I just have to build a little base in it, fire station, and the brown church with no graveyard to name 2 I rather like using. Ends up costing much more material to upgrade them though as they are pretty big poi's compared to if I just made a base myself.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top