I think deleting the quest tutorial is not as hard as it seems. Perhaps I'm wrong and it requires writing code comparable to writing code for a drone, but this is unlikely. What other quests are you talking about? About the notes for which they give 500 dukes and 300 experience?
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I'm not sure if this is true. Trader's POIs could remain but become empty. Whether it is possible to implement it easily, I don’t know. Perhaps this really only applies to generating a new world. If you do it with minimal cost.
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And?
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False, optional
If you play the game without a trader (I do), then the tutorial quest remains, you get perk points, but you cannot complete it in. Because there is no trader. The only thing that remains to be done is to complete it upon the completion of the penultimate point, and not after finding a trader. I don't think this is a huge amount of work.
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False, optional
So, all your responses to the problems I mentioned are kind of like this, if I have it right:
Problem: change loot to remove all challenge quests if playing without traders.
Solution: don't bother, it just becomes useless loot.
That's the kind of thing that
kills a game on review. It's unprofessional, incomplete, a hack. If it is to be done, TFP will try to do it right. It means ALL of it so the experience is smooth and pleasant to the players. It means no empty traders, it means challenges you get from loot and then cannot complete because there's no traders, it means all of I said and things I didn't think of and things TFP won't think of until QA starts playing with it and find issues that need to be addressed.
Besides, I'm not saying that the trader should be removed for everyone by default. I offer this as an option,
It would be much easier if it they removed it for everyone. Being an option means they have to support both paths.
Man, this won't happen until 2 years from now, if we're lucky.
And it will take longer if they take time to add another option to the game, and even longer if that option makes the factions/bandits/storyline development harder.
Breaking is not building. Cutting off some of the content isn't a big deal. The Trader disable option is a compromise between fine-tuning the trader and doing nothing. Therefore, it could be regarded as temporary. Or not. After all, you can turn off Blood Moon in the settings. How so? After all, Blood Moon is almost the central mechanics of the game. How did it happen that the appearance of this setting was considered acceptable?
The blood moon wasn't even a thing for many alphas. And there were multiple "modes" to play the game that were removed. Disabling blood moon did not require changes on anything else. There's no mention of blood moons anywhere in the game, there's nothing that depends on blood moons happening.
I think you are fooling yourself by talking about some kind of loot balancing or world generation that is necessary in the case of a setting that allows you to remove a merchant. Removing the trader is balancing the loot. Because he is the OP at the moment.
Come on, buddy, what kind of balance are you talking about? There is no balance in the game and no one is doing it. For many years to come, we will be able to destroy hordes with a Pipe Bomb made of 1 coal and 2 grass leaves. We will have a Treasure Hunter and so on for many years to come. In this game, balancing is the lot of the player, not the developer. Everybody declares this openly. They say it's a sandbox. So give us a handy balancing tool.
If you think that, you are plain wrong. TFP spends a lot of time balancing things, and the existing balance problems are just a testament to how difficulty and time consuming it is to do it. I was part of the Ravenhearst mod team for a while so I can speak from experience on how hard it is to do it. As for TFP "not doing it"... Alpha 18 was basically a balancing alpha. They talked on dev streams about changing loot balance, they are talking in this very thread right now about changing balance on trader prices. And the new gamestage per biome thing, do you think there's no effort being done to balance it? They spend a ton of time on game balance and you just need to go back and play older alphas to see how much it changed. Just because you don't like the current balance doesn't mean they don't care.
If they add a no-trader option and people start complaining you can't get crucibles, you can't get ammo, etc, etc, they have to pay attention to it. They might decide not to do anything about it, but just meeting and discussing and deciding takes time. And if they decide that yes, they need to do something, it's more time. Adding an option that is so badly supported people will only complain about it does more harm than good.
I don't think that the development of water, the development of bandits, the development of AI drones is comparable in volume in order to pull xml files into the options menu. In order to ban some POI (trader) from the generation list with one button. They already have this mechanic. The game has other options that are also configured in xml files.
If I offered to change the background in the main menu, would you also tell me that developers need to make bandits, and not waste time on the background image? But the background is not what the players suffer from.
Once again, wake up and notice that NO other settings affect anything other than what is written in them. Accept it and stop making lies
I have a fair amount of experience with modding 7 Days to Die. I have mods available on the mod launcher, I was part of the Ravenhearst overhaul mod modding team. I have open source tools I've created to support it.
In replying to you I thought of all things I'd have to change if I were to make a mod to remove traders entirely. I thought of the things I would not be able to do with a modlet and how much code support would be needed for it (I'm a software developer myself). And it isn't the first time I thought about it either: Jax wanted to remove traders from Ravenhearst around the time I was in the project -- as did I --, so I thought about what would be needed at that time.
Every single thing I mentioned as being needed comes from actual experience.
That said, I'm not trying to convince you of it. You asked a question, and I answered to the best of my ability. I can't help it that you don't like the answer.
Yes, a simple modlet with a few lines will delete that quest line very easily. And by using a modlet, it should work for later patches unless they change the code around during development.
Yes, it is very easy for a modlet to completely change the quests. Alas, if you change a quest line that is in progress you can easily completely break the quest progression -- that's something that happened a few times while I was on the Ravenhearst team, forcing people to start a new game when updating. I had not considered this in my original reply, but it's something else that would have to be considered if this option was to be set on game load like the other options.
But the point is that the modlet
completely changes the quest. It doesn't make it an option. There's no way in the present system for a quest to go different ways depending on a game option.
hwell:
