PC I just realized what is wrong with 7d2d as multiplayer and it would be easy to fix: loot amount

[MikeSixx]

The biggest problem I have with trying to play with friends is that we competing over the loot. So if you play 7d2d with a friend you get half as much loot. 
And to make things worse you get twice as much enemies by the engine enemy levelling (*). So playing as team you get half or less as much loot in same time as you would get solo. 
I would suggest adding an option for "personal loot" so that when player loots a chest, it would be looted and empty ONLY to HIM/HER and for all other players the loot chest would still be not looted so they too can loot it.  Or another even easier alternative would be to multiply the loot by number of players in the team. So if there is AK in loot chest, then if there are 3 players in the team, there would be 3 AKs. For 50 ammo is solo, there would be 100 for team of 2. 

Zombie games are great for co-op play. But 7d2d as garbage for co-op play or even as multiplayer. This loot competition kills the social game play. Most people for most time play multiplayer games just to hang out with friends. 7d2d as it is just do not serve that need. If you play with friend you friend needs to set up their base far enough of you that they have places to loot. 

So to recap, either 

1. Make loot personal, would also fix problem in crowded servers and you could even turn off loot respawn. (Best) 

2. Multiply loot by team member count. (Easy)

3. Do not auto level-up enemies by team member count so when team's loot is divided by the members number, they speed would be increased by same amount. (Easiest, just ignore team member count in game level calculation for example instead of sum of player game levels, get average) 

And that should/could be as game setting, allowing server owners to set to their player's liking. 

* I also hate the enemy level auto increase, you do not progress in this game at all, as anytime your character gets stronger, the ALL the enemies get stronger too as same amount. 
It would be much more interesting to have enemy level by biome. So players could themselves choose when to progress to harder level areas with better loot. You know, like in every singel good  & popular MMO. As that would naturally balance the PvP levels too. 

 

[zztong]

The biggest problem I have with trying to play with friends is that we competing over the loot.

That's one perspective, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but perhaps not the entire story. I would have said when I played with friends we were cooperating when dividing up the loot. A team blows through POIs super fast, resulting in the looting of more POIs in the same amount of time. I'd even argue a team takes the challenge out of nearly all POIs.

I also hate the enemy level auto increase, you do not progress in this game at all, as anytime your character gets stronger, the ALL the enemies get stronger too as same amount. 

I'm not always a fan of "The Level Treadmill" found in many games either. I don't notice is so much in 7D2D, but in other games (like Pathfinder 2) I'm right there with you. Maybe some would say comparing a computer game to a pencil-paper game is a bad comparison, but the mechanic exists in both. I know some POI developers hate that relatively new characters can take successfully on Tier 5 POIs.

 

[theFlu]

The way you describe it is as if there is no benefit for teaming up. zztong above mentioned some things already, there's plenty uncovered. I'm basically of the opposite opinion, the team play is so much better than solo that I'd at least nerf the artificial boosts that are currently given to teams.

Just going from one to two players:

- Double DPS. That also leads to half damage taken and half the meds required.

- Double the inventory, with a little smart stack management that's huge.

- Share your quests, take them near each other, basically double quests per travel time. And double quest rewards.

- Specializing into different weapons makes almost every drop useful, as well as the quest rewards. No competition, just less waste.

- Prioritizing different ammo types you get more use of each ammo drop. Not less.

A little more meta, but since you have that double DPS going, and always have backup, you can play a lot more reckless. That allows you to clear faster. You get "tougher" zeds, which are basically just more XP against your double DPS.

The amount of XP you get per zed is also artificially increased - two players killing two zeds get more XP each than a solo killing one.

 

[BFT2020]

If you feel that looting POIs is loot competition, then you are not truly playing Co-Op.  At most, you are just a group of people in the same area.

 

[Meiya]

I don't feel like loot is really an issue, even in a group. As long as everyone is contributing to the stockpiling of that loot, and not eating through ammunition as if they were PEZ. ((Which means not unnecessarily discharging powerful ammo if you can kill weaker zeds using melee or cheaply crafted arrows, as well as wooden traps you can carry with you on looting runs.

The only starting issue in those regards would be brass as eventually you'll eat through all POI's static generation of cars, home radiators, air conditions, and doors so that accumulating it would become reliant solely on looting containers. 

 

 

[Roland]

The biggest problem I have with trying to play with friends is that we competing over the loot

Ah... my favorite subject: The Type of "Friends" I Play With

I'll just point out simply that not all teams experience the dynamic you describe so there must not be some control beam shooting out of the game code that forces people to act uncooperatively with each other. All of that originates from the hearts and minds of the people you play with. There is a remedy.

I would suggest adding an option for "personal loot" so that when player loots a chest, it would be looted and empty ONLY to HIM/HER and for all other players the loot chest would still be not looted so they too can loot it.  Or another even easier alternative would be to multiply the loot by number of players in the team. So if there is AK in loot chest, then if there are 3 players in the team, there would be 3 AKs. For 50 ammo is solo, there would be 100 for team of 2. 

But sharing is one of the skills the game rewards. You can get better at aiming, driving, flying, meleeing, as these are all player skills needed in the game. Same goes for sharing and coordinating as a team. Your suggestion would be like adding auto-aim or fast travel to the game which would negate any of the skills required by the game.

Zombie games are great for co-op play. But 7d2d as garbage for co-op play or even as multiplayer.

That is one opinion but it is eclipsed by the thousands of people who have expressed that 7 Days to Die is one of the best cooperative team building experiences they have ever played. We have had letters from fathers who have told us playing our game with his children healed their relationship because of how they bonded while playing. I bet they figured out how to share loot.

This loot competition kills the social game play. Most people for most time play multiplayer games just to hang out with friends. 7d2d as it is just do not serve that need. If you play with friend you friend needs to set up their base far enough of you that they have places to loot.

That is definitely not a universal outcome of friends playing the game together. Sorry you guys are so competitive with regards to loot.

So to recap, either 

1. Make loot personal, would also fix problem in crowded servers and you could even turn off loot respawn. (Best) 

2. Multiply loot by team member count. (Easy)

3. Do not auto level-up enemies by team member count so when team's loot is divided by the members number, they speed would be increased by same amount. (Easiest, just ignore team member count in game level calculation for example instead of sum of player game levels, get average) 

And that should/could be as game setting, allowing server owners to set to their player's liking. 

Since you added the line that these settings would be optional I have no problem with them being added. I doubt I would ever select them as I think 1 & 2 would be detrimental to the gameplay experience but just like there already is a loot multiplier I don't care whether others decide to give themselves more loot. I definitely don't believe these measures are necessary for effective cooperative play but as a mod or an option for those that want them...sure.

* I also hate the enemy level auto increase, you do not progress in this game at all, as anytime your character gets stronger, the ALL the enemies get stronger too as same amount. 
It would be much more interesting to have enemy level by biome. So players could themselves choose when to progress to harder level areas with better loot. You know, like in every singel good  & popular MMO. As that would naturally balance the PvP levels too. 

This is not accurate at all. There are biomes you can go to for more difficult enemies and better loot as of Alpha 20. Are you playing Alpha 20? The enemies also do not ALL get stronger as you progress. There are still regular zombies but as you progress there are more feral zombies and radiated that start appearing. But this is not the same thing at all as the entire world progressing in difficulty along with the player so that no progress can be felt. You can definitely experience progression. You can select T1 and T2 and T3 quests once you've progressed to T5 for an easier experience. You can even without a quest try and take on a T5 POI and clear it on day one with all your low level gear as a challenge if you wish. What you describe as wanting is already in the game on the biome level and on the POI level and what you accuse the game of doing is more subtle and less in your face than you describe. There has to be SOME progression of challenge so that the game isn't essentially won by Day 3. But there is definitely a feeling of progress when you start out needing to hit a zombie several times to kill it to when you realize you are one shot killing most zombies. Then as ferals and radiated start appearing you are back to needing a few hits to kill but then again you progress to being able to mow even these foes down as your ability to scale up your ammo production and your access to the top tier weapons and highest perk abilities make you practically unstoppable.

 

[meganoth]

Reading this my first suggestion would be: Build one horde base and one crafting base for all of you. Do quests and you will have always shiny new POIs to clear.

Also when starting a new game, everyone of you should select the main attribute he wants to spec into. Whoever does INT for example builds not 1 but 4 vehicles (in A21 this might change, but the principle stays the same).

As soon as you all have motorbikes create some small subbases in other towns. If one of you had enough of group raiding for a while he can just go to that subbase between horde nights and clear another town. (In A21 you will have an option so that seldom used areas are reset automatically so you don't even need to do quests there.

 

[RyanX]

I always thought harder to find loot was one of the strengths of the multiplayer experience.  In the larger multiplayer servers, before trader quests, it could definitely be a problem but there are plenty of ways around that such as increasing loot respawn frequency, car respawner mods etc.  Now with trader quests, looting has become nearly trivial and it feels like there is way too much loot now.

 

[Pernicious]

It's a bit like life right? Some people can get away with leeching off friends for a while. I cover friends drinks and dinner all the time. But if someone does that all the time and never gives back, they start losing friends.

Among my friends, we have a bit of a "need before greed" honor system. We don't call out components or whatnot - that just goes into the general box, but if someone has a pump action shottie, and the other has a pipe shottie and an auto shottie is found, the pipe shottie guy gets it if he wants it. If he's not speccing into it and doesn't want it, then someone else can call for it. This is the same with ammo. If someone runs out, whoever has the most will usually offer to share some. Again, this works out, until someone's spraying valuable 7.62 from an AK into rabbit or something.

This was a bit disrupted when one of the regular player's 14 year old son joined us - he just wanted everything, and always demanded more ammo, but that's part of maturity. We (well most of us) learn to cooperate with each other and give up selfish needs to reach the same goal. It's why good leaders genuinely understand and desire teamwork from team members, and why someone with poorer knowledge, but more maturity than a grad, can be paid double, and the grad simply cannot understand why he's "underpaid".

I wouldn't object to some transparency - Items of a certain quality or value being displayed for all to see when someone loots it - or even just a loot notification scrolling up in small letters out of the way for anyone who cares to look. But really, if you can't trust your "friends" with in-game items, why are you wasting time with them?

 

[myrkana]

Ehhh.. if you're playing with friends you should be playing WITH friends, not against friends. I play with one person and we share everything. If one person buys something super nice the other person gets next dibs, or if one loots an awesome thing the other can then go buy something from the trader. We share stuff since its a coop game, sounds like you and your friends are not playing a coop game.

 

[warmer]

To me this comes down to how much of a pack rat are you? Whenever I play with friends we end up combining out inventory stacks so we aren't overly encumbered. You almost never have the room to take it all with you. I think that is one of the benefits of co op team play. You can actually fully clear a POI vs making several trips as a single player

 

[Weazelsun]

Eh... considering I play exclusively multiplayer. It sounds like you should consider looting separately. Like I understand that might not be possible since you are together with your friend. But, take advantage of looting buildings by yourself and then dividing up that loot back at base. Or instead set the loot to be higher or have loot respawn be shorter.

 

[MikeSixx]

That's one perspective, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but perhaps not the entire story. I would have said when I played with friends we were cooperating when dividing up the loot. A team blows through POIs super fast, resulting in the looting of more POIs in the same amount of time. I'd even argue a team takes the challenge out of nearly all POIs.

I'm not always a fan of "The Level Treadmill" found in many games either. I don't notice is so much in 7D2D, but in other games (like Pathfinder 2) I'm right there with you. Maybe some would say comparing a computer game to a pencil-paper game is a bad comparison, but the mechanic exists in both. I know some POI developers hate that relatively new characters can take successfully on Tier 5 POIs.

1. It is one thing play togerher with you friend jsut two of you. But playing on co-op server where every city is looted bare. Specially the main loot location, I feels they have timer to wake them even at middle of night so they loot all the location immediately they respawn. 
The whole loot respawn is hacky workaround for the small maps running out of loot before the RGW reature was made. Now for example Son Of Forest now has individual loot for co-op. And many people are praining that game for it. 
So again: Individual loot. 
 
2. For level threadmill solution is already there. not making individual POIs harder but make BIOMES harder. Like in Fallout, you can not access the irradiated area at all without radiation protection suit. And the destroyed area is a place you really do not want to access of foot or without good firearms or the birds eat you alive. 

Eh... considering I play exclusively multiplayer. It sounds like you should consider looting separately. Like I understand that might not be possible since you are together with your friend. But, take advantage of looting buildings by yourself and then dividing up that loot back at base. Or instead set the loot to be higher or have loot respawn be shorter.

Lootign separately the cities that are camped by 4 other players. And once they got helicopter they camping citues in 100 km radius 

 

[zztong]

But playing on co-op server where every city is looted bare. Specially the main loot location, I feels they have timer to wake them even at middle of night so they loot all the location immediately they respawn.

I've seen this and it is a bummer. I've started on a couple of servers where everything was picked clean and the Trader/Quest system was the only way to find loot. That sounds similar to individual loot, but you must be seeing some significant difference?

 

[playlessNamer]

set loot to 200%, fixed. If my problems with this game would be so easy...

This is everything easy to fix in some minutes in xml files.

 

[Roland]

1. It is one thing play togerher with you friend jsut two of you. But playing on co-op server where every city is looted bare.

A21 has a new chunk respawn timer that can be set that should restore cities to their originally generated status and prevent situations like you describe. The closest TFP will get to individual loot is individual rewards for shared quests.

 

[outhous]

If you play with friend you friend needs to set up their base far enough of you that they have places to loot. 

So when you play with your friends are you competing with them or are you playing cooperatively? Why would each have a base. Why would you not share loot?

 

[FA_Q2]

So when you play with your friends are you competing with them or are you playing cooperatively? Why would each have a base. Why would you not share loot?

While the OP seems to be getting at something more, I do not understand where the opposition to 'competing' for loot comes from.  It is a given that you are competing for loot as there will be overlap in what you both need.  It is likely that you will share some ammo types, armor or weapons.  You will certainly share tools.  It means there is competition for loot even if it is 100 percent cooperative in the manner that you divide it up at the end.

Of course I have to disagree with the OP's point though as the sheer amount of loot you will get with multiplayer is much more than single player as the game becomes exponentially easier with multiple people making looting far faster.  The mention of zeds getting harder ignores the fact that is tied to your loot level as well so your loot is also greatly improved.  

the bigger issue IMHO is that there really is no semblance of balance in multiplayer and, afaik, TFP does not have plans to truly address that.  The game is a single player game in its center even if multiplayer exists.

 

[warmer]

I have played with groups of 6 and not once has anyone complained about loot amount. We usually dont go through the same POI, so its not an issue, unless we all join the same quest, and even then we all get our own loot at quest completion.

If you aren't a fan of moving through a city to get to the fresh POI, I can see this being an issue, but honestly as it is, SP with 100% loot feels way to easy to me.

 

[Roland]

While the OP seems to be getting at something more, I do not understand where the opposition to 'competing' for loot comes from.

There's healthy competition and there's unhealthy competition just like there is healthy trash talking and bantering and there is toxic bullying and verbal abuse. It really depends on your group where the line between everyone scrambling to open containers and grab loot ends and where everyone being absolute jerks about it begins. It is usually all about communication. In our group we have decided that whoever owns the quest we are all doing gets to open the loot room containers while everything else in the POI is up for grabs as you come to it. Zombie bags after horde night are a free for all but we pool our ammo and money and resources anyway and if we get a mod or a weapon or tool we usually check in to see if anyone has been hoping for that item and give it over.

In my opinion unhealthy competition rears its ugly head when players are being selfish: "I must be highest level in the group" "I must have the best gear before anyone else"

or if they care more about min/maxing than friendship: "I should open everything because I have the best looting stats!" "You shouldn't waste ammo using that unperked weapon!"

Should the game institute rules that prevent players from behaving poorly and force them to coordinate better as a team and treat their friends like friends? I say no. Keep it a social sandbox and let what happens as a result happen. Wait until A21 magazines change the whole social dynamic again...haha