PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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madmole said:
Being similar doesn't stand up in copyright courts. Ours is down turned, a different color and part of a sad face, and I imagine they have better things to do like we do. AFAIK you can even do a parody on something, call it Manazon if you felt like it, nothing they can do about it. Its intended to be funny, it's considered fair use.
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Being a former (unpopular) musician, I'm a bit of an IP wonk... and almost none of this is accurate.

This would not involve copyright law at all. It would involve trademark law. That's the one that doesn't come from the Constitution, has a "use-it-or-lose-it" provision (unlike copyrights or patents), and whose primary purpose is to avoid consumer confusion about a product's origin. Trademark fair use is very different, parody isn't even considered.

So, Amazon would have to take TFP to court to show that their use of the "arrow smile" had a good chance of causing the average consumer to be confused, and that the junk sledge was somehow coming from Amazon in real life.

Amazon would have a case if they sold branded video game assets, and argued that this was intended to falsely show that the junk sledge asset came from Amazon. Otherwise they'd have no case.

One thing is absolutely correct though: both TFP and Amazon have better things to do than worry about this.

 
faatal said:
I think I am, but my office got so hot near the end, I could be delirious.
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Your mining helmet has incandescent light maybe, lol. 

MechanicalLens said:
So guys (any gals?), which streamers are you going to watch, or are you going to try to avoid spoilers?
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I'll try to keep it in my pants until monday so I can stream it myself without spoilers... I like surprises. What about you?

meganoth said:
That streams was recorded two years ago. Did you take off your alu hat?
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Dang...I did it again.

 
meganoth said:
You..., you Bohr-ist, I'll heisenberg you 4 times before you can leave your energy level even once.
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Everyone gets antsy when there's only 100 billion kilometres until release  🙂

I'm having to sit this one out (mostly) but I'm glad to see the hype-train post count is climbing by the day  🙂

 
Visigoth said:
Any more information anywhere on what metrics are gathered in game and sent back to TFP ?

Enjoying the new look A19, not long now 🙂
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From what I have read, its purely gameplay information.

What blocks people build and use, items things like that

 
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Visigoth said:
Any more information anywhere on what metrics are gathered in game and sent back to TFP ?
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Probably the common sense stuff. What perks are picked most or never picked, what quest types are picked most or never picked, what weapons are never used, what zombie causes the most player deaths, how many players die within X days etc.

ATM they have basically zero data on any of that so it's hard for them to know what people are really doing in game besides the forums, which they mostly ignore feedback wise because it's not the feedback they are looking for. We all have 500 to 1500+ hours in the game and don't play like a noob, and ATM they are trying to make the game more accessible to newer players rather than cater to veteran players and make the game harder and more tedious

Hopefully the new metrics are made public, I love me some graphs and excel sheets! Would make for good reference points to see if people actually do pick the terribad perks, like Madmole saying the Animal Tracker and Animal harvesting perks didn't need to be combined . . .I've literally never heard of anyone putting a point in either of those lol. Even at only 3 levels and even if both were combined into one perk . . .I still wouldn't waste a point on it personally.  But I'm not a new player and could be an outlier, so it'd be cool to see if there is some weird group of people that actually does go around trying to find animals in a world where animals are basically extinct by day 4. I find most of my deer by hitting them with my motorcycle between quests

 
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I think the metrics themselves will be dull and mostly useless, but I think more interesting would be the conversations had about the results.

Take a metric that says 99% of players use the trader once per day. Does that mean traders are a great value add to the game? Does it mean people use it as a cheese game mechanic?  Two possible different interpretations, with two possible meanings.

Take a metric that says only 1% of players use a blunderbuss.  Does that mean the blunderbuss is useless? Does it mean most players don't even know about it?  Again, two different possible interpretations, with two different possible meanings.

Metrics are great, but only if you know *why*.

Violent crime increases when ice cream trucks are out.  Does that mean the truck music causes violence?  Does it mean heat causes violence and coincidentally that's when ice cream trucks are out? 

At any rate, hopefully it's not a complete waste of time. 

 
Oh, and to my point, I'd hate to see something like the blunderbuss be removed because "no one uses it", when the /reason/ may be a simple fix.  Tfp has a history of removing rather than fixing what was wrong with things (miss you LBD!). 

 
Guppycur said:
Violent crime increases when ice cream trucks are out.  Does that mean the truck music causes violence?  Does it mean heat causes violence and coincidentally that's when ice cream trucks are out? 
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Ice cream trucks lead to children getting a sugar rush, leading to them misbehaving, leading to frustrated parents, leading to more purchases of illegal substances, leading to distribution wars. There is a causal connection, and a potential ban for them.

 
Guppycur said:
Oh, and to my point, I'd hate to see something like the blunderbuss be removed because "no one uses it", when the /reason/ may be a simple fix.  Tfp has a history of removing rather than fixing what was wrong with things (miss you LBD!). 
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Their game is just bursting with content.... They must be rich people if they can afford to throw something away instead of fixing it.

 We are poor modders, we can live well on their garbage. :D

I think that we only need one instruction that works with tags, and we can fully have LBD in our mods - "onSelfItemCrafted" ;)

 
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Damocles said:
Ice cream trucks lead to children getting a sugar rush, leading to them misbehaving, leading to frustrated parents, leading to more purchases of illegal substances, leading to distribution wars. There is a causal connection, and a potential ban for them.
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In Glasgow the correlation is a little more direct.

"The Ice Cream Wars was a turf war in the East End of Glasgow, in Scotland, in the 1980s between rival criminal organisations selling drugs and stolen goods from ice cream vans. Van operators were involved in frequent violence and intimidation tactics."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Ice_Cream_Wars

Given that the same idea has been used from Germany to New York the answer is yes, on average, the sound of an ice cream truck leads to an increase of the risk of violence.

 
Guppycur said:
Oh, and to my point, I'd hate to see something like the blunderbuss be removed because "no one uses it", when the /reason/ may be a simple fix.  Tfp has a history of removing rather than fixing what was wrong with things (miss you LBD!). 
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You always repeat that and always ignore that LBD had at least 2 **public** fixing iterations (if LBD was introduced in A14, 4 iterations if in A12).  

But yes, hopefully the blunderbuss is kept in the game

 
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Meg, changing != fixing.

The issue was that lbd allowed someone to spam stone axes to give them points to buy unrelated abilities.  That was never fixed.

Spamming stone axes should have ONLY resulted in a superior ability to make stone axes.  That was *never* introduced as a fix.

Don't conflate the two things. 

 
Suspend it ;)  or they'll pay attention to it now... We need to move this agenda forward discreetly.

 
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Guppycur said:
Oh, and to my point, I'd hate to see something like the blunderbuss be removed because "no one uses it", when the /reason/ may be a simple fix.  Tfp has a history of removing rather than fixing what was wrong with things (miss you LBD!). 
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The blunderbus got the biggest boost it has ever had with A19. I never used the blunderbus pre A19 and now I use it all the time--even putting three on my belt at times so that I can get three blasts off before needing to reload. With the new stone age looting rules the blunderbus is definitely king and guaranteed to rise in popularity. Joel even adjusted the recipe for ammo to be a bit cheaper: 1 paper, 1 rock, 2 gp

I find myself hitting trash piles now to get that extra bit of paper.....

Blunderbus is here to stay!

 
Guppycur said:
Meg, changing != fixing.

The issue was that lbd allowed someone to spam stone axes to give them points to buy unrelated abilities.  That was never fixed.

Spamming stone axes should have ONLY resulted in a superior ability to make stone axes.  That was *never* introduced as a fix.

Don't conflate the two things. 
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I never played the game before A17, but IMHO, I feel like there could be a nice equilibrium between LBD and the current perk system, for example, the more you use your machine guns, the better you become with them, but you would have to perk into making higher quality ammo after you had found the correct schematic in stead of instantly knowing how to do so after spending the point. So you’d find the schematic, and then have to spend the point to unlock it. All while firing your AK47 and continually getting better and improving your aim.

 
n2n1 said:
Suspend it ;)  or they'll pay attention to it now... We need to move this agenda forward discreetly.
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Anyway, they already have lots of LBD in A19!

Building is a type of doing, right?

Killing zombies is a type of doing too!

I'm completely satisfied that I will be watching streamers LBD mistakes and getting killed. They will not do those mistakes again!

 
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