PC Traders and Loot need a serious nerf.

Riamus said:
Trying to look at Steam achievements and determine how many people do something is not going to get you very far.  A lot of people buy a game and never open it, potentially for years.  This is why your easiest achievements are often around 70-80%.  Many others who do start the game will play for an hour or two and then shelf the game because it either isn't what they like or they have other things they want to play and just wanted to take a peek at the game, which is why most games have an even lower percent of people who have completed the first area/chapter/zone, etc. of the game and it steadily goes down from there.  None of these players would be active players and so really don't count when trying to debate what active players are doing or not doing in the game.  You can probably estimate most achievements at 2-3x what they are to get a good idea of active players, though that's nothing more than a general estimate you can make it basically any Steam game and may not be very accurate.

Regarding the traders, if you don't use Daring Adventurer, I think the traders are fine for what they sell and when they sell it.  Of course, I rarely buy anything from traders except what I can't find or craft (e.g. solar).  If you put points into DA, you need to accept that they'll sell stuff that will often be better than you can craft.  If you don't like that, don't use DA.  Quest rewards should relate to the tier of quest you are doing and so a high tier quest should give good quest rewards.  I think the rewards in A20 were generally fine.  And once the bug is fixed in A21, I think they'll be fine there as well.  If you are rushing quests, you're in the same boat as DA... you're going to get better stuff than you can craft.  If you're more casual in how you play, you'll be relatively even.  That being said, I do think the magazine nerf slowed crafting down way too much to stay even with questing and should be bumped up again.  That, or they should just adjust the number of magazines needed to craft things rather than changing the number of magazines you find.  You can have magazine numbers be lower without killing crafting by just lowering the number needed to craft things, achieving a balance without needing a ton of magazines.  To me, a balance is where you can craft pretty much the same things you find in loot if you quest around 50-70% of your day.  If you are pushing quests more than that, then you should expect crafting to be behind and if you're doing less questing, you should expect crafting to be ahead.  Those numbers could be adjusted some to fit what others might like but it would still be somewhere around there in order so most people are going to craft at about the same rate they loot.

The one change I'd make to traders is the quantities in their quest rewards.  1500 wood?  800 coal?  10 boiled water?  This is too high.  Most (not all) resource rewards are too high by 50-75%.
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Not only that, but giving money AND loot for quest reward is too much. Dukes should be just one guaranteed choice and probably a bit less than now. Because ideally the trader could have better weapons on display if buying it would mean you would have to save up for it and get nothing else from rewards in the meantime.

The typical player would then start the game by saving up dukes for the filter in his first 2-3 quests, then either going full on saving up money or mixing it up and getting quests rewards or money whatever seems better, For example on day 5 the save-all player could then actually afford an iron quality 4 weapon by giving all his money, the other player could just buy a stone tier5 or iron tier1.

As it is now, my group of 4 gets so much money from questing that we could afford to buy everything of iron level useful to us the traders had offered. AND I got a quest reward from a tier2 infestation quest of a q4 steel pickaxe. On day 7! The only iron level item we actually crafted is a q2 turret, nothing at all was looted(!), about 5-8 iron level items were simply bought from the trader or were quest rewards

 
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Zerginfestor said:
That's why I did the mathematics based on the players who actually crafted the bedroll and whatnot as the bare minimum
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Huh, so you did. And the rest of the thread happened.. I must've had a massive brainfart, or had some old version of the thread loaded when replying.. oh well :)

 
The traders are the dev team's first love. They have been OP since the start and will never be balanced except by mods. Been many years since the traders were added and till this day they have been WAY OP compared to the looting game outside of questing.

 
The role of the trade should be to smooth out the RNG of the game.

In the early game while wearing no armor it's very easy to get injuries like lacerations and infections. It can be very difficult to find sewing kits, honey, aloe, and splints. I'd be fine if the trader was coded in such a way that if you walked up to him with a broken leg, he always carried a splint, and a cast at +200% prices. Demand is up buddy.

The problem is the trader isn't smoothing out the RNG what he carries is just more RNG. He might sell you a double barrel shotgun, he might sell you an M60, who knows. Completely random. That was one of the big issues with the trader perks before, you needed 5 perks to get his secret stash up to buying night vision and q5t4 weapons that any other progression option was worthless.

He should sell food/water/medical/materials thats it, he shouldn't be used to bypass crafting gates. He could also be used to upgrade q5 weapons to q6 for a cost in dukes.

 
Just from doing quests and playing normal as intended by day 17 I've gotten my character more OP than in alpha 20 at the same day on same settings of warrior difficulty. 

It feels like this ridiculous goal of nerfing water because duct tape and yet again reworking the skill system made the game be even more out of balance than before. 

Almost 2 years all for this. Something they could have ignore and instead released something that would want players to actually get past gamestage 50 and maybe try dipping into end game content instead of getting bored at mid game and starting over because according to certain people that's what most folks find interesting about the game which is really sad after what almost 10 years in EA? And the early game is the only thing they still find interesting. 

 
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Riamus said:
The one change I'd make to traders is the quantities in their quest rewards.  1500 wood?  800 coal?  10 boiled water?  This is too high.  Most (not all) resource rewards are too high by 50-75%.
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1500 wood is 5 1200 hp trees (by comparison, my tree farms are a minimum of 60 trees.)  800 coal is 8 coal blocks.  I thought those rewards were laughable when I saw them, they're easily harvested in a minute or two.  Arguably the water is too much, but I've never been tempted to take it, since water is a non-issue past day 2 or so.

 
Vaeliorin said:
1500 wood is 5 1200 hp trees (by comparison, my tree farms are a minimum of 60 trees.)  800 coal is 8 coal blocks.  I thought those rewards were laughable when I saw them, they're easily harvested in a minute or two.  Arguably the water is too much, but I've never been tempted to take it, since water is a non-issue past day 2 or so.
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Yes, but for people who quest a lot, they can get all the resources they'll ever need without ever gathering the resources at this level of reward.  You should need to gather resources and not just quest if you want to build things, imo.

Kostriktor said:
want to share your secret ? how do you make all those dukes, in order to skip "progression" so fast ?
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If you quest as much as you are able to in the first few days, you'll have plenty of dukes.  You can then work on your base before day 7 and once it's ready, go back to questing all day each day and you'll end up with stacks and stacks of dukes.  Quest rewards offer a lot of dukes and you can sell all the stuff you found that you don't need or want for even more.  Any points into Daring Adventurer will increase the dukes you get from the quest rewards as well.  So if you're going that route, you can easily skip progression.  If you don't want to skip progression, you just don't go this route or you choose not to spend your dukes.

 
I suppose it's because of the way I build, but I'd need to take that reward a couple dozen times to have enough wood to even build a mid-game type of base.  It just seems a horribly inefficient way to get those resources to me.

 
theFlu said:
That's with a full mother lode, no? My gut feeling is more like 30-40 per block, for non-STR builds 20 blocks is, well. Trivial, but most people don't seem to like mining even that much :)
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Yeah.  It's actually 114 per block (iirc) with maxed Mother Lode, Art of Mining and Coffee.

Like I've said previously, I do a lot of mining, so 20 blocks is basically nothing to me.  I once built a base that was as big as the max size land claim block (71 X 71) so the initial concrete slab took over 100,000 concrete. :)

 
Vaeliorin said:
I suppose it's because of the way I build, but I'd need to take that reward a couple dozen times to have enough wood to even build a mid-game type of base.  It just seems a horribly inefficient way to get those resources to me.
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Yes, you'd normally need more but when you can complete multiple quests in a day, you can easily get that.  And these rewards are even at the lowest tiers of rewards, which can be completed very quickly.  If you happen to have fetch quests, it's even easier to quickly get these rewards.  For anyone who likes to gather resources, that is certainly the most efficient way to do so.  But for anyone who prefers questing, this virtually eliminates any need to harvest wood or coal.  I suppose if that's the intent - making it so you don't have to do part of the game if you don't want to - then I suppose it's fine.  But otherwise it just feels too high.  If this was tier 4-5 loot, I wouldn't bat an eyelash.  But at tier 1-2, it's too much.  My comments on it are specific to early game, low tier quest rewards.  Mid game or late game, when you're doing high tier quests, the amount isn't such a big deal.

 
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Zerginfestor said:
Extreme disagree. The trader as it is in early game is borderline useless, at least from experience of up to in-game 2 weeks of gameplay. Progression is so slow in terms of magazines, crafting, and upgrading, that even with 5 levels into miner, I just barely accessed a tier 1 Iron Pickaxe. 
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This, I am doing Tier 5 infested quests in the wasteland and getting level 2 iron cross bow rewards with game stage 233.

Traders need a buff

 
Labrat309 said:
This, I am doing Tier 5 infested quests in the wasteland and getting level 2 iron cross bow rewards with game stage 233.

Traders need a buff
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That specific reward issue is a bug that came in with B317, they are aware and it should hopefully be fixed whenever we get the next build

 
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