PC Why are the devs screwing over agi/stealth in their POI design?

[Kalen]

"Sleeping" zombies that are completely unresponsive to sound and light and ONLY responsive to player presence within a pre-defined X,Y,Z space are NOT congruent with the rest of the game "rules" and game play dynamics in Seven Days to Die.

I would say the majority of zombies that an average player encounters in a game with default settings are sleepers.... so it would be more accurate, IMO, to say that zombies encountered in the wild are not congruent with the rest of the game.

 

[Diche_Bach]

Why don't they just make it so that the noises of zombies can wake up other zombies, if they want to keep things spicy?
(not to be confused with a screamer that actually spawns in additional zombies).
When a zombie sees you, perhaps a 50% chance it will yell out, drawing in close by zombies, waking sleeping zombies.
Make it so that when you stealth kill a zombie, it has something like 25% chance to groan loudly as it dies.
As you level up in stealth, this percentage goes down... but cap it so that there is always at least a 5% chance.
 
To resolve blood moon, extend Stealth into Stealth and Evasion, which can be a big help during BM.
- chance to dodge melee attacks.
- significantly reduces the player being targeted by cops.
- significantly reduces the player being targeted by vultures.
- significantly reduces the number of vultures chasing you down while driving.

The first part of this sounds very promising to me. Even leaving out the groan loudly, just the collapsing body might wake up other zombies and it would be a LOT more immersive and less incongruous than zombies up on perches that are impervious to all sensory feedback EXCEPT player stepping into an X,Y,Z space.

I won't comment on the issues of 'resolving blood moon' as it isn't something about which I have a clear view.

 

[meganoth]

So I would guess that the scale is 100% means you always get crit and 0% means you never do.... so the negative % get you closer to 0.   That at least makes sense based on the numbers we're seeing.   Except where you saw a -4% being "better" than a -6%.   

The one thing we seem to know is that -4% IS better than -6%, as better armors have -4% or even -3%, at least if I understand hiemfire correctly. Now you propose a new theory that simply doesn't fit the facts.

100% would mean 100% crit RESISTANCE. If I'm right with the 10% for no armor (altough 8% sounds more likely), with no armor and 5 armor slots you have a crit resistance of measly 100%-5*10%=50%

Decked out in -6% padded armor the RESISTANCE would increase to 100%-5*6%= 70%

In steel armor with -3% the RESISTANCE would increase to 100%-5*3% = 85%

 

[Diche_Bach]

I would say the majority of zombies that an average player encounters in a game with default settings are sleepers.... so it would be more accurate, IMO, to say that zombies encountered in the wild are not congruent with the rest of the game.

Some zombies ("many" zombies? maybe "most" zombies"?) seem to have retained some of their sensory capacities from when they were alive. They seem to have something akin to vision, hearing, and perhaps smell and taste? Their reactions to being the recipient of violence also suggest they retain something akin to 'touch' and/or pain receptors. They ALSO seem to have something like hunger or longing (they seem to be looking for something when they shamble about quite often), and they also seem to experience anger or rage.

Playing the game for 5 hours will present the player with COPIOUS game play and in-game tool-tip information which supports all of the above. Efforts to evade these facts by claiming that the "Zombies in Stasis Until the Player crosses a magical geographic threshold" are "the norm" are not going to dispel the inevitable user revulsion at the game mechanic.

ADDIT: and it is perhaps salutary to point out that there are more than one type of "sleeper." There are sleepers standing inside a cupboard who will "behave congruently with prevailing game rules," i.e., they will "wake up" in response to noise. There are sleepers standing up on a perch in the attic space of a small building who will NOT behave congruently in the sense that you can approach them from above make as much noise as you want and until your toon touches the floor in the XYZ space that is defined by the level builder as the "auto aggro trigger" this type of "Stasis Zombie" will not wake up.

 

[Kalen]

The one thing we seem to know is that -4% IS better than -6%, as better armors have -4% or even -3%, at least if I understand hiemfire correctly. Now you propose a new theory that simply doesn't fit the facts.

100% would mean 100% crit RESISTANCE. If I'm right with the 10% for no armor (altough 8% sounds more likely), with no armor and 5 armor slots you have a crit resistance of measly 100%-5*10%=50%

Decked out in -6% padded armor the RESISTANCE would increase to 100%-5*6%= 70%

In steel armor with -3% the RESISTANCE would increase to 100%-5*3% = 85%

That makes sense.... I just don't understand why the %s are listed as negative values.   Starting with a base of -10 and armor has higher values (but still negative) seems overly confusing.    I think it would be more intuitive if the base was 0 and armor had positive values.

 

[hiemfire]

So I would guess that the scale is 100% means you always get crit and 0% means you never do.... so the negative % get you closer to 0.   That at least makes sense based on the numbers we're seeing.   Except where you saw a -4% being "better" than a -6%.   

Padded has a flat -6% across the board on every piece. Steel (on the other end of the spectrum) I've seen with -4% and -3%. Those are not the numbers in green or red either, those are the items' base stats. My character on my test save is wearing fiber in every slot that we can make it for so the -6% armor crit resist has a green value of +4% (which lends to @meganoth's thought that the bare value for a body location, since plant fiber clothing only adds minimal thermal protection, is -10%). It looks like these are negative modifiers on a d% roll over (x) resist roll, the way the information is presented is just confusing.

 

[Kalen]

Some zombies ("many" zombies? maybe "most" zombies"?) seem to have retained some of their sensory capacities from when they were alive. They seem to have something akin to vision, hearing, and perhaps smell and taste? Their reactions to being the recipient of violence also suggest they retain something akin to 'touch' and/or pain receptors. They ALSO seem to have something like hunger or longing (they seem to be looking for something when they shamble about quite often), and they also seem to experience anger or rage.

Playing the game for 5 hours will present the player with COPIOUS game play and in-game tool-tip information which supports all of the above. Efforts to evade these facts by claiming that the "Zombies in Stasis Until the Player crosses a magical geographic threshold" are "the norm" are not going to dispel the inevitable user revulsion at the game mechanic.

ADDIT: and it is perhaps salutary to point out that there are more than one type of "sleeper." There are sleepers standing inside a cupboard who will "behave congruently with prevailing game rules," i.e., they will "wake up" in response to noise. There are sleepers standing up on a perch in the attic space of a small building who will NOT behave congruently in the sense that you can approach them from above make as much noise as you want and until your toon touches the floor in the XYZ space that is defined by the level builder as the "auto aggro trigger" this type of "Stasis Zombie" will not wake up.

I get what you are saying.... however, the alternative is worse, IMO.   We used to have entire houses of free roaming zombies and they pretty much tore up the house before you could get to any of the loot.   Sleepers are a decent compromise, as far as I'm concerned.   So I wouldn't say I'm even close to revolted by it.

 

[hiemfire]

they pretty much tore up the house before you could get to any of the loot.

They pretty much tore up the POI's to get to you if you walked anywhere near them from what I remember from the vids I watched of pre A17...

 

[Kalen]

They pretty much tore up the POI's to get to you if you walked anywhere near them from what I remember from the vids I watched of pre A17...

Yup, you would be in a house and you'd stir up the zombies in the neighboring houses.   When you went to loot those houses they'd be in shambles.

 

[Diche_Bach]

I get what you are saying.... however, the alternative is worse, IMO.   We used to have entire houses of free roaming zombies and they pretty much tore up the house before you could get to any of the loot.   Sleepers are a decent compromise, as far as I'm concerned.   So I wouldn't say I'm even close to revolted by it.

If having sleepers inside structures is desirable for reasons which were obvious in past builds I can understand that. The most obvious "solution" would be that any and all sleepers ARE responsive to noise (however with caveats, see m ADDIT section below). It has to be noted that the present system DOES create breaches of immersion which look, at best comical. Check out my screen cap here: 





That type of thing is now going to become a very common experience for users who stop to consider how to survive with the least risk and most reward.

I realize that, if ALL zombies respond to enough noise then players can "game" that system by making a bunch of noise while in safety either outside a POI structure or otherwise, but those are the breaks. Either the game is "open world" or it is "linear" and if it is one then the degree to which it can involve elements of the other while still retaining a high degree of fidelity, immersion, and fun is necessarily limited.

ADDIT: one possible happy medium . . . set ALL zombies in the game to be sensitive to sensory inputs. Let us assume that the maximum level of sensory receptivity is "1000" for a wide awake monkey dude zombie roaming in the wilderness (or whichever one would represent "the most perceptive" and aware).

In addition to a basic sensory receptivity threshold (1, or 10, or 50 to 1000 or whatever was appropriate) which would be compared to the level of light/noise/other the player creates, zombie "sensation" could have a second variable regulating it which would be something like "Repetition Threshold." This variable would represent how many sequential cycles the zombie would have to be exposed to a sensory signal that exceeded their threshold. 1 would be the "most alert," 10 would mean that, even if the zombies sensation threshold is "500" it needs to receive a player generated signal that is >=500 ten times in a row in order to be alerted -> this, if properly tuned, could conceivable achieve the intended purpose of the "Stasis Zombies" without making them totally insensitive to noise.

 

[Krougal]

Yup, you would be in a house and you'd stir up the zombies in the neighboring houses.   When you went to loot those houses they'd be in shambles.

Ahh yes the good old days. It was like a pack of Endermen and Creepers stomping through your world.

Now between mostly sleepers and 1/4 zed block damage setting my world is mostly intact for me to wreck!

 

[hiemfire]

Ahh yes the good old days. It was like a pack of Endermen and Creepers stomping through your world.

Now between mostly sleepers and 1/4 zed block damage setting my world is mostly intact for me to wreck!

Especially if you're using shotguns and have all the perk mags for them... YouTubers grumping about the "low" RoF on the Auto-Shotgun absolutely amaze me. Especially when they're also talking about how easily shotguns tear blocks to shreds...

 

[Boidster]

Another possibility might be that when a poi is visited the server somehow stores somewhere the state it was when it was visited and upon a next visit no longer loads the POI from the prefabs folder but actually picks up the stored copy of the POI with all the changes a player might have done when visiting it the previous time (all the broken walls, removed trash, looted containers, zombies already killed, etc). In that scenario, if you change the POI SleeperVolumeFlags in prefabs after the POI has been already visited by any player it might not register until someone gets a mission there and resets the POI, at which point I'd assume it would be freshly loaded from the prefabs and the new SleeperVolumeFlags register.

I did think of that which is why I tested in two different POIs. They were far from each other on the map, in chunks I had never before visited (used the POI teleporter to get there). I need to do a more controlled test, not using my live co-op game, which I don't want to tinker around with too much.

Padded has a flat -6% across the board on every piece. Steel (on the other end of the spectrum) I've seen with -4% and -3%. Those are not the numbers in green or red either, those are the items' base stats.

This all sounds like some silliness TFP just needs to fix by normalizing values to 0-100%. Naked survivor should have 0% resistance to critical damage. Armor, perks, and mods ought to add +xx% to that. Why they make it so weird? (I get that the actual number being used behind the scenes in the calc might be negative, but for UI it should all be normalized for intuitiveness.)

And cold and heat resistance? Ugh. Puffer coat should give negative heat resistance. Fight me.

 

[Krougal]

And cold and heat resistance? Ugh. Puffer coat should give negative heat resistance. Fight me.

It used to be this way (more or less). The temperatures also swung all over the place frequently. It was a nightmare.

Realistic? Sure. Fun? No.

Especially if you're using shotguns and have all the perk mags for them... YouTubers grumping about the "low" RoF on the Auto-Shotgun absolutely amaze me. Especially when they're also talking about how easily shotguns tear blocks to shreds...

Yeah  I hate using shotguns because of that. Otherwise they would be my hordenight weapon of choice.

 

[Danidas]

The thing that your missing Diche_Bach is that zombies literally do not exist with in POIs at all in any from. Instead what happens is when a designer makes the POI they place spawn points into the rooms to make encounters. Then they draw a single box around the room that the spawn points are in and then not only choose how many points will be used but also pick one of 3 modes for the whole box. Which are Sleeper, Awake, and lastly Attack to determine how all the zombies in that room will behave.

Now for players nothing at all exists with in that box until they cross into it and at the point the specified number of spawners will activate to fill that room with zombies. Now if the designer did a good job drawing the box it would not be possible for the player to look into it with out triggering it. However in a lot of cases especially when players deviate from the intended path to bust wholes in POIs they can see the mechanic in action. AKA zombies popping into existence 

 

[hiemfire]

Yeah  I hate using shotguns because of that. Otherwise they would be my hordenight weapon of choice.

They're about as friendly to horde bases as dynamite.  I don't use them either, both for that reason and the way they're set up being the opposite of my preference to make use of distance when in the open. When I'm in the range where a shotgun will hit something in 7d2d I'm either switching to a melee weapon or moving to open the distance.

 

[meganoth]

If having sleepers inside structures is desirable for reasons which were obvious in past builds I can understand that. The most obvious "solution" would be that any and all sleepers ARE responsive to noise (however with caveats, see m ADDIT section below). It has to be noted that the present system DOES create breaches of immersion which look, at best comical. Check out my screen cap here: 





That type of thing is now going to become a very common experience for users who stop to consider how to survive with the least risk and most reward.

I realize that, if ALL zombies respond to enough noise then players can "game" that system by making a bunch of noise while in safety either outside a POI structure or otherwise, but those are the breaks. Either the game is "open world" or it is "linear" and if it is one then the degree to which it can involve elements of the other while still retaining a high degree of fidelity, immersion, and fun is necessarily limited.

ADDIT: one possible happy medium . . . set ALL zombies in the game to be sensitive to sensory inputs. Let us assume that the maximum level of sensory receptivity is "1000" for a wide awake monkey dude zombie roaming in the wilderness (or whichever one would represent "the most perceptive" and aware).

In addition to a basic sensory receptivity threshold (1, or 10, or 50 to 1000 or whatever was appropriate) which would be compared to the level of light/noise/other the player creates, zombie "sensation" could have a second variable regulating it which would be something like "Repetition Threshold." This variable would represent how many sequential cycles the zombie would have to be exposed to a sensory signal that exceeded their threshold. 1 would be the "most alert," 10 would mean that, even if the zombies sensation threshold is "500" it needs to receive a player generated signal that is >=500 ten times in a row in order to be alerted -> this, if properly tuned, could conceivable achieve the intended purpose of the "Stasis Zombies" without making them totally insensitive to noise.

My senses may be dulled from playing this game for a long time, but I don't see anything strange in your picture. A stealth player sees zombies in about that distance all the time, even in lesser distance if perked into the shadows. It can be assumed that if zombies "sleep", they are a lot less likey to notice noise and motion.

Now if you tell me you then stood up and shot your blunderbuss a few times and that zombies was still sleeping, then I would find something strange about the situation.

 

[th3s0n1c]

True it is.   But it comes down to what it represents.   If we assume 100% crit resistance means you never get crit.... and 0% means you always get crit.   Anything that gets you close to 100 is good.   But, if the armor is giving you -4 or -6, yes the -4 is better.... but they both suck.  I'd rather have neither.   So that can't be what it means.

Unless, of course, you are right and empty armor has a base of -10.   But if thats true, that is silly.... you are more likely to be crit wearing armor?

My guess? This is just like how armor stats used to be displayed back in A17 (or was it 18?) . Remember when the "comparison" stats was added and it would show the difference on numbers compared to what you were seeing, instead of what you were wearing? Everyone had a mind@%$# at the time because it was very counter-intuitive.

 

[Kalen]

My guess? This is just like how armor stats used to be displayed back in A17 (or was it 18?) . Remember when the "comparison" stats was added and it would show the difference on numbers compared to what you were seeing, instead of what you were wearing? Everyone had a mind@%$# at the time because it was very counter-intuitive.

Yeah could be.... hopefully they polish that up and make it a little more intuitive in the future.

 

[meganoth]

I just tried it again. Half the rooms in shotgun and shamway will aggro after you kill one or two zeds with a crossbow or silenced sniper. Then you have to either shotgun or mp5 everything (slower run and gun basically) or run and hide which works maybe half the time with de-aggro, then start again. If there are many zeds, you have to do this 3 or 4 times to actually stealth kill everything, which makes the clear maybe 10x longer than run and gun. There are aggro rooms, which will automatically chase you, then you have to run and hide again to stealth kill instead of just throwing a grenade or two. This is with game stage 200. Agi builds are quite garbage. There is serious balance issues. This is with almost all of the books, tons of points, and t5-t6 armor and weapons.

I will time my runs on the next test to compare the two.

One question: You previously said you don't use NV-goggles. Did you increase brightness or how can you still see the zombies in the night?

I tried another shotgun messiah run as well, on insane difficulty with similar gear like last time. I mainly tried to count how many zombies I could kill while sleeping and how often I failed in this. And I just did the ground floor of the shotgun messiah, I don't expect further rooms to be any different. Mainly used the crossbow by the way.

Result: Only twice did I wake up zombies because of failed stealth on the whole ground floor, the other two instances were from failing to spot zombies

Further results: Silenced guns are still much more likely to wake up nearby zombies than the crossbow. And using small stones to distract zombies is a big help in re-stealthing

If anyone wants the details, read on:

---------------------------------------

I killed 2 in the first room but forgot to check the ceiling. Got a surprise later when I ran through unstealthed and got into a fight with 4 more.

Then 2 halls and several rooms with altogether 19 zombies killed in their sleep. One zombie woke up because I didn't see him until I was practically standing on him. One other zombie needed two shots which woke up 2 more.

Then the cafeteria with the zombie-filled toilets in front. Killed 3 in the left toilet, then tried to kill the feral biker. Unlike most of the irradiated before he actually did not get killed in one shot and I needed to switch to vulture. This woke up others so I ran. After getting some distance I stealthed, ran a few meters further and threw small stones into far edges. Killed 4 easily.

The right side toilet still had 3 zombies I killed silently. This was in daytime btw. Then up the ramp, killed another 9 plus 3 vultures. The only one who needed a finisher shot from the desert vuiture was the biker, again.