PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

Farm changes are ok. They are a bit tough right now, but just wait for the farmer outfit and crazy legendary tools and you will notice that we will be better off. This change gives seeds a significant increase in importance, both from loot and harvesting. Before it was just plant and forget.

That assumes planned features will boost those things.

Wouldn't it be better to wait for those things to be confirmed or confirmed to be being actively worked on presently before messing with a functional and legitimate system?

In my humble opinion, shafting people in the short term on the possibility it 'may' be compensated for in the long term is senseless and inconvenient, to say the least.

 

[meganoth]

On thing should be clear to everyone:

Unless you have played A20 and tried out farming and food in general for ingame weeks you can at most make a guess what it means but not make definite statements about its validity or what should be changed.

There are multiple changes to the food system: The loot system was seriously overhauled (maybe more seeds might drop for example?), canned food has higher food value and the farm management has changed. And the patch notes themselves leave room for interpretation!!  

One consequence might be that only the Fortitude player would be able to make a self-supplying farm, everyone else would just feed found or bought seeds into a farm as long as they last.

Another conesquence seems to be that you always have to replant your farm which (if it is true) will not make me look forward to operating a farm at all, Again this is something we had already in previous alphas and when this was improved (in my opinion) there was a group of players who complained about this. Even something like this seems to have fans.

One thing I can say from experience, food in all previous versions was suboptimal in its exponential growth, usually you cared for food (finding it and producing it) the first x days then it immediately became a non-issue. The changes now have the potential to improve food on many levels with the grave danger to make farming the most hated feature of all again (at least for lazy people like me)

 

[Blake_]

That assumes planned features will boost those things.

Wouldn't it be better to wait for those things to be confirmed or confirmed to be being actively worked on presently before messing with a functional and legitimate system?

In my humble opinion, shafting people in the short term on the possibility it 'may' be compensated for in the long term is senseless and inconvenient, to say the least.

Correct. Now ask TFP if they care about the end goal or the temporary goal. Still, it's almost as good as the a19 farming, so no biggie.

 

[Aldranon]

JaWoodle got a flying drone on day one!

Its not only nice, its cute in several ways.

I don't plan spoiling it for anyone, but if you have JaWoodle's luck, its a thing! 

 

[meganoth]

That assumes planned features will boost those things.

Wouldn't it be better to wait for those things to be confirmed or confirmed to be being actively worked on presently before messing with a functional and legitimate system?

In my humble opinion, shafting people in the short term on the possibility it 'may' be compensated for in the long term is senseless and inconvenient, to say the least.

This is not a service game. TFP doesn't get payed regularily to deliver a fully balanced system. Features will be "tested" on us and our feedback might lead to further changes. And saying people are shafted before even playing it is adventurous to say the least 

We look into the internals of a sometimes messy development process and we get (as reward) experimentals to play with. Even when the A20.5 or 6 really gets a "stable" moniker and isn't changed anymore in 1-2 months from now it is in fact an experimental unfinished prototype version of a game.

 

[BFT2020]

The problem is; much like zombies digging, many features are opposed vehemently by people who won't even be affected.

It's funny to me, and quite sad, that those who want the above ground challenge (to use a previous example of an implemented change) aren't only opposed to disabling zombies digging, but also even against the idea of a slider to disable it. Same goes for some who are suddenly all 'Farming is OP' and could easily take their own advice and not farm, but won't because they don't want others to have the convenience of sustainability; or perhaps because the nerf is a new and infallible Fun Pimp change.

The farming change affects me as I always build a farm in every playthrough I do, but right now I am fine with the changes (I haven’t played it yet to see it fully in action).

 

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

Correct. Now ask TFP if they care about the end goal or the temporary goal. Still, it's almost as good as the a19 farming, so no biggie.

Meganoth made a point relating to criticism and implied it is more valid if we experience our concerns first hand in game then form an opinion.

This is a legitimate point but isn't necessarily required, neither does it doesn't detract from what I said earlier, a point I will reiterate in response to yourself, as well as Blakes statement on farming being 'almost as good as A19.'

Points of alteration may be criticised even in principle. I don't see the productive point of interfering with a perfectly functional system.

If it turns out to be as people have suggested, and that perking will make farming sustainable with elements of rng, then all the developers will have achieved is an artificial limit on food through a system of irritating chance return of seeds, and tedious replant requirement.

To what end this will improve the game; if this is indeed the case, which granted, it may not be, is beyond me...

And saying people are shafted before even playing it is adventurous to say the least .

I'm not saying we are being shafted in absolute terms, it's sort of a conditional thing.

If it is the case that farming has been messed about with to inconvenience us in the short term, only to be corrected or restored to what it is currently; in the future, with clothing sets or whatever else, and notably after another lengthy Alpha development, then, in the short term, I see that as an example of farmers being shafted.

I think that is an entirely reasonable assessment of reality.

 

[zztong]

Let me explain something. When I walk into a military base and see a hummer.

The first thing I think is can I drive that.

Only for my memory to recall it is just window dressing.

Then when I loot the Hummer I expect to find

a M16, a grenade or an army helmet.

But instead I find a level two pick axe.

Even the next update won't fix that.

Not intending to throw fuel on the fire, but I wouldn't expect to find weaponry on an unattended Hummer on a military base, unless it were attached to the vehicle (such as mounted in a turret). The military I was part of took gun control very seriously. You would find them in a weapons locker.

Tools would certainly be apropos as military vehicles still get stuck in mud and folks otherwise need to solve non-martial problems. I might also expect to find things like MREs, water bottles, medical supplies, candy bar wrappers, a newspaper, toilet paper, etc.

Now if the base were overrun, folks were fighting and dying, and the base fell to the Z's, then I'd expect to find M16s and all sorts of stuff laying all around the compound.

Once "society" becomes a few remaining individual survivors then I don't expect anything to stay where it was, specially if you start advancing the timeline over a period of years.

 

[Aldranon]

Actually the farming changes makes the support player in MP playthroughs important. 

For SP, it appears that a couple points in farming might be necessary for long running games.

 

[meganoth]

Actually the farming changes makes the support player in MP playthroughs important. 

For SP, it appears that a couple points in farming might be necessary for long running games.

Possibly. But it also could be the case that single players not speccing into FOR will depend on continued food scavenging while supplementing and improving the canned food from hunting and small scale farming. If single players **need** a couple of points in farming instead of at most one I would view this as a serious balancing bug.

 

[SnowDog1942]

 booty quality

I like this guy.   
 

Hey billbill can u introduce me to some Chinese babes that have a high booty quality?

 

[meganoth]

I'm not saying we are being shafted in absolute terms, it's sort of a conditional thing.

If it is the case that farming has been messed about with to inconvenience us in the short term, only to be corrected or restored to what it is currently; in the future, with clothing sets or whatever else, and notably after another lengthy Alpha development, then, in the short term, I see that as an example of farmers being shafted.

I think that is an entirely reasonable assessment of reality.

Lots of crudely balanced features have been dropped on alpha audiences, probably in other alpha games too. If that makes the game unplayable in any way I would protest as well. But I don't expect this to be unusable at all since internal testers would complain as well. Therefore I don't need to paint that on the wall.

If you want a finely balanced complete game wait for gold. Meanwhile I suspect the changes might need further balance tweaks in experimental but in A20.5 stable the feature will be as usable as everything else is usually in a stable.

Remember how the minibike still was buggy in A15 stable and often fell through the world or stopped working at all? This is the level of inconvenience you should expect in an alpha, but that level of inconvenience is already a thing of the past. Nowadays the biggest inconvenience might be that you need to hunt more in game and use other food sources (or mod the game or use creative menue) because farming is not worth the effort until further balanced.

 

[Jost Amman]

Not intending to throw fuel on the fire, but I wouldn't expect to find weaponry on an unattended Hummer on a military base, unless it were attached to the vehicle (such as mounted in a turret). The military I was part of took gun control very seriously. You would find them in a weapons locker.

Tell that to the Taliban...  :heh:

 

[Roland]

Sure but then doesn't it beg the question of why people are so quick to silence critics?

Nobody has been silenced. I just read through pages of the usual angst we get from people who have read the patch notes and then imagine all the worst case scenarios of gameplay plus the usual worry that brand new features added to an alpha game must somehow be in their final intended form— and not a bit of it has been deleted or censored. 
 

I have seen some opposing viewpoints and some debate and some differing opinions expressed but that should be expected on a forum. If you offer a viewpoint and someone then offers an opposing viewpoint and you feel “silenced” because of it then it must be that your viewpoint wasn’t as compelling even in your own eyes. 
 

The only thing we silence here is rudeness and libelous accusations. You can express that you are worried that farming is going to suck all you want but as soon as you start getting insulting and flaming THEN you will be shut down.  Of course some people don’t know how to express criticism without being toxic about it. 
 

One poster just wrote that TFP should expect critical feedback when they put their game out to the public. By the same token, if someone puts their idea out to the public on a forum they should expect to read critical feedback about their point of view. But some people just want to be able to write something and have it stand without commentary. 
 

To that I say, go invest in a journal and start keeping a diary of criticisms that never get challenged…

 

[Games'n'Grumble]

Sorry, I don't know where else to ask this, but how can old prefabs be converted to new forms? I downloaded the location from A19, and it all consists of "lost blocks" and question marks. The devteam didn't rebuild all the prefabs manually, did they?

 

[bilibili-wayne]

我喜欢这个家伙。   
 

嘿，比尔比尔，你能向我介绍一些具有高赃物品质的中国美女吗？

Unfortunately, most of them do not understand English, and don't know how to come to the official BBS
 

 

[Roland]

To what end this will improve the game; if this is indeed the case, which granted, it may not be, is beyond me...

Since you admit you can’t think of a reason, let me offer one: Post Apocalyptic  Survival.  
 

A PAS world ought to be a struggle to live in. There is a degree of radiation that could cause a percentage of seeds to not germinate. 
 

The arguments I have read so far against this idea in every case has been from players who hate unlucky random results because it annoys them. They want only positive results and look at setbacks to the player as bad design. 
 

I suggest that PAS games must have chances for failure and setbacks or the world isn’t believable. Sometimes you have to do without and adapt your gameplay because what you planned to happen didn’t work. So, yes, there should be a chance that your farm fails and doesn’t automatically always return enough seeds to sustain it. 
 

I get that not everyone has fun the same way. Some people have fun in steadily and without risk of failure getting stronger and more powerful and eventually completely be 100% safe and secure and successful.  Some people have fun by achieving all that by Day 3. 
 

Other people have fun by overcoming setbacks and recovering when something unlucky destroys their plans and they have to adjust. That’s me. I’m fine with the possibility of getting zero seeds back and having to adjust to this event. I was fine when we had a chance to vomit— maybe 1% instead of 4% and only when infected would have been better but still— I liked how losing all my fullness immediately disrupted my plans and caused me to have to focus on getting food again instead of preparing to be 100% safe on horde night. I hate that the death penalty cures all debuffs because it robs me of the gameplay of working myself out of those conditions. 
 

So everyone is different but occasional negative events that randomly set me back and ruin my plans are not things that annoy me. They are fun to play for me and give me a sense of accomplishment just as completing a quest does if I get a broken arm and have no remedy available. The setback makes that quest memorable to me. 
 

For my gameplay preferences and what I expect from life after a zombie and nuclear apocalypse the new farming does not feel like bad design to me. But I knew it wasn’t going to be liked by people who loathe negative results on dice rolls and believe that design should never ever ever punish the player but only ever reward the player. 

 

[Blake_]

YES, I've upgraded my rig for this alpha.

Sorry, I don't know where else to ask this, but how can old prefabs be converted to new forms? I downloaded the location from A19, and it all consists of "lost blocks" and question marks. The devteam didn't rebuild all the prefabs manually, did they?

Not the prefabs, but the blocks, and yes, it was an unbearable amount of work. So any previous prefab is kind off useless now, sorry. 

Edit: Most of the prefabs were also upgraded, so it's also almost as you ask too.

 

[Kalex]

Hmm, streamers are saying no new t5's, but they might be wrong, or the patch notes might be wrong since it was wrong on drone.

What do you mean it was wrong on drones? The drone was listed in the patch notes, and the drone is in the game. Just because you didn't read the patch notes carefully enough, doesn't mean it wasn't there.

 

[meganoth]

YES, I've upgraded my rig for this alpha.

Sorry, but your new headset does not meet minimum specs for the game of 2Ghz CPU and 8G RAM.