So far 2.0 is bad

[meganoth]

I wouldn't say that. I'm almost in the endgame, and I've only spent enough time in the Wasteland to complete the challenge. I don't care about the rest. I still live in the forest biome, and I don't need better loot since I craft most of my gear. Even if I cared about the loot bonus. The snow biome is just around the corner from where I live, and it has almost the same loot bonus. Once you have the Wasteland Badge, the loot stage limit is lifted.

Many thanks for that information.

@Kyoji : Not sure, but this should alleviate one of the big problems you have with the system. So wherever you are you will get all the loot you want.

 

[Kalen]

Why should people try to open doors to other areas if there isn't anything there? This is the least the system has to do, to get a proper carrot before my nose. And yes, better loot is exactly the carrot that most players of 7D2D will follow. Just like you, but you want an extra carrot with a yellow ribbon because you don't like blue ribbons

I've been thinking about this too while playing. There isn't a ton of incentive to move to another biome. I was thinking about modding my traders so that you have to go to the harder biomes to get higher tier of quests. Limit Rekt to tier 1 or 2 quests, Jen to 3.... etc. That way you'd have to progress biomes to progress questing.

 

[binf_shinana]

I don't agree with the opinion that speedruns are no longer possible.
I was able to create an SMG in 4 hours and 30 minutes on Insane difficulty. By fully understanding the specifications of the magazine, you can create any weapon before the first BMH.
As for whether the previous or current version is better as a vanilla version, I will not comment now that I am a modder.

 

[meganoth]

100% agree that the developers shouldn't base decisions on subjective feelings. Me saying I didn't like the wasteland isn't the rationale behind my statements. So if I worded that poorly let me take a step back and apologize for that.

My critique is that every end game would effectively push you to the wasteland forever. Every game would end you up in the Wasteland and lowers the replayability. It is the antithesis of a sandbox. Now the issue is how to go about that.


Indeed that is of the most recent patches but the only POI changes as far as danger goes is whether they are positioned in a city, large city, wasteland city. Those are the three main types of city spawners in the game xmls. So you could just as easily find a T5 POI in the forest as you could in the snow biome as an example.

Really? I would have thought there simply are no small town stamps/tiles/whatever_they_are_called big enough for T5s to fit in, and that was used by TFP as a way to make T5s mostly appear only in big cities in snow or wasteland. In previous alphas this was the case I think, did this change?

Also between forest and wasteland there should be a 4 skull difference for everything. Going into a basic 2 skull POI in the wasteland means going into a 6 skull POI. And I would suspect that 6 skulls would be guaranteed glowies in there on day 1, whereas you wouldn't even see a feral there in the forest.

While writing this segment I found that at the end of the day the developers created a progression system without thinking about the rest of the game. Currently they removed a large portion of the open world aspect for not a lot of gain. If you enjoyed going to the Wasteland or Snow biome you could still do that in the old version. The forced progression doesn't really add much to the game that you couldn't just do without it by assigning your own guiderails.

As far as making each biome viable I think that will have to be scrapped without major investment from the developers. With each biome being quite far from each other and how city generation is handled one would have to shrink the map a bit to make each biome viable to visit frequently. The ore nodes would help in this endeavor if the resources they represented were not so readily available elsewhere, but again with distance/time constraints I don't think that is a good idea either at this point. I wish I had more ideas, but the distance between areas is a major inhibiting factor so even trying to think of a possible solution I have to backpedal my current stance. I think map generation would have to be addressed to make significant strides in this regard or people would have to just be accustomed to traveling an entire day into a new zone and spending the night there before returning.

Agreed. As I said in another thread, the POI refresh removes the incentive to explore for unlooted POIs. Which led to the map being largely irrelevant. So some other incentives were needed to go to other biomes. But POI refresh has been part of the basic equation and a solution for MP for so long I don't think it will get removed, meaning we depend on something like the current solution to draw people to venture out.

Also I don't want progression removed. If I did I could simply disable it. I am simply suggesting ways to make it more tenable. Currently whether on the forums or on youtube there are only a handful that actually think this iteration of gameplay is good. Most think it could use some tweaks to be better and a minority think that the whole thing is terrible. I fall into the middle camp where I think it could be a good system but with some tweaks that do not inhibit the open world spirit of the game we were sold on.

Without making each biome offer something the only things I can think of to make the progression system better would be slightly lowering the loot stage disparity between each zone such that there isn't an overwhelming gap between them but significant enough to encourage exploration in such zones.

Second, I think they should have the other biomes loot stages rise as the game progresses and is not capped. You can have a gap between the zones as you suggested.

Third, I would change the smoothie concept into something based more in reality.

Fourth, I would change progression from it's current state into one that is built within the quests. Think of it like having a quest that has you go find a part that would be needed to complete an item that would allow you to breathe in the burnt forest for good. The burnt forest would maybe be like a 2 part quest, the desert a 3 part quest, etc and so forth. This would make the stay in each biome more impactful and it would tie in with the current questing system we have.

Fifth, you should have alternative methods of living in the biomes but in a much more difficult state. Remove damage over time from each biome, with perhaps the Wasteland being an exception. Living in the desert would make you more thirsty and the snow biome more hungry and with hot and cold days you could perhaps have negative maladies associated with venturing out in the elements with a percent chance of a negative externality happening every x minutes without proper gear (badge). The burnt forest could lower visibility at range by a good amount and make wandering there dangerous as you can't see very well. Being the first zone after the forest you may not need anything else there to inhibit you. The Wasteland would require iodine tablets that you can find in the world that would give you x minutes of protection each. Being a resource you would have to gather it is not ideal to keep using them as you would have to resupply frequently. Without the tablets you would take radiation damage that would get progressively worse over time. At first perhaps you would have lowered stamina and max health, followed by radiation poisoning which mandates a vomit animation that could happen in the middle of a fight potentially ending in your death and then after x hours you would slowly take damage over time. These are just some rough ideas but the general concept is that each zone can be accessed but at a cost. This allows players the freedom to venture how they wish but with manageable repercussions attached to make it more difficult.


That is a good point, but is also contingent on the other zones actually being more difficult outside of the biome itself getting an extra skull which could still be the differentiating factor in either scenario. Outside of the wasteland getting "Wasteland_City" in the xml and the skull variance I don't see anything specific to that biome.

I think a trailing system would be fine assuming eventually you would get the sweet spot of 245 loot stage I think it was for the cutoff of T2.

No contest from me about using quests instead of challenges. But when you say alternative methods for living in a biome, what else are the smoothies if not an alternative method? First you go into the biome to get materials for a smoothie, then with the help of those smoothies you go in for extended times.

5 minutes per smoothie seems a bit short for the amount of ingredients (especially looking at you, 5 mushrooms), and it definitely is too short and expensive to make a permanent base there before having a badge. But it is enough for say staying on the border and making excursions into the biome for quests and scrounging. This is something I had hoped for when the system was revealed: https://community.thefunpimps.com/threads/v2-0-storms-brewing-dev-diary.42281/page-2#post-584978

Maybe after experiencing the other biomes myself I would campain for extending the 5 minutes. Or making the smoothie cheaper to craft. I'll have to see.

Knowing TFPs method of balancing I also suspect that right now the damage over time is probably too high. Essentially any damage that ticks down will feel like impending doom to a player even if it is practically too low.
Maybe it would even be better to decrease the damage further and remove the time before the DOT starts completely. This way there would be no cheesy warning in the display and factually more options for the player (i.e. you could risk longer times in the biome without smoothie but would also be induced to do more risky stuff

But I really should be playing now before too much theorycrafting. Still I think the dot is fundamentally the correct detriment. Even if we had heat or thirst instead like you suggest it would have to eventually result in health damage, otherwise everyone would largely ignore it like in previous alphas. I think what you really want with those suggestions is a longer delay before your time runs out in a biome. And maybe I'll eventually come to the same conclusion.

 

[Kyoji]

Really? I would have thought there simply are no small town stamps/tiles/whatever_they_are_called big enough for T5s to fit in, and that was used by TFP as a way to make T5s mostly appear only in big cities in snow or wasteland. In previous alphas this was the case I think, did this change?

Also between forest and wasteland there should be a 4 skull difference for everything. Going into a basic 2 skull POI in the wasteland means going into a 6 skull POI. And I would suspect that 6 skulls would be guaranteed glowies in there on day 1, whereas you wouldn't even see a feral there in the forest.



Agreed. As I said in another thread, the POI refresh removes the incentive to explore for unlooted POIs. Which led to the map being largely irrelevant. So some other incentives were needed to go to other biomes. But POI refresh has been part of the basic equation and a solution for MP for so long I don't think it will get removed, meaning we depend on something like the current solution to draw people to venture out.



No contest from me about using quests instead of challenges. But when you say alternative methods for living in a biome, what else are the smoothies if not an alternative method? First you go into the biome to get materials for a smoothie, then with the help of those smoothies you go in for extended times.

5 minutes per smoothie seems a bit short for the amount of ingredients (especially looking at you, 5 mushrooms), and it definitely is too short and expensive to make a permanent base there before having a badge. But it is enough for say staying on the border and making excursions into the biome for quests and scrounging. This is something I had hoped for when the system was revealed: https://community.thefunpimps.com/threads/v2-0-storms-brewing-dev-diary.42281/page-2#post-584978

Maybe after experiencing the other biomes myself I would campain for extending the 5 minutes. Or making the smoothie cheaper to craft. I'll have to see.

Knowing TFPs method of balancing I also suspect that right now the damage over time is probably too high. Essentially any damage that ticks down will feel like impending doom to a player even if it is practically too low.
Maybe it would even be better to decrease the damage further and remove the time before the DOT starts completely. This way there would be no cheesy warning in the display and factually more options for the player (i.e. you could risk longer times in the biome without smoothie but would also be induced to do more risky stuff

But I really should be playing now before too much theorycrafting. Still I think the dot is fundamentally the correct detriment. Even if we had heat or thirst instead like you suggest it would have to eventually result in health damage, otherwise everyone would largely ignore it like in previous alphas. I think what you really want with those suggestions is a longer delay before your time runs out in a biome. And maybe I'll eventually come to the same conclusion.

The forest and burnt forest currently do not have cities, but that was a product of 2.0 and not 1.0 as you could still get cities in the forest and there obviously wasn't a burnt forest.

Correct skull variation is the main difference for difficulty. Although Wasteland has it's own city spawning mechanics to guarantee larger cities as otherwise the city limit is spread throughout the other biomes (snow and desert as of now). In Alpha 1.0 there were cities in the forest so that was effectively the only difference in difficulty. To be fair I don't like the current worldgen because of the lack of cities in the forest and burnt forest. The default settings have each biome much larger than the smaller towns leaving a lot of space in between areas. I think the developers need to code cities per biome and limit forest and burnt forest to one, but they should each get at least one or they need to increase the amount of forest_town spawns default in the settings as the gaps lead to a lot of unnecessary travel time taking you out of the action IMO.

The smoothies concept itself is silly. A smoothie to live in an area that is hard to breathe due to smoke inhalation. Assuming they eventually replace smoothies with something more representative of the problem you are trying to fix then that could be a potential solution but only once the time/resources were adjusted. I think the old food/water drain system was effective at allowing the freedom to play in the harsher biomes without making it impossible for the desert and snow biome. For the burnt forest biome you would need to find something equally as easy to remedy but still providing a problem. For example, perhaps your stamina bar is lowered due to the smoke pervasive in the air so you could live in the burnt forest right away but you would have a permanently lowered stamina bar while you were in that area until you remedied it with the biome badge or some smoothie replacement modifier. The Wasteland can have a more serious detriment up to and including DoT due to the fact it's radiation poisoning essentially, but I think that should be a gradual process and not one of an instant DoT.

I think we will just fundamentally disagree that zones should prevent people from living there. I dislike the World of Warcraft style 1-20, 21-30 zone implementation and think that zones can get progressively more difficult, but not prohibitively so that no one can live there until they go through hours and hours worth of quests to get there. There is far less sandbox and I think that is where a lot of the pushback is coming from to begin with.

 

[theFlu]

In previous alphas this was the case I think, did this change?

My current base is in an Army Post (T5) in burnt forest; that's on a pregen map. And some T5-quarries were seen in the forest during the streamer weekend (haven't seen those myself yet). So, you can find T5:s in lower biomes (not necessarily ALL of them).

 

[zztong]

Really? I would have thought there simply are no small town stamps/tiles/whatever_they_are_called big enough for T5s to fit in, and that was used by TFP as a way to make T5s mostly appear only in big cities in snow or wasteland. In previous alphas this was the case I think, did this change?

I would say that's a common belief, but not necessarily true. You've had Wilderness Tier 5s for a while now and got more with 2.0.

For one, if you save the big POIs for only Downtown, Commercial, and Industrial Tiles then you get into performance problems that y'all have been working to control since A21. The Residential, CountryTown, CountryResidential, Rural, and Western tiles are all big enough to have a Tier 5 if somebody wanted to create them, and again I think scattering out the T5s for performance reasons creates a good reason to place them on those other Tiles.

 

[meganoth]

The forest and burnt forest currently do not have cities, but that was a product of 2.0 and not 1.0 as you could still get cities in the forest and there obviously wasn't a burnt forest.

Correct skull variation is the main difference for difficulty. Although Wasteland has it's own city spawning mechanics to guarantee larger cities as otherwise the city limit is spread throughout the other biomes (snow and desert as of now). In Alpha 1.0 there were cities in the forest so that was effectively the only difference in difficulty. To be fair I don't like the current worldgen because of the lack of cities in the forest and burnt forest. The default settings have each biome much larger than the smaller towns leaving a lot of space in between areas. I think the developers need to code cities per biome and limit forest and burnt forest to one, but they should each get at least one or they need to increase the amount of forest_town spawns default in the settings as the gaps lead to a lot of unnecessary travel time taking you out of the action IMO.

The smoothies concept itself is silly. A smoothie to live in an area that is hard to breathe due to smoke inhalation. Assuming they eventually replace smoothies with something more representative of the problem you are trying to fix then that could be a potential solution but only once the time/resources were adjusted. I think the old food/water drain system was effective at allowing the freedom to play in the harsher biomes without making it impossible for the desert and snow biome. For the burnt forest biome you would need to find something equally as easy to remedy but still providing a problem. For example, perhaps your stamina bar is lowered due to the smoke pervasive in the air so you could live in the burnt forest right away but you would have a permanently lowered stamina bar while you were in that area until you remedied it with the biome badge or some smoothie replacement modifier. The Wasteland can have a more serious detriment up to and including DoT due to the fact it's radiation poisoning essentially, but I think that should be a gradual process and not one of an instant DoT.

I think we will just fundamentally disagree that zones should prevent people from living there. I dislike the World of Warcraft style 1-20, 21-30 zone implementation and think that zones can get progressively more difficult, but not prohibitively so that no one can live there until they go through hours and hours worth of quests to get there. There is far less sandbox and I think that is where a lot of the pushback is coming from to begin with.

Re: "Stamina bar lowered" as detriment isn't a bad idea, though similar detriments implemented in 7D2D so far didn't hinder players from going directly to higher biomes, progressing fast and then complaining about being in end-game on day 10. Not that I care, but TFP has to.

I also don't see it necessarily as a sandbox limitation. You can do everything in any biome, so how does it limit how someone wants to play? Want to play a miner? You can, no matter which biome you are in. Want to play a farmer? Ditto. Yes, it is a (temporary) limit to where you can go but so is the unavailability of the gyro in early game limiting you to go into the air "biome"

Post automatically merged: Thursday at 11:11 AM

I would say that's a common belief, but not necessarily true. You've had Wilderness Tier 5s for a while now and got more with 2.0.

For one, if you save the big POIs for only Downtown, Commercial, and Industrial Tiles then you get into performance problems that y'all have been working to control since A21. The Residential, CountryTown, CountryResidential, Rural, and Western tiles are all big enough to have a Tier 5 if somebody wanted to create them, and again I think scattering out the T5s for performance reasons creates a good reason to place them on those other Tiles.

Good point. Just making sure, the T5 in the wasteland has still a lot more skulls than the T5 in forest though, right?

 

[RipClaw]

Many thanks for that information.

@Kyoji : Not sure, but this should alleviate one of the big problems you have with the system. So wherever you are you will get all the loot you want.

I have to correct myself. The loot level will be raised but the limit will not be completely removed. I looked it up in the XML files.

The forest biome has a limit of 40 and each badge adds a certain value. After obtaining the wasteland badge the maximum loot stage in the forest biome and the burnt forest raises to 140, in the desert to 170 and in the snow to 180. Only the wasteland is unlimited.

But if you turn off the biome progress then there is no loot stage cap.

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

@Laz Man

Can POI spawn, be set by parameter to spawn differently per Biome as well as player level?
This is a curiosity question.

What I am talking about is if I were to categorize zombies int 5 levels of ascension
created a group for each, could the same poi if replicated in another biome, pull from the
alternate group specifically for that biome?

If it is possible what property line would I need to add or adjust?

 

[7daysOfFun]

Biome progression while not horrible it is badly implemented.

i give u right...the trader progression and the new biome perks are A VERY DRUNK IDEA...it woud be so cool
when you go to the first trader > u must make quests >lvl6, THEN u MUST go to the next trader (in the biome/perks) and make trader quest >6, then u go to next trader.... so u must make a round and so u complete all

but now they killed the daily trader limit on server = my players are MEGA MASSIVE FRUSTRATET

 

[Kyoji]

I have to correct myself. The loot level will be raised but the limit will not be completely removed. I looked it up in the XML files.

The forest biome has a limit of 40 and each badge adds a certain value. After obtaining the wasteland badge the maximum loot stage in the forest biome and the burnt forest raises to 140, in the desert to 170 and in the snow to 180. Only the wasteland is unlimited.

But if you turn off the biome progress then there is no loot stage cap.

That is pretty bad seeing as how you still get T2 gear until 245+ if I recall. This means you won't get T3 in anything but the Wasteland. I'll dive into the files a bit more and see if anything else raises it or if it is a hard cap.

 

[RipClaw]

That is pretty bad seeing as how you still get T2 gear until 245+ if I recall. This means you won't get T3 in anything but the Wasteland. I'll dive into the files a bit more and see if anything else raises it or if it is a hard cap.

However, this only matters if you want to loot everything rather than craft it . The lootstage is irrelevant for books and parts. Starting at a loot stage of around 120, there is a chance of getting T3 loot. At 180, there is a pretty good chance of getting T3 loot.

 

[Laz Man]

@Laz Man

Can POI spawn, be set by parameter to spawn differently per Biome as well as player level?
This is a curiosity question.

What I am talking about is if I were to categorize zombies int 5 levels of ascension
created a group for each, could the same poi if replicated in another biome, pull from the
alternate group specifically for that biome?

If it is possible what property line would I need to add or adjust?

You can control which biome a POI spawns in via the rwgmixer.xml file. Don't know anything about your other question.

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

ok thanks for the answer.

 

[zztong]

Good point. Just making sure, the T5 in the wasteland has still a lot more skulls than the T5 in forest though, right?

Yes. The biome skulls are golden, the POI skulls are red.

Burnt is +0.5
Desert is +1
Snow is +1.5
Wasteland is +2

 

[meganoth]

However, this only matters if you want to loot everything rather than craft it . The lootstage is irrelevant for books and parts. Starting at a loot stage of around 120, there is a chance of getting T3 loot. At 180, there is a pretty good chance of getting T3 loot.

Since crafting should, for balance sakes, be progressing nearly as fast as looting, then as soon as you hit any cap crafting would overtake looting and everyone will simply craft any stuff he might not find (or buy it)

Psychologically the cap might make a huge difference, in practice it should have a negligible effect. There just isn't enough end-game loot and it all can be acquired in 2 other ways.

 

[Kyoji]

Since crafting should, for balance sakes, be progressing nearly as fast as looting, then as soon as you hit any cap crafting would overtake looting and everyone will simply craft any stuff he might not find (or buy it)

Psychologically the cap might make a huge difference, in practice it should have a negligible effect. There just isn't enough end-game loot and it all can be acquired in 2 other ways.

If it doesn't have an effect then why have the loot stage cap at all? I think we all know it does have an effect. TFP purposefully crippled the earlier zones by removing cities and adding a loot cap to encourage players into a progression-like state. The issue isn't the progression, the issue is how they went about forcing it.

People here have come up with a myriad of ways to encourage progression without the negative externalities associated with the loot stage cap and removing cities.

An easy example is to have loot stages be soft-caped meaning you would ideally want to go to the next zone to progress as waiting for the loot stage to increase in the lower biomes would take valuable time. So you then proceed with the game up to the wasteland and the forest may still be at loot stage 80 versus the wasteland at 180 as an example. Now once you have played long enough the loot stage of the forest, burnt forest, desert and snow should all gradually rise until they are on par with the wasteland. This means that the wasteland would be a few weeks ahead of the snow biome and the snow biome might be 2 weeks ahead of the desert biome. Regardless it allows players who progressed through the game as TFP intended to split off from the end point and revisit old stomping grounds thus providing more diversity in gameplay without sacrificing progression.

I can also deal with the lack of cities in the lower zones, but I think more towns and wilderness POIs need to be added to add to the empty space. If you generate a map with the new update it's pretty barren from my excursions.

 

[Riamus]

If it doesn't have an effect then why have the loot stage cap at all? I think we all know it does have an effect. TFP purposefully crippled the earlier zones by removing cities and adding a loot cap to encourage players into a progression-like state. The issue isn't the progression, the issue is how they went about forcing it.

People here have come up with a myriad of ways to encourage progression without the negative externalities associated with the loot stage cap and removing cities.

An easy example is to have loot stages be soft-caped meaning you would ideally want to go to the next zone to progress as waiting for the loot stage to increase in the lower biomes would take valuable time. So you then proceed with the game up to the wasteland and the forest may still be at loot stage 80 versus the wasteland at 180 as an example. Now once you have played long enough the loot stage of the forest, burnt forest, desert and snow should all gradually rise until they are on par with the wasteland. This means that the wasteland would be a few weeks ahead of the snow biome and the snow biome might be 2 weeks ahead of the desert biome. Regardless it allows players who progressed through the game as TFP intended to split off from the end point and revisit old stomping grounds thus providing more diversity in gameplay without sacrificing progression.

I can also deal with the lack of cities in the lower zones, but I think more towns and wilderness POIs need to be added to add to the empty space. If you generate a map with the new update it's pretty barren from my excursions.

Well.... Although I agree with you, the loot caps supposedly increase as you complete higher badges, so it somewhat does what you want. I haven't tried it to see if it really does, though.

 

[Kyoji]

Well.... Although I agree with you, the loot caps supposedly increase as you complete higher badges, so it somewhat does what you want. I haven't tried it to see if it really does, though.

They do but not to the level necessary IMO. Gunz Nerdz Steel did a good YouTube video on it.

Attached is an image showing the loot caps and loot tiers per loot stage. I think ideally you would want the cap to slowly raise each day until it reaches +235 where the loot maxes out. If not that then increase the base cap for each zone by at least +20 to provide slightly better loot values but still offer a reason to venture to other zones.

Again this is all just to allow progression while not being too punishing for players in other biomes.