PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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fragtzack said:
Navezgane Prison <Salute> POI team !

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Thought I was completing the quest to clear Navezgane Prison.  Alas, the Prison seems bugged. There is still 2 zombies left that can't be found. When I got to the spot where the zombie is indicated by yellow dot, there dot is in mid air with nothing there or around. I tried "killall" in console to no avail.

 
meganoth said:
You missed the easiest option that would not need any global balance changes:  If TFP diminishes the stats range between q1 and q6 weapons, then the differenence between the tiers will be automatically bigger

Currently each quality level increases damage by 5% of the base damage for a weapon (if I remember correctly), plus/minus a random value. Reduce that to 3% and a q5 stone axe is not on average 20% better than a q1 stone axe but only 12%. An q1 iron pickaxe would now be 8% better in relation to that q5 stone axe without changing anything about it.
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Nope, I actually did think of that.  You're not thinking of this with balance brain. 

First of all it is a global balance change, you're changing the balance of literally every weapon and tool lol.  Q5 stone gets nerfed by 8% globally, which might not sound like much but if you cross any hit thresholds it becomes substantial.  And that's going to happen across the range of quality/weapons/enemies/tools.  So it won't be 8%.  Let's take the common zombie.  Lets say pre-nerf it took Q5 stone 3 hits and a power attack on the ground to kill...all headshots.  Now it takes 4 hits and a power attack.  That's effectively a 25% nerf for the most common weapon in the game.  Players are going to notice their stone tools are weaker.


It also STILL runs into much the same problem as currently.  Right now its a question of "x is literally better than y", but even if you squish everything numerically you're forgetting about the repair costs.  Stone Spear does not have repair kits required to maintain.  If Iron upgrades are only a tiny bit better (and with the mod amount differences they'll prolly still be worse) then its not better at all unless you have infinite repair kits.  In a game state where the water economy has been hit and glue and duct tape have significant value then Stone Spear is still going to be the better choice for smart players until roughly the same quality break point...iron 3.  This is even worse for Stone Axe since its good for everything and now Stone

Not only that but you've made this change at a cost.  Quality now matters alot less.  Not only might you still skip Quality 5 stone to Q3 iron, you might just skip qualities more in general now because it takes 2 qualities to make the difference of 1 now.  5% vs 6% for two compressed qualities.

 
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A21 b317

I don't know where to post, but I will post it here. I found 2 bugs so far. One of them I'm not quite sure if it's a bug.

1) When it begins raining, the brightness settings indoors goes down dramatically, to the point you can barely see anything at all, only in areas where there's no available source of light. If you see the video in this link, you will see how going back to a zone where it has light normalizes everything, going downstairs makes everything pitch dark, and even by solely looking downstairs, everything goes pitch black:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/697933906879447130/1121840816428679178/7_Days_To_Die_2023-06-22_16-06-58.mp4

2) When I was playing, I alt-tabbed, doing so froze the game, then my entire computer, then both of my screens went pitch black, to the point they stopped detecting video source as if my PC was turned off for few seconds, and when it got back, it alt tabbed, but the game froze.

When I opened the game again, every single time I try to load my world, it gets an error and the game keeps freezing, which I assume that this now corrupted my world for good. This is the error I get every single time I try to load in. The last action I did before alt tabbing was completing a quest and I selected as reward the crafting bundle.

image.png


Computer specs:

-i9 10900

-RTX 2070 Super

-32GB Ram

-Game is installed on a M2 disc.

I hope this helps, because my world now can't be loaded since I get this error every single time.

 
Riamus said:
Well, since LazMan said they are working on a change for it, any ideas are moot but I'm curious on your response.  Shouldn't we want players to upgrade?  You shouldn't be using stone if you can use iron or iron if you can use steel.  Those should be better.  Mods shouldn't make stone better than iron.  And really, how many mods do you end up having for stone before you upgrade as it is currently?  1, maybe 2 if you are upgrading slowly or happen to be lucky in what drops early game (at least normally; you can always have a game where you find a lot of mods)?  You really shouldn't have stone long enough to max out the mods.  If you do, then it's probably because you don't want to craft a quality 1-3 or 4 iron weapon because it's actually worse than keeping your quality 5/6 stone weapon.  Not because you can't do so.  The stone really should not be better than iron regardless of mods.

Even for cloth, you can stealth in military armor.  I understand why that's not the preferred option but they could look into making it a better stealth option for players if they wanted.  In the end, cloth is just cloth.  It shouldn't be the best armor in the game.  You shouldn't be able to buff it with mods enough that it's a great option for anything other than just being quiet for stealth, imo.  (I know anyone who uses it this way will disagree and I understand why but at the same time it really doesn't make sense and is just what players are used to and so want to keep.)
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This is now like 3 separate conversations.  Choose 1 at a time and we can do this.  Otherwise its just going to be huge walls of text :D.  Qaulity upgrades have been covered.  So I'd say either choose mods or cloth armor.  Though with hyperbole like "Cloth shouldn't be the best armor in the game" (misleading at best, just flat wrong at worst) I would prolly avoid the cloth armor conversation :D.

 

 
Claud said:
A21 b317

I don't know where to post, but I will post it here. I found 2 bugs so far. One of them I'm not quite sure if it's a bug.

1) When it begins raining, the brightness settings indoors goes down dramatically, to the point you can barely see anything at all, only in areas where there's no available source of light. If you see the video in this link, you will see how going back to a zone where it has light normalizes everything, going downstairs makes everything pitch dark, and even by solely looking downstairs, everything goes pitch black:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/697933906879447130/1121840816428679178/7_Days_To_Die_2023-06-22_16-06-58.mp4

2) When I was playing, I alt-tabbed, doing so froze the game, then my entire computer, then both of my screens went pitch black, to the point they stopped detecting video source as if my PC was turned off for few seconds, and when it got back, it alt tabbed, but the game froze.

When I opened the game again, every single time I try to load my world, it gets an error and the game keeps freezing, which I assume that this now corrupted my world for good. This is the error I get every single time I try to load in. The last action I did before alt tabbing was completing a quest and I selected as reward the crafting bundle.



Computer specs:

-i9 10900

-RTX 2070 Super

-32GB Ram

-Game is installed on a M2 disc.

I hope this helps, because my world now can't be loaded since I get this error every single time.
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There is nice big red banner at the top of every screen where you can post bugs.

image.png

Direct Link: 





 
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One thing that could be improved is the tents. The tent is so brittle that it fell apart when I went inside to pick some medicine.

 
Ralathar44 said:
Nope, I actually did think of that.  You're not thinking of this with balance brain. 

First of all it is a global balance change, you're changing the balance of literally every weapon and tool lol.  Q5 stone gets nerfed by 8% globally, which might not sound like much but if you cross any hit thresholds it becomes substantial.  And that's going to happen across the range of quality/weapons/enemies/tools.  So it won't be 8%.  Let's take the common zombie.  Lets say pre-nerf it took Q5 stone 3 hits and a power attack on the ground to kill...all headshots.  Now it takes 4 hits and a power attack.  That's effectively a 25% nerf for the most common weapon in the game.  Players are going to notice their stone tools are weaker.
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Oh yes, Q5 gets nerfed but now players learn to change faster to iron tools tier 1 and 2 because those are actually taking over the place of stone q5. While currently you stop at Q5 stone and there is a "long" stretch of progression where you are NOT progressing at all.

Naturally that is till a change overall, but now you have a smooth progression instead of a jumpy one. I don't think the jumpy progression was intended. There is no guarantee for a q5 stone axe doing the same damage between alphas. The interesting thing with this change is though that the length of overall progression is exactly the same. If you have a q5 steel tier weapon on day 40 on average before you will be there exactly at the same time.

Ralathar44 said:
It also STILL runs into much the same problem as currently.  Right now its a question of "x is literally better than y", but even if you squish everything numerically you're forgetting about the repair costs.  Stone Spear does not have repair kits required to maintain.  If Iron upgrades are only a tiny bit better (and with the mod amount differences they'll prolly still be worse) then its not better at all unless you have infinite repair kits.  In a game state where the water economy has been hit and glue and duct tape have significant value then Stone Spear is still going to be the better choice for smart players until roughly the same quality break point...iron 3.  This is even worse for Stone Axe since its good for everything and now Stone
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As it is now stone q5 is miles above iron tier 1, not only in damage but also like you just explained in repair cost. I.e. even if compression is not enough it still changes the balance in the right direction. And if it wasn't compressed enough it can be compressed more or more advantages added to the higher tier. 

Ralathar44 said:
Not only that but you've made this change at a cost.  Quality now matters alot less.  Not only might you still skip Quality 5 stone to Q3 iron, you might just skip qualities more in general now because it takes 2 qualities to make the difference of 1 now.  5% vs 6% for two compressed qualities.
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So? I have done that in the old system as well, ignoring steps because the change was not worth whatever dukes or work or material was necessary. That is every users personal choice how much damage more is worth a change. If you get the next tier for naught (aka through looting) even 1 more damage may be enough to switch, if you have to pay 12000 dukes for it, not even 6 more damage may be enough to sway someone. But when you already have something lower-tier that is objectively better, NOBODY will ever switch to it. 

Remember that one reason the crafting system was changed that there almost never was a reason to craft a large section of the weapon progression, and this is still a remnant where progressing feels like not worth it.

 
Ralathar44 said:
This is now like 3 separate conversations.  Choose 1 at a time and we can do this.  Otherwise its just going to be huge walls of text :D.  Qaulity upgrades have been covered.  So I'd say either choose mods or cloth armor.  Though with hyperbole like "Cloth shouldn't be the best armor in the game" (misleading at best, just flat wrong at worst) I would prolly avoid the cloth armor conversation :D.
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There are many people who consider cloth armor to be the best in the game.  Whether it is or not is an opinion.  There are benefits like stamina and detriments like lower armor.  My point was that I don't think it should be considered by anyone to be the best armor in the game.  You can see various posts about it being the best every so often here.  I'm fine with the idea that military armor (still light armor) might be considered to be the best by people who like the light armor route but not that the first armor you get in the game is considered by anyone to be better than later armor.

Any change to rework the levels with quality and tiers will most likely also affect cloth armor and will likely upset those who consider it the best armor.

This still is tied to options to adjust quality levels and/or mods for tiers but if you want to only talk about one part at a time, I'll leave what I said before as my comment on that rather than continue the rest of the discussion.  Either way, since they are already working on a change, nothing we say is really going to matter at this point.  The discussion might have made a difference before they started.  But since they've already chosen their path we'll just have to deal with whatever that path ends up being.  Oh well.  I can live with whatever they do.  I don't have to go through all quality levels and tiers even though that would be preferable.

Yopo said:
Yo, what happened to the cube 3x3x1 block? It’s no longer in the black shape menu. 
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Unfortunately, they removed it.

 
Riamus said:
Any change to rework the levels with quality and tiers will most likely also affect cloth armor and will likely upset those who consider it the best armor.
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& @Ralathar44

It is the "best" for a couple of specific play styles, one of which I admittedly prefer to play in any game, for the simple factors of no mobility reduction (being able to cover distances faster when not in a vehicle and being able to actually get out of a bad situation to open up the needed space to deal with threats), no stamina penalties at all from the armor (move faster and farther for longer) and no additional "noise" generation (until about player lvl 50ish when for some reason most of the zombies can't even tell if an unperked sneaker in steel is within 5 blocks, this keeps a sneaking player from getting attacked at the cost of taking allot longer to move through POIs) while still giving the player access to the mods allowed for armor and adding a slight mit of crit mitigation. Those of us who use it do so knowing that when we get hit it will hurt allot more than what others consider the "best", but weigh that against the stark increase negative effects even leather (Mil, Scrap, Iron, and Steel armors are worse much than leather on this) has on any of those things I mentioned. Not going to go into the argument over stealth/mobility playstyles vs TFP POI design philosophy that renders those playstyles more and more the purveyance of hardline masochists here.

Honestly, in my opinion, any discussion about the current armors ingame outside of supposition around what TFP is planning to replace them with when/after bandits and the new player creation system hit public is completely moot.

 
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Laz Man said:
Love seeing what players create, especially castles.  Unfortunately there are not many castles in Arizona to warrant a full on castle like that one.

I do have a couple of castle facade house designs that could make it next Alpha.  Will see...
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Thanks.   😃

You know you could task someone to make a whole new map of some territory in Europe where castles are a thing. 😀  There are no shortage of people who would want to add content to the game. Many of them don't even work for TFP;s. You could ask them. 

 
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meganoth said:
Oh yes, Q5 gets nerfed but now players learn to change faster to iron tools tier 1 and 2 because those are actually taking over the place of stone q5. While currently you stop at Q5 stone and there is a "long" stretch of progression where you are NOT progressing at all.

Naturally that is till a change overall, but now you have a smooth progression instead of a jumpy one. I don't think the jumpy progression was intended. There is no guarantee for a q5 stone axe doing the same damage between alphas. The interesting thing with this change is though that the length of overall progression is exactly the same. If you have a q5 steel tier weapon on day 40 on average before you will be there exactly at the same time.
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Aye,  I get your intent, I'm just saying that it definitely is a large impacting global balance change and it could have larger ramifications than you may realize, often to specific weapons or tools.  These would be difficult to identify without alot of testing or just letting the individual players get upset at the nerf and bug report it if their weapon/tool is affected more than feels good.

meganoth said:
As it is now stone q5 is miles above iron tier 1, not only in damage but also like you just explained in repair cost. I.e. even if compression is not enough it still changes the balance in the right direction. And if it wasn't compressed enough it can be compressed more or more advantages added to the higher tier. 

So? I have done that in the old system as well, ignoring steps because the change was not worth whatever dukes or work or material was necessary. That is every users personal choice how much damage more is worth a change. If you get the next tier for naught (aka through looting) even 1 more damage may be enough to switch, if you have to pay 12000 dukes for it, not even 6 more damage may be enough to sway someone. But when you already have something lower-tier that is objectively better, NOBODY will ever switch to it. 

Remember that one reason the crafting system was changed that there almost never was a reason to craft a large section of the weapon progression, and this is still a remnant where progressing feels like not worth it.
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Ultimately its a preference thing and something is being lost no matter where you move the air in the balloon.  I'll  play either way ofc, I just push back against the idea that these kinds of solutions actually solve the problem.  They do not.  At bet they reduce it somewhat while potentially causing new problems :).

 
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Riamus said:
There are many people who consider cloth armor to be the best in the game.  Whether it is or not is an opinion.  There are benefits like stamina and detriments like lower armor.  My point was that I don't think it should be considered by anyone to be the best armor in the game.  You can see various posts about it being the best every so often here.  I'm fine with the idea that military armor (still light armor) might be considered to be the best by people who like the light armor route but not that the first armor you get in the game is considered by anyone to be better than later armor.
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It's definitively not the best armor though.  If you measure it by the job of being armor its the worst armor in the game hands down.  Even if you're concerned about mobility and stamina and sneaking with mods leather and military are just as good.   Now cloth armor may be best at a particular role, but even that I contend is no longer correct.  It WAS correct back when mobility and noise mods were usable and you could get bonuses, now military and leather are highly competitive in that area.

In fact in this update it is even worse because injuries happen much more often and its got the least injury resistance.  Its the best armor in the game only by ease of crafting and cost.  And if we're going by that then the Stone Axe is the best pick and best Axe in the game :D.

 

hiemfire said:
& @Ralathar44

It is the "best" for a couple of specific play styles, one of which I admittedly prefer to play in any game, for the simple factors of no mobility reduction (being able to cover distances faster when not in a vehicle and being able to actually get out of a bad situation to open up the needed space to deal with threats), no stamina penalties at all from the armor (move faster and farther for longer) and no additional "noise" generation (until about player lvl 50ish when for some reason most of the zombies can't even tell if an unperked sneaker in steel is within 5 blocks, this keeps a sneaking player from getting attacked at the cost of taking allot longer to move through POIs) while still giving the player access to the mods allowed for armor and adding a slight mit of crit mitigation. Those of us who use it do so knowing that when we get hit it will hurt allot more than what others consider the "best", but weigh that against the stark increase negative effects even leather (Mil, Scrap, Iron, and Steel armors are worse much than leather on this) has on any of those things I mentioned. Not going to go into the argument over stealth/mobility playstyles vs TFP POI design philosophy that renders those playstyles more and more the purveyance of hardline masochists here.

Honestly, in my opinion, any discussion about the current armors ingame outside of supposition around what TFP is planning to replace them with when/after bandits and the new player creation system hit public is completely moot.
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As mentioned before this is only true until mods.  Once you add mods in leather and military do the stealth and mobility job just as well.  There was a time long ago this was not the case because cloth armor could also use those same mods to be even faster and stealthier, but they wisely removed the use of those mods from cloth armor multiple updates back.  So baseline cloth is more mobile and sneaks better, but with mods its just an inferior version of leather and military.

I should know, I used to be one of those people who would wear cloth armor end game :D.  But after those mod changes there is no reason to.

 
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Has any determination been made that build 317 is going to be the one that goes stable?

...and yeah, that's my roundabout way of asking "when is stable coming out?" without asking for a specific date. If there will be at least one more build before stable, then I don't expect stable to be released within a week.

 
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