PC Thoughts on Trader Quests.

That Being said I must admit these large building become rather boring rather quickly. The main reason for this is because most traders only have 1-3 types near there location. If you happen to know exactly how many tier 5 buildings there are plz let me know.
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It becomes also boring with T1-4 quests. It's always the same buildings once you know all of them. Doesn't matter if they are in the town in the north or in a town in the south.

*I need you to grab the supplies we have been gathering from 3 different locations, each of them being a tier 2 building.
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Then you need to loot 3 buildings in a row, you also know... no change at all, just even more anyoing.

*I need you to find out what happened to this person, which could entail as much as 4 tier 1 and a dig up quest.

*It's time to start taking back this land, that involves clearing a pair of tier 4's
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Doesn't change anything, because still just the same in a row.

Those are just ones I could come up at the time. but I feel adding these chain quests would add a lot more variety while also making it so you as the Fun Pimps do not need to just make a bunch more giant buildings/quests.
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Imho it does not anything of real value. The only thing it does is it makes the quest longer to complete and instead saves you some traveling.

The core problem you mentioned and i agree with you is once you know the POIs it becomes boring and you can "rush" them. Chaining multiple of them doesn't make it better.

I guess you are talking about singleplayer. In multiplayer the quests are even more overpowered, because you can share them and everybody participating gets the reward. And you can chain as much as you have players, because everybody can have one quest. We currently reached tier 5 quests and there are only 2 buildings in range. So with 4 players we may get 4 times the same quest in the same building and can do this quest 4 times in a row without even need to return to the trader.

I don't know how to make this more interesting but the reward (and free loot respawn) with quests is far to much overpowered. We don't even loot normal POIs anymore... why, if you can have reasonable POIs with free loot respawn?

Only thing i can imagine is to make this some kind of "scavenger hunt". The trader doesn't even tell you in what direction the quest is AND it is chained, so in the first poi you might only find a hint where to go next or already find the target.

Then it would be a gamble about the trader quests and not just "yeah, i know where it is, i know how to do this POI and i will be done in 10min".

Maybe combined with some sort of standing towards a trader. You get a quest "fetch stuff" but you don't know where or what level. If you are lucky its a tier 5 in the first target. If you have bad luck, it's a chain of 5 tier 5 quests, but if you cancel the quest, you will lose standing towards the trader.

So it's your choice. Fullfil it even it takes much more time, or cancel it but loose standing.

But i guess that might be something coming with bandits in like A25, so in 2025. ;)

 
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I agree on the repetitive same old tier 5 quest locations. Chaining multiple lower tier locations would be nice variation. I also like the idea of checking off a location once you have done them, especially if you have loot respawn disabled. I hope the quests in future alphas are more interactive with NPCs. An NPC runs up to you and asks your help to rescue a family member trapped in their house with zombies trying to break in. Each rescued NPC can join you at your base and help you fight during horde night. The mission fails if they die. Maybe they are infected and need x number of antibiotics. Maybe a bandit pretends to need help and lures you into a trap that you need to fight your way through. Maybe my suggestions are making this sound too much like skyrim...
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I also like the idea of finding strange notes and weird secrets in filing cabinets and desks. I once found a super corn recipe in dishong tower. Why was it there? Now what would be neat is if say there was a special safe in dishong tower like in the sham factory that would give the location of the supercorn house and reveal that some company was stealing the research.

Maybe the quests should be small at first, and when you build a relationship with the traders they tell us rumors that will be in very far away pois, on weird locations in the map. Maybe have these unlock "horror quests" or "Mystery quests" that have a different icon: a skull and bones for the horror quests, and a question mark for the mystery quests. Have these reset the poi in a special way where the loot is gone but there is something bad/weird in a random room.

An example of a horror quest is you fall through a fake floor, and instead of dogs, its 15 feral screamers.... An example of a mystery quest is you go to the day care after a trader tells shares his concern about the kids, and you click on the question mark, and you find that at one point survivors were there, but they made it out and now you have to find a bus. This starts a new conversation with a trader, who will tell you where some gas stations are. This will lead to a quest where you just have to look at each gas station, and when you get close to the right one a new question mark kicks off.

I also would like to see some bosses in the game, like a shotgun wielding Jesus.... that would be a rare quest trigger for the gun factory or the church...

 
Don't know if this is even viable, but imagine you could do a quest to expand the safe zone around traders, so that you eventually end up with a secure village with the trader in the middle.

You could also pay to spend the night there. Legit way to avoid the horde for those that desire.

 
The game needs to keep track of what pois you have quested at, and remove those from the questing pool for a month.
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Hmm, interesting idea. Couple it to the loot respawn value would make it impossible to just do quests over and over and create a need to further explore again. We totally stopped exploring and just run traderquests anymore. Even more OP then just running a quest and get a reward in opposite to just loot a building without a quest imho is the free loot respawn.

 
Don't know if this is even viable, but imagine you could do a quest to expand the safe zone around traders, so that you eventually end up with a secure village with the trader in the middle.
You could also pay to spend the night there. Legit way to avoid the horde for those that desire.
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I love the idea except the spending the night to avoid horde night but that's a ton of systems to implement from a programming standpoint. Maybe you could pay to sleep there on non horde nights (the excuse for why you couldn't on horde nights being something like "we can't afford to have dead weight around while defending against the horde") and immediately pass time til morning. Of course that's only viable in single player, unless it's something like if all players have paid to sleep through the night and are in the outpost the time will jump to 04:00. That incorrectly assumes, however, that after a week or two of leveling and obtaining gear, the night actually poses a risk to a competent player. It doesn't really right now unfortunately, except for maybe clearing tier 5 POIs at night for some.

I remember first starting this game alphas ago, and cowering in my base waiting for morning. Granted I was much less experienced, but the lack of open world zombie spawns now coupled with the abundance of ammo you're not going to get in any real trouble unless you're blasting away in the middle of a tier 5 POI.

 
I love the idea except the spending the night to avoid horde night but that's a ton of systems to implement from a programming standpoint.
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?

New dialogue: "I want to stay the night [x dukes {insert formula}]" -> remove money from player (if enough money) -> set flag trader_no_teleport_at_night for player -> add new if (trader_no_teleport_at_night ) {return;} to teleport function.

 
Just completed the dishong clear quest for the first time I think.

I made this random world with 1337 seed and just picked the biggest forest biome city and added a bunch of PoIs, including all skyscrapers in the center.

Now traders offer slightly more variety and with max agi/stealth build, I like doing the dishong fetch from the top floor by trying to avoid zombies and parkouring through elevator shafts, smashing staircase barriers to skip sections, leaving behind random cobble blocks to slow down the chasing horde etc.

Still, I am running out of ideas to spice things up any further.

 
If you play on RWG maps (or any of the PREGEN0x maps), you'll get the apt complex ones. Sometimes, that's the only ones in range of the trader.

Shotgun messiah is an easy one IF you use guns. Vultures are annoying on clear quests (at least one always gets bugged).

It's the waterworks that I hate. that collapsing catwalk, that dumps you into water where YOU can't shoot/hit anything, yet the zeds can hit you. grrrr.

Never had dishong/pharma ones yet. Dishong is in PREGEN02, so planning to go for that one soon.

 
I played pregen02 extensively and there is only one nearby trader (within 0,5 kms from the dishong) but he doesn't often give the quest.

Crack-a-book is the simplest, fastest tier 5 quest location.

I did some rough calculations that assume you ignore most mundane containers except for weapon chests, bags and any of the wooden boxes like stiff, shamway or shotgun messiah.

Just get through the location clearing it up asap and picking only the essentials, no shortcuts:

Apartment 6: ~29 minutes, 161 zombies

Factory 1 (shamway): ~23 minutes, 156 zombies

Factory 2 (messiah): 27 minutes, 192 zombies

Skyscraper 1 (dishong): above 1 hour, ~330 zombies

Skyscraper 2 (crack-a-book): 17 minutes, 67 zombies

These are of course estimates, zombie counts may vary.

Also, I have a maxed agi char with all seven pistol pete skills and a bad-ass smg so it's a one-hit wonder against 95% of zeds, cuts the time considerably.

I still need to do this for the hospital but I expect it to be between the apartment and shamway factory both in terms of kill count and time.

Higashi is probably closer to Dishong, with roughly 250 zombies and 40 minutes but that remains to be checked.

Shamway is overall quite decent because you get to access 3 hidden stashes placed conveniently on the path and you don't face as many zombies as in most cases.

EDIT: Just did a quick run with the fetch/clear quest in Dishong. Almost exactly 1 hour of real-time and 374 zombies. Ignoring 90% of all loot containers. Had to descend down to level 5 (again, as in my previous run) to clear a room with construction workers. Seems like those under-construction levels are quite elusive, despite the fact I was very thorough and liberal with my pick-axe.

 
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