PC Loot on a19

[ZugZuggies]

I'm pretty new to 7 Days, got it during the Steam Summer Sale. I've put about 60 hours into the game, most of which was done on the latest a18 patch. Playing the two patches is like night and day. I get not wanting AKs to drop immedately but I've searched about 3 towns at this point, made it to 15 and I'm still only finding blunderbusses and clubs. I've found ONE hunting rifle but that's the 'best' I've found. 3 stacks 2-3 stacks of 7.62 and 9mm but not a single 9mm pistol for miles around! If a middle ground could be found between blunderbusses/clubs/stone axes for 10 hours of gameplay and AKs being overly abundant in the 'early game' Or even a server option where you can control the quality of loot that could be found. 

Of course, I'm new to the game so I could quite possibly be playing/doing something wrong so let me know if anyone else has noticed this or if it's something I'm doing. 

 

[beHypE]

The worst thing as far as I'm concerned is how replayability got affected. I like the slow progression but we've had to restart with the latest patch and it feels EXACTLY like the previous one. Stone tools, blunderbusses, bicycle schematics, molotov as quest rewards, the same mods... The loot tables early game are very shallow and it shows. 

We've cranked the experience multiplier up to 125% now. It should speed up the game quite a bit and reduce the '10th metal chest and still only blunderbusses' syndrom. 

 

[Spatch]

This is my issue with the new loot mechanics.  I loved the feeling of looting and not knowing what you would find on each play-through!  I loved that you might not find a good weapon or you might find one, it was random.  Now, with the new alpha, I know no matter how hard I look or how much time I spend chopping into a safe, its going to have blunderbusses, stone axes, or stone sledges and nothing truly random.  I went from playing at least 100+ hours per alpha to less than 3 in this one.

Yes, I know why they added it!  Yes, I know many people love the progression!  But there are also players like me who don't like it and like instead the randomness without 1, having to mod the game, or 2, up experience gained and get to ferals and cops that much faster!

What I miss about earlier alphas is that the game felt like a game you could do what you wanted to do.  Now it feels like a game that forces you down a certain path, and that, to me, is what isn't fun.

I keep hoping that the game will revert but I know it won't as TFP doesn't see that as their goal.  That is fine with me as it is their IP.  Just wish there was a way to satisfy all major  groups of players instead of only some of the major groups, and the group I am in is major.  Just reading the forums shows there are many players like me who miss the old randomness.

For me, a slider that gives % of tier level loot for containers would be ideal.  It felt like 0% anything cool to me when I played (while it might actually not be 0%) but I'd like to be able to up it to 5% or 10% chance so I have that exploration feeling that I loved about this game.  Now it feels more like a slog and not as fun.

Now I've already bought the game, but I also brought at least 10 players into this game, helping TFP.  I won't be recommending it to anyone for now because I just don't think it has the same thing it did when I was experiencing earlier alphas.

BTW, I would love it someone could mod this game like Alpha 14 and before but with the current graphics.  I loved knowing that I shouldn't go into cities without backup.  I loved not knowing when I was going to be able to get around the map more easily.  I loved making bases where I didn't know which direction zombies were going to come from and didn't have to worry about engineer-zombies that know my base's weaknesses better than I do!  I loved the randomness of maybe not finding the calipers or the minibike and the way this game really felt more fun with multiplayer because that was more people to help find things.  Guess its like life - things change and you can't live in the past!

Hell if it wasn't for minibikes falling through the world, I'd stay back in those alphas!

Just my humble opinion.

 

[beHypE]

It's all part of a plan of raising the game stage of hard POIs / biomes so that you can find good loot if you're willing to take the risks. Sadly this is only going to be a thing further down the road so now we're stuck with a very linear and scripted progression. Time will tell how good it will become! 

 

[Spatch]

It's all part of a plan of raising the game stage of hard POIs / biomes so that you can find good loot if you're willing to take the risks. Sadly this is only going to be a thing further down the road so now we're stuck with a very linear and scripted progression. Time will tell how good it will become! 

Yes, I saw Roland's post a few days ago and am aware of their longer goal based on that post.  I won't like that either, if it removes all random "good" loot from easier POIs.  I don't want to find stone tools in any POI the devs don't think is "hard" enough.  Also, if I spend several minutes chopping into a locked safe, I should find something besides a blunderbuss, of which I've already found three.  Just my opinion.

 

[Roland]

I'm pretty new to 7 Days, got it during the Steam Summer Sale. I've put about 60 hours into the game, most of which was done on the latest a18 patch. Playing the two patches is like night and day. I get not wanting AKs to drop immedately but I've searched about 3 towns at this point, made it to 15 and I'm still only finding blunderbusses and clubs. I've found ONE hunting rifle but that's the 'best' I've found. 3 stacks 2-3 stacks of 7.62 and 9mm but not a single 9mm pistol for miles around! If a middle ground could be found between blunderbusses/clubs/stone axes for 10 hours of gameplay and AKs being overly abundant in the 'early game' Or even a server option where you can control the quality of loot that could be found. 

Of course, I'm new to the game so I could quite possibly be playing/doing something wrong so let me know if anyone else has noticed this or if it's something I'm doing. 

You’re not doing anything wrong other than perhaps choosing to opt in to a voluntary experimental branch of the game where large swings in balancing can occur since the devs are...ahem...experimenting. 
 

They are still tuning things in and then there will likely be a 19.1, 19.2, and 19.3 to further smooth things out. 
 

In this specific case, the full development is not likely to come until A20. They want to add a primitive pistol and rifle to the mix which will add variety. They also want to add higher risk for better rewards so that certain locations will have higher tier loot earlier. 
 

If the current status hurts a player’s feelings of wanting to replay then the best is to either find a mod that changes it or put it aside until the development of this system is complete. 
 

Some people play through the game only once or twice at each major update so as to not get burned out on the game.

 

[Solomon]

This is my issue with the new loot mechanics.  I loved the feeling of looting and not knowing what you would find on each play-through!  I loved that you might not find a good weapon or you might find one, it was random.  Now, with the new alpha, I know no matter how hard I look or how much time I spend chopping into a safe, its going to have blunderbusses, stone axes, or stone sledges and nothing truly random.  I went from playing at least 100+ hours per alpha to less than 3 in this one.

Im seriously missing this, in A18 everything was random if i opened up a trashbag and found ammo i was like "Damm....NOICE!". It makes exploration interesting and fun, i dont want to run into the third Shotgun Messiah factory just to get 8 different tier 6 blunderbusses.

Also just to clarify i also dont like the idea that the good items will be tied strictly to difficult areas, i want things random and in a form what keeps the immersion intact. If they add harder POI's thats ok and nice but they shouldnt be the only places to find certain items, i dont want to enter an age where the new game experience looks like this:

1. Spawn, find the house what always have a workbench
   
2. Search for the semi-challanging house and cheese out the guns hidden in it
   
3. Rush to the military POI with the new weapons to cheese it and get the endgame loot
   
4. Repeat every new map the exact same way.
   

 

[Axonius]

I recommend that in a future alpha we make the "Progression Type" a configurable option. "Scaled Loot" and "Random Loot". Where Scaled Loot would be the A19 looting approach. 

 

[Mday]

lucky looter lv2~3 + lucky goggles + eye candy. I got my AK pretty early, even thou it is only lv1.

I didn't spend any points in combat/survival perk. Eat canned food + charred meat, fight Z with stone spear and spam blunderbuss. Stockpile enough handgun/rifle ammo for the first horde.

 

[Scyris]

I feel the same, I much prefer the loot system A18 had, you never know what you were going to find, and getting tier 5-6 stuff was very rare, compared to now where every single poi just hands quality 5 and 6 items to you like they are water. Now? its too linear, and predictable, and as I said the guarnteed quality 5/6 weapons has got to go, make that part like a18, where you'll usually get quality 1-3, and 4 and up being very rare even at higher gamestage numbers. This way finding a qual 4-6 thing still feels special where as now? its too common that it loses all excitement over it.

 

[dowz0r]

The worst thing as far as I'm concerned is how replayability got affected. I like the slow progression but we've had to restart with the latest patch and it feels EXACTLY like the previous one. Stone tools, blunderbusses, bicycle schematics, molotov as quest rewards, the same mods... The loot tables early game are very shallow and it shows. 

We've cranked the experience multiplier up to 125% now. It should speed up the game quite a bit and reduce the '10th metal chest and still only blunderbusses' syndrom. 

I agree about the replayability being @%$*#!ed. I used to start new playthroughs without too much hesitance, but now I dread the thought of grinding through the stages. It shows that this new system is pretty bad. Loot should be random and not predictable. 

 

[Ralathar44]

The worst thing as far as I'm concerned is how replayability got affected. I like the slow progression but we've had to restart with the latest patch and it feels EXACTLY like the previous one. Stone tools, blunderbusses, bicycle schematics, molotov as quest rewards, the same mods... The loot tables early game are very shallow and it shows. 

We've cranked the experience multiplier up to 125% now. It should speed up the game quite a bit and reduce the '10th metal chest and still only blunderbusses' syndrom. 

That's why we need primitive weapons of every spec.  We've got blunderbuss and primitive bow.  Now we just need a primitive weapon for the other 3.  Flintlock pistol, pipe rifle, and musket for example.  Dunno what to do about Int.  It's an odd duck quack quack.

 

[ElCabong]

I have looted over 700 gunpowder. Anybody else looting a lot of gunpowder? As far as weapons go, I'm a bow guy with a 9 mm backup in case I'm cornered by a crowd. I make those. in this build I have found all the parts I need to do this but for the last build I always had to scrap my old bow to make my new bow.

Yes I'm very disappointed whenever I open a chest or a safe anymore. Yet it's not a problem.

Is anybody having trouble making the weapon for the attribute they are developing?

 

[beHypE]

That's why we need primitive weapons of every spec.  We've got blunderbuss and primitive bow.  Now we just need a primitive weapon for the other 3.  Flintlock pistol, pipe rifle, and musket for example.  Dunno what to do about Int.  It's an odd duck quack quack.

The thing is... those won't really solve the underlying issue. Sure, you'll be able to find makeshift guns, but it's still going to be linear as can be, just with 3-4 more items in the loot table. I think every now and then you should be able to find absolutely everything. Maybe at a pace of 1-2 uncapped items every 10 hours or so. It's not so much about not being able to find decent guns early, I'm actually glad about that. It's more about knowing exactly what I can and what I can't find, and never being gifted a "lucky find" until I reach a certain XP treshhold. The huge pleasure from starting over came from having different unlocks at different stages. Sometimes you found a crucible super early on and you'd have steel early. Sometimes you'd find the motorbike recipes and were able to skip crafting the bicycle/minibike. Sometimes you found an auger and would be a mining king right of the bat in that particular playthrough. Right now, everything seems to happen in a very specific order, and you'll have about the same bottlenecks in every single game.

I understand not handing over M60's day 2 in every other chest, but knowing 3/4 of the game is locked anyways makes you wonder why the hell you'd waste your time finding hardenest chests and treasures. I mean to be completely honest it seems to be a better strat to just loot POIs to the bone but leaving the end stash for later. Come back when you're gamestage 50+ and you'll suddenly be swimming in good loot.

Maybe tying the local gamestage to the underlying difficulty of a POI/biome will solve that issue, but for now I doubt i'll start over very often, or i'll crank up the early game XP multiplier quite a lot to "push through" the shallow loot tables faster.

 

[Ralathar44]

The thing is... those won't really solve the underlying issue. Sure, you'll be able to find makeshift guns, but it's still going to be linear as can be, just with 3-4 more items in the loot table. I think every now and then you should be able to find absolutely everything. Maybe at a pace of 1-2 uncapped items every 10 hours or so. It's not so much about not being able to find decent guns early, I'm actually glad about that. It's more about knowing exactly what I can and what I can't find, and never being gifted a "lucky find" until I reach a certain XP treshhold. The huge pleasure from starting over came from having different unlocks at different stages. Sometimes you found a crucible super early on and you'd have steel early. Sometimes you'd find the motorbike recipes and were able to skip crafting the bicycle/minibike. Sometimes you found an auger and would be a mining king right of the bat in that particular playthrough. Right now, everything seems to happen in a very specific order, and you'll have about the same bottlenecks in every single game.

I understand not handing over M60's day 2 in every other chest, but knowing 3/4 of the game is locked anyways makes you wonder why the hell you'd waste your time finding hardenest chests and treasures. I mean to be completely honest it seems to be a better strat to just loot POIs to the bone but leaving the end stash for later. Come back when you're gamestage 50+ and you'll suddenly be swimming in good loot.

Maybe tying the local gamestage to the underlying difficulty of a POI/biome will solve that issue, but for now I doubt i'll start over very often, or i'll crank up the early game XP multiplier quite a lot to "push through" the shallow loot tables faster.

This loot is the same way it works in even Diablo style games or looter shooters or RPGs or etc.  You will never find items beyond a certain power in normal mode of diablo or path of exiles at level X.  You are artificially gated.  You cannot find many sets, afixes, gems, runes, rings, amulets, etc.  Entire builds cannot even come online before certain levels.

These things are not done by accident.   This is honestly just normal gameplay designed based on generations of metrics and game history.  The most successful most highly loot driven games on the planet take this approach .  So i'm going to have to completely disagree based on what I can see in both reality and gaming history.  I don't think that design is by accident, it's so you keep having things to look forwards to as you level.  The rewards are given in carefully designed time frames, even with RNG involved.  Some folks are always unhappy with it.  All the most successful examples of the loot driven genres speak for themselves however.

So can the balance be improved?  Prolly always.  But as to your core premise of "I think every now and then you should be able to find absolutely everything." I'd say you're pretty directly wrong on that one.

 

[beHypE]

I mean, comparing this game with a Diablo-like game to make a point that restricted loot tables are good is... well, funny to say the least. 

Diablo has tremendously more equipment than 7DTD, even at low levels. Every second level there's an upgrade to be found, hell, even the blacksmith has new recipes every 5 levels. The core emphasis in a game like that is the end game, and still even early game there's ten times more diverse loot to be found than in 7 Days, which puts just as strong of an emphasis on early/mid game than on late game. See the issue ?

Also, enemy scaling. 7 days lacks proper difficulty scaling, since there's basically 3 steps : normal zombies, feral zombies, irradiated zombies. What ends up happening is you're gonna be behind the curve early game, and then suddenly once you have a gun, the game becomes ezpz until you start encountering ferals (and I mean, even then... it's really not hard either when you can just unload bullets that are so easy to find/craft).

I mean, I might change my mind but not when your argument is "other games do it too", when those games counter the "shallow loot tables" by actually having 10 times bigger loot tables at every stage of the game...

 

[Solomon]

The thing is... those won't really solve the underlying issue. Sure, you'll be able to find makeshift guns, but it's still going to be linear as can be, just with 3-4 more items in the loot table. I think every now and then you should be able to find absolutely everything. Maybe at a pace of 1-2 uncapped items every 10 hours or so. It's not so much about not being able to find decent guns early, I'm actually glad about that. It's more about knowing exactly what I can and what I can't find, and never being gifted a "lucky find" until I reach a certain XP treshhold.

I dont think capping would fix the issue, even if we go with 1 ingame hour or every second container looted you will always know exactly what you will find because its no longer random.

In my opinion we first would need to atleast double the amount of weapons we have for each tier before we could even imagine going for somekind of capping and even that would be too soon because the gating would still be too noticable.

 

[sadpickle]

Also, enemy scaling. 7 days lacks proper difficulty scaling, since there's basically 3 steps : normal zombies, feral zombies, irradiated zombies. What ends up happening is you're gonna be behind the curve early game, and then suddenly once you have a gun, the game becomes ezpz until you start encountering ferals (and I mean, even then... it's really not hard either when you can just unload bullets that are so easy to find/craft).

I feel like this is such a huge problem, not just in singleplayer (where the game most strongly resembles Skyrim, with the perks and enemies leveling with the player) but especially in multiplayer... I cannot count the times I've walked into a POI at level 10 only for a bunch of Ferals and glowing zombies to appear, because someone who is high level is playing the game too. I feel like cities are smaller now so it's really easy for one or two guys farming an area to raise the gamestage so high you cannot loot those cities without serious gear. At level 30 I'm still slumming it with a club, which so far is fine in singleplayer... unless I'm expected to clear ferals from a building. That's not gonna happen with a club, even if I'm perking into it heavily. The game pushes you to use firearms, but it also expects you to loot, either to find a firearm or to find things to sell to get a firearm... and a mechanic of the game is making it very hard to loot unless everyone playing is at a low level. But show me a server that doesn't have a guy who is heavily leveled.

I know what TFP want to do, make going into POIs dangerous and keep them dangerous for high levels... the problem is low-leveled people getting locked out of looting areas.

 

[rivle]

Right now the trader is my best friend. Im my current game i could buy a lvl 4 AK on day 4. In previous alphas I mostly ignored trader missions in first days. With alpha 19 I try early on to make as much money as I can to buy nice stuff.

 

[Spatch]

Right now the trader is my best friend. Im my current game i could buy a lvl 4 AK on day 4. In previous alphas I mostly ignored trader missions in first days. With alpha 19 I try early on to make as much money as I can to buy nice stuff.

Which is fine if you enjoy that style of game play.  What I liked about earlier alphas is it felt like an open world game that allowed me to play the way I wanted to play.  Now it feels so much more common and driven by the devs instead of an open world zombie survival game that left you in charge of how you wanted to play the game.