PC Make blood moons worth it, please

Although most have already mention this, but I want to do my +1 for

1. This is a Survival game

2. There is no reward of surviving.

3. You play 7 days to get reward by surviving blood moon. Blood moon is expected to be toughest challenge of surviving.

 
I love the concept of survival being its own reward. Every time this thread comes up, the same arguments about it come up too. However, the reward of taking risks in this game outweighs any survival aspects of this game by ten fold or more. Put simply, this is in fact a reward-driven game and there is no question about it.

Every zombie kill, every tree fallen, every block smashed or upgraded, rewards you with experience which equates to skill points to improve your character.

Every POI we loot, we are looking for the reward of the best gear in the game. We might be doing it for food and basic supplies just to survive... for like 2 days. After that, all about reward. In fact, let’s see someone do a tier 5 POI daily for the sake of survival... not happening.

Every challenge we read we do it for the reward. You can’t tell me it’s just for the challenge. They aren’t a challenge.

Every treasure map we read is for the reward. That’s just a given.

Every trader quest we accept is for the reward. Sure, the first few help you survive, stock up on food, and medicine. Explain the next 4 tiers. There are even perks to purchase, using your rewarded experience, that increase the number of rewards to choose from and make better use of your hard earned (rewarded) dukes.

I’m sorry but the noble fight to try to make this game all about survival was lost a long time ago. This makes a non-rewarding BM stick out like a sore thumb.

 
Its pretty clear to me that you find way too much ammo in the game right now for your daily needs but at the same time the bloodmoon hordes are huge bullet sink. The problem is that you actually dont find enough bullets in 7 days do deal with the horde when it does comes but all the other days you are flooded. very simple solution: lower ammo drops everywhere and just make bloodmoon zombies drop more loot bags with ammo.
Having to go mine/scavenge for ammo just feels more like a job than a video game when you know the horde is coming. Also the game tries to make you think that you want to save your ammo for the horde night and to be careful about ammo usage while scavenging POIs, but the reality is that you clear POI faster with guns and you also loot alot of ammo in POIs. The 40 bullet you would have saved if you used a bow or melee instead will be meaningless when the bloodmoon require a thousand bullet and you could have gotten more bullets if you used your guns and looted two POI instead. If the bloodmoon horde spawned ammo, then at least youd have an incentive to be efficient with ammo on horde night, because right now you cant really be ammo efficient in POIs anyways (better to use 30 bullets to get 60 bullet twice instead of using your bow/melee and getting 60 bullet and only clearing one POI during that time).

the ammo and bloodmoon system looks really broken and illogical to me right now
I kinda agree with this. I try not to use firearms for clearing POIs right now (still fairly early/mid game), because.... it's more tense and fun in a way to melee. I'd probably get bored super fast of doing POIs if I just shot my M60 at everything that moves an inch. But indeed, from a pure efficiency point of view, i'm probably far behind someone playing a more run & gun playstyle. Like you said, the ~50 ammo I save per POI would be more than easily compensated by mining a bit longer with all the spare time I'd have. Alas I don't see any solution for this but a complete rebalancing, by reducing how many zombies spawn on horde nights and making bullet crafting way costlier to compensate.

In the end the best way to play this game is not to look after efficiency too much. I'm so used to competitive shooters that I look for every edge I can get and it's very often detrimental to the fun I get out of more casual games.

As far as making BM's more appealing, I guess upping the number of loot bags and/or increasing the quality of loot in bags could help a bit. I very much like the idea of AtomicUs5000, filling some kind of station with blood moon kills and getting a pretty good reward from the trader could be amazing.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
It’s sad that a lot of players don’t like challenges to overcome anymore. I play dead is dead and my reward for surviving blood moon is not having to start over.
It’s always about loot anymore, constant carrot on a stick, Positive reinforcement, u know.
It's actually the opposite.

People aren't complaining that they want a reward for everything.

People are complaining about the design behind the blood moon. TFP have pushed for the blood moon being SOLELY an "obstacle" - something to be overcome. The zombie loot change was specifically done because the devs didn't want "loot delivered to the player's doorstep." They wanted the reward for the blood moon gone.

And there was complaints, but eventually it settled into "OK, fine. If the blood moon is JUST an "obstacle to be overcome, then we'll bend our gamer thinking to the task of overcoming it." And they did. Gamers beat the algorithms behind the blood moon in minutes flat. They figured out bases that were immune to damage, bases that zombies never swing at, they drove around on vehicles, waited on roofs. They successfully overcame the obstacle wonderfully.

Except they LIKED the old tradeoff. Fight the horde -> get the loot. Skip the horde -> no loot and you've used up that gaming time. It made sense...it was a meaningful choice in the game. Now they're listening to the devs saying "play like this. Do it because we said so." And the player response is "well, why? you've made that aspect of the game unappealing, avoidable, and unrewarding. It's a cool game aspect, but you've removed the point in partaking in it"

And for some reason, the forum community constantly thinks that players who say this are just whining for a reward, and that the blood moon should be it's own reward.

I play "life." It's a good game, I have no plans on giving it up any time soon. I'm not too thrilled about the "work" aspect of the game. Luckily, the devs of "life" have implemented some fairly good incentives to the "work" aspect of this game and made it worthwhile for most people to participate in. I imagine that if the incentive for "work" was removed, most people would probably stop participating in that aspect of the game. Not you though! You think the challenge is enough! You should let your bosses know they don't need to/never will need to pay you for work ever again. The experience and sense of duty you get out of it should be enough for anyone.

In short, if you implement an aspect of a game whose cost is higher than it's reward, and make that aspect avoidable, then people will avoid it.

 
It’s sad that a lot of players don’t like challenges to overcome anymore. I play dead is dead and my reward for surviving blood moon is not having to start over.
I'm ambivalent about Blood Moons. If i'd deactivate them, there would be no challenge anymore. Nothing what you are working towards. On the other hand i'd find them anoying. If you want to build or take some loot expeditions, you're always interrupted by those damn BMs.

My co-players have very different thinkings about this. While one would prefer only blood moons, other hate them, and the third ones are like me something like "i don't like it, but somehow i need it anyway". That's why we can't simply make BMs happen less frequently.

Atm we agreed on the setting, that BM happens earliest after 7 days and then within 3 days for sure. We also turned of the red day number in the UI, so we don't know which day exactly a BM may occur, until we hear the thunder and see the red sunset.

For me personally that made it a lot more exciting.

I don't play any games with permadeath. Especially not games that take a long time to level up and build stuff. But i started with A15 and already mentioned there that "free" deaths are also anyoing. So the death penalty in A18 is a great change i waited for since i play 7dtd. I'd even prefer a harder penalty, maybe loosing one level and therfore also one random stat? But i don't want loose a whole game just because i made a single wrong step once. It's still just a game, not real-life. ;)

I'd appreciate anything that makes bloodmoon more interesting/varying. But i don't have any satisfying idee how to achieve that and i'm also happy with. Just make BMs give you loot is boring. Just make Zs stronger is also boring.

The BM-Lovers of my co-players will also dislike it, but make softer Bloodmoons happen, so that the gamestage only says what max difficulty a BM could be, but it may turn out even -30% or so. Would at least add some variance.

 
And there was complaints, but eventually it settled into "OK, fine. If the blood moon is JUST an "obstacle to be overcome, then we'll bend our gamer thinking to the task of overcoming it." And they did. Gamers beat the algorithms behind the blood moon in minutes flat.

Except they LIKED the old tradeoff. Fight the horde -> get the loot. Skip the horde -> no loot and you've used up that gaming time.
Exactly that.

We try to balance the game ourself, e.g. we don't build an AI-tricking base which makes a bloodmoon ignorable, even if we know how we could make it. There should be some challange anyway, something the player has to play, not just sit around and wait until your trick-base has taken out all Zombies.

Some of us like the bloodmoons and play them like a round of "killing floor 2", they'd even accept cheating in ammunition just for being able to play a bloodmoon every second day.

Others like looting POIs (which became better and better), building stuff, running trader quests, ... some of them would even perfer skipping the BMs.

I tend to be one of the second group, but turning of the BMs would make the whole game something pointless.

 
What made the horde worthwhile for me was not the loot. It was that I saw in the end that I had accomplished something.

The zombies are like ghosts now. After a short time their corpses disappear and you can't see how many they were. In A16 I had a huge base and the ground was almost completely covered with the corpses of the zombies. This is a completely different feeling than when you just see the damage to the base after the horde but not what caused the damage.

 
Back
Top