If it continuously takes up part of your time without any changes throughout the entire playthrough - it becomes a core mechanic. Do you really expect to get through even a day 14 or 21 horde without a nice stockpile of ammo? Like sure, I get it - there needs to be a little challenge to it - but the amount of time necessary to build up enough ammo is much higher than necessary especially for those who do eventually wind up with bad RNG.
My view may be skewed because I often play agility which has the lowest ammo usage of all attributes, but just with buying and looting ammo and using a lot of melee you have enough ammo for horde night, at least for all the time before you go into late late end-game. Ask around, other people on the forum said this as well as far as I remember.
Now before you counter with the "play-style" argument, sure, there is the play-style of spray-and-pray ignoring melee, but the ease of use and safety of shooting all zombies into pulp comes at a cost. There are so many ways to get ammo in this game that I have qualms to call ammo crafting a core mechanism. Crafting in general for all sorts of consumables and building materials IS a core mechanism, ammo crafting is just an optional part of it.
If you play so carelessly that you require a machine gun for every occasion, I feel bad for you.
Well, good then that that isn't the case. I shouldn't be surprised you don't know the meaning of "oh-@%$#" weapon in this forum, but you have only 4 posts so maybe I should have defined the term. "Oh-@%$#" weapons are those weapons you use when you get rushed by a group of zombies into a corner or small room and you would surely die if you still try meleeing yourself out of that situation. It is for the
rare occasions where @%$# hits the fans.
With 10 toolbelt slots, I don't know how you don't have slots available for an extra weapon. Every weapon has it's place, more-so if you spec into it. I carry in my toolbelt (early game) bone knife/wrench/hammer (depending on need), bow, all the pipe weapons except the rifle (because bow [aka 4 slots]), axe, pick, shovel, and a club. Why would I carry, in my toolbelt at least, literally anything else? Everything else can be used from the inventory window itself when there isn't other issues to deal with like your face getting eaten off.
Everyone has preferences here. I find wooden ladder and healing bandages are more important as they also allow me to survive close enounters with my grave. Generally all the non-dangerous stuff can be dealt with by melee. Guns are optional here.
I'm surely not the best player of 7D2D. I don't even play on insane like many here. Maybe we hear from other experienced players how they view pipe weapons and whether they always use more than one in early game.
Your clear distain of others' playstyles is weak and cringy. Learn to expand out of your comfort zone and you may learn that the weapons you despise have utility, even if you don't like it.
I don*t despise them and I don't have been denigrating other playstyles. I brought up arguments you are free to counter instead of analysing my psychological makeup.
I merely said that other pipe weapons are
relatively weak compared to machine gun and in most cases can simply be substituted by the pipe machine gun. And in my opinion the machine gun should have the longest reload of them all to balance that.
If you have found a niche to play with them good for you, I think that niche is too small. I don't doubt that you have fun using them and if we didn't do some things just for fun in this game everyone would have to play strength or Int anyway. But that doen't mean those pipe weapons couldn't be balanced better.
And yes, this is just my opinion, in a complex game with many strategies balancing IS a very subjective matter and arguments are seldom enough to really find out the truth.
I think telemetry (which we don't have, only TFP has that) will tell if other pipe weapons are commonly used. My guess would be that if someone finds a higher quality pipe weapon of any type he will use it. But if he has to craft one, the majority of players will craft a pipe machine gun.
You've missed the point.
There is the ability to get a compound bow, which is stronger than ANY of the other weapons available to you, available and crafted early game (within 7 days). Ya know, the same time you'd actually be using pipe weapons. I don't give two @%$#s if the XML says it's supposed to drop later, I'm telling you it's possible to have t3 weapons at the same time as t0/t1 which considering you'd have 'compare' the DPS vs. Quality vs. Tier to know this issue is in-fact an issue, it is fair to compare. It's cheaper on ammo cost, easier to craft than any t2 weapon, and more effective at that stage - THAT'S A PROBLEM. If there was an issue of ammo type like a rocket launcher where the ammo itself was difficult to get, and it would just have to sit in a chest until usable, then it makes sense not to compare them. But as it sits, I can get a quality 1 compound and use my stone arrows and be mostly content until later mid game (like quality 3 standard weapons) - save most everything for hordes. That is not balanced, there should at least be an unavailability to use stone arrows so you're at least incentivized to get a tier of ammo that would be comparable to say, a carbon arrow or some @%$#, or the possibility that stone arrows break occasionally if you risk to try them.
As it currently is, I have way more incentive to go out of my way to find bow parts in more difficult POIs than spend time finding and mining resources to get the other ammo types because I can mass spam crafting stone arrows in my inventory - feathers and stone are around every bush. The only struggle there even is, is having a workbench, but the drops on those schematics already seem higher than most so it's not even a big deal.
Lets just call the compound bow a tier2 weapon. In everything but internal name it seems to be one.
If someone has the luck of finding a tier2 weapon of any type in the early game he will use it instead of any pipe weapon in situations where he needs firepower. If you don't agree to that then we simply have to agree to disagree. This has nothing to do with playstyle. Except for the pipe rifle if that tier2 weapons has no range or using specific ammo there is no compelling reason to use any of the other weapons.
The only problem is actually if tier2 guns/bows commonly drop too early. I find it nice that you have a very low chance at a lucky draw (the absence of that lucky draw was a common criticism made against A18/A19 loot), but that chance must be low enough that you can't depend on it. If you can show that you more often than not find a tier2 gun in normal gameplay on say day 7 and without going into the wasteland for "super-loot", then that is a balancing problem in the loot tables.
