PC An in depth discussion on zombie loot in alpha 17

[Poojam]

From my experience on A17, you get one loot bag in 50 kills roughly which is really bad. I think the horde nights should have a boss every horde night. Standard zombies give junk loot with the odd one with no loot. The harder the zombie is the better the loot should be. The boss should be hard as Fk and give at least one rare item. This balances it much better

I miss having a reason to kill zombies other than gaining generic xp. Like if I was in need of an antibiotic or bandage, I would specifically search out and kill nurse zombies. Same was true for military gear from soldier zombies, and rad gear .... etc. Or if I really needed brass because the server I was on was severely looted in my area, I would just farm zombies and trash cans. It made certain things technically infinite which helped with older servers.

 

[hotpoon]

I miss having a reason to kill zombies other than gaining generic xp. Like if I was in need of an antibiotic or bandage, I would specifically search out and kill nurse zombies. Same was true for military gear from soldier zombies, and rad gear .... etc. Or if I really needed brass because the server I was on was severely looted in my area, I would just farm zombies and trash cans. It made certain things technically infinite which helped with older servers.

Same

 

[OzHawkeye]

I miss having a reason to kill zombies other than gaining generic xp. Like if I was in need of an antibiotic or bandage, I would specifically search out and kill nurse zombies. Same was true for military gear from soldier zombies, and rad gear .... etc. Or if I really needed brass because the server I was on was severely looted in my area, I would just farm zombies and trash cans. It made certain things technically infinite which helped with older servers.

This is probably one of the better arguments I've heard for restoring the prior system.

I think though that some compromise solution can still achieve the best of both worlds, I certainly hope it can, because I'm personally very much liking not having to loot every single zombie I kill (I also dislike the idea that the games primary threat should also be considered a major loot source to).

To me, the ideal solution would be a mix, where most zombies still don't drop loot, except for the following:

1) Bosses have a much higher chance of dropping loot, and the loot tends to be more valuable.

2) Certain zombies have a higher degree of dropping a particular subset of loot (nurses dropping bandages for example, or fat zombies dropping animal fat etc)

It would still mean that the player wouldn't have to laboriously check every single zombie kill, but would still incentivize some "target selection" on behalf of the player in terms of perhaps taking extra risks to kill a particular zombie in a group.

 

[hotpoon]

It would still mean that the player wouldn't have to laboriously check every single zombie kill, but would still incentivize some "target selection" on behalf of the player in terms of perhaps taking extra risks to kill a particular zombie in a group.

I actually want to rifle through the pockets of every corpse. I love a loot reward for a kill, even if it's crap loot. Loot on corpses is one of the major differentiators between an RPG and a shooter. This being a survival game, we have both camps fighting for what they want. Maybe it should be a toggle in the settings?

 

[OzHawkeye]

I actually want to rifle through the pockets of every corpse. I love a loot reward for a kill, even if it's crap loot. Loot on corpses is one of the major differentiators between an RPG and a shooter. This being a survival game, we have both camps fighting for what they want. Maybe it should be a toggle in the settings?

And this is the probably hopeless conundrum TFP have on their hands - the playerbase simply doesn't speak with one voice, and sometimes, as in this case, what one segment of the playerbase wants is mutually exclusive to what the other segment wants.

There's also some caution needed when opening up the "put a toggle in the settings menu" line. Taken too often, it could lead to a settings "page" that is dozens, even hundreds, of lines long.

The best, near-term solution, is XML modding. I've not bothered to look (and I can't right now), but hopefully the percent change for loot (currently 2%) can be simply edited in the appropriate XML, and then each player is free to set it however they prefer.

For me, I'd leave it where it's at - I love not having to loot every single kill, but I understand that not everyone is going to feel the same way.

 

[Poojam]

And this is the probably hopeless conundrum TFP have on their hands - the playerbase simply doesn't speak with one voice, and sometimes, as in this case, what one segment of the playerbase wants is mutually exclusive to what the other segment wants.
There's also some caution needed when opening up the "put a toggle in the settings menu" line. Taken too often, it could lead to a settings "page" that is dozens, even hundreds, of lines long.

The best, near-term solution, is XML modding. I've not bothered to look (and I can't right now), but hopefully the percent change for loot (currently 2%) can be simply edited in the appropriate XML, and then each player is free to set it however they prefer.

For me, I'd leave it where it's at - I love not having to loot every single kill, but I understand that not everyone is going to feel the same way.

I think it would be fine with 20% loot drop rate, but also delete the true garbage from the common loot table (nails, paper, broken glass, seeds, $3, glass panes, jars, scrap iron).

 

[Sellsents]

In general, as I said in the other thread as well, zombies should never be something to be chased after or farmed or be seen as a source of loot. It goes against everything its zombie-apocalypse survival concept stands for, both thematically and in gameplay terms.

Wait what? Did you ever saw The Walking Dead. They killed Zombies for Loot like gear, weapons, keys etc pp and even for its gore.

Also would you ever be in an apocalyptic world you would do everything and I mean everything to stay alive. And if a zombie has anything you need, you would go and kill him for it. Killing zombies would be essential to gain basic materials that you are desperatly need. No matter if it is a simple lighter, a knife, other tools or just a warm coat. And yes, zombies are dangerous but you would take the risk nevertheless.

 

[Hogweed]

I have been playing this game since 2014, and have over 3500 hours on Steam. I always loved this game, a large part of it was the fun we had playing online. We did a lot of goofy things, including building skyscrapers, having group horde nights, building a village with houses a few hundred feet apart, and sharing and helping each other. So many great things we could do and so much fun to be had.

I think so much of that has changed, and the game has gone from so much fun to very serious, almost to the point of tedious, with little room to focus on the fun of building the way we used to. Finding drops has become so sparse now that I really agree that zombies need to drop zombie stuff a lot more than they are now.

I killed over 50 zombies in the short time I have been playing this, and only 1 drop? I really like the way it drops, that big noticeable bag, but it needs to happen a lot more. Not every time, but not rarely either. You get a lot of these hard core "I love it super hard" gamers, but I think they are the minority, most of us like a game that you can have fun in, and this Alpha 17 has lost so much of that.

I dont play as often as I used to, as there are too many games that i really enjoy playing cause they are FUN. Your supposed to be the FUN Pimps, not the Tediously Serious Pimps. I dont mean to discount that this game has gotten to the place where it is really frighteningly realistic now, and there is a lot to love about that. But making it too hard is going to detract a lot of players. And I have a hard time getting enough food without having to beg from others sometimes. I think increasing the drops is still staying within lines of realism, since people will be carrying stuff, food, even guns and bullets, before they succumb.

You really should raise the % of drops to close to at least 40%, that would satisfy so many people, and still be low enough for the hard cores.

 

[HungryZombie]

Right, the "zombies aren't a resource" argument. Please explain to me the point of defending a base against a zombie horde when you could just ride a minibike instead.
That's all I want to know.

I really loved the tower defense aspect of the game and now unless TFP has a trick up their sleeves, I don't see the point in even bothering with it.

There is no defense over fighting the horde or riding your minibike all night. It's not a right or wrong kinda choice. I can tell you I prefer to fight the zombies because i'm playing a zombie game and well, I wanna fight zombies.

If you don't see a point then don't bother as you say. What I don't think I want to see is some kind of forced incentive to do anything. Just put stuff out there and let me decide what I want to do.

 

[RestInPieces]

There is no defense over fighting the horde or riding your minibike all night. It's not a right or wrong kinda choice. I can tell you I prefer to fight the zombies because i'm playing a zombie game and well, I wanna fight zombies.
If you don't see a point then don't bother as you say. What I don't think I want to see is some kind of forced incentive to do anything. Just put stuff out there and let me decide what I want to do.

The game is already full of forced incentives. The incentive to kill zombies should be survival/base protection. Not loot like eidobunny says, lest we want a combat-focused zombie grinder rpg. A "I fancy killing zombies" is not good enough either. The "riding all night with a minibike without risk/almost no cost/consequence" not only does not make for engaging gameplay, but it retracts a part of it from the game. Choices are for playstyles and playstyles do not involve cheesing game mechanics out of the game - that is irrelevant to what a "playstyle" is.

 

[meganoth]

I have been playing this game since 2014, and have over 3500 hours on Steam. I always loved this game, a large part of it was the fun we had playing online. We did a lot of goofy things, including building skyscrapers, having group horde nights, building a village with houses a few hundred feet apart, and sharing and helping each other. So many great things we could do and so much fun to be had.
I think so much of that has changed, and the game has gone from so much fun to very serious, almost to the point of tedious, with little room to focus on the fun of building the way we used to. Finding drops has become so sparse now that I really agree that zombies need to drop zombie stuff a lot more than they are now.

Well, I can tell you where the fun is for our co-op group, but I don't know if it will help. We had a lot of fun looting pois together. Shared xp, combating the difficulty through helping each other, massive amount of zombies, poi dungeons where you want someone watching your back, and the quests, all of this made us often group up again when we went looting.

Also consider turning down difficulty and/or increasing block HP. I think building balance is off at the moment but that will surely change.

 

[HungryZombie]

My main concern is that as the hordes get extreme - I'm talking like maximum gamestage hordes with like 50 simultaneous zombies all night, half radiated cops the other half radiated ferals - that you're going to spend more than 6 days recouping your losses for the 7th night. My greatest fear here is that as the game progresses, you'll be able to spend less and less time doing anything other than preparing for the horde - unless you avoid the horde completely.

Isn't that the point of the game? To eventually get so overwhelmed by zombies you can't survive?

I'm not talking about what I feel is the point, or what you feel is the point or what either of us likes. I mean from the game developers point of view isn't that the game they are building?

 

[Reth]

After playing A17 for quite a few hours, I have to say that I dislike the new loot system. My main issue - it feels too artificial. I'd rather loot more believable things off zombies - like cloths, coins, paper money, an occasional gun, bones, etc - basically stuff you can easily attribute to a person.

Right now when that bag drops, I feel like I am in a cartoon. Suddenly a chest full of goodies falls from the sky and you are golden. /shrug Doesn't really fit the game setting.

 

[sadpickle]

I'm ok with the loot change. Clean-up after horde night took way too long and yielded tons of mostly crap loot. Only military zeds and cops dropped anything of value. Their actual value in late-game was as a source for fertilizer precursor.

With the amount of XP they generate, I would be fine if they never dropped loot. It feels very game-y to have every zed kill have a small random chance of dropping a big bag full of free stuff. Killing zeds should not be a goal - surviving them is the goal.

 

[Kitsep]

I actually want to rifle through the pockets of every corpse. I love a loot reward for a kill, even if it's crap loot. Loot on corpses is one of the major differentiators between an RPG and a shooter. This being a survival game, we have both camps fighting for what they want. Maybe it should be a toggle in the settings?

You see... it USED to be a toggle, sort of. I've run a bunch of 7D2D servers for almost 2 years now, and as soon as I updated the non-modded ones to A17, I saw an instant and massive drop in players. I went from 50-60 players on average to like 10 overnight. The issue for me is, I used to be able to edit the zombie loot spawn myself in the server files, it was super easy, and I could turn off zombie loot spawns myself if I really wanted to. With A17, it feels like they are just taking away options without giving us a meaningful replacement. Even if I set the environment loot (cabinets and trashcans and such) to respawn every 5 minutes, that wouldn't solve the problem of heavily congested areas and it would make less contested areas a complete joke. If someone were to make the argument of just spreading out further away from everyone else, then that completely destroys the concept of PVP.

Speaking of PVP, in the 3 servers I switched to A17, I saw the following happen (as reported by my frantic moderators):

(keep in mind, I had advertised the change to my players, and everyone was eager to log on and test out A17)

Stage 1: everyone explores to see what was new

Stage 2: 30% of my active players log out after 10 minutes of exploring and never log back in again.

Stage 3: players rush out and frantically loot all the environment loot they can (I had loot set to respawn every 5 in-game days, which is pretty fast if you think about it... default is 7 if I recall correctly)

Stage 4: players begin frantically attacking each other to collect hoard more loot, wasting their own resources fighting each other endlessly, they literally would fight to the death, respawn and then go fight again

Stage 5: about 5 hours after the switch to A17 I begin getting angry emails as if this was MY fault. Players are now running low on resources and it has only been a little over 2 in-game days (days set to 120 real world minutes per in game day)

Stage 6: 6 hours after the switch. Players have exhausted the resources they have spent so long to collect and create. all of the carefully crafted bases were viciously attacked and frantically defended during the fighting and are in ruins, some of the larger factions have managed to keep their bases more-or-less intact, but all bare scars from the fighting. The maps are all in ruins, everything is picked clean and with no way to resupply without manual intervention, the players all begin to log off en-mass, filling up their inventories with what little they have left so they won't be raided while offline. Most of those players never return.

stage 7: over the next couple days, players who had not been logged in during the insanity all slowly filtered in only to find their bases ravaged and no way to resupply since the -few- active players left on the server spent almost all of their time scavenging the cities and then the countryside for loot, leaving NOTHING behind.

All of my modded A16 servers are still healthy, and in fact, most have actually seen an influx of new players, possibly spillover from the devastated A17 servers. I have shut down 2 of the 3 A17 servers, and the single one left standing sees an average of 13 active players

I'm not going to say what is actually best for players, my experience may have been the exception. All I know is that MY players don't like A17 and it all seems to stem from the lack of Z loot... Maybe there is a way to turn it back on, or even to just increase the frequency of loot drops, I don't know... I haven't had much spare time to look into that since I'm still dealing with the fallout. Also, as a side note, the "1 loot bag per 50 zombies" seems to be incorrect, according to my mods and some of the angry players I got emails from, it SEEMED to be just flat out zero loot drops at all.

 

[Nexian]

They just need to reward horde night. Killing zombies gives exp when they are killed by you personally, so out in the world they are worth it.

Stopping after every kill to loot was tedious. Now zombies are a threat to be dealt with so you can loot a location. I prefer zombies just being bodies once dead, I have no strong desire to treat each body like a cupboard after a kill.

 

[Shokuku]

Honestly after seeing this trend and playing with that 2% drop rate it feels like no drop at all which is why I play with, ''Zombie Loot Drop Increase A17'' from the old nexus mods (would post link but not sure if allowed or not). brings that 2% up to a manageable 15% which I think is perfect for larger servers. Honestly I cannot join a server in ALPHA 17 no loot to get my feet off the ground and I like PVE by the way.

 

[xXMagnusXx]

Personally, I'm in favor of the change. Zombies still drop loot. The drops are extremely rare, but they seem to always have GOOD stuff inside, as opposed to 3$ and some pocket lint on every zombie.

I especially like how the zombs now drop a bag instead of having to loot the body. With night 7 hordes, more than half of the loot would have despawned or been destroyed by other bodies. With this, you don't lose any loot, and you can wait until morning to go grab it. Not to mention it took time to search eevvrryy zombie for loot. Now just grab one or two bags and you're good. It saves a lot of energy for me.

 

[Venemox]

Zombies are a prime source of the most important resource int eh game: Experience. Harvesting them is one of the prime wats to improve your character.

 

[dregonazure]

Zombies are a prime source of the most important resource int eh game: Experience. Harvesting them is one of the prime wats to improve your character.

it feels abit reversed honestly, would prefer it if zombies dropped loot but gave no exp