PC Risk vs. Reward? Upping the difficulty level

Apocalyptical Survivor

Apocalyptical Survivor

Refugee
I've found the game getting too easy so I've started to up the difficulty level to get more challenge. But I have some questions about how this works.

1) It doesn't appear that you get any better rewards from higher difficulties, is that the case? If so, I hope this changes. If you're going to take greater risk, you should get greater rewards.

2) Is stealth affected by this? I have my stealth perks maxed, I'm wearing military armor with mufflers and mobilizers, I'm always in sneak, I used a compound crossbow, yet now in the higher difficulties I seem to wake up more zombies than I ever did before. Coincidence, or is something affected by difficulty level?

3) Any other side effects of raising the difficulty level that I should be aware of?

Thanks for any insights or suggestions.

 
As I remember it...

Loot is based on game stage and modified by the world more recently.  There are biome modifiers currently so that the harder biomes (wasteland, snow, and desert) increase the effective game stage and therefore give you better loot.  There is/was talk of adding a modifier for POIs, too (but I'm not sure exactly how multiple modifiers will work, whether additive or multiplicative).

Keep in mind that "better" loot is subjective but it amounts to getting higher end gear (like steel versus iron weapons or armor, for instance) as well as higher end ammo (like AP ammo for guns).  Some things become far less likely to find in the late game and some things stop dropping at all.  Not everyone will be happy with the default settings.

As for stealth being affected game stage... sort of maybe?  As your game stage goes up you will get tougher versions of zombies spawning as least sometimes.  These tougher versions may have better stealth detection... but I'm not 100% certain that true.

 
The only thing that affects the difficulty setting is how much damage you do to the zombies and how much damage you get from the zombies. The difficulty setting used to affect the gamestage but that has not been the case for several alphas.

The default setting is Adventurer. You deal 150% damage to the zombies and they deal 75% damage to the player. On Nomad, both values are set to 100%. On Warrior, the zombies deal 150% damage and the player 83% damage.

The highest level is Insane. The zombies deal 250% damage and the player only 50% damage.

 
I believe the other thing that difficultly affects is the chance of a zombie going into rage mode when taking damage.

There are a lot of settings other that the one labelled difficulty that will make the game harder.  Turning up baseline zombie run speeds, turning on feral sense and turning on delete all gear on death will all give you a harder game.

Increased risk vs reward doesn't work with difficultly settings.  If you give more loot on harder difficulties, they don't really become harder.  The game correctly separates the two so difficulty settings don't affect loot.

 
Increasing the exp multiplier will advance loot stage faster as you will level up faster.  However, game stage will also accelerate which will make zombie spawns and bloodmoon increase faster.

You can also create a modlet to modify the bonus for the loot stage modifiers.  There are two files where you can edit xml values to adjust those - biomes and loot

biomes

<!--BIOMES.XML

A20 Biome Loot Modifier and Bonus
Biome Modifier A.K.A lootstage_modifier percentage added to the loot stage calculations
Pine Forest 0
Burnt Forest 0.5
Desert 0.5
Snow 1
Wasteland 1.5



Biome Bonus A.K.A. lootstage_bonus whole number added to the loot stage calculations
Pine Forest 0
Burnt Forest 10
Desert 10
Snow 20
Wasteland 30

-->



    <!-- Snow Main Biome -->
    <biome name="snow" topsoil_block="terrSnow" biomemapcolor="#FFFFFF" lootstage_modifier = "1" lootstage_bonus="20">




Modifier is a percentage so in this case, snow is doubled.  Bonus is a flat add so +20 to your loot stage bonus.

loot

<!-- *** POI_Loot_Stage_Modifier_And_Bonus_Settings -->
<loot_settings poi_tier_mod="0.05,0.1,0.15,0.2,0.25" poi_tier_bonus="3,6,9,12,15" />




mod is a percentage so 5% bonus in a Tier1 POI.  bonus is a flat add so +3 to your loot stage in a T1 POI.

Maharin said:
Loot is based on game stage and modified by the world more recently.  There are biome modifiers currently so that the harder biomes (wasteland, snow, and desert) increase the effective game stage and therefore give you better loot.  There is/was talk of adding a modifier for POIs, too (but I'm not sure exactly how multiple modifiers will work, whether additive or multiplicative).
Click to expand...


I believe the biome bonuses are added first (since that establishes your baseline) and then POI bonuses are calculated  I know this was discussed before, but hazy on the details.  Might try it out later on a game to see.

 
Ray Garraty said:
Set Loot Abundance to 200% => problem solved
Click to expand...
I've tried playing with loot abundance increased (was playing a no trader, so wanted to try and balance it a little), but as far as I could tell, loot abundance is exactly that. It was more loot. Not necessarily better loot.

 
Apocalyptical Survivor said:
I've found the game getting too easy so I've started to up the difficulty level to get more challenge. But I have some questions about how this works.

1) It doesn't appear that you get any better rewards from higher difficulties, is that the case? If so, I hope this changes. If you're going to take greater risk, you should get greater rewards.
Click to expand...
Why would you want better rewards if the reason is that the game was too easy? Seems counter productive to me.

 
JCrook1028 said:
Why would you want better rewards if the reason is that the game was too easy? Seems counter productive to me.
Click to expand...
Counter productive? If you raise the risk of dying, it seems intuitive that you should be compensated in some way. In virtually every game the formula is: Greater risk = greater reward. The greater challenge may be sufficient compensation for some, but it's odd actually to not have greater rewards accompany greater risk. Not a showstopper for me, but I find it strange and I have seen videos where streamers continue to play on the default difficulty explicitly because they are not getting rewarded for playing on harder modes, so I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's made this observation.

@BFT2020 Excellent response, thank you very much for that detailed information! 

 
Apocalyptical Survivor said:
Counter productive? If you raise the risk of dying, it seems intuitive that you should be compensated in some way.
Click to expand...


That is a principle that should be true for different actions in the same game. You go into a tier5 instead of a tier1 POI, you risk more, you get more.

But when we talk about the difficulty setting you are not comparing two actions, you are comparing players and their qualities. And both those players have a desire to be challenged.

If you don't feel challenged at normal difficulty (for example because you can make headshots out of 50% of your shots) but another player is dying twice per week (because his shots just hope to hit the body somewhere), then you are taking a lesser risk than he is to die.

The problem is that if you get better loot as compensation your power level rises faster as well. Hence after a very short time you will not be challenged anymore again. You run around with Marksman Rifle while that other player still shoots with a mediocre AK and does much less damage per shot. In result you make less damage because of the difficulty setting but you make more damage because of marksman instead of ak

Apocalyptical Survivor said:
In virtually every game the formula is: Greater risk = greater reward. The greater challenge may be sufficient compensation for some, but it's odd actually to not have greater rewards accompany greater risk. Not a showstopper for me, but I find it strange and I have seen videos where streamers continue to play on the default difficulty explicitly because they are not getting rewarded for playing on harder modes, so I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's made this observation.

@BFT2020 Excellent response, thank you very much for that detailed information! 
Click to expand...




 
Last edited by a moderator:
Difficulty is always subjective and based on a players preferences.

For me, the difficulty level really is not that difficult.  Sure, the relative HP of the zombies increase since your damage output is significantly reduced - solution - lots of bullets

Increase blood moon horde size - same solution, more bullets

I prefer increasing the struggle - taking longer to get better gear, using what you have

@KhaineGB has a couple of mods that he has released that changes the difficulty by making adjustments to the game mechanics

  • Headshots only
  • Wandering Horde Frequency


Khaine is also working on another one that removes XP from zombie kills so they only way you advanced in levels is by surviving the day (Do not die) - This is something that Roland did for previous Alphas but we never could get him motivated to update it for A20.  Thankfully, Khaine got tired of his laziness and decided he was going to do it himself.  😁

I would also recommend his Romero mod.  It removes the Blooodmoon hordes, but greatly up the wandering hordes.  It is an overhaul mod, but very close to vanilla (so you can add other modlets if you want).

There are more out there of course.  Some really good overhaul mods if you want to change up vanilla 7D2D.

 
BFT2020 said:
@KhaineGB has a couple of mods that he has released that changes the difficulty by making adjustments to the game mechanics

  • Headshots only
  • Wandering Horde Frequency
Click to expand...
THIS.

My latest playthrough (warrior) has been focused on increased world spawns as well as increased wandering hordes (in number of zombies and frequency). I also have a mod that increases the damage dealt by enemies. Not only does the world feel more like a zombie apocalypse due to the amount of zombies, the challenge has been much greater and far more satisfying. I tried just simply changing the difficulty in the past, but to me, the number of enemies I have to deal with is far harder than how many hits they take to die.

 
I havent done head shots only because that is level of hard I can deal with using just a bow hehe.  Specially with the wiggle wiggle zombie behavior.  But I agree it would definitely up the ante.  Specially if you up the amount of @%$#s coming at ya.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Apocalyptical Survivor said:
Counter productive? If you raise the risk of dying, it seems intuitive that you should be compensated in some way.
Click to expand...
You started this by saying the game was too easy and that you wanted more of a challenge. By upping the difficulty you are getting rewarded with exactly what you asked for, more of a challenge. If you also got more conventional rewards like better loot etc then you again LOSE the challenge that was thew reason you stated. Can't have it both ways. Do you actually want more of a challenge or do you just want to pretend so?

 
I didn't say the game was too easy, I said that *I* was finding it too easy and I considered raising the difficulty level. What I learned however is that if you do that, you increase the difficulty without getting any additional reward, which means that all you get by doing that is more challenge. More challenge is not in and of itself my goal, my goal is more fun, and that usually derives from the standard formula: more risk = more reward, i.e., better loot. The disappointment of extra effort without any payoff other than extra challenge was the point of my message. A simple observation (apparently shared by others), no need to complicate it with additional interpretations.

 
Apocalyptical Survivor said:
I didn't say the game was too easy, I said that *I* was finding it too easy and I considered raising the difficulty level. What I learned however is that if you do that, you increase the difficulty without getting any additional reward, which means that all you get by doing that is more challenge. More challenge is not in and of itself my goal, my goal is more fun, and that usually derives from the standard formula: more risk = more reward, i.e., better loot. The disappointment of extra effort without any payoff other than extra challenge was the point of my message. A simple observation (apparently shared by others), no need to complicate it with additional interpretations.
Click to expand...


That is exactly the use case for biomes. Go into other biomes, there is more reward for more challenge.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Apocalyptical Survivor said:
more risk = more reward, i.e., better loot.
Click to expand...
You could argue that the Same thing - essentially survival - is worth More when the difficulty is higher. So, while you get exactly the same thing, you're also appreciating it more. Sorta kinda matches with basic economics, mass produced junk vs skilled artisan items, or price hikes when things get rough etc etc.

And if the challenge isn't fun, then why play with zeds on? :)

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top