That was gone after I knew the mechanics of the game, so after like 50 hours of playing the game. The only times I feel in danger are my first ~three days in a new alpha, since I don't know if the game got harder or not. There is also some thrill right before and at the start of the first bloodmoon night in a new alpha, because I don't know if my base will hold, but that's gone during the bloodmoon night. It's not the gear that makes the game easy, but my experience with the game.
I doubt that vanilla game with default setting will ever be a challenge again, I'm just too experienced. Balancing it to my experience level would make the game unplayable for new players.
With my own experience, I too can certainly survive and
avoid danger until I'm strong enough, but still I can't go anywhere. For example can I not go into a room full of running zombies with only a bow and a club, particularly because the attack speed of the attackers will have them kill me before I can even use the slow bow and slow club enough to kill them. No problem with a pistol though.
So unless you have godlike skills of a degree that I have never seen and never even heard of before, you might be talking about knowing how to
avoid danger. For example is there a POI that has a zombie bear. I would not go there with only a bow and a club. With a pistol I can.
But if a single gun and a handfull of ammo sends you into endgame, how are those pinatas a problem? You would get a gun in the first two days even if you would ignore those pinatas entirely.
It's not a handful, it's defined as "all the ammo I need". I have 100 rounds on day 1, so I can just rush through the next POI, kill all the zombies, plunder the next treasure room, either find ammo there or stuff to sell to the trader to buy more. Rinse repeat. Even - unless I roleplay not spending skillpoints - grabbing tons of XP on the way, leveling my character up.
I played the game since A9 and the problem of having a gun with enough ammo on the first day exactly arrived with the release of A17. It was no problem before. Before, you might be lucky and find a pistol - I think the only option for that was the toilet pistol - but then you had no steady flow of ammo. Also, the weapons still had proper levels, meaning that a low level pistol was practically useless and you had to pump.. something like 5 bullets into a zombie head to take it down. 'Twas the time when weapons had four parts, so when you broke into a safe or a messiah crate (and these crates were mostly restricted to the messiah shop, which again was one of the rarest POIs, thus giving the player a lot of pleasure when they found one), you could just find a part, and in the early game one of low quality, that I would simply scrap over it's uselessness.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like them either. At least not with the amount of loot they are providing us. But with the low bar you set for reaching the endgame, they don't even matter.
So you agree that there is way too much good loot in the early game. Where else would I get the gun then?
And the bar I set never seemed low before. Before, it would take roughly two ingame weeks to get a proper gun and a steady flow of ammo going, with 1 hour days that's 14 hours. A pretty good early game. It was necessary to craft the ammo, that's a major reason, plus you had to find certain recipes.
I was always missing a somewhat clearly defined mid game, maybe I could define that as the phase where I still do not have stuff that I would like to have. These days, that would mostly be the motorcycle. But then again, it's just a convenience piece of no essential relevance.
What exact changes are you speaking of?
In this case, the treasure rooms that enable the player to find great gear very early on. I layed out the six pillars of my criticism in
the post you initially replied to.
While I don't like everything A17 did and I don't like everything A18 did and I'm even convinced that some changes are bad for the game, not just my preferences, I do think that both alphas had more positive changes than negative ones and made the game overall a better one. At least if we ignore the lack of outside zeds, but as we know that's work in progress.
I obviously disagree, but I guess you've already agreed that the treasure rooms are a negative change. As do the devs. If you have never played an alpha that has these different cell-hub-types - I'm not sure when these were removed, before the introduction of sleeper I believe - I recommend going back to such an alpha and try that out, you don't know what you're missing (though that might even be a case of "ignorance is bliss", eh). It's certainly in A14 and earlier.
That's what I'd call endgame. I also think that it makes sense to define early, mid and end game in a way that all three exist and differentiate them by milestones that change the way you play the game, but at what point that happens, is up to everyone themselves.
So while in the past a bow and club were all I needed to not be challenged by zeds anymore, my gameplay and goals didn't change the moment I had them. It was still about getting started, finding a place to settle down, not starving and getting geared up.
I look at it from the survivalist perspective: I reach endgame when I'm certain I will survive
any situation. And once I have that pistol with enough ammo, I'm certain I will survive
any situation. Food is no problem anyway, and with a gun, no enemy is either. Ergo: Endgame.
Do not, however, get cought up in the word. It's probably some sort of hyperbole too. Though.. Well. I do mean it. But I layed out how and why, and it's obviously fine if you do not accept that as the definition of end game.
I don't think a real life comparison works here. In real life I wouldn't start multiple runs, so I wouldn't know where the loot is. I also wouldn't know the pathing of zeds from previous runs. I wouldn't have a creative mode to test setups.
At best I could capture a handful of zeds and run some tests, but there is a lot of risk involved and there wouldn't be certainty that other zeds have the same pathing. So in real life I would never build a base that fails instantly as soon as a single zed behaves differently. That's how you end up a zombie yourself. It only works in the game due to patchnotes.
I'm comparing how you approach and deal with problems. If you knew where the next weapon cache is and could be certain how zombies behave (and it would be easy to construct IRL reasons why you would know that), you would use that information and not roleplay over it. And therefor, a design that makes these things as forseeable as they are now, is inferior to one that makes these things not as forseeable. Aka if you know a solution to a problem, it is against your nature to pretend not to know the solution.
Which means that if you do not like things to be forseeable - and I like things not to be forseeable - you dislike the current design.
My base "design" does fail frequently. Zombies frequently do not exactly follow the path. But they still can't get to me, because the staircase leads up to a structure that they can't climb, usually an unmodified poi that I'm sitting on. Sooner or later they will go back on the staircase though.
Just imagine TFP could change the ai midgame, even mid bloodmoon night without any notice and every game were dead is dead. Would you still go for cheating ai pathing?
I don't cheat, so let's not normalize that word. I don't even abuse any mechanics. It's just bad design that the ai is this forseeable and easy to outsmart, it's unjustified to blame the player for not "roleplaying" ignorance of the obvious.
And if the ai was unforseeable, I obviously could not outsmart it with a simple single design and I would prefer that very very much over what we have now.
The game is still in alpha, so even if it would be possible to make the perfect game, we couldn't expect to already be perfect, so some "roleplaying" in doing POI the intented way instead of nerdpoling to the loot room, isn't that bad, if it makes the game more fun.
I don't expect the game to be perfect and I'm bascially unwilling to roleplay to compensate design flaws. Roleplaying that way also is a reduction of fun for me. It did work with the skillpoints, because spending skillpoints itself is roleplaying too, as that activity has no counterpart in reality, it roleplays learning something in an unrealistic way. Thinking about it, instead of roleplaying, not spending skillpoints is actually a refusal of roleplay.
Why don't you play a previous alpha then until they fixed some of your problems? If they had replay value nothing should stop you.
I did - I have several of them actually installed right now. But it has an element of frustration, plus I'm very patient and in a mindset of "waiting for gold". For example, I went back to A12, a great alpha, but it had so many flaws and inconveniences, that I started missing features that came later. Same with A14. There are also a lot of things in A17+ that I like, i.e. the POI-design, the new weapons and the weapon mods, the vehicles, obviously the graphics, the new zombie models, the animals.
What I mostly do is not playing at all. But I can still explain why I don't like what I don't like about A17+.
