PC What can be done for game balance?

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Slingblade2040

Active member
It's obvious slot of stuff in this game isn't balanced. TFP recently tried and let's be honest sorta failed with this whole stone age nonsense. also don't come into this with self imposing rules and other nonsense like that. if you set up your own rules to play this game that's on you and with those rules the game is borderline no longer vanilla. 

The trader and quests are one of the issues that kills off the balance since they have become very easy to find, getting about 10k dukes by the end of day 3 isn't an issue and usual they have some really decent guns as high as tier 3. not to mention how much experience you gain by selling all those items.

loot rooms..those things are just dumb and after running a few PoIs you know how to get to them and in the easiest way possible. they should just be removed or saved for the tower style PoIs. personally I'd prefer for them to be removed from the game.

the perk system. it's fairly easy to max out a attribute and a damage perk by level 19. you can get very OP by day 7.  especially if you find the item that gives you an extra attribute point for the tree you are going into it makes getting OP that much faster. 

obviously a lot can be done to better balance this game. certain things can be added back in and changed a bit to work better with the current perk and book system. obviously no one is talking about bringing back spam crafting so don't even bring up that nonsense.

loot can go back to being a bit more random or having higher tier's show up according to gamestage.

also I really wouldn't mind the return of feral or radiated zombies showing up at certain PoIs no matter what gamestage you are at or even during horde nights. a bit of randomness to horde night would be great to add some kind of element of danger. 

those are just my thoughts. feel free to add in your issues and what you think could balance this game for the better. even though it will probably be ignored.

 
Slingblade2040 said:
It's obvious slot of stuff in this game isn't balanced. TFP recently tried and let's be honest sorta failed with this whole stone age nonsense. also don't come into this with self imposing rules and other nonsense like that. if you set up your own rules to play this game that's on you and with those rules the game is borderline no longer vanilla. 

..................... snip ...........

those are just my thoughts. feel free to add in your issues and what you think could balance this game for the better. even though it will probably be ignored.
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The question I have, are the developers listening to the customer?  Are any of the changes changes we wanted?   Or are the developers putting in changes they wanted?

 
It's incredibly simple. Every single action role playing game has got this right.

Beginner areas are populated by weak monsters and have basic loot, advanced POIs have dangerous monsters and contain good loot.

The mistake is in thinking this is a SURVIVAL game. It isn't. Survival is not rewarded in 7D2D, killing bulk zeds and acquiring shiny loot is and that's an ARPG, the only difference is that 7D2D makes you fill a couple of green and blue meters periodically.

Good loot should exist from the start in difficult to assault areas, let the player balance the risk versus reward.

 
secateurs said:
Beginner areas are populated by weak monsters and have basic loot, advanced POIs have dangerous monsters and contain good loot.
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In a way they used to have this. The Hub City. Which was great. Always there, always tempting you, all the best loot.

And at least for the last few years threads regularly pop up on these forums suggesintg increasing difficulty as players get further from the middle, or starter areas.

From recent dev posts it seems like they are going to do that, based on Biomes.

As to current things..

While I like a bit of slow start, don't want to loot a Q5 M60 day 4 kind of thing, the whole "stone" tools is just wacky. "Scrap" or "handmade" tools, absolutely. Who would ever spend a couple hours knapping out a stone axe head if they had ready access to an empty town full of cars, buildings, etc.

But that's an immersion thing.

The bipolar 'balance' of the Stone Axe vs. the Stone Shovel is boggling. I don't have exact number but the Shovel does about multiple times more damage, to it's main targets, which already have half the HPs as an Axes main targets. So ~3-4 hits per clay block vs. 20+ hits per stone block.

One of the main reasons for this I've heard is to drastically slow down early game mining. Goal Achieved.

But as to why, well that's not as clear. To slow down players from having unbreachable bases out of the gate. hmm.. well, the already common 'take over a poi' really negates that argument, unless they get rid of or rebuild all the pois with brick or concrete walls, as those are already totally OPd early horde bases.

But the more impactful part of this one recent change is, 'what the heck else do we do at night if we're not mining?'

Sure, first thing that pops into your head is, well go out night looting.

With the current aggressive predators night spawns? No thanks. I'd gotten either a Bear or a Dire (red eyes) Wolf at my base almost every single night. I think no visitors only the first, second & horde nights. I remember thinking, "a bear, on the third night?" "glad I didn't take over a house with wood walls". To be clear, not saying anything about the night spawns here, other than as it applies to 'what to do at night'.

The Skill/Classes/Attributes/Templates Trees, whatever they are, just bad design. Nothing wrong with _offering_ Templates, but the obvious mis-step of tying weapons into these trees should really have been warning enough not to go there. At least for a "sandbox" game.

Simply goes to replayability. One clear example being if someone prefers to mine and build every game. There is literally no rational reason that if that player decides to buy every single perk the exact same, except goes with Rifles and Stun batons instead of Shotguns/Clubs that they should be many points behind a player who went with Shotguns/Clubs.

They were on to something with Learn By Doing. Sure they took it too far (cactus sitting, spam crafting), and then went too far in canning the whole idea. Limited LBD with governors could be great. If you walk at least 1 kilometer in a day then come night time your cardio gets a wee bit better. More than a klick doesn't matter. Do that for a week and it's equivalent to lvl 1 Rule#1Cardio perk. Week 2, 2 klicks per day. If you just had to put in a 'get tougher by getting hit' lbd bit, then make it over a multiday period. Something like, 'if you take damage from npcs equal to your total max health over a 5 day period, you gain 2 hit points over your normal max'. So 50 days into a game the most gain would be 20 more hitpoints.

Basically nothing OPd, and nothing stupid. Gains small but worthwhile over time. You know, kind of like if you were dropped into a post apocolyptic world and gradually got tougher simply by doing all the physical things needed to survive.

Enough tilting at windmills for me. Have a good night all. 😉

 
secateurs said:
It's incredibly simple. Every single action role playing game has got this right.

Beginner areas are populated by weak monsters and have basic loot, advanced POIs have dangerous monsters and contain good loot.
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A lot of things sound simple if you're not the one doing them. =P

Difficulty modifiers for biomes and POI are on the list but not done, yet. /shrug

 
Readding 600 quality guns / tools back + gun parts/parts you have to find again to complete them. a14-a15 progression was perfect. And yeah add LBD ofc. but without clicking anything in perk menu. Also UMA zombies, so it does not look as colorful and repetitive as now, and maybe option for it to produce different clothed / skin colored zombies each time with different stats. Devs should admit they @%$*#!ed up and go back to their best ideas from the past instead of polishing the turd the game became now.

 
The only real balance issue I see is the scaling of danger proportionally to the progression of the player. There are just too drastic changes in combat efficiency throughout the game (especially once once you have your first firearm), whereas the difficulty actually doesn't ramp up at all for ages (I think the first daytime ferals are supposed to spawn at GS 66, or ~25 hours of gameplay on average I'd say ?). It basically means the game presents proper challenges (or is too hard, depending on how you wanna view it) until you get a gun, and suddenly it gets super easy until... ferals, but even then, with basic FPS experience, it really doesn't add a big threat either. 

This brings us to the next concern, the usefulness of melee past the stone age. Spamcrafting bullets is such a breeze, on top of finding boxes of ammunition everywhere, there's not even a proper argument for ammo conservation anymore. I still use melee because I enjoy it, but i'm quite honestly gimping my progression more than anything. Grinding nitrate powder and/or buying everything I need to make bullets at a trader would be a smaller time investment than taking the time of killing each zombie with melee when I can just pop heads left and right with ease.

I hope proper gamestaged zones coupled with new, special infected zombies will make the game difficulty ride along my own progression in a more enjoyable way, instead of the current very obvious power breakthroughs.

EDIT : I'd also like the return of gun parts; if progression is supposed to be slow, I'd like it to be a bit more granular in the way of completing a gun rather than needing to get lucky just once. Slowly finding all the parts and maybe buying the missing ones at a trader would be a much smoother experience than going from 0 to 100 with a single lucky loot container.

 
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Okay let me ask the main question here, do we really need this much balancing here?

Lets be honest the sandbox mode is one of the most important key point of this game, everything what takes aspects out of the sandbox feeling is actively ruining the experience.

Guns were never a problem, what causes people to get bored is that the game is generally empty between all horde nights and theres not much actual content to do ingame.

Op said no to self-rules but for an example lets say that you started the game with the goal to only use spears and never use perks at all, once you get your steel spear T6 what are you doing? Theres nothing to do!

In A18 have a fully kitted horde base and that means i dont really have anything left to do. I have all the weapons, all the loot i need i have everything what i would want. Im at day 40 and have nothing left to do. Im actively looking into modlets to see how can i spice things up and this is kind of the same situation in A19 the only thing changed is that its slower but NOT MORE FUN to reach this point.

Now how did i get to this point? Well instead of adding more content and widening the sandbox capatibilities of the game the devs spend time on slowing down the early game so the content feels "bigger".

We had this learn by action system what needed improvements so players would only gain more out of their weapons if they use them but it was ditched for this perk system what ironically speed up the process and decreased content while not improving much.

The dungeon design of POIs only managed to make this game look more generic and at the same time it removed most of the stealth content from the game.

We had stupid zombies what made people create traditional bases but the AI "improvements" and general zombie changes drastically cut down the possible ways of survival effectively reducing content again.

Now we have this wonderful loot rebalance what only made sure that you progress slower but didnt added anything into the game, its just grind. I generally wouldnt complain about grind (i played poe and their kind) but this is not the kind of game what should have that.

I say the developers should stop now with all their balance ideas and focus on content for a sandbox enviroment. From the top of my head we could already have:

  • Acid sprinklers, flame throwers, dart turrets, hidden spikes, more traps in general!
  • Swords, maces, machetes, whips, expansion of melee weaponary!
  • Randomisation of Poi's because we really dont need to have a collection of dungeon maps for all pois!
  • Adding all ingame decorations into the players crafting capatibilites also more variations of certain decorations!
  • More ranged weapons, bows, guns, a freakin mortar! Weapons are key for survival!
  • More blocks in general for various purposes!
  • Readding lost features, items and such from older alphas!





 
Definately agree. Gradual and steady progression. More item variety. More enemy variety, and smoother scaling of difficulty. Some/More/Any end game content (depending on how you view things currently).

When I posted a recent idea in the dev thread about different bears, I had no idea they'd appreantly be a large vram hog. Just using that thought as an example here.

Right now the first time a player sees a bear it's an oh @%$*#! moment. And those are good. But, imo, there aren't nearly enough of them.

If bears could be scaled so in starter biome you'd only get smallish black bears, they'd still be a oh @%$*#! moment.

But as you progressed you'd also get a scare the first time you saw a really big brown bear (basically whats in game now), and you'd likely get an even bigger scare the first time a polar bear appeared out of the snow.

Bonus scare factor would be if black bears could fit through a door, unlike the current bears. Which would also stay with a player so even if the larger brown/polar bears couldn't fit through a door, the player would have been trained to believe that a "bear" can chase them inside a building.

Same thing with a player who's gotten used to the small black bears, sees what looks like one, says, "hey I can take that", heads over only to discover it's a massive brown bear, or better yet is at reange and pops off a shot and only realizes their mistake as it charges them and keeps getting bigger and bigger.

To me that's a good example of ramping difficulty and adding tension to progression. Really too bad they can't do it.

This kind of thing is why I've plead the case for at least one more caliber, the .223/5.56. For inexplicable reasons they've now added that calibers iconic weapon, the M4, but continue to stubbornly refuse to add it's ammo. Which is perfectly situated mid way between the 9mm and 7.62 power wise.

That gives more progression, more choices and, done right, would allow upping the hitpoints of the end game bosses some, by upping the damage of the 7.62. Which is really needed imo. Due to really only having two 'ranged' calibers, the 9mm in SMG and the 7.62, they've had to compress zed hps to fit the very narrow 'power' range of these two calibers. Imagine if they'd mimic'd rl. The 7.62 is roughly 5 times the power of a 9mm.

Basically add in 5.56. Slot it into where the 7.62 is power wise now. Double the current 7.62 for the new 7.62. You wind up roughly with 9mm as base, double that for the 5.56, and double the 5.56 for the 7.62. (say, 50, 100, 200)

Now late game zeds like ferals don't have to fall so easily to the 9mm. And the bosses could have 75% more HPs and not be quite so bullet spongy, but only to a 7.62 or a Slug. And if all you had was a 9mm pistol, well, better be up on an unreachable concrete perch cause it's gonna be like trying to kill a bear with body shots using a primitive bow and stone arrows. (don't forget that pistoleros now have the vulture in .44 Mag, ~roughly in the 5.56 power neighborhood, so they're not totally screwed)

Anyway, guess I'm just venting at this point. Should be saying 'thanks!' that the M4 was added. Now that all the art/animations are in game a small modlet adding in 5.56 & some loot table work and we can have a mid-power rifle.

 
Different ammo won't solve the underlying "no challenge rampup" issue though. Just like adding pipe pistols like they plan on doing won't fix the early loot problems (opening containers and finding junk). 

The real issue comes from a lack of challenge variety. I mean, the most challenging the game ever has been was during that crazy patch with bears and direwolves everywhere. It was over the top, but it was a refreshing "I can't just run though lootville without any fear" feeling. We're back to square one unless you leave the forests, it's an empty world. Wandering hordes are more like a wandering XP train, they present no challenge whatsoever compared to normal roaming zombies.

And this is definitely the issue : you CAN make the game difficult by making zombies run during daytime and playing on Insane difficulty. But it's a bandaid, since Day 1 is living nightmare but there isn't any change at all after that.

Nothing to do but to wait for gamestages biomes/POIs, special infected zombies and bandits to be honest.

 
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Yes, this game needs more stuff to fill the sandbox feel and extend the gameplay between the Bloodmoon hordes. Like beHypE said, you can ramp up the difficulty, but that isn't the solution. Lowering the loot, also, can extend your fun time in the game by making it harder, but it's not a solution either. Some things that could help, in my humble opinion:

  • I'd definitely scrap the dungeon style POI's and most of the sleepers and increase the wandering zeds and ramp up the wandering hordes. Why? Game feels empty and too linear, while the wandering "horde" is just an XP pinata.
  • Expand the farming/cooking part of the game with real benefits like wellness was back in the day. I'd LOVE to see custom recipes that players could invent themselves that would give benefits according to the ingredients you put in them, but I'm not holding my breath for that one (maybe give us info on how to mod recipes into the game for ourselves?) :) Also more stuff to grow would be cool.
  • Maybe give us more building options for decorating, or useful objects like working sinks (working with some rain catching thingamajiggy), working ovens when you have power (maybe needed for those better meals).
  • If perk trees go unchanged, I'd split weapons from them (at least firearms), because it just doesn't make sense. Weapon usage should get better by using them, or have it's own perks (accuracy, assembly, maintenance or whatever that would deal with damage dealt, quality you could make and anything else relevant).
  • Things I love are writable boxes, more tools and weapons... also the new zambies :)
I'm out of ideas for now, but you get the point. More meat for the in-between BM horde sandwich :)

 
FileMachete said:
When I posted a recent idea in the dev thread about different bears, I had no idea they'd appreantly be a large vram hog. Just using that thought as an example here.
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Now im kind of interested in just what makes the bears got the vram. The only difference between a bear and a zombie is the textures and the hitbox so what makes them worse compared to like the flaming zombies.

Adding more and wider variety of zombies could allevite a lot of issues along with adding in new items to create proper progression.

 
Solomon said:
Now im kind of interested in just what makes the bears got the vram. The only difference between a bear and a zombie is the textures and the hitbox so what makes them worse compared to like the flaming zombies.

Adding more and wider variety of zombies could allevite a lot of issues along with adding in new items to create proper progression.
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It's probably same bs as with UMA using too much resources. I got @%$*#!ty pc and was able to crank 140 of those out with semi ok fps (with custom AI), probably it will be even better on dedi. (the ones on the picture are from khzmusik . and there is lot's more variety of them available on forums for example here:



).

A19.0_2020-08-08_10-04-28.jpg

 
kebab39 said:
It's probably same bs as with UMA using too much resources. I got @%$*#!ty pc and was able to crank 140 of those out with semi ok fps (with custom AI), probably it will be even better on dedi. (the ones on the picture are from khzmusik . and there is lot's more variety of them available on forums for example here:



).

View attachment 13281
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Perfect screenshot showing why UMA zombies were cut. Look how awful the rest of the world has to look to allow a bunch of them onscreen. Thank you for making TFP's point so well.

 
JCrook1028 said:
Perfect screenshot showing why UMA zombies were cut. Look how awful the rest of the world has to look to allow a bunch of them onscreen. Thank you for making TFP's point so well.
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It kinda shows just how bad is TFP at optimization, theres like 3 max 4 of the same zombies in a cluster there. If its the same problem with UMA as with bears that means that TFP doesnt learned anything from the situation and just gone with the lazy approach of fixing aka delete and restart.

 
JCrook1028 said:
Perfect screenshot showing why UMA zombies were cut. Look how awful the rest of the world has to look to allow a bunch of them onscreen. Thank you for making TFP's point so well.
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Rest of the world is optimized (no distant buildings, less objects, less block types etc.), there is potentially 70 people I know who want to play "alpha 14 but without downgrade" which is a goal of this mod. I can spawn same amount of current non UMA zombies (with 3-4 variants) and you will see that performance is similar (biggest factor is ai tbh, if you freeze it, you can slap maybe 300-400 entities before you notice anything).

Here is what the saved performance would be used for in the mod:


Screen below shows halved performance when using non uma zombies, same amount.

tttttttt5f.png

 
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Guys, I just want to be clear that I'm not certain how to interpret what MM said, so to be fair, here's what his reply was;

"I love it when realism trumps feature requests. Uh no Arizona does not have polar bears, and computers do not have 100 gig video cards yet so we can't add stuff forever. We're lucky to have what we have, and we're not getting any new animals except maybe a dire wolf model."

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/16394-alpha-19-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=385663

And just my thoughts on it, but I do think that TFPs are painfully aware that the world is mostly empty, and they don't see that as a good thing.

But. and this is from someone who honestly doesn't know what the various costs are. I do think they put themselves in the situation. Maybe too much in the way of deco block textures? Maybe the AI being too expensive to support large numbers of zeds at a time. I don't know. I do know that, personally, I would gladly give up a lot of the visual 'looks great' bits for more zombies in the world, like there used to be.

But this from a guy who thought the first Doom was great and grew up reading books, so 'looks' have always been secondary to gameplay for me.

When I started playing there were still Hub Cities, with -lots- of z's all over the place. Sure, they were all dumb as rocks, and did goofy things as a result, but the world never felt empty, and you never felt safe. You used to constantly sidestep around and around a tree when you were chopping it down, because if you didn't you could count on getting jumped. Now, even on day 1 I don't have to bother doing that. Yet I do think they'd increased the random z spawn in the world in a19. Which is a good thing imo, and I hope they can increase it some more in the cities.

 
FileMachete said:
Guys, I just want to be clear that I'm not certain how to interpret what MM said, so to be fair, here's what his reply was;

"I love it when realism trumps feature requests. Uh no Arizona does not have polar bears, and computers do not have 100 gig video cards yet so we can't add stuff forever. We're lucky to have what we have, and we're not getting any new animals except maybe a dire wolf model."

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/16394-alpha-19-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=385663

And just my thoughts on it, but I do think that TFPs are painfully aware that the world is mostly empty, and they don't see that as a good thing.

But. and this is from someone who honestly doesn't know what the various costs are. I do think they put themselves in the situation. Maybe too much in the way of deco block textures? Maybe the AI being too expensive to support large numbers of zeds at a time. I don't know. I do know that, personally, I would gladly give up a lot of the visual 'looks great' bits for more zombies in the world, like there used to be.

But this from a guy who thought the first Doom was great and grew up reading books, so 'looks' have always been secondary to gameplay for me.

When I started playing there were still Hub Cities, with -lots- of z's all over the place. Sure, they were all dumb as rocks, and did goofy things as a result, but the world never felt empty, and you never felt safe. You used to constantly sidestep around and around a tree when you were chopping it down, because if you didn't you could count on getting jumped. Now, even on day 1 I don't have to bother doing that. Yet I do think they'd increased the random z spawn in the world in a19. Which is a good thing imo, and I hope they can increase it some more in the cities.
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Deco blocks sure are problem for many clients (skyscraper test is good to check if your pc can handle lots of weird blocks). I too grew up on old games, and would rather have 1000 zombies roaming world that looks like pile of @%$*#!, than current 10 in "kinda nice 2013 graphics alpha 19" world. I think in older updates game used to spawn zombies bit closer to the player, or their footsteps were barely heard, but yeah, felt like constant danger.

 
JCrook1028 said:
Perfect screenshot showing why UMA zombies were cut. Look how awful the rest of the world has to look to allow a bunch of them onscreen. Thank you for making TFP's point so well.
Click to expand...
I mean, that's 140 UMA zombies. TFP's point is "the streets are empty for FPS gainz", but there's a pretty huge gap between 140 UMA zombies in a single chunk and 1 normal zombie per chunk, don't you think ? Even during the crazy wildlife patch where you'd find a bear/direwolf every 50 blocks, my group and I never had any FPS issues.

I love new art and deco blocks but hell, gameplay rules everything. I'd rather have a living world than a beautiful dead one like we currently have.

 
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