WickesGuru
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I've not found a single santa hat since A20 experimental dropped until now so...whos really getting the shaft here?
PC Loving A20 except the way loot is COMPLETELY BROKEN
- Thread starter nostalginator
- Start date
Belgarion32
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I'm in the same boat. It's just silly that I can unlock a chem station using points yet to craft one it requires one item that isn't even craftable and the RNG is so damn low that it's nearly impossible to find reliably. It's not a 'end-game' item, an auto-shotgun, SMG turret, or gyro are end-game items - just being able to craft gunpower more efficiently =/= end-game, it just equals a different playstyle that allows for more use of guns.
I like the idea that a certain POI would certainty have items with items that we can't craft if they keep it uncraftable, or even a POI type where there was just a high chance of it like the gas stations and wheels. It makes sense and the current loot tables just need to get updated. Also wish Acid was able to just be gotten by scraping batteries instead of getting lead... or both, both is good.
To the people about the bows/plentiful ammo, what settings do you have that makes your playthroughs so damn easy? Compound bows are stronger than ALL of the pipe weapons, have faster reload (the reload of the pipe weapons alone makes it only a failback weapon), and even a perk tree to increase the reload/damage - ammo/canned food in my playthroughs have been scarce just as TFP said it would. Also if your ammo is as plentiful as you say it is, it makes the chem station even LESS of an end-game item.
I like the idea that a certain POI would certainty have items with items that we can't craft if they keep it uncraftable, or even a POI type where there was just a high chance of it like the gas stations and wheels. It makes sense and the current loot tables just need to get updated. Also wish Acid was able to just be gotten by scraping batteries instead of getting lead... or both, both is good.
To the people about the bows/plentiful ammo, what settings do you have that makes your playthroughs so damn easy? Compound bows are stronger than ALL of the pipe weapons, have faster reload (the reload of the pipe weapons alone makes it only a failback weapon), and even a perk tree to increase the reload/damage - ammo/canned food in my playthroughs have been scarce just as TFP said it would. Also if your ammo is as plentiful as you say it is, it makes the chem station even LESS of an end-game item.
Bows are great, feathers are easy to get and, with the right mods a bow and bat/club are all you need. Guns and way too much ammo give far too much of an advantage too early ( my opinion )
Struggling for canned food and even water is more common now and we need more challenge not less of it, no struggle for anything is to the games detriment. The struggle to find that one thing you want forces you to roam more widely and take more risky chances than you otherwise would.
Ferals and dire wolves on day 1 as well as being ganged up on in some poi has put some of the risk back into the game and its better for it. Is it really so critical to have a beaker with so many other options open to you? By your rationale everything would be easy to find from steel axes to augers to uzis, while that may be largely true it doesnt make for a better game, suspension of disbelief has a part to play. Accepting that some items are difficult to find is part of the game.
Surely having to adjust gameplay and tactics every playthrough because of missing items is far better than having everything to hand " Because it would be easy to find after a real apocalypse."
Socks and bloody car keys cause me enough real life grief on a daily basis, thats realism i DONT need! ( OMG imagine having keys for the vehicles to search for? WAIT! I never said that DELETE goddammit DELETE!!!!)
Struggling for canned food and even water is more common now and we need more challenge not less of it, no struggle for anything is to the games detriment. The struggle to find that one thing you want forces you to roam more widely and take more risky chances than you otherwise would.
Ferals and dire wolves on day 1 as well as being ganged up on in some poi has put some of the risk back into the game and its better for it. Is it really so critical to have a beaker with so many other options open to you? By your rationale everything would be easy to find from steel axes to augers to uzis, while that may be largely true it doesnt make for a better game, suspension of disbelief has a part to play. Accepting that some items are difficult to find is part of the game.
Surely having to adjust gameplay and tactics every playthrough because of missing items is far better than having everything to hand " Because it would be easy to find after a real apocalypse."
Socks and bloody car keys cause me enough real life grief on a daily basis, thats realism i DONT need! ( OMG imagine having keys for the vehicles to search for? WAIT! I never said that DELETE goddammit DELETE!!!!)
nostalginator
New member
Not only literally not my rationale but contrary to things I have explicitly stated. 0/10 effort.
Sorry, no, I coined that term to mean exactly what you requested in your OP article, that the game should manipulate the dice throws in your favour, like a card shark that has loaded dice he uses when he needs specific values. I quote myself: "But your initial suggestion was to change random into fake-random, i.e. people should believe it is random but the game should remove any obstacles the survival part offers and make sure his "luck" never runs out.". At a minimum I expect you as OP to at least know what you were demanding yourself!
So this time you want containers to have the loot in containers where you expect them. But this is already implemented, you can find beakers in in trash AND in appropriate containers. Since everything will eventually land in trash that would not break immersion. Your suggestion to have the probability for appropriate containers be better than trash is fine by me, but a small detail. It also won't prevent one unlucky guy of hundreds to just not find a beaker in 60 days.
Which is end-game, since before demos and glowy ferals "unlimited" ammo is simply OP. With spray and pray I can deal with a horde of normal and feral zombies easy without getting a scratch. But sure, the definition of what IS end-game depends very strongly on how the game seeks to balance the progress of the player. Eventually the TFP developers are the ones who define what is an end-game item and what isn't-
Pipe weapons are very unbalanced at the moment. Which is acceptable as you can build and use any of them with almost equal skill as you probably used your initial perk points for better things than boosting your gun skill.
So the pipe rifle is good for hunting game but absolutely nothing else. The pipe machine gun is the only effective oh @%$# weapon. Pipe pistol and shotgun are only there to use ammo you otherwise couldn't use.
But comparing pipe weapons with compound bow doesn't make any sense. Compare them with a primitive bow. The compound bow is at least tier2, (maybe even tier3 and there exists no tier2).
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nostalginator
New member
That is not even remotely what I "demanded." Go back and reread my OP if you need to, and point out where I said that. In fact, in my very next comment I said, "I'm not even asking for deterministic loot. I'm asking for something between 'deterministic' and '62 fishing weights in 7 days.'"
Having said that-- Jesus Christ, why does the idea of finding a beaker in under 28 days, without having to have visited 12 traders to no avail make some of you folks's @%$#s itch so furiously? How is finding an auger before finding a beaker even remotely reasonable? Are augers not end-game gear now? I swear to God-- if you loot a beaker even before you have a use for one the game suddenly does not become a friggin' cakewalk, despite some of you people's incredibly ludicrous assertions to the contrary.
Do y'all imagine I only tried one playthrough where I couldn't find a beaker? You know, I've not found things before in this game, and when that happens, typically I find them after I no longer need them (and no, I don't always quit in a fit of pique afterward).
The problem I'm having here is consistently not finding ONE item after trying harder than was reasonably necessary for such a trivial thing. You would think that I was asking to be outfitted with literally everything possible on starting the game the way some of you are reacting.
Tier 2 would be the wooden bow.
Why do so many people feel the need to mention the obvious all the time with devs; yes they get the final word, it's understood, it doesn't bear being mentioned, we still have the right (the duty even!) to debate among ourselves the kind of game we want it to be. I also always hear those words said in a nasal mouth-breathing neckbeard voice in my head "It's the devs game" Pfffffttttt! As if.
Pipe weapons are pointless gamey-game guns. It would have been better to just make us suffer through low
Your assessment is correct. The thing is ammo doesn't go bad so the pistol and shotgun are even more useless because their only use is to waste ammo that you could just stockpile until you get a real gun.
I'd be pretty reluctant to use a Saturday night special of any kind but the machine gun just takes huge balls of steel and so is a manly gun for a manly mans game. Of course you'd have no balls after the thing inevitably blows up on you, taking your big steel balls with it.
You forgot the "bow" bow. That is tier
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I mention this in this case specifically because there are not many objective indications available for placing the chem station in the progression. You could argument it is an early game item if the rest of the game is setup so you need the better ammo production in early game. which depends strongly in how you play the game and the balance of the game which isn't finished.
What exactly are you proposing here? We suffer through low tier firearms now with pipe weapons.
Except if you don't plan on using higher tier shotguns and SMGs much.
If you are talking about the wooden bow, this is tier1. Primitive bow is tier0 like the pipe weapons. And I'm pretty happy when I find a good wooden bow as it allows me to shoot zombies and animals from farther away than the pitiful distance the primitive bow allows.
Generally your are right that tier1 weapons are often very short-lived items. Though there are always exceptions, in my current SP I have been using a pistol for a very long time before I could finally craft an SMG.
Sorry, my bad. I actually was confusing you with GryphGlyph who was making that suggestion.
Beaker is just one of multiple items that are scarce. I don't care about the beaker specifically, I care about items being random and scarce in this game so we can always get surprises and not everything runs according to plan.
Whether the beaker is TOO scarce at the moment I don't know. This can only be evaluated statistically, no single player can evaluate that just by playing even a handful games. There will always be one player with an extreme "draw" in a group of hundreds of players.
Ok.
Internal name in the xml is gunBowT1WoodenBow
Internal name of the compound bow is gunBowT3CompoundBow
That went right over your head; it wasn't about the chem station, it was about saying "it's the devs decision!"
My bad, in this case I meant quality level not tier. Suffer through low quality real firearms instead of having the pipe weapons, especially when it doesn't take long to get t6 pipes.
I couldn't remember if we were starting at t0 or t1 (especially since I don't even think it is defined anywhere in the game files, and I probably missed whatever discussion of it is considered official). So bring everything up a tier.
I typically use a pistol a long time before SMG too, this game I did manage to score one but not agility spec so not using. Normally (well, when I was stealth build) I still used a pistol endgame, since it was setup with a silencer and I used it for executions. The SMG was for "oh @%$#sies!" and optimized for hip-fire. That's another flaw of tiers to me, I don't like tiers, I like weapons which are situationally more or less useful than others. One of the saving graces of the mod system, you can setup different weapons for different situations. I actually ran around with a whole set of 9mm and .44 guns then, although the Dirty Harry special was for bartering really.
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And it still goes over my head. I was talking about the chem station with Belgarion32 and thought it neccessary to state the obvious. Because decisions of the devs can be objectively wrong in some way, but for example the chem station is an item you can place anywhere in the progression and make it right (even though there are stronger arguments for it being better late game than early game IMHO). Where to place it can be seen simply as a decision some dev made.
Objectively wrong for example would be putting the M60 into early game and the pipe machine gun into tier3. While the developers could do this (if they want to torpedo their own game) it is practically forbidden, even for a dev.
Yes, maybe the 4 tiers are too much, at least for experienced players when they "rush" through the game. But if you remember the protests about finding only stone tools in containers in A18 and A19, the addition of pipe weapons solved that problem quite well.
It is defined in the xml files. There are 4 tiers from 0 to 3, pipe weapons, stone tools, primitive bow, wooden club, stone spear,... are all tier 0
AGI is fortunate in that way as it has multiple and diverse weapons, I consider it the ultimate SP build. I often use some agi weapons even if I perk into other attributes though, especially the (cross)bows.
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Boidster
New member
I'm keen to hear your suggestion for a loot mechanism which does not meet Meganoth's (and my own) definition of "fake-random" and which would prevent the situation above. And just so we're crystal clear on how it works now:
1) Every possible loot item in a container is assigned a probability
2) Game produces a random number and checks against the probabilities
3) Game gives you the item indicated by the random number
4) Game does not track in any way what you have found already, what you still need, or what you want to find
Okay - how could it be changed to prevent Auger before Beaker?
I remember the stone axes protest yes. I was there with my (stone)pitchfork and torch!
I think they should have removed them but their response was to add in @%$# weapons to complement them and thumb their nose at the playerbase.
Englishman 7DTD player, I fart in your general direction!
I think it's good that we can make these primitive tools as a fallback and before we've learned things but finding them as loot is silly (see how I avoided saying unrealistic there
).
No, I don't think more weapons as loot is the answer, I think more parts. Early game there should be more parts, although I suppose having the option of using the low quality weapon for a bit and then scrapping it into parts works out the same.
I think they should have removed them but their response was to add in @%$# weapons to complement them and thumb their nose at the playerbase.
I think it's good that we can make these primitive tools as a fallback and before we've learned things but finding them as loot is silly (see how I avoided saying unrealistic there
).No, I don't think more weapons as loot is the answer, I think more parts. Early game there should be more parts, although I suppose having the option of using the low quality weapon for a bit and then scrapping it into parts works out the same.
JCrook1028
New member
RNG is RNG. Just because you are getting unlucky does not mean it is broken. If it did then my having found/bought 2 beakers by D13 means they are far too common. Neither is true.
Raise the minimum gamestage that auger appears at, making at least 50% of the playerbase absolutely livid?
I admit it's been a minute since I looked at the loot spawning in depth; there are other things that annoy me more that need modlets written and I have to relearn modding for this game after every hiatus.
I rarely find augers early game, hell I'm still to find one. Have gotten several chainsaws already. By the time I find a decent auger I've usually got a t6 steel pickaxe anyway.
JCrook1028
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Boidster
New member
Indeed. And even this solution would not prevent Auger before Beaker. It would only reduce the probability of that happening. In essence it only changes the balancing of loot tables. Which is my main point in this particular thread - OP and others are only complaining about balance, but they think they are complaining about a broken system. I'm keen to understand what a non-broken (and non "fake-random") system looks like. I'm honestly not sure how they think the game should be behaving. "It shouldn't give me an auger before giving me a beaker" is not a description of how the loot system should behave, it's only a specific complaint about a specific playthrough (or maybe several) which frustrated a particular player.
Let's fix the broken system! But how, without "fake-random"?
Well, yeah, I think a lot of the time people post the topics with an inflammatory topic, partly to cause discussion and partly because they are posting out of frustration.
I tend to overlook the title and honestly I have been more devils advocate taking OPs side, I can see where it would be frustrating and there are still things that irk me but to be honest I have had an amazing run so far for A20 stable. OTOH, I have prioritized barter & DA so I damn well better get good loot. It shouldn't be mandatory to max those 2 skills to enjoy your play through though.
For sure there needs to be more balancing and tweaking though. I am also adamant that if you have to plan so much and spend so many skill points to get certain skills you need to be able to practice those skills. It isn't just the skills, it's the stats which are expensive, especially if you are taking it for 1 or 2 skills alone. Whether that is through giving more choices or having some of the loot adjusted by skills (obviously that would take quite a bit of additional code) or some other means is open for debate.
I remember the stone axes protest yes. I was there with my (stone)pitchfork and torch!
I think they should have removed them but their response was to add in @%$# weapons to complement them and thumb their nose at the playerbase.
Englishman7DTD player, I fart in your general direction!
I think it's good that we can make these primitive tools as a fallback and before we've learned things but finding them as loot is silly (see how I avoided saying unrealistic there
No, I don't think more weapons as loot is the answer, I think more parts. Early game there should be more parts, although I suppose having the option of using the low quality weapon for a bit and then scrapping it into parts works out the same.
Finding parts would be a solution. naturally even a Tier1 pistol would then need >10 parts for it to be a limitation or gate against an early weapon flood. There might be protests that you find useless ammo for a time, but I would like that the early game would depend on bows again.