PC Learn by doing instead of reading?

[H7dek7]

Oh don't give me that, if a single modder can do it in a short time (less than a week working an hour or 2 a day or so), tfp has no excuse.

I 100% agree. Most if not all TFP's excuses have been debunked by the modding community. Until A20 I haven't used mods in 7DTD, but had to just because of farm plots. For me playing survival games is all about immersion. Each and every big update 7DTD goes further away from simulation and closer to arcade. I've been playing 7DTD since the single digits (A7 I think) and since A17 I'm more reluctant every time my friends want to come back to this game.

 

[White-Gandalf]

Nice idea, but somewhat time-consuming and expensive for TFP to do as they would have to optimize and balance the LBD system as well and if the "player base" would then want perks back they would have to scrap all other work they have done in the meantime and integrate that with the perk system again. Also they could not add bandits at the same time as that would influence the vote as well.

Maybe a better way would be to actually provide two versions, one with perks and one with LBD. So everybody can have what he wants. Drawback is that TFP would have to support both versions.

(Actually we have two versions available, one with perks and one with LBD (DF). But for some the availability of a mod doesn't count)

Is that a kind of joke?

TFP have completely reinvented the skill/perk system with EVERY alpha out there since at least A15.
Every alpha, they have thrown every thing they had into the bin and completely redone the whole system.

How on earth would you better describe "time-consuming and expensive" than by what TFP HAVE ACTUALLY DONE all the time? <shaking head> <LOL>

 

[meganoth]

Oh don't give me that, if a single modder can do it in a short time (less than a week working an hour or 2 a day or so), tfp has no excuse.

Which modder needed just a week to implement a full LBD system?

Darkness Falls completly tosses vanilla's stat system in the garbage (where it should be imo) each alpha, and I believe its very easy for him it implement it everytime the game updates.

What a load of nonsense. Ask Khaine how he does it. Or let me explain: He simply doesn't take any XML from TFP and just adapts his own huge code-base to work with the underlying engine changes. His whole mod including the LBD system in it has been in the works for more than 3 years if I remember correctly.

As he throws away all (or almost all?) XML from TFP he doesn't need to care what changes they implement, he only needs to see that his XML works with whatever changed below that.  That can be done in a relatively short time, but the code that Khaine uses for his mod has cost him countless hours of many years.

This proves the coding to support it still exists from when it was in a16.4, if it wasn't it'd be much harder to be put in, still doable, just be more work, going from a16.4's system to the a18 stat system was probally way more work than if they just fixed the 2-3 issues with the a16.4 system, yet instead of fixing the few small issues it had they decided to redo it from scratch.

Get it in your head, they didn't want the LBD system. They still don't want it, and about half the players are perfectly fine with that.

As for balancing it.

skill levels 1, 20, 40, 60, 80 are level 1,2,3,4,5 of a perk like pummel pete, miner 69'er, motherload etc. To balance headshot damage. look at what the bonus is at 10 in the stat, and set it as a range from 1 skill to 100 skill. with 0 skill being equil to 1 stat, and 100 skill being whatever the stat at 10 would have (this can be done, many aspects of the game already use this system). You could also make the action skill give a bit of damage, and a bit faster reload that stacks on top of the perks, but that could come later.

The point is just because mods exist aren't an excuse for the devs to bascially ignore what the playerbase. I'm tired of 7dtd devs using mods as a excuse as to why they don't have X feature, give us a real reason. Your not making a game just for yourselves devs, your making it to try to appeal to players to buy it, need to learn to cave on some things for the sake of players.

And I am tired with you argumenting with the "playerbase". As far as appeal for players to buy and play it, TFP seems happy about how many players buy and continue to play it, so what lesson do they need to learn? That they have to avoid success now? Redesign their progression system again when they are blamed all the time for too much redesigning?

Good example is the whole needing farm plots, Devs say its because you can't hoe the ground due to some technical reason with the way the game handles biomes or something (I forget exactly what it was but it was along these lines), yet multiple mods have shown it can easly be done and it works fine. Whats the excuse now? As your technical reason was just debunked since modders were able to do it without a problem, calling it a "hacky" way doesn't matter, what matters is it was easly done, by some modder in his home on his own. TFP in this case made a choice, thats the only reason it "needed" to be changed. BTW DF also has the farm plots, you can use either way to grow crops, either hoeing the ground or using farm plots.. See players like choices? Some like the farm plots in DF, me? I just hoe the ground.

That is a matter where *I* have no answer as I don't know the reason, don't know the technical foundation of it. I suspect you do not know either, but are fast in claiming it is debunked. Has any of those modders explained to you how he did it and maybe given his assessment that there is no reason to not add it? I would call that a first step to actually calling it "debunked".

Just of the top of my head, if DF uses some resource for doing it that TFP has reserved for some specific future use, then DF including it is perfectly fine, but TFP still would have a reason to stay with the current system in vanilla. And there may have been other reasons they changed it. Which doesn't mean they could simply have lied to us, sure. But it isn't just as easy as you make it to determine such stuff.

And lastly, I am glad you hoe the ground in DF, where you also have your LBD system. I just don't get why you then say mods are not the solution. They are!!

Why should TFP copy DF when DF already exists?

One of my biggest gripes is TFP keeps removing choice from the player, A21 with the sex t-rex thing is a prime example, why not add it to the weapon lines as they did, but also leave sex t-rex in? so players could choose to invest in sex t-rex to get all around stam reduction, or could choose to ignore it and focus on their chosen stat/weapon. I know what i'd choose, I'd choose to get sex t-rex in str, as its more efficent, as even maxing the stam reduction in ONE weapon or tool line now costs over double the perk points maxing sex t-rex used to cost that effected every weapon or tool. Its just gone from being efficent to super inefficent as hell from a20 to a21.

This is why balancing would have needed to make sex t-rex 3-5 times as weak as  now since it otherwise would have been unbalanced. Or simply not change sex-rex at all, because everyone would draw the same conclusion and then complain that there is no way to avoid STR. And that explains why they changed it, because the complaint that sex-rex was practically unavoidable was valid. YOU like sex-rex so much **because** it was OP.

 

[RhinoW]

The most simple answer: Because it was one of the promises in the kickstarter. And if kickstarter promised a story as well, bandits aka NPCs make that possible as well. 

Ahh, fair enough then, understandable.

I 100% agree. Most if not all TFP's excuses have been debunked by the modding community. Until A20 I haven't used mods in 7DTD, but had to just because of farm plots. For me playing survival games is all about immersion. Each and every big update 7DTD goes further away from simulation and closer to arcade. I've been playing 7DTD since the single digits (A7 I think) and since A17 I'm more reluctant every time my friends want to come back to this game.

Very, very true. I started playing in A12/13, can't recall, and to be fair, so far, ever since A17, A21 has been my favourite "new age" alpha, and one that I really don't have much criticism about, other than some balacancing and feature polishing, aaand things I've been wanting for a long time now, but as far as what A21 does, I got no complaints for the most part.

For me, A16 was 7 days to die identity peak, but people forget this is an early access game, we all should know what we signed up for. And at the end of the day, it's the devs view of their own game, not just what we want.

Truth be told, the game has never been better from a technical standpoint, and while it strays from the mood it once had, it's not a bad game by any means, just an unfinished one with a new direction that's more arcadey and fallout-styled (if I recall, madmole is a fallout and fallout 4 fan).

Oh don't give me that, if a single modder can do it in a short time (less than a week working an hour or 2 a day or so), tfp has no excuse. Darkness Falls completly tosses vanilla's stat system in the garbage (where it should be imo) each alpha, and I believe its very easy for him it implement it everytime the game updates. This proves the coding to support it still exists from when it was in a16.4, if it wasn't it'd be much harder to be put in, still doable, just be more work, going from a16.4's system to the a18 stat system was probally way more work than if they just fixed the 2-3 issues with the a16.4 system, yet instead of fixing the few small issues it had they decided to redo it from scratch.

As for balancing it.

skill levels 1, 20, 40, 60, 80 are level 1,2,3,4,5 of a perk like pummel pete, miner 69'er, motherload etc. To balance headshot damage. look at what the bonus is at 10 in the stat, and set it as a range from 1 skill to 100 skill. with 0 skill being equil to 1 stat, and 100 skill being whatever the stat at 10 would have (this can be done, many aspects of the game already use this system). You could also make the action skill give a bit of damage, and a bit faster reload that stacks on top of the perks, but that could come later.

The point is just because mods exist aren't an excuse for the devs to bascially ignore what the playerbase. I'm tired of 7dtd devs using mods as a excuse as to why they don't have X feature, give us a real reason. Your not making a game just for yourselves devs, your making it to try to appeal to players to buy it, need to learn to cave on some things for the sake of players.

Good example is the whole needing farm plots, Devs say its because you can't hoe the ground due to some technical reason with the way the game handles biomes or something (I forget exactly what it was but it was along these lines), yet multiple mods have shown it can easly be done and it works fine. Whats the excuse now? As your technical reason was just debunked since modders were able to do it without a problem, calling it a "hacky" way doesn't matter, what matters is it was easly done, by some modder in his home on his own. TFP in this case made a choice, thats the only reason it "needed" to be changed. BTW DF also has the farm plots, you can use either way to grow crops, either hoeing the ground or using farm plots.. See players like choices? Some like the farm plots in DF, me? I just hoe the ground.

One of my biggest gripes is TFP keeps removing choice from the player, A21 with the sex t-rex thing is a prime example, why not add it to the weapon lines as they did, but also leave sex t-rex in? so players could choose to invest in sex t-rex to get all around stam reduction, or could choose to ignore it and focus on their chosen stat/weapon. I know what i'd choose, I'd choose to get sex t-rex in str, as its more efficent, as even maxing the stam reduction in ONE weapon or tool line now costs over double the perk points maxing sex t-rex used to cost that effected every weapon or tool. Its just gone from being efficent to super inefficent as hell from a20 to a21.

I can relate to how p*ssed you are, but I've just accepted that this is how the game plays out now, and we won't be getting A16 back. We should just look forward to see how we can improve the new systems and build off from that.

As for the farmplots, it's really a meaningless thing, as they are not as expensive to craft now (I think, I play with 300% XP and 300% damage so I'm not very aware of other settings). My biggest gripe is the absolutely stupid logic behind living off the land, where you require tier 2 to have a sustainable farm. Last time I mentioned this, the reason for this was "so seeds you find is juist food you can grow", which means "Potato seed = potato that you have to wait for", and that is the most artificial difficulty/economy barrier I've ever seen in my life, why not just give me the potato then?

Now, skill talk. Besides some perks needing a rework/tweak, I do believe the biggest issue with the current system is the main attribute system. All it does is give you dismemberment chance and headshot damage for weapons affected by that tree, which uninspiring, boring and uncharacteristic of the tree. Not to mention, you have to waste your points, to break the gatekeep of the perks that require X attribute level. The reason this works in fallout 4 (the only fallout that allows you to alocate perk points into SPECIAL stats), is because you can choose what to spec as you create your character, and are not forced to start with all of them at 1. Just imagine fallout 4 but you start with 1 SPECIAL stat, and have to work your way to even get the required points for a perk, that has levels itself. That's 7 days to die perk system atm, but for some reason later levels cost 2 and 3 points.

I would either allow the player to allocate attribute points when he creates the world (15 points for example) and then create more variety of perks and rebalance their values.

Or, I would have a LBD system that only affects attributes so relevant actions improve points in that category.

Strength - Harvesting, using shotguns, using clubs, using sledgehammers

Perception - Scoring headshots, using rifles, using spears, looting

Fortitude - Using fist weapons, using machineguns, taking damage, running

Agility - Using bows, using knives, using pistols, jumping, sneaking/sneak attack

Intellect - Crafting, healing, bartering, questing, using batons, using turrets

This way your attributes naturally adapt to your playstyle, considering that now everyone can have a pipe version of their skill's weapon early on very easily. If you fully focus on one thing, you're going to excel at it, and will be maxed out at like day 7, allowing you to focus your perk points on...the perks. Obviously we would need some form of XP nerf or have some perks require 2 points instead of 1 through all levels, things like that.

 

[meganoth]

Is that a kind of joke?

TFP have completely reinvented the skill/perk system with EVERY alpha out there since at least A15.
Every alpha, they have thrown every thing they had into the bin and completely redone the whole system.

What happened between A20 and A21? The perk system was largely unchanged, just that some perks lost schematics they automatically gave because the way how schematics were learned was changed, from learn-by-reading-a-schematic to learn-by-reading-a-small-part-of-a-schematic. That is all that happened.

And some rebalancing took place, so a perk vanished and its effect was redistributed to other perks. If that is completely reinventing then cars have been completely reinvented 30 times in the last century. <sarcasm>Oh look, the ashtray moved from the front dashboard to the middle console, the car was completely reinvented again<sarcasm off>

Sorry, I see mostly incremental or balance changes in the progression system, except for A16->A17 and A17->A18.

How on earth would you better describe "time-consuming and expensive" than by what TFP HAVE ACTUALLY DONE all the time? <shaking head> <LOL>

Whether that is expensive is a different matter. If TFP is willing to sink money into developing the game to **their (subjective)** level of perfection I don't have a problem with that.

 

[meganoth]

[...]

My biggest gripe is the absolutely stupid logic behind living off the land, where you require tier 2 to have a sustainable farm. Last time I mentioned this, the reason for this was "so seeds you find is juist food you can grow", which means "Potato seed = potato that you have to wait for", and that is the most artificial difficulty/economy barrier I've ever seen in my life, why not just give me the potato then?

Please do the math. A LotL tier1(*) farm plot will give you back the equivalent of 1 seed plus 1.5 plants **on average**. That is very much sustainable while not absolutely safe from mis-harvests. Just like reality, by the way

(*) tier 1 meaning 1 perk point invested in LotL

 

[Lokeus]

I might be a minority here, but I really think bandits is possibly one of the worst things to add to the game. It will 100% take a bunch of time to make, needing more complex AI and animations than the zombies, and it will come with its fair share of bugs until it is fixed, which will take up more time.

Time that could be used to focus on the main selling points of this game, which is the sandbox exploration and tower defense/7 day horde and polishing it. Why would they add something the game clearly doesn't need? Hats of to them for going with the duke storyline and having all that cool concept art and most likely really neat end game ideas in the backlog, but isn't that essentially shifting the focus of the game into 2 major parts? Bandits/Storyline and Zombies? When the game has always been about the zombies and surviving them? Only recently (in comparison to how many alphas there are) did the trader actually become something core to the gameplay rather than an elusive spawn on the map.

So many things that still need to be looked into (and I know some of these are already confirmed)

- Stealth and sleepers

- Combat and fluidity (recoil, animations, weapon swapping, hit reactions)

- Gore and VFX update (ex: zombie cop puke)

- Sound update and vehicle physics/controls

- Player character and armor

- New mods/Mod visuals/Mod rebalance

- Swimming

- Biome/PoI identity and zombie variants (remember the frostbitten zombies from previous alphas?)

- Special infected (we need new ones, some for bloodmoons, some for PoIs, some for both, and with very distinct abilities to make the player have to think about their base building)

- Blood Moon spawns (currently it's just shoot the bullet sponges that decide to focus on a single block until the demolisher comes which then punishes you from shooting a horde)

7 days to die is the only PVE survival zombie game out there that is able to differentiate itself from others and actually innovate, rather than being a reskin of your average survival game with X setting. Why would they go the route of adding bandits, to, let's be real, an already buggy game with its current AI. Never once in my life did I think "Damn, this game really needs human enemies".

I agree mostly with your arguments. I am also not sure if the bandits will work in a way it will satisfy me. I also fear that they will just introduce them as a new stronger and special enemy type but i do not really think they will behave like real bandits would do. I hardly doubt that they will scavenge the towns or trading with you or other groups in an realistic manner. Interaction won`t be very immersive so just don`t try to do so. Focus on battling it would be fun just to encounter them, being annoyed an when they are too strong and established on one spot, it would be cool to hire your own bandits to do some gang fights with them, but please not as a main aspect of the game, it should be a side task. When you don`t want them it should be easy to dodge them. But yes, there are cooler things they could keep focus on. Meh.