PC Open Letter to TFP's...

[AtomicUs5000]

Most of them will only notice it after they have either seen the video of Vedui or try to escape from a horde with a vehicle. As long as they fight the Horde in their base they won't notice anything.

Don't forget that this is still the experimental version. Most players probably still play Alpha 18. Especially the players who play on public servers.

I am particularly curious about the feedback of the multiplayer players once A19 stable is released. They have no way to disable the horde.

I believe the game was named after the disease that created the zombies. If you got infected, you were dead after 7 days.

The Horde didn't even exist in the first alpha versions.

Everyone thinks that he is part of the majority.

I think more are playing experimental right now for a few reasons. The first is that they actually have it announced in the Steam news this time. The second reason is because when A19e came out, the jump in players was too extreme while also reaching a new high. The third reason is because of the dev streaming and the streamer weekend beforehand. People want to play what I've been seeing.
 
You are correct about why the game was named what it was named, but BM replaces that and is the reason now, or I should say, since its introduction. Still the pinnacle moment of gameplay, though.
 
If everyone thinks they are part of the majority of some binary concept, then most of those people must be correct because they are indeed the majority. Setting aside that logic, I already know I am the minority on these forums... always have been regarding this issue. The reason why I think what I think though is because of the past trends in response to similar things. Some people really, really hated digging zombies. The complaints about that have dwindled as the player count has gone up. New players just accept it as the way the game goes. New players will accept this as the way as well. People hated the old skills system going away. In my opinion, the replacement isn't the best, but it's generally been accepted... and the player count still goes up. New players have no idea about the old skills.

 

[Demandred1957]

Please Do Not Approach The Pram​

Binkies, Rattles, and a Stuffed Rabbit May Emerge Without Warning​

Or the business end of a blunderbuss.

 

[RipClaw]

I think more are playing experimental right now for a few reasons. The first is that they actually have it announced in the Steam news this time. The second reason is because when A19e came out, the jump in players was too extreme while also reaching a new high. The third reason is because of the dev streaming and the streamer weekend beforehand. People want to play what I've been seeing.

I'm not so sure. If you take a closer look at the numbers you will find out that the increase already began on the streamer weekend while most players did not have access to the experimental version yet. In addition to that, the Steam Summer Sale also started on that weekend.

We would only know exactly when Steam would publish which versions are played.

Some people really, really hated digging zombies. The complaints about that have dwindled as the player count has gone up. New players just accept it as the way the game goes.

Just because you have learned to live with them does not mean that you suddenly love them. I also hate the digging zombies, but part of the reason is gone now, because of the changes in the mining system I am mining in open pit. So the zombies can no longer bring my mines down when they dig. But they are still annoying, and I hate that I have to interrupt my work every time such a zombie comes to visit.

People hated the old skills system going away. In my opinion, the replacement isn't the best, but it's generally been accepted... and the player count still goes up. New players have no idea about the old skills.

New players accept everything because they know nothing else but that doesn't mean that the old system was bad.

Even if the Fun Pimps would throw away most parts of the game and turn the game into a zombie loot-shooter, there would still be new players who like it. And if you look at the number of players who prefer such games, this would bring an enormous increase in new players. Nevertheless, you probably wouldn't like such a change and lot of the old players as well.

 

[Raestloz]

Personally speaking, I don't get why people are so.... how do I put this... gatekeeping? of people surviving the 7th day?
It's like players don't have the right to survive the 7th day, and only the Best of The Best, The Chosen One, The One and Only, Champion of The Gods, The Bane of Evil, Banisher of Undead, Builder of Dragon, Avatar of Death may survive the 7th day, even on easy.

Dude, what's up with that?

All the time spent on making absolutely sure people get killed on 7th day is really distracting the gameplay. All this.... futile attempt of making 1000IQ hunter zombies that can pinpoint your location and mark the stairs with GPS simply results in people building even cheesier designs. All that time, spent on making a smart AI that can find the stairs, only for them to be shot as they walk single file wailing on a bunch of iron bars? Which part of that is smart?

Do people really revel in making the zombies act as dumb as possible and then proclaim they've succeeded? That they've earned the right to be called Survivor?

It's like proclaiming glory after you've shot through an APC with an anti-materiel rifle. Like, duh, that's the entire point of that rifle. That's not an achievement, that's just the rifle doing its job

sowhen the... inferior people can't handle it, they @%$*#!ed up somewhere, they have to bail, the answer is a Big Old "NOPE!" you have to die, by any means necessary. Git gud scrub. Grow a bigger brain. Cry to your mum and try again, maybe next time you can join the Big Boys Club

Really?

Setting aside the insensitive Ubermensch joke that basically writes itself, all that time spent on making sure Day 7 is Bombastic Crescendo leaves the other 6 days bare. I can walk into Diersville at night and, well, the roads are empty. Sure we have zombies in the buildings, yet the outside is as bare as it gets. You can fire 3 entire ammo box's worth of 7.62 with an M60 machine gun and there's relatively nothing. The outside is too safe

Meanwhile, a couple days after the next round of AI adjustments where people really, definitely, can't just cheese the @%$*#! out of this round of AI, swear to God, a YouTuber somewhere posts a video with clickbait thumbnail revealing exactly how he just cheesed the @%$*#! out of that AI

Presumably involving yet another elaborate staircase design where zombies feel they'd be too uncultured for not using staircases, and accept their fate as casing after casing gets ejected out of an M60 machine gun fired by some dude standing behind some iron bars, backed by a bunch of automatic turrets, who laments how easy the game is afterwards, dreaming up yet another set of "challenges" for next time

Honestly!

If somebody builds a cumbersome mansion up on the peak of the freezing mountains, or dig 100 feet underground for a nuclear bunker with 10 layers of blast door to escape the blood moon, by golly let them! They've earned the right!

"But oooooh why not just turn it off you spineless coward?" Why? People like to play differently. Maybe they want to have a safe haven, but feel like they should be punished if they forget to return? I don't know, why do you care?

The map is huge, there's a lot of exploration potential. What's with the fascination of dying on the 7th day? What's the point? "That's the name of the game dumbass" then why not just script you to die on the 7th day? What's with all this elaborate designs of zombies and traps and whatnot?

"To give us a challenge"

>:-\

You mean to let you build yet another cheesy base design?

 

[RipClaw]

Personally speaking, I don't get why people are so.... how do I put this... gatekeeping? of people surviving the 7th day?
It's like players don't have the right to survive the 7th day, and only the Best of The Best, The Chosen One, The One and Only, Champion of The Gods, The Bane of Evil, Banisher of Undead, Builder of Dragon, Avatar of Death may survive the 7th day, even on easy.

There are apparently players who wants to have the feeling that they are in great danger and have to fight a desperate battle. I can't quite understand that but I think it has something to do with the whole immersion thing.
 

 

[Feycat]

No kidding.. But the base game shouldn't be so hard as to need to turn the default settings down. You masochist expert players are all like "git gud noob" that is so b.s. The should keep the settings to make it insane like that on the far end of the difficulty slider. There is a concept called good sportsmanship. TFP need to look that up in the dictionary. On default settings, I should have a good chance of surviving for a long time, as long as I play smart and am careful.

I mean, honestly?

I play on default settings because higher settings just give you bullet sponges, which isn't harder it's just annoying. 

You can turn off horde night. 

And it's very easy to build a base that isn't destroyed every 7 days. I wouldn't call myself an expert player, despite playing from A9, because they change things up so much between alphas that you usually have to change tactics. 

The simplest base is a solid base, about 6 x 6 (or bigger if you like.) Make it out of brick (flagstones are stupid easy to find from POIs, or upgrade from wood to brick for lots more xp.) Upgrade the outside when you have the chance. Built a shelter on top so you don't get non-stop spit on. Put a ring of bars around the outside to stop spiders. Put a 1-deep moat around it for about 3 rows of spikes. It's very easy to build this and upgrade it as you go. You will NEVER collapse this base, playing on default settings. Ever.  You will have to replace spikes and the occasional block until you get steel. You can smelt on it and screamers will die on the spikes. You can eventually place turrets on columns around the base and add blade traps and hanging dart traps. This is a very very basic base, it's worked since day one I started playing, and in every alpha. Even demolishers will not collapse it once you've upgraded to steel and as long as you don't have more than 2 of them explode in the same area.

You can buy turrets, dart traps, pressure plates, blade traps and motion sensers from the traders. You never need to put points into trapmaking if you don't want. You don't even need to put points in int at all. You can buy forges,  chem tables, work benches and even vehicles from traders. Put your points in salvage operations and better barter, take everything in every POI apart and sell the mech/electric/plastic parts to the traders, and do quests. You'll have plenty of dukes to buy ammo and science stuff. 

My husband and I took over one of the half-destroyed brick structures this game. We filled in the bottom floor, put pressure plates on the landings and dart traps where there used to be windows. We put turrets above the dart traps attached to motion sensors. Most of the horde is dead before they get up the five floors to us. We're on day 25 and have spent what feels like the majority of our time just getting food. We didn't even get a chance to mine until the third week. We only just now qualified for T3 quests because we just haven't had time. The POI held up fine with no defenses except us at the top with the top stairs knocked out, just shooting arrows and spikes in the bottom hallways for 7 and 14. Simple wooden spikes take care of screamers. We've upgraded that whole hallway with nothing more than stuff dug out of POIs, and reinforced the walls that lead into rooms we're using with 4-deep walls. Zombies will go to the path of least resistance. They don't break our stairway or our rooms because they want to get to us at the top. 

On my three-player game, we've built a raised kill corridor. It's basically just stairs and a built that leads to us with a drop in the middle they can't quite jump across (except spider zombies, those @%$*#!s) and we sit on a raised platform and shoot. We've built a hallway around the bridge and there'll be dart traps, electric fences and turrets up there in coming days. 

Playing smart means figuring out how the AI works and then using the resources you have. 

I hope you read through this whole post, because I'm not attacking you. You have a lot more options than you seem to think for playing with horde nights on and winning. If you'd rather escape or hide from the horde, why in the world not just turn them off? You're not getting any use out of them, and there's no one to judge you. If you hate them, turn 'em off. For me personally, they're the highlight of a game that is otherwise pretty grindy and samey.

 

[Raestloz]

There are apparently players who wants to have the feeling that they are in great danger and have to fight a desperate battle. I can't quite understand that but I think it has something to do with the whole immersion thing.
 

Then maybe those players need to ask for a different approach to blood moon because honestly building a single tile hallway with a grand staircase to shoot at single file zombies is really not that desperate. YouTubers post simple, cheap designs that let you shoot at zombies in safety all the time.

Ironically, in an attempt to make players "not cheese" the system, they make the "smart" zombies susceptible to all sorts of base designs.

 

[Feycat]

ummm watch the video yourself.. 20:59 is the exact moment I fell, and you tell me how you would survive??

You had plenty of time. You fell, you booked it out, hit a spike and turned around. There were no zombies anywhere near you. You had plenty of time to pillar up and jump back on top of your base. I've fallen, run to get round, circled around and then climbed the base so often. 

 

[RipClaw]

Then maybe those players need to ask for a different approach to blood moon because honestly building a single tile hallway with a grand staircase to shoot at single file zombies is really not that desperate. YouTubers post simple, cheap designs that let you shoot at zombies in safety all the time.

From what I've read, some of these players who want more danger seem to build bases where there is a high probability that the zombies can break through during the night.

Ironically, in an attempt to make players "not cheese" the system, they make the "smart" zombies susceptible to all sorts of base designs.

Everybody chooses his own poison and the Fun Pimps have chosen the intelligent zombies. It's fine by me.

 

[Raestloz]

From what I've read, some of these players who want more danger seem to build bases where there is a high probability that the zombies can break through during the night.

You seem to be reading from a different source, because all I've found in this thread? They're all basically "ok here's what you do: build. better. bases. I build these cheesy designs and I'm perfectly fine! Git gud!".

and honestly, I'd love it if people support the idea of emergent difficulty like you imply, but they simply don't. The same people who support restricting player choice in difficulty are simply not the same people who deliberately weaken their bases

 

[Feycat]

But if they do then I want to give the strategy a go while it works. That’s the fun of early access. We are going to be able to have fond memories of play styles and strategies that future players will never ever see or try. 

I miss the old pillar-50 fight cages we used in A16. They were so fun! Then they added more block damage and zombies homing in on a weak spot and oof, those days were over! But they were fun while they lasted!

And like how you said, they are nerfing things in a pattern.. Yep, painting you into a corner, forcing you to play things THEIR way, rather than just giving you a problem, and letting you have fun solving it your way..

That's... just not true. A very, very basic strategy has always worked. And there's been lots of different base designs in every alpha as things change.

I get annoyed when they take away something I enjoyed building (rip pillar-50 fight cages!) but it's very easy to go back to a basic, non-cheese, never fail base and then figure out more from there. 

 

[Solomon]

I kinda agree, when it comes to the horde night i should be on my base or escaping the wilderness on a truck but the escape should never be impossible.

That vulture thing is straight up stupid and as you said it and we should really be able to build a defendable base without fearing that the next patch is going to introduce teleporting zombies because someone posted a video about how to build unpenetrable walls.

 

[Raestloz]

Personally, I play the way the developers probably intended.

• I don't build grand castles with elaborate traps, architected specifically with zombie pathway AI in mind. I just board up a POI
  
• I don't nerdpole myself to loots, I always walk in
  
• I make my stand at home
  

and personally, I have a good time fighting zombies, they're everywhere. But I do those in the expectation that if I can't stand it anymore, maybe I ran out of ammo, maybe I ran out of health, maybe the current build I have doesn't work as well as I thought they'd be, I can take my car and run away.

If someone just wants to run away? That's fine, they're losing out on EXP.

I don't want to be forced to accept death, just because somebody out there somewhere may be running away from blood moon entirely

 

[Viktoriusiii]

[...]

You basicially just said: "STOP REMOVING EXPLOITS!"
"OMG FIX THESE EXPLOITS THAT AVOID THE HORDENIGHT!"

like... you can't be both sides in this arugment dude
Either you want there to be ways to completely avoid the horde, or you don't want there to be ways to avoid the horde.

I give you that the current implementation (as is the TFPs stadart) is not ideal and there is loads of things that need to be fixed. BUT trying to force the player to face the horde SHOULD be their objective. If you can easily avoid it, then there is no challenge.

For the 500th time. If you want to avoid the horde, disable it. If you want it, you shouldn't have easy ways to deal with them (like digging down and using a poi)

 

[Demandred1957]

Personally speaking, I don't get why people are so.... how do I put this... gatekeeping? of people surviving the 7th day?
It's like players don't have the right to survive the 7th day, and only the Best of The Best, The Chosen One, The One and Only, Champion of The Gods, The Bane of Evil, Banisher of Undead, Builder of Dragon, Avatar of Death may survive the 7th day, even on easy.

Dude, what's up with that?

All the time spent on making absolutely sure people get killed on 7th day is really distracting the gameplay. All this.... futile attempt of making 1000IQ hunter zombies that can pinpoint your location and mark the stairs with GPS simply results in people building even cheesier designs. All that time, spent on making a smart AI that can find the stairs, only for them to be shot as they walk single file wailing on a bunch of iron bars? Which part of that is smart?

Do people really revel in making the zombies act as dumb as possible and then proclaim they've succeeded? That they've earned the right to be called Survivor?

It's like proclaiming glory after you've shot through an APC with an anti-materiel rifle. Like, duh, that's the entire point of that rifle. That's not an achievement, that's just the rifle doing its job

sowhen the... inferior people can't handle it, they @%$*#!ed up somewhere, they have to bail, the answer is a Big Old "NOPE!" you have to die, by any means necessary. Git gud scrub. Grow a bigger brain. Cry to your mum and try again, maybe next time you can join the Big Boys Club

Really?

Setting aside the insensitive Ubermensch joke that basically writes itself, all that time spent on making sure Day 7 is Bombastic Crescendo leaves the other 6 days bare. I can walk into Diersville at night and, well, the roads are empty. Sure we have zombies in the buildings, yet the outside is as bare as it gets. You can fire 3 entire ammo box's worth of 7.62 with an M60 machine gun and there's relatively nothing. The outside is too safe

Meanwhile, a couple days after the next round of AI adjustments where people really, definitely, can't just cheese the @%$*#! out of this round of AI, swear to God, a YouTuber somewhere posts a video with clickbait thumbnail revealing exactly how he just cheesed the @%$*#! out of that AI

Presumably involving yet another elaborate staircase design where zombies feel they'd be too uncultured for not using staircases, and accept their fate as casing after casing gets ejected out of an M60 machine gun fired by some dude standing behind some iron bars, backed by a bunch of automatic turrets, who laments how easy the game is afterwards, dreaming up yet another set of "challenges" for next time

Honestly!

If somebody builds a cumbersome mansion up on the peak of the freezing mountains, or dig 100 feet underground for a nuclear bunker with 10 layers of blast door to escape the blood moon, by golly let them! They've earned the right!

"But oooooh why not just turn it off you spineless coward?" Why? People like to play differently. Maybe they want to have a safe haven, but feel like they should be punished if they forget to return? I don't know, why do you care?

The map is huge, there's a lot of exploration potential. What's with the fascination of dying on the 7th day? What's the point? "That's the name of the game dumbass" then why not just script you to die on the 7th day? What's with all this elaborate designs of zombies and traps and whatnot?

"To give us a challenge"

>:-\

You mean to let you build yet another cheesy base design?

Nailed it right there! I am glad there are people that are more eloquent than me to say what I am feeling.

I mean, honestly?

I play on default settings because higher settings just give you bullet sponges, which isn't harder it's just annoying. 

You can turn off horde night. 

And it's very easy to build a base that isn't destroyed every 7 days. I wouldn't call myself an expert player, despite playing from A9, because they change things up so much between alphas that you usually have to change tactics. 

The simplest base is a solid base, about 6 x 6 (or bigger if you like.) Make it out of brick (flagstones are stupid easy to find from POIs, or upgrade from wood to brick for lots more xp.) Upgrade the outside when you have the chance. Built a shelter on top so you don't get non-stop spit on. Put a ring of bars around the outside to stop spiders. Put a 1-deep moat around it for about 3 rows of spikes. It's very easy to build this and upgrade it as you go. You will NEVER collapse this base, playing on default settings. Ever.  You will have to replace spikes and the occasional block until you get steel. You can smelt on it and screamers will die on the spikes. You can eventually place turrets on columns around the base and add blade traps and hanging dart traps. This is a very very basic base, it's worked since day one I started playing, and in every alpha. Even demolishers will not collapse it once you've upgraded to steel and as long as you don't have more than 2 of them explode in the same area.

You can buy turrets, dart traps, pressure plates, blade traps and motion sensers from the traders. You never need to put points into trapmaking if you don't want. You don't even need to put points in int at all. You can buy forges,  chem tables, work benches and even vehicles from traders. Put your points in salvage operations and better barter, take everything in every POI apart and sell the mech/electric/plastic parts to the traders, and do quests. You'll have plenty of dukes to buy ammo and science stuff. 

My husband and I took over one of the half-destroyed brick structures this game. We filled in the bottom floor, put pressure plates on the landings and dart traps where there used to be windows. We put turrets above the dart traps attached to motion sensors. Most of the horde is dead before they get up the five floors to us. We're on day 25 and have spent what feels like the majority of our time just getting food. We didn't even get a chance to mine until the third week. We only just now qualified for T3 quests because we just haven't had time. The POI held up fine with no defenses except us at the top with the top stairs knocked out, just shooting arrows and spikes in the bottom hallways for 7 and 14. Simple wooden spikes take care of screamers. We've upgraded that whole hallway with nothing more than stuff dug out of POIs, and reinforced the walls that lead into rooms we're using with 4-deep walls. Zombies will go to the path of least resistance. They don't break our stairway or our rooms because they want to get to us at the top. 

On my three-player game, we've built a raised kill corridor. It's basically just stairs and a built that leads to us with a drop in the middle they can't quite jump across (except spider zombies, those @%$*#!s) and we sit on a raised platform and shoot. We've built a hallway around the bridge and there'll be dart traps, electric fences and turrets up there in coming days. 

Playing smart means figuring out how the AI works and then using the resources you have. 

I hope you read through this whole post, because I'm not attacking you. You have a lot more options than you seem to think for playing with horde nights on and winning. If you'd rather escape or hide from the horde, why in the world not just turn them off? You're not getting any use out of them, and there's no one to judge you. If you hate them, turn 'em off. For me personally, they're the highlight of a game that is otherwise pretty grindy and samey.

I did read through it. I know how to make bases. Made one that shrugged off the Day 126 horde @64 zom per wave on 2 hr days. Had a oopsie when it was almost over and had to run around for a couple of minutes on the 4x4 before I could git mah crap together and regroup in the base. Don't like how TFP have taken away the most basic and logical plan b with stupid broken buzzards just because they are butt hurt.

Just another comment boiled down to "git gud scrub"

How about Hey fun pimps, quit cheating??

You basicially just said: "STOP REMOVING EXPLOITS!"
"OMG FIX THESE EXPLOITS THAT AVOID THE HORDENIGHT!"

like... you can't be both sides in this arugment dude
Either you want there to be ways to completely avoid the horde, or you don't want there to be ways to avoid the horde.

I give you that the current implementation (as is the TFPs stadart) is not ideal and there is loads of things that need to be fixed. BUT trying to force the player to face the horde SHOULD be their objective. If you can easily avoid it, then there is no challenge.

For the 500th time. If you want to avoid the horde, disable it. If you want it, you shouldn't have easy ways to deal with them (like digging down and using a poi)

Never said to remove exploits.. Unlike TFP's I don't gaf how you solve the problems presented to you. Just don't be cheesier than the players with your own broken exploits to keep them from playing the way that they want to. that's not your job.

 

[Demandred1957]

Personally, I play the way the developers probably intended.

• I don't build grand castles with elaborate traps, architected specifically with zombie pathway AI in mind. I just board up a POI
  
• I don't nerdpole myself to loots, I always walk in
  
• I make my stand at home
  

and personally, I have a good time fighting zombies, they're everywhere. But I do those in the expectation that if I can't stand it anymore, maybe I ran out of ammo, maybe I ran out of health, maybe the current build I have doesn't work as well as I thought they'd be, I can take my car and run away.

If someone just wants to run away? That's fine, they're losing out on EXP.

I don't want to be forced to accept death, just because somebody out there somewhere may be running away from blood moon entirely

exactly. except ya, I will nerdpole in sometimes, cause I'm a little lazy. Be a hot minute, and they will try to keep you from doing that next..lol

 

[Alpacko]

nice try op, but this is a tower defense game at this point with some grains of shooting & looting rpg stuff inbetween.

 

[RipClaw]

nice try op, but this is a tower defense game at this point with some grains of shooting & looting rpg stuff inbetween.

Actually is "7 days to die" a blend of different genres and each one picks his preferred genre for his argumentation. I like to see the game as a sandbox survival game.

 

[Alpacko]

i think the point of op is that its clearly not a sand box(anymore).

freedom of playstyle (hidden bases, escpace the horde, lbd) vs ghost snakes

 

[Dracula]

It's fairly undeniable that gameplay strategies get restricted every update; I get the desire to make it challenging, but there has to be some balance.  When you get overwhelmed with later hordes that are squads of cops vomiting on everything, exploding zombies, and radioactive ferals it gets to be a bit much; but, by that point, I have enough junk turrets that they seldom make it and, if they do, I've got a shotgun.

By that point, I wind up building a death corridor that will funnel them to me; a 3x3 channel with two-high spikes on each side of the main corridor and I sit at the end shooting fish in a barrel over my emergency escape hatch.

All higher block damage does is mean that I'm repairing more on my "daily" base that I store all my resources at or that I'm fixing the walls on the abandoned factory that has my garden on the roof.

The new AI has it so that my thought process becomes:  "Oh, it's a horde night.  Time to go farm some XP.  Let me get my best shotgun, a ton of ammo, and head to my death funnel."  Now that I've added a roof of spikes it stops the vultures; though, they still annoy the piss out of me when gathering resources.

I think that the game needs to do more to make the difficulty levels different; change the default zombies, number of them, etc.  I would like to see an advanced option that would allow players to control what zombies spawn so that if you don't like vultures you uncheck the box; or tie them to a difficulty level.  Easiest doesn't have them, moderate introduces vultures, hard has radioactive, etc.