My thoughts, experience, suggestions, and concerns for A17 so far. I have collected all the points I find valid to mention in just one post, to hopefully make some changes to the game, without having to spend weeks upon weeks writing XML and stealing from other writers.
I break this into some categories, because I like to have a system. Also, easier to read.
RWG mixer
I start with what I found the most negative. This is 100% the RWG mixer. The world has become small (almost claustrophobic), going from 625 km2 to 16km2, absolutely did not work for me.
Bluefangsolutions, where I have my servers, had issues with larger maps. After their testing, I ended up doubling my server payment, from 12$ to 25$, simply to go from 16km2 (4k) to 64km2 (8k).
Disregarding the money, which would be even more pathetic if I went to 16k map, the map STILL feels too small. My friend and I basically scouted the entire 8k in 1 day. Only to find out, there was almost nothing in the map. There were 1 big town. Not city, no, just a town. We had zero skyscrapers in our map, and the majority of the town buildings are halfway, or fully destroyed. So that’s overall very boring.
So I can just pay the money, and go to 256km2 (16k). It will take forever to load into a game, but at least there will be more to explore. Except, the RWG mixer has become exceedingly boring. To me it seems like 3 different biomes are mixing all over the place. It’s forest, burnt, and wasteland. All over the place. The only distinctions I have found, is deserts and snow biomes. They seem to stand alone. That’s nice. If burnt forest and wasteland would also be at least a tad more stand alone, the world would feel less sad to explore.
Still talking about the RWG setup, there must be something wrong.
First off, in our first map (b197?) we found no cities. Only boring towns. In our second map (b199) we found 1 city, with 2 skyscrapers, I think. In our third map (b208) we found no cities again. Just 3 sad and boring towns. One of them was rather big, but consisted mostly of rubble. Not entertaining.
But that’s not the worst. When we went out to find cities, we encountered horrible consistency in the POI density/spawn. On the west side of the center, we had a good amount of POI’s. It felt lovely to explore it. On the east side, I actually explored 1,2km x 1km of PURE nothing. Yes, the only building I found, was those silly little quarter of an outhouse building, with a sink and a toilet. There was like 5 of them, I think. Most of this zone was snow. Maybe that is the trigger. However, I have not felt such boredom and loneliness in 7d2d, since A15. With only silly 64km2 worth 25$ of rent, this world is simply too sad and boring. The RWG mixer is way off.
To top it off, is it just me or does every map seed looks the same? Every single seed I make, looks basically the same, just localizations are different. To my friends and I, the massive worlds with extremely varying generations in both biomes, mountains, and POI’s, was the most interesting thing about 7d2d. Without those massive worlds for us to explore and get lost in, we don’t feel good at all. I actually feel claustrophobic when I play A17. I know it sounds dramatic, but I have Bluefang open right now, just daring myself to upgrade to a 40 player slots server to be able to get a 16k map. But my wife will kill me when she sees the bill!!!
Don’t get me wrong. Both my friends and I LOVE the heck out of this game, and I think that’s why this new “world” is completely suppressing the fun and demoralizing us. This is not why we play 7d2d. We need the massive world to explore. It’s concerning to us, especially as it seems like this won’t change. It looks like one of those decisions that can’t be undone. I imagine it’s good somewhere else, but I doubt the world size cut is worth what we got in the other end.
Progression
In A16 my friend and I had Bloodmoon count on 64, difficulty 6, with drop nothing on death. That was what we had to do, to get challenged enough. And even then, it was the wrong kind of challenge.
In A17, we actually enjoy the progression a lot more, sort of. We went down to nomad difficulty right away, and found the overall balance to be lovely, as the new perk system encourage us to go melee and whatnot. Amazing experience for us, since we always felt like we HAD to be ranged to do anything in the game. Now we can finally make a build in whatever way we want. And the fact that we can go several ways with melee alone, is just WONDERFUL!
What doesn’t work, is the game stage progression. It’s way off! Getting radiated ferals on second Bloodmoon (once we had it on first Bloodmoon
). That cannot possible be intended.
We went into the xml, and we basically changed the nomad progression multiplier to 1.0. This sort works for now. We want the difficulty of nomad or warrior right now, but we absolutely do NOT want radiated zombies at first Bloodmoon. We actually had to force ourselves to not level. Which to me feels wrong in so many ways. So instead of raiding a POI, we had to spend several days on just mining and such. Just to keep the gamestage from rising.
Also, this might just be a bug, but the Bloodmoon horde seem weird to us now. In b208, we got something like 2 waves, at first and second Bloodmoon. That was it. No more zombies spawned after we killed that. We expected zombies to spawn through out the entire night. Not sure if this limited spawn rate is intended, but it’s not something we enjoy. Just our opinion on this
In case it makes a difference, our setup: 60 mins day/night cycle (18/6), 32 Bloodmoon count. So, our bloodmoon last for 15 real life mins. Those 2 big waves did not take more than 3 mins. The other 12 mins we just sat there, checking the log if more would spawn.
Vehicles
The new vehicles are fun for about 10 mins. After that it’s mostly cursing about all the things we hit and get stuck in.
I’m not angry about getting more toys to play with, it’s far from a problem. It’s just everything around it that aren’t matching.
A couple of things:
1) The map is a tiny little thing now. We don’t even need them new toys. Even an 8k map can be explored on foot in a matter of days. I think if we are 2 people, we can have the entire 8k map explored in 2 hours of game time. A motorcycle or a 4x4 is redundant. But I guess it’s handy to save a minute or two when going to the trader.
2) There are no counters to them. Just for purpose of testing, we jumped on our bicycles on third Bloodmoon in b199. We drove around with hordes around us, without using SHIFT key. Survived the Bloodmoon with ease, and went back to our base.
This is exactly the problem we expected when it came to our attention long ago, that new vehicles would come. There is already nothing zeds can do about the minibike, then we add even more, bigger and better vehicles to the game? I even tried looking into making zeds run SUPER fast at night time, to make them chase down the vehicles. But it seems like it doesn’t work cause of attack animations an such. And then we completely ruin night time for the risky players on foot. Either way, it’s messed up balance.
A suggestion for for A18. Make specific zeds that DIRECTLY counters vehicles. Zeds that can leap far, run super-fast (when chasing a vehicle only), hit very hard against vehicle, and maybe just MAYBE, be able to grab onto the vehicle to rip it apart. It would only require that one zombie.
As of now, we are even discussing removing the new vehicles from our server, so it’s not possible to escape the hordes. Because if it’s available, it’s too easy to be tempted to “cheat” as we call it. Cause that’s basically what it is. It’s Godlike mode you craft on the workbench.
I sound negative, but I’m not. I’m only confused with the decision to add the vehicle when no counters are added along with them. We love the game, just not this decision.
Performance
I’m confused with this subject. I was expecting a more optimized game with A17. Most of the decisions made, seems logic to a performance increase. But it’s actually running WAY worse. If it’s not horrible FPS, it’s spikes and whatnot. At some point I stood at a Forge, and timed the 1 second freeze spikes. They occurred every 19 seconds, to the tenth of a second. Just weird.
Anyway, I assume performance will go up with the builds and the patches coming up. If not, then I’m a little worried. As of now, I accept it because I know it’s experimental. If it was a released A17, I would stop play right now.
The only place I see optimization in performance, is during Bloodmoons. The horde in A16 caused MASSIVE lag. Now I don’t really see that. The overall performance is horrible, but just stays horrible on Bloodmoons. So that’s a pretty good start I would say
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I break this into some categories, because I like to have a system. Also, easier to read.
RWG mixer
I start with what I found the most negative. This is 100% the RWG mixer. The world has become small (almost claustrophobic), going from 625 km2 to 16km2, absolutely did not work for me.
Bluefangsolutions, where I have my servers, had issues with larger maps. After their testing, I ended up doubling my server payment, from 12$ to 25$, simply to go from 16km2 (4k) to 64km2 (8k).
Disregarding the money, which would be even more pathetic if I went to 16k map, the map STILL feels too small. My friend and I basically scouted the entire 8k in 1 day. Only to find out, there was almost nothing in the map. There were 1 big town. Not city, no, just a town. We had zero skyscrapers in our map, and the majority of the town buildings are halfway, or fully destroyed. So that’s overall very boring.
So I can just pay the money, and go to 256km2 (16k). It will take forever to load into a game, but at least there will be more to explore. Except, the RWG mixer has become exceedingly boring. To me it seems like 3 different biomes are mixing all over the place. It’s forest, burnt, and wasteland. All over the place. The only distinctions I have found, is deserts and snow biomes. They seem to stand alone. That’s nice. If burnt forest and wasteland would also be at least a tad more stand alone, the world would feel less sad to explore.
Still talking about the RWG setup, there must be something wrong.
First off, in our first map (b197?) we found no cities. Only boring towns. In our second map (b199) we found 1 city, with 2 skyscrapers, I think. In our third map (b208) we found no cities again. Just 3 sad and boring towns. One of them was rather big, but consisted mostly of rubble. Not entertaining.
But that’s not the worst. When we went out to find cities, we encountered horrible consistency in the POI density/spawn. On the west side of the center, we had a good amount of POI’s. It felt lovely to explore it. On the east side, I actually explored 1,2km x 1km of PURE nothing. Yes, the only building I found, was those silly little quarter of an outhouse building, with a sink and a toilet. There was like 5 of them, I think. Most of this zone was snow. Maybe that is the trigger. However, I have not felt such boredom and loneliness in 7d2d, since A15. With only silly 64km2 worth 25$ of rent, this world is simply too sad and boring. The RWG mixer is way off.
To top it off, is it just me or does every map seed looks the same? Every single seed I make, looks basically the same, just localizations are different. To my friends and I, the massive worlds with extremely varying generations in both biomes, mountains, and POI’s, was the most interesting thing about 7d2d. Without those massive worlds for us to explore and get lost in, we don’t feel good at all. I actually feel claustrophobic when I play A17. I know it sounds dramatic, but I have Bluefang open right now, just daring myself to upgrade to a 40 player slots server to be able to get a 16k map. But my wife will kill me when she sees the bill!!!
Don’t get me wrong. Both my friends and I LOVE the heck out of this game, and I think that’s why this new “world” is completely suppressing the fun and demoralizing us. This is not why we play 7d2d. We need the massive world to explore. It’s concerning to us, especially as it seems like this won’t change. It looks like one of those decisions that can’t be undone. I imagine it’s good somewhere else, but I doubt the world size cut is worth what we got in the other end.
Progression
In A16 my friend and I had Bloodmoon count on 64, difficulty 6, with drop nothing on death. That was what we had to do, to get challenged enough. And even then, it was the wrong kind of challenge.
In A17, we actually enjoy the progression a lot more, sort of. We went down to nomad difficulty right away, and found the overall balance to be lovely, as the new perk system encourage us to go melee and whatnot. Amazing experience for us, since we always felt like we HAD to be ranged to do anything in the game. Now we can finally make a build in whatever way we want. And the fact that we can go several ways with melee alone, is just WONDERFUL!
What doesn’t work, is the game stage progression. It’s way off! Getting radiated ferals on second Bloodmoon (once we had it on first Bloodmoon
). That cannot possible be intended.We went into the xml, and we basically changed the nomad progression multiplier to 1.0. This sort works for now. We want the difficulty of nomad or warrior right now, but we absolutely do NOT want radiated zombies at first Bloodmoon. We actually had to force ourselves to not level. Which to me feels wrong in so many ways. So instead of raiding a POI, we had to spend several days on just mining and such. Just to keep the gamestage from rising.
Also, this might just be a bug, but the Bloodmoon horde seem weird to us now. In b208, we got something like 2 waves, at first and second Bloodmoon. That was it. No more zombies spawned after we killed that. We expected zombies to spawn through out the entire night. Not sure if this limited spawn rate is intended, but it’s not something we enjoy. Just our opinion on this
In case it makes a difference, our setup: 60 mins day/night cycle (18/6), 32 Bloodmoon count. So, our bloodmoon last for 15 real life mins. Those 2 big waves did not take more than 3 mins. The other 12 mins we just sat there, checking the log if more would spawn.
Vehicles
The new vehicles are fun for about 10 mins. After that it’s mostly cursing about all the things we hit and get stuck in.
I’m not angry about getting more toys to play with, it’s far from a problem. It’s just everything around it that aren’t matching.
A couple of things:
1) The map is a tiny little thing now. We don’t even need them new toys. Even an 8k map can be explored on foot in a matter of days. I think if we are 2 people, we can have the entire 8k map explored in 2 hours of game time. A motorcycle or a 4x4 is redundant. But I guess it’s handy to save a minute or two when going to the trader.
2) There are no counters to them. Just for purpose of testing, we jumped on our bicycles on third Bloodmoon in b199. We drove around with hordes around us, without using SHIFT key. Survived the Bloodmoon with ease, and went back to our base.
This is exactly the problem we expected when it came to our attention long ago, that new vehicles would come. There is already nothing zeds can do about the minibike, then we add even more, bigger and better vehicles to the game? I even tried looking into making zeds run SUPER fast at night time, to make them chase down the vehicles. But it seems like it doesn’t work cause of attack animations an such. And then we completely ruin night time for the risky players on foot. Either way, it’s messed up balance.
A suggestion for for A18. Make specific zeds that DIRECTLY counters vehicles. Zeds that can leap far, run super-fast (when chasing a vehicle only), hit very hard against vehicle, and maybe just MAYBE, be able to grab onto the vehicle to rip it apart. It would only require that one zombie.
As of now, we are even discussing removing the new vehicles from our server, so it’s not possible to escape the hordes. Because if it’s available, it’s too easy to be tempted to “cheat” as we call it. Cause that’s basically what it is. It’s Godlike mode you craft on the workbench.
I sound negative, but I’m not. I’m only confused with the decision to add the vehicle when no counters are added along with them. We love the game, just not this decision.
Performance
I’m confused with this subject. I was expecting a more optimized game with A17. Most of the decisions made, seems logic to a performance increase. But it’s actually running WAY worse. If it’s not horrible FPS, it’s spikes and whatnot. At some point I stood at a Forge, and timed the 1 second freeze spikes. They occurred every 19 seconds, to the tenth of a second. Just weird.
Anyway, I assume performance will go up with the builds and the patches coming up. If not, then I’m a little worried. As of now, I accept it because I know it’s experimental. If it was a released A17, I would stop play right now.
The only place I see optimization in performance, is during Bloodmoons. The horde in A16 caused MASSIVE lag. Now I don’t really see that. The overall performance is horrible, but just stays horrible on Bloodmoons. So that’s a pretty good start I would say
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Base construction suddenly requires new meta! Pen a paper and communication with the team is a big part of our 7d2d experience now. We are brainstorming and cracking ideas all the time now. Digging along with pathing, thumbs up. ��
