PC Cheese Quiz: POI Clearing

[Boidster]

I am fascinated with how different players evaluate what is or is not "cheese" in this game. This poll considers different ways to clear a POI.

Choose all options which, in your opinion, count as "cheese".

The poll choices (mostly) consider three aspects of POI clearing:

• What type of reconnaissance do you do? None=no recon of what's inside the POI. Passive=poke holes, look around, no attacking sleepers. Active=poke holes, kill sleepers if possible before entering.
  
• Where do you enter the POI? At the One True Path (OTP) entrance given to you by the developers? Or at some other entrance that you prefer?
  
• How do you handle interior obstructions? Do you follow the OTP and avoid all the locked doors, barbed wire, etc.? Or do you modify the OTP once inside (breaking doors, clearing spikes/mines, etc.) to make progress or retreat easier?
  

Again, choose the "cheesy" options, not the method you use!

 

[SylenThunder]

Passive

Usually OTP, but depends on how many trips I've made. I like the dungeon style they've set up.

Following OTP unless I've done the POI several times already. (per-playthrough, not total visited per poi.)

 

[Boidster]

Silly forum posts the text before I've finished the poll! I am steadfast in my "there is no cheese" POV so I can't even vote in my own poll.

 

[Ghostlight]

Did everyone misunderstand the poll? How on earth can 'No recon; enter at OTP; follow OTP without modification' be cheese? That's basically the exact way TPF intend you to do it.

Looks more like everyone just voted for the way they typically do POIs.

 

[Roland]

Did everyone misunderstand the poll? How on earth can 'No recon; enter at OTP; follow OTP without modification' be cheese? That's basically the exact way TPF intend you to do it.
Looks more like everyone just voted for the way they typically do POIs.

Had to comment to say:

I agree 100% with Ghostlight



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I only voted the last one and even that is light cheese. Only if you use outside knowledge to know exactly where the loot room is would it be true cheese. Nerdpoling to the roof is pretty stinky cheese in my opinion but I'm talking about the act of nerdpoling and not about going directly to the loot. Everything else seems like tactics that can bring variety to how you approach clearing a building.

My own preferred method is no recon, enter at a preferred point and follow preferred path. I almost never just follow the trail of lights....

 

[Boidster]

I also agree 100% with GhostLight, which...well it's a good day today. Peace and love and harmony (as long as you avoid the NVidia vs AMD slapfight thread).

Perhaps the word "cheese" is not as universally understood as I thought?

 

[Crater Creator]

Drawing all the sleepers out would be cheesy in my view, if it were easy to do. Luckily, my imagined scenario where you fire a single shot in the air and they all come running has not come to pass in the current game. Now, someone was arguing recently that what they had to do to prevent that, basically making zombies very heavy sleepers, has made stealth too easy. But I suppose that's a separate discussion.

Breaking directly into the loot room is cheesy. I must admit, once I got a gyrocopter I couldn't resist landing on Tier 5 buildings that had a clear pile of loot on the roof in plain sight. But it is cheesy. The solution is to randomize POIs. Instead of monolithic buildings where the 'one true path' is the same every time, we need variation for all these buildings to have replayability. We need the big loot room to be in 3-5 different spots, depending on size. Then the risk/reward of playing through and enjoying the whole building will compare favorably to selectively poking into every possible loot room.

Of course, that's easy for me to say. There's no way to do it that wouldn't be a substantial amount of work. But making variants, custom or random, of existing POIs would be less work than making an equivalent number of brand new POIs. Unlike new POIs, making variants would mean you can still recognize a building from the outside, without knowing what's on the inside. That 'wrapped present' quality is a big part of what makes looting fun.

 

[Ghostlight]

I also agree 100% with GhostLight

I quit

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

In a survival game where the goal is to survive as good as possible, nothing should be considered cheesing. Luring out POI´s is a thing TFP tried to avoid by making sleepers respawn in their original position. But that lead to the fact that getting back your backpack is now "cheesy" because the sleepers sleep again and it´s super easy to get it back.

None of them are cheesy. So i didn´t vote anyting. The beauty of the game is that you can do all of the options in the vote. That is what makes it unique.

 

[Crater Creator]

Oh, I think it’s absolutely possible to have cheesy things in this game. Just because a player can do something, and have a survival reason to do it, doesn’t make it not cheesy. The rookie mistake is finding fault with the player(s) leveraging that cheese, instead of with the game.

 

[theFlu]

None of those really seem cheese to me;

- for recon, I can only imagine using x-ray exploits as cheese.. and even then, the sleepers haven't spawned when you're doing it from the outside, so it would do nothing.

- for path, in a voxel game.. I'll path just like the zombies, the route of least resistance. It's the nature of the game. (usually I clear for XP and sports, but I can't consider levelling a POI being cheese)

- funneling them outside; well, if it even worked.. and even then, not cheese, just smart.

- straight to loot room? if ya like, it's there for a reason, looting. Just mark your damage for other players when on a friendly server...

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

If something is cheese or not also depends on how long you already play. If i look for some certain weapon or armor lvl 6 on day 150 i am not going trough the whole shotgun messiah factory anymore. I land on the loot. See no cheese there. Been there done that often enough. Not interested in a game where i have to go trough the same buildings a dozen of times.

 

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

You forgot the "none of the above" option, which is the one I would vote for if it were there. As it is, it won't let me vote without choosing at least one method to be "cheese" - and I don't think that any of them are.

 

[blugold1]

I’ll do one of two things, depending on the size of the POI.

- I’ll nerd pole to the top of big POI’s, take out the largest hordes first, then work my way down if I want to clear it. Sometimes, on the nerd pole, I’ll pound on the walls, one level at a time, to wake up as many zombies as I can, then kill from outside.

- For smaller ones, like houses, I’ll start in the back of the building and hit as many walls as I can to wake up as many zombies as possible. Then in the front, I have my junk turret and a standing platform ready to gun them down. I rarely take the path designed by developers.

I like to be as loud as possible so there are few surprises waiting for me on the inside.

 

[Pille]

None. Imo some of them are even the opposite of cheese or sort of counterproductive.

For instance "Wake up the sleepers, funnel them outside for killing, clear POI at your leisure" is not a very good idea on nightmare running speed. It's better to build obstacles that block the zombies' path. A stone axe and a couple of woodframes can stop whole groups of zombies even on insane difficulty and 300% block damage.

"follow your preferred path" may trigger sleeper volumes (and thus zombie spawns) unpredictably, whereas the default path usually follows the predicable Fun Pimps zombie spawning patterns.

That's why "No recon; enter at OTP; follow OTP without modification" can be is cheesier.^^ Ofc this is not true if you always take the same preferred path and there are advantages of the cross country method that I didn't mention.

Imo it only becomes cheese when it has been actively called so by the devs.

 

[Boidster]

Thanks everyone for voting and responding. Great discussion and I'm not even being sarcastic. I lern stuf.

Roland's comment made me think about my own rubric for identifying "cheese". I started from a point of "there is no cheese except cheating" (i.e. exploiting obvious game bugs and oh BTW funky AI != a bug) and ended up with this:

If the survivor is using knowledge or metadata that he/she should not have access to, that is a key indicator of cheese.

And but so, some responses:

I must admit, once I got a gyrocopter I couldn't resist landing on Tier 5 buildings that had a clear pile of loot on the roof

I absolutely will do this. And by my own rubric, this is not cheese. If the survivor can fly above the buildings and scope out valuable caches of survival equipment, landing and pilfering the loot is completely acceptable. Hopefully the defending zombies put up a fight.

The solution is to randomize POIs. Instead of monolithic buildings where the 'one true path' is the same every time, we need variation for all these buildings to have replayability.

What a great project for the POI designers who built Compopack - take all of the stock POIs and create 2 or 3 variants of each. Just tweak sleeper, loot, and OTP locations. Probably take a fraction of the time of designing a new POI from scratch.

The rookie mistake is finding fault with the player(s) leveraging that cheese, instead of with the game.

This my thinking regarding AI pathing. If zombies are stupid and I can use that to my advantage, great. Passes my rubric since the survivor can observe zombie behavior and craft defenses to confound them. Zombies need to git gud.

for recon, I can only imagine using x-ray exploits as cheese

I was thinking of this specifically as I tried to come up with my definition. The survivor obviously would not actually be able to see through walls, so using x-ray exploits is cheese.

If something is cheese or not also depends on how long you already play.

And this is the one situation where my definition would call "busting directly into the loot room" cheesy. If the survivor has never been to that POI before (in that game), then the POI must be explored using one of the other options first. Randomizing the loot rooms and sleepers would make this much more interesting. Once you've been through the POI, going right to the loot is not cheesy. Neither is it cheesy if the loot is obviously visible e.g. the gyrocopter/roof scenario above.

You forgot the "none of the above" option, which is the one I would vote for if it were there.

Yeah, sorry, only 10 options allowed in polls and I had 15 or more in my original draft. I couldn't vote either!

 

[edyonline]

The game is way more fun, following the proper path. I only use brawler weapons, and its nice not having to build or break things, especially with t1 tools

A steel sledge is nice for breaking open the boxes, but apart from that I like to travel light weight and work my way to the Jack Pot.

If Im low level, then at night I like to bang the front door and fight them on the road. But when Im high enough and have decent gear/consumables, ill just quest at night, as usual. Its quicker and a lot more fun.

 

[ZombieSurvivor]

I have no clue what the term cheese means in this context. so I have yet to cast my vote. This is a dumb question I know but, what does the slang cheese mean? I've heard of chedder, or make that cheese as in money.

 

[meganoth]

Yeah, sorry, only 10 options allowed in polls and I had 15 or more in my original draft. I couldn't vote either!

You could just list the possible cheese methods (passive recon, active recon, use different entrance, funnel sleepers outside, break directly into loot room) plus "none of above" and allow multiple selections.

 

[ZombieSurvivor]

Ok I think I figured out what this term of cheesing means. I vote "none of the above" if I could.

I think everyone has there own way of clearing a POI and since TFP has given us multiple ways of doing so none are cheesing imo. There are some POIs I find boring so i'll skip the whole poi and go straight for the loot room. *cough water works cough*