PC Good Alpha overall - The Good, Bad and Ugly

[m84midnighter]

The Good
You ok there? - Zombie's falling from heights into a crumpled mess is A+. 

Candy - Best addition to the game and lots of variety to aid your playstyle. 

Head tracking -  Spooky and weird but also helps with headshots so win-win.

Gamestage loot - Tiered correctly, I shouldn't be running around with a T5 M60 while still in grass pants.

New Skill books - Much needed for Javelin and Brawlers

Trader specific loot - This is great and encourages me to find new traders.

Lacerations - Well done overall, if I want these shorter it encourages me to put points in the med perks.

New POI's - Love the shooting range, crack-a-book and clothing stores. 

The Bad
Base Analyzing - Zombies will attack the weakest blocks beside a door instead of the door, I don't think they should have this level of intelligence being undead. A fair compromise will be something like letting Construction Zombies do this rather than all of them.

Risk vs Reward loot - Horde night zombie loot needs to be better, if I go through 1,500 rounds plus count the cost of base repairs I shouldn't be getting everyday loot like cloth in loot bags even with Lucky Looter 4. Add an artificial gamesstage buff to horde night loot bags.

Mach 3 Vultures - I can see why it was done but evasion on horde night should be a legitimate playstyle. A better change would be reduce their speed but increase their damage to vehicles, this forces the player to make a choice whether they are skilful enough to use a vehicle during horde night, because if not then 3 or 4 hits and its gone.

The Ugly
POI triggers break stealth - With max stealth skills, night skills, padded clothes and sneaking at night - some POI's will activate a whole room of GPS zombies when you pass a certain point or area even while super stealthed. I think this is broken and ruins this play-style. Again Risk vs Reward is key, if i'm skilfull and brave enough to creep around in the dark with a knife that should mean something and I should not be cheesed by general mechanics.

Food - 10 cans of food a day doesn't make sense. The problem is early game you have to physically exert yourself more just to get around and your only choice is to use melee weapons to defend yourself so this needs a gentle re-tuning. 

 

[Gr.o.m.]

Food - 10 cans of food a day doesn't make sense. The problem is early game you have to physically exert yourself more just to get around and your only choice is to use melee weapons to defend yourself so this needs a gentle re-tuning. 

WALK! Walking does not use up stamina.

 

[JCrook1028]

WALK! Walking does not use up stamina.

Lol, I hear ya. I tend to walk/run myself to save stam early but asking most people to walk instead of sprint is like asking them to stop breathing. They'd rather totally overburden themselves and sprint all the time then complain then actually take the steps to alleviate the problem. Or they ask for a rollback to easy mode early hunting and then MM gets his hands on the buttons and totally screws up all the animal spawns lol. I LIKED that early food was a problem before 163. Guess that didn't last long. People cried because they can't walk and deal with the issue so it got kicked back into easy mode. (easy for food and horrible for enemy animals I mean)

 

[Ralathar44]

The Bad

Base Analyzing - Zombies will attack the weakest blocks beside a door instead of the door, I don't think they should have this level of intelligence being undead. A fair compromise will be something like letting Construction Zombies do this rather than all of them.

Risk vs Reward loot - Horde night zombie loot needs to be better, if I go through 1,500 rounds plus count the cost of base repairs I shouldn't be getting everyday loot like cloth in loot bags even with Lucky Looter 4. Add an artificial gamesstage buff to horde night loot bags.

Mach 3 Vultures - I can see why it was done but evasion on horde night should be a legitimate playstyle. A better change would be reduce their speed but increase their damage to vehicles, this forces the player to make a choice whether they are skilful enough to use a vehicle during horde night, because if not then 3 or 4 hits and its gone.

The Ugly
POI triggers break stealth - With max stealth skills, night skills, padded clothes and sneaking at night - some POI's will activate a whole room of GPS zombies when you pass a certain point or area even while super stealthed. I think this is broken and ruins this play-style. Again Risk vs Reward is key, if i'm skilfull and brave enough to creep around in the dark with a knife that should mean something and I should not be cheesed by general mechanics.

Food - 10 cans of food a day doesn't make sense. The problem is early game you have to physically exert yourself more just to get around and your only choice is to use melee weapons to defend yourself so this needs a gentle re-tuning. 

Base Analyzing:  While I agree with you in principal in practice unguided zombies are a complete non-threat.  It was so exploitable it wasn't even funny before they made them smarter. HAving 32 zombies hitting like 12 different blocks at a time allowed me to build normal bases they could literally beat on all night and never threaten.  It was way too easy. 

I know them being smarter is a controversial change, but they tested many ideas to try and give us more challenge and most of them did not pan out.  Example being zombies that would charge walls and do splash damage to surrounding blocks were something they wanted to do at one time.  So the question is how do you make the zombies be a real threat to a base without making them too powerful?  Because if the zombies are not a threat due to AI being too stupid and walls being too

Risk vs Reward Loot for Zombie Hordes:  Your reward for killing zombies on a horde night is not dying and repairing less.  It's survival, not a loot bag that walks to your door and delivers high tier loot.  The "risk" on default difficulties with 8 zombies at a time is incredibly low.  You have to crank up difficulty and zombie amounts at a time to add any real risk to any non-new players.

Mach 3 Vultures:  TBH I'm totally ok with this.  I'd rather there be a more elegant solution but more elegant solutions fail to accomplish their goals more AND are more time/resource intensive to implement.  My personal headcannon would be zombiefied versions of worms from the movie Tremors tunneling out of the ground underneath vehicles on horde night doing significant damage to the vehicle and minor damage to the player.  The goal being to destroy the vehicle and leave the player stranded on foot.  Vultures could destroy the gyrocopter with their current speeds toned down a bit and their damage toned up.  I'd be ok with zombie damage vs vehicles being turned up and speed turned down a bit, but I think you'd find people would be much saltier at losing their precious vehicles than they'd be with dying and being able to reclaim the vehicle.

POI triggers break stealth:  This needs to stay.  I'm an archer in every game and in A18 I did a complete stealth archer run through and I'm currently doing an agility run throw.  Stealth archer/knife is already the second strongest POI clearing machine exceeded only by Intellect with dual turrets and stun baton.  Once you get full stealth skill  cloth + mufflers you can clear most of every POI riskless and your knife/bow is still quite strong even non-stealth.  There is little risk.  Bow and knife are both quite strong even without stealth.  Pistols/SMG are strong.  AND you have stealth on top of all that.  Without the occasional risk of random activation there is no threat at all to a stealth player clearing POIs.

Food:  Cans are low tier food, they are not the super foods you survive off of they once were in previous updates.  Consider canned food Tier 1, comparable to charred/grilled meat.  Stuff like Boiled meat is T2, much better but still not great yet.  Bacon and Eggs and some other recipes are T3.  More complicated recipes like blueberry pie are T4.  Recipes using canned food like gumbo and shepards pie and chili dogs and etc are T5/T6.   The food problem disappears when you stop surving off of T1 foods.  Multiple foods offer 100+ hunger now.  Many foods offer 50+.   Check every can to see if it can go into a recipes.  Almost all of them are used in recipes now.  Cooking now kicks @%$*#! and surviving off of low tier food sucks now.   As you find more recipes and your farm kicks in your food issues will go away and you'll have huge stockpiles of food that you only rarely have to eat.

 

[Ralathar44]

The Ugly

POI triggers break stealth - With max stealth skills, night skills, padded clothes and sneaking at night - some POI's will activate a whole room of GPS zombies when you pass a certain point or area even while super stealthed. I think this is broken and ruins this play-style. Again Risk vs Reward is key, if i'm skilfull and brave enough to creep around in the dark with a knife that should mean something and I should not be cheesed by general mechanics.

I forgot to mention, turn off your helmet light .  I forgot to do that this morning and I was encountering what you mentioned.  Turned off the helmet light and was back to full stealth kills with a KNIFE.  It doesn't matter how super stealthy you are if you're shining a light .

 

[Laz Man]

Great feedback from both of you.  You guys should get together and do a siskel and Ebert youtube channel lol...

 

[Boidster]

Siskel & Ebert? Nah, man, gotta stay on theme for this forum.