PC The difficulty progression need some balance

[MechanicalLens]

I think this shift is long overdue. The only issue for new players is that they will assume that 300% xp gain is a setting to reduce difficulty by allowing them to level up faster when, in fact, 300% xp gain increases the challenge by making the difficulty curve easily outpace the player's ability to gear up to meet the challenge. But if they play with everything default I think they will be just fine.

An issue that remains in my opinion is the game does nothing to explain game stage, let alone loot stage or trader stage. It just gives you an arbitrary number, which a new player is not going to know what to look out for and, should they chance upon it, will have no idea what it represents and if it's important or not. There is a challenge designated for finishing off your first horde. Provided the information isn't displayed there, perhaps that would be a decent place for it? (Explain where to find your game stage, what it means, and how it goes up and down.)

I've not read many of the challenges in detail, so perhaps TFP have already tucked it away in there somewhere. Still, I feel like this metric is something only "the nerds" would know about.

Also, this is a common issue, new players jacking the gamestage to 300% and then wondering why the game is so difficult so early on. Perhaps the setting should come with a warning? Something, somehow, to let the player know that increasing it about default will increase the difficulty of the game.

 

[Roland]

An issue that remains in my opinion is the game does nothing to explain game stage, let alone loot stage or trader stage. It just gives you an arbitrary number, which a new player is not going to know what to look out for and, should they chance upon it, will have no idea what it represents and if it's important or not. There is a challenge designated for finishing off your first horde. Provided the information isn't displayed there, perhaps that would be a decent place for it? (Explain where to find your game stage, what it means, and how it goes up and down.)

I've not read many of the challenges in detail, so perhaps TFP have already tucked it away in there somewhere. Still, I feel like this metric is something only "the nerds" would know about.

Also, this is a common issue, new players jacking the gamestage to 300% and then wondering why the game is so difficult so early on. Perhaps the setting should come with a warning? Something, somehow, to let the player know that increasing it about default will increase the difficulty of the game.

Maybe red text that warns of the outcome like when you are warned about trader progression when generating a map. 

 

[MechanicalLens]

Maybe red text that warns of the outcome like when you are warned about trader progression when generating a map. 

Agreed. Even just some red screen at the bottom of the screen saying something along the lines of, "Warning: Increasing XP gain will result in a more challenging experience." could suffice. If they want to be descriptive but not go into a full deep dive into game stage, they could tack onto the end, "More advanced zombies will appear in progression sooner."

 

[Euzio]

It could do with a little fine tuning. If there was a way to stop feral wights or Rads from appearing based on player level rather than gamestage it would be perhaps beneficial? The reason being that locking those spawns to gamestage can sometimes lead to those stronger zombies appearing far sooner than players are capable of handling. 

Increasing the XP gain does nothing but simply increase the difficulty really. Sure you get more points to spend but the scaling is not balanced. In fact, looting will play a far more important role because the quality of weapons and tools we get is dependent alot on the amount of books we find now. 

That said, there are mods available to circumvent the progression a little. I myself typically play with a mod that gives 2 skill points per level instead of just 1. That does help speed up player progression but not the zombie progression. 

 

[TWORDY]

The latter strategy made it very easy to keep people out, with turrets and spikes in the pit. I remember using stacked hatches to make an impenetrable "ladder" with the jump glitch, but the strategy for attacking bases like this was just to have a low-level friend empty out all the turrets by dying repeatedly, and then auger down all the pillar bases to collapse the base. I think adopting some more ideas from Rust here would work well - multiple bedrolls with unique cooldown timers and a minimum radius for placing another nearby an existing one. I would also be curious to see an auto-refillable turret where you could connect "ammo lines" from a central ammo dump similar to how electricity is wired from generators/batteries.

Some of the gameplay solutions are incredible I must say. 

I truly like how resources might be siphoned straight from the chest by making a direct pipe connection with a forge.

I suppose that devs are missing the opportunity to make traders even more interesting or create some monuments so players would build their bases around and "socialize" under the barrel of the gun . 

The difficulty of zombies in 7DTD is mainly governed by in-game build level and gamestage, do I read it correctly? Are the rewards and loot generated based on trader mission level? More complicated than that I guess.

 

[stample]

Not by build level.  It's gamestage, but that is influenced by the biome.  I'm not sure if the Tier of the POI affects it, but I don't think so.  Historically, the Tier of the POI is just a representation of the size and number of zombies in it, as well as the amount of loot.

Trader quest rewards are absolutely influenced by the Tier of the mission and the characters Loot stage (different from gamestage, but heavily influenced by it).  Unclear to me whether the Trader's biome influences it, but I suspect it does, since your chars loot stage is modified by it when you're doing the turn in and rewards are generated.

 

[RipClaw]

Not by build level.  It's gamestage, but that is influenced by the biome.  I'm not sure if the Tier of the POI affects it, but I don't think so.  Historically, the Tier of the POI is just a representation of the size and number of zombies in it, as well as the amount of loot.

The tier of the POI also affects the gamestage.

 

[myrkana]

We've felt the difficulty to be just right so far.

Day 13 with 2 people total. Forget what level we are but we're not crazy leveled. 1 player hasnt died, the other died early on day one (so hasnt affected gamestage much).

We're on tier 3 quests, we've mostly stayed in the forest but are leaving because we're starting to see irradiated zombies pop up in the buildings. The rewards for doing stuff in the forest is lagging behind so we're moving to the tundra with our newly unlocked Trader Bob and our newly crafted motorcycles.

We've been able to deal with the zombies pretty easily so far, some of the quests have almsot killed us recently but our gear has been keeping up well enough with everything. We both have guns that are the step above pipe guns, a machine gun ak47 and a pistol. Im using a club, hes using a stun baton. Havent gotten enough books for a bat yet. We both have level 3 armor sets we crafted, 2 slots in each piece filled with mods. Im wearing the mining set for the bonuses to mining, as we have 2 forges set up and a workbench.

Im the cook and have somehwere around 60/100 food books and can craft most of the seeds. Going Fort/Str.

Other player is doing Int, Agi and is doing most of the crafting. They get most of the crafting books and I get anything they have learned recipe wise. 3rd+ copies get sold to traders. Food has become plentiful, maybe too plentiful? But it did take some setting up to get it going.

 

[Villskap]

I'm playing in a group with 6 or 7 friends. We typically have between 3 and 5 people online together at a time, and nearly all of us have been playing since like... A10. We've played several group games like this, some of them past day 70. But this time we are struggling, on Adventurer difficulty. We've had TPKs on at least half of our horde nights so far, with horde bases that were considered pretty solid early-game and even mid-game builds. Then we decided we wanted to pack up and move to the burnout zone to get to see Trader Jen, and see more of the 1.0 game. Hoo boy. Big mistake.

It's been nonstop rad-screamer swarms around the house and base, and every quest and horde night has thrown more neon green at us than a Disney villain! We only just got a fully concrete horde base set up in time for day 35 and the acid storm and rad zombies MELTED through to us in about 30 seconds.
Something has definitely changed! But I'm not seeing as many people talking about it as I'd expect, so I guessed it's only being this extreme for bigger groups. It used to be that we'd start seeing cops in POIs, and then one or two would show up on horde night soon after. Then we'd start running into ferals... same. Then omg rad zombies! And then a week or so later, a few of them come in with the horde... and then a few more. Now it's the other way around. Hordes of horrid abominations flooded us on day 21... then started showing up a few at a time on quests.

So I did some digging on the wiki about how game stage is calculated now, and looking at how the game has been for us, I think I understand what's going on? TL,DR: the game difficulty is double-dipping how much harder it gets for multiple players now. Quests and POI zombies scaling up in type by "party game stage" makes sense, and really makes them more of a challenge! But Horde Nights and screamer spawns already spawn more numbers of Zs directly proportional to number of players, and now they're also scaling each of those Zs to a "party game stage" well above the game stage of the highest level player! And the biome bonus applies to each player before that, and while the diminishing returns modifier hits it for each player after the 1st, it still adds a LOT more if you're in a party.

Example: 3 players with game stages at 80, 70, and 40 are in a party. The party game stage used to decide what kinds of zombies to spawn for them is 80 + 70x(0.5) + 40x(0.25) = 125
With 5 players on together all around game stage 80, that means you are getting 5 times the number of Zs all spawning at game stage 155 for Horde Night. Then we've also observed the burnout zone is adding about 50 to each of our game stages when we enter it. But for 5 players, that's adding a total of 50 + 50*(0.5) + 50*(0.25) + 50*(0.125) + 50*(0.0625) , approaching 100, for a total game stage of 255. We wind up with a huge swarm of late-game rad zombies when we've only just gotten a concrete mixer.

I don't know if I've understood this 100% correctly, but it definitely lines up with what we've observed in our game. If correct, then what I'd humbly request/suggest of the Fun Pimps would be to dial this change back just a bit:
- Move the zombie-type scaling of horde night and screamer spawns back to individual player's game stages instead of "party game stage." Or at most make it scale the game stage for the group to the highest level player, instead of like double or triple their game stage. This will also keep the increase from zones from doubling up.
- Keep the "party game stage" calculation for POI and quest zombie types, since the numbers on those don't scale up as much, and it makes for some neat boss fights when group-questing!
- But also if you can, make it so that the party-game-stage calculates based on the number of players present and accounted for (already checked at quest start "!") rather than also including the party members crafting back at base or off doing their own thing. A lot of us just party up as allies connect, because it's easy and then we don't have to constantly un-party and re-party, and we can see where each other are on are on our maps. But the new changes seem to really punish this. Going out to do a simple Level 2 Buried Supplies quest on your own and getting a face full of rad-hulks and feral bikers hurts!