Why does there even have to be any PvP? I'm kinda irked that whenever there's a big survival game, there has to be PvP. Can't we try to survive the endless hordes without trying to kill each other?
This would work if they were any real threat, the day 77/84 hordes in a18 are easier than the first day 7 horde in the darkness falls mod in alpha 17.4, long before day 77 in that mod you have demons that shoot molotovs, behemoths and other nasty stuff. The problem is most of the enemies in vanilla 7dtd just pose no real threat.
As for pvp, imo if you wanna go gank people play fortnite BR or something. This is meant to be a survival game, the walking dead tv series for example became garbage once it was all about the pvp human vs human than about the zombie threat. First 2 seasons were the best then it went downhill.
Pvp also brings another problem: balance, balacing stuff for pvp and pve at the same time just does not work unless you can have 2 sets of stats for each other, one in pvp mode, 1 in pve mode, that can switch on the fly if your hitting a player or a zombie. I've seen to many games ruin the pve side due to balancing stuff for the pvp side when they try to balance it in a single item with no differing stats for both modes. This is probally what TFP is trying to avoid, unless they can get my dual stat thing where every item including armor has both pve and pvp stats, they will never balance it properly without destroying the pve side. As a example: greifers were using the old water mechanics to flood peoples bases, so tfp had to change the water mechanics to the jello it basically is now to stop them from doing it. So water ended up ruined due to a few asshats using it to greif with it. See the problem with pvp now? Well that was a bigger issue as it could be even done on a non-pvp server.
TFP has also said this game was never meant to be a pvp game its meant to be a pve survival, so I don't understand why people don't seem to be able to get that thru their heads. Going on about pvp is basically beating a dead corpse now, its pointless.
They did say they will work more on the pvp side once the game finally goes gold (if it ever does, imo once they start selling it to me = gold). Also in a game like this thats fully destructable its going to be near impossible to get rid of all of the expoilts due to the worlds fully destroyable nature. Thats why survival games with a static map like Ark Survival evolved etc have better pvp.
For example: with the SI system if I wanted to be an ass, I could dig around someones base under ground 1-2 blocks wide, then dig thru the rock right under the base and collapse it. This could be done even with the owner sitting right in it. you'd not even need to remove the very top grass layer as it'll cave under the weight once you dig thru the 500 hp rock under the base. This can be done with no exploits, just using the games own SI system to do the work. Only way to prevent this is if the land claim blocks protection is set to infinite so its impossible to destroy the rock under the base.
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I wager that it would be a much higher percentage if TFP did a better job at fixing the exploits and hacks. A11-A14ish was a hackfest for a couple of YEARS, servers struggled to handle more than a dozen players, and then the RPG elements began to take over in subsequent alphas. Upon first implementation, some of the PVE-RPG elements resulted in comical force multipliers and resulted in a devastation of the PVP audience.
The PVP playerbase is so low because the game is quite bad at PVP. The ones that still play it are sitting here going ~"hey you could just tweak a few things to remove the ridiculous inbalances, fix the hacks, and it would be so much better."
Result =
GARRRR YOU DON'T MATTER BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY 3-5% OF YOU AND IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SO FK OFF!!!!!111
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I'm always around.
Naw, pvp playerbase is always much MUCH lower than the pve playerbase in any game that has both modes. Thats just a fact of gaming in general. Games like fortnite BR do not count as its 100% pvp.