PC It's about time the devs show you where all the zombies need to die.

D

Darklegend222

Refugee
Couldn't complete red mesa, shamway factory, or shotgun messiah factory, or dishong tower without using the "killall" command every 5 steps in order to "find" all straggler zombies to kill.

It's ridiculous, how does the quest giver know there's zombies there yet doesn't tell us where till NEAR THE END??

I've had zombies behind locked doors, in places behind rafters (looking at you grocery_2) all of which didn't appear till i got 2-3 blocks next to them.

Its impossible to complete a poi on 1 hour days with zombies set to sprint before nighttime, assuming you start at 4 and end at 21:00. Since there is just not enough time to thoroughly scan EVERY wall and break down every single door.

 
I sympathize with you having a tough time with the higher tier quests but I have to completely disagree that we need more radar information on the compass or anything at all done to dumb down the quests. The point of the clear quest is to search the entire building and clear it. All the lower tier clear quests can easily be done during daylight hours. It is just the higher tier quests that might cause you to either camp out in the building over night or keep trying to clear it through the night depending on how well you do against running enemies. But that's the point: they are higher tier (AKA more difficult) and you should not expect them to just be able to be done quickly before night comes.

In my opinion, after reading this, there are only two things that need to be done. 1) Allow lower tier quests to be chosen so players aren't forced to take quests that are too difficult and 2) make it so using the killall command auto fails the quest.

 
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But then all Z's of the POI should spawn once you activate the POI.

So all the Z's should come after you if you made too much noise (like at previous alphas).

Then you won't have problems to find any remaining sleepers but more to survive the horde.

These lvl 5 POI are rather big and i never encounter a way/path like at the level 3/4 the player should follow and find all Z's at this way.

Thats why i personaly never doing a kill lvl 5 quest.

 
The way/path is meant to eventually lead the player to the treasure room througha circuitous gauntlet and is not designed as a guarantee that the player will cross paths with every zombie in the building. When a child is lost in the forest, searchers do not religiously remain on existing paths and trails expecting to eventually come upon the child. They methodically cover all the ground on and off the path because they are searching the entire area. The clear quests require us to search and find zombies in the entire building and clear them out. The radar gives general abstract clues as an abstraction of our situational awareness once zombies are awake and moving around but they are not meant as high tech infrared spy tech to remove all the searching out of the quest. By the same token, if you could solve every quest by making noise and having them all come to you they would be too easy. It was for this reason the change you referenced was made. They used to all come raging out and were easily dispatched by kiting, nerdpoling up to high ground, etc. The way it is now there is room-by-room fighting and it is much better, imo. As for surviving a horde of indoor zombies, we had that in A17 and people hated it so zombies were thinned indoors.

 
Roland said:
The way/path is meant to eventually lead the player to the treasure room througha circuitous gauntlet and is not designed as a guarantee that the player will cross paths with every zombie in the building. When a child is lost in the forest, searchers do not religiously remain on existing paths and trails expecting to eventually come upon the child. They methodically cover all the ground on and off the path because they are searching the entire area. The clear quests require us to search and find zombies in the entire building and clear them out. The radar gives general abstract clues as an abstraction of our situational awareness once zombies are awake and moving around but they are not meant as high tech infrared spy tech to remove all the searching out of the quest. By the same token, if you could solve every quest by making noise and having them all come to you they would be too easy. It was for this reason the change you referenced was made. They used to all come raging out and were easily dispatched by kiting, nerdpoling up to high ground, etc. The way it is now there is room-by-room fighting and it is much better, imo. As for surviving a horde of indoor zombies, we had that in A17 and people hated it so zombies were thinned indoors.
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The tier 1-3 houses have a set path to follow, and that path includes all zombies. I can understand the "path only goes to the treasure" but.. I'm not there just for the treasure otherwise id just bash the treasure wall and grab and go. (Which i don't do, but that's the point of doing any POI). I've been keeping an eye on the dev notes and they tweaked the lower tiers (because the higher ones are obviously too large to be top priority over other things that need added and fixed) so that "you don't need to break any doors to complete a quest and do pois" which was their goal.

I am okay with the killall command disabling the quests.. if the quest showed you where to go. I'm fine camping in a POI overnight but it's stupid how the quest giver KNOWS there's zombies there. "They send a search party in the general area" I'm the search party, and we aren't looking for a missing person. We can easily mistake that we killed them all without knowing that was it. But if you insist on not being able to show you where they all are, then allow us to turn the quest in and get a ratio of the percentage. For instance, 10,000 dukes for killing 100 enemies, i kill 60 enemies and turn in, i only get 6,000 dukes. Or, make it so that once you grab the treasure (hardened chest) all the enemies are visible since you basically completed the POI.

 
Darklegend222 said:
Couldn't complete red mesa, shamway factory, or shotgun messiah factory, or dishong tower without using the "killall" command every 5 steps in order to "find" all straggler zombies to kill.

It's ridiculous, how does the quest giver know there's zombies there yet doesn't tell us where till NEAR THE END??

I've had zombies behind locked doors, in places behind rafters (looking at you grocery_2) all of which didn't appear till i got 2-3 blocks next to them.

Its impossible to complete a poi on 1 hour days with zombies set to sprint before nighttime, assuming you start at 4 and end at 21:00. Since there is just not enough time to thoroughly scan EVERY wall and break down every single door.
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Hi Darklegend222,

Last time I checked, store_grocery_02 is one of the POIs where the on screen navigation beacon is configured to pop up on your screen/compass (e.g. orange dot) pretty early through the playthrough.  Is this happening for you?  This is probably as designed since that POI has a very open ended design for the player path.

 
Laz Man said:
Hi Darklegend222,

Last time I checked, store_grocery_02 is one of the POIs where the on screen navigation beacon is configured to pop up on your screen/compass (e.g. orange dot) pretty early through the playthrough.  Is this happening for you?  This is probably as designed since that POI has a very open ended design for the player path.
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I just did this quest again actually, the crawler at the entrance and the dogs/radiated zombie were missed on my first playthrough. The dogs above the freezer and the zombie to the right of the dogs spawn did not activate the first way through. I ended up getting lost and just nerd poling my way to the ceiling tiles. On my second way through, i had to walk REALLY close to the zombie dog like 3-4 blocks so it would notice me and i had to manually trigger the crawler by punching it, and the room with the lone zombie and cault door was no issue to find after that.

The first time through was a mess but once i knew the locations my second way through was a lot easier but it felt.. wrong because the distance didn't seem to be setup far enough. Which is why i brought it up in this thread since larger pois have that issue.

 
Roland said:
The way/path ... is not designed as a guarantee that the player will cross paths with every zombie in the building. When a child is lost in the forest, searchers do not religiously remain on existing paths and trails expecting to eventually come upon the child. They methodically cover all the ground on and off the path because they are searching the entire area. The clear quests require us to search and find zombies in the entire building and clear them out....
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Hey, I know how to read between the lines... child zombies confirmed in Alpha 20!

 
Darklegend222 said:
Its impossible to complete a poi on 1 hour days with zombies set to sprint before nighttime, assuming you start at 4 and end at 21:00.
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Who said that they are meant to be done within one day?

Roland said:
It is just the higher tier quests that might cause you to either camp out in the building over night or keep trying to clear it through the night depending on how well you do against running enemies.
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For the towers we usually expected to need 2-3 days with 2 players. Pretty normal.

However usually before we even accept such a quest, we already reached a gamestage where most zombies are ferrals or radiateds anyway. Since these do also run during day, there is no reason to stop clearing just because it's night.

From the lower level quests the problem more often is not the poi, but the way you need to travel to the poi. So for us it's pretty common that we camp a night in poi, where it doesn't matter if you camp in some poi just before traveling home, or if you camp in the quest-poi while the quest is still active. Of course you need food and drinks. That's called preparation.

 
Darklegend222 said:
Its impossible to complete a poi on 1 hour days with zombies set to sprint before nighttime, assuming you start at 4 and end at 21:00. Since there is just not enough time to thoroughly scan EVERY wall and break down every single door.
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That is not true.  I am doing 1 hour days and able to clear out the zombies before nightfall in T5 POIs.  The tactic I employ is that I just clear out the zombies.  I do literally zero looting until afterwards.  Then I use the night to loot everything and start stashing away the loot in chests I have left at the stairwells or at the doors.  Once I loot everything, I then carry everything back to the 4X4, starting from the top and making my way downwards (stopping at chests to finish filling stacks).  The only POI I could not clear and loot in one day (24 hours) are the skyscrapers, but I plan for those going into 2 days.

 
Roland said:
In my opinion, after reading this, there are only two things that need to be done. 1) Allow lower tier quests to be chosen so players aren't forced to take quests that are too difficult and 2) make it so using the killall command auto fails the quest.
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i agree with #1 but #2, we can not govern the fact that some people will cheat or use developer tools to avoid certain aspects of game and objectives.

disabling/crippling commands will not stop this... same as a locked door does not stop a thief.

 
Achievements are disabled if you open dm or cm in the console. This would be along the same lines. I understand that during development programmers and testers might need to use commands in order to work on the quests but if the quests are pretty much finished then using console commands and dev tools should cause the quest to fail. We can't stop cheaters ultimately but we can at least remove some of the low hanging fruit. They still would get the loot from the POI but forego the Trader reward if they use godmode or killall commands during the quest. Is this unreasonable?

 
Darklegend222 said:
I just did this quest again actually, the crawler at the entrance and the dogs/radiated zombie were missed on my first playthrough. The dogs above the freezer and the zombie to the right of the dogs spawn did not activate the first way through. I ended up getting lost and just nerd poling my way to the ceiling tiles. On my second way through, i had to walk REALLY close to the zombie dog like 3-4 blocks so it would notice me and i had to manually trigger the crawler by punching it, and the room with the lone zombie and cault door was no issue to find after that.

The first time through was a mess but once i knew the locations my second way through was a lot easier but it felt.. wrong because the distance didn't seem to be setup far enough. Which is why i brought it up in this thread since larger pois have that issue.
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Those are good specifics.  If you have anymore feedback like that (pictures help too), please share.  I will check it out and can potentially report as an improvement ticket.  Thanks.

 
I never really had much problem finding all the zombies in any POI (Including T5s)...  But I tend to follow the predefined "path" through them.

That being said, 1 thing I definitely wouldn't be opposed to is : Make zombies that are part of a "trap" not count toward clearing the POI. Right now, we are kindda forced to fall in traps to clear POI which is lame.  For some trap floor, you are forced to fall into as zombies won't spawn if you manage to stay on the floor above, so you can't even snipe them from the upper floor (or you need to abuse foreknowledge of said trap and get them through the wall from the lower level).

And as BFT2020 mentioned, what takes time is looting, not so much clearing.  The only POI I can see taking more than 1 day clearing is probably Dishong Tower.  Crack-a-Book and Higashi skyscraper are 10-15 mins in "speed clearing" mode. (On default difficulty setting anyway).

 
Mastermind said:
Right now, we are kindda forced to fall in traps to clear POI which is lame.
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I agree with this for sure. This could be fixed by extending the vertical on the sleeper volume. Not even counting the quest, it isn't really a fair trap if the zombies don't even spawn until you are already in free fall. Get your improvement ticket trigger finger moving on this one @Laz Man  :)

 
Roland said:
Achievements are disabled if you open dm or cm in the console. This would be along the same lines. I understand that during development programmers and testers might need to use commands in order to work on the quests but if the quests are pretty much finished then using console commands and dev tools should cause the quest to fail. We can't stop cheaters ultimately but we can at least remove some of the low hanging fruit. They still would get the loot from the POI but forego the Trader reward if they use godmode or killall commands during the quest. Is this unreasonable?
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There can be a blanket disabling of achievements, but I think trying to police the gameplay effects of using console commands to cheat is going down a rabbit hole.  If you’ll forgive the hypothetical, it isn’t hard to imagine if the game had ‘quest_succeed’ and ‘quest_fail’ commands added explicitly to automatically resolve the active quest.  What then?  Either the command works or it doesn’t.  killall is just a slightly more roundabout way of doing the same thing.  I’m afraid your idea is at odds with why the cheats exist in the first place.

 
I guess I always assumed that the commands existed to assist the testers and developers and not as gameplay options. I don't really consider having using console commands autofail quests as going down a rabbit hole. I'm not saying to completely disable "killall" after all. I'm just saying make it so if you use it during a quest, the quest fails. But...if I'm wrong about the purpose of console commands and why they are part of the game then so be it.

 
yes it is not a game play option... there are times when i have used it because radar shows one zed and i dont see him.. no coords for him or not found clipped anywhere... so use the killall and if it dies then it was hidden and need to find out where but if nothing happens then it might be a ui or counter issue... so we do have uses for it as a dev tool.

along the lines with Roland, i think when its used then quest credit is null & void... just like the achievement when using dm commands. i dont want to see a quest fail code... just dont give death credit of zombies and people will be deferred from using it that way.

however, when someone finds a poi where they absolutely cant find the zeds... we need to see reports with all info to help pin them down and not complaints which doesnt help. hope i made sense.. if not.. just ignore me as always... i crawl back under my rock. :)

 
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I was under the impression that killall won't kill things that haven't spawned yet..? If so, it's not going to solve the quest issue anyway; the things you haven't found aren't even there yet, usually?

And even if it does .. I can't see why it would be a problem to cheat a quest completion, but perfectly fine to be able to spawn in whatever you want / play god / whatever... you need elevated privileges to do killall, and those will give you more powerful "cheats" anyway?

 
i can sympathize with the OP. i do get annoyed finding that last one or two zombies i missed in the tier Vs. but once you learn the structure after doing it several times, you'll know where to search. doesn't make it any less annoying though.

i can finish a tV in less than one day (typically play on 90min) but the payoff is not worth it. i can do 3-4 tVs in a day if i just go to the loot and sell it to the trader. make loads of cash. and if you count all the cash and XP you make from selling all the high level loot of 3-4 tVs, it's a lot more than finishing one tV and getting the measly reward.

 
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