PC Why was this feature removed?

[theFlu]

playing the game focused on exploiting its underlying mechanics.

Focused on exploiting, obsessing, these are the phrases that lose me (and I guess most everyone else you're applying them to).

The mechanics are what they are, and where I think they could be improved, I make some noise. Not because I can't enjoy the game, but because I'd like it to BE better. If I didn't enjoy the game, I wouldn't bother.

Some of the mechanics are "mostly fine", and even the B-movie moments are great at times. Games4kickz just had a funny moment where a stripper fell thru a ceiling in a horror attic, nailed a landing on the ritual table at the end of the room and stood there, menacingly, staring at the player for a few seconds before charging in. Proper b-movie moment. Sadly she was accompanied by a couple worker zeds, who decided on "DestroyArea" upon landing, and carried on to eat the walls, making the sum of the moment .. well, a lil less. (that spot is also one of the better zed droppers, it looks like you could get there "normally", it could easily exist in such a place, etc.. biggest flaw is it's still "breaking upon entering" under the activating zeds)

That DestroyArea there is a bit of a weird design. Lets obsess over that for a bit. Why? Well, they didn't want zeds to be infinitely loopable by simple droppers. So they added a mechanic where if they fall, they'll rage at the nearest blocks for a while. Technically works. If they made it conditional by some means, people could exploit That, so it's just random. But for some reason it is also applied to zeds that fall from their pre-designed traps within POIs. This neuters the traps, as you'll get about 10 extra secs for free. Props for keeping it continuous, I guess, but it defeats the purpose of the traps.

Can I play with it like that? Yeah. Would I like it to be disabled for the dropping zeds, to improve the droppers.. yeh. Even if I dislike the droppers in general, that'd make them at least better towards their function as a difficulty element, and thus also add to their horror effect; you won't be scared of a clown car for long..  

 

[theFlu]

Looking up at the airdrop plane and seeing a line of zombies falling out of it as it streaks across the sky...

That might be neat indeed, maybe a little tough to explain in the lore as a duke-tactic, but at least they'd have an origin

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

My prediction, which aligns with Newton's, for that scenario is
a lot of pock marks, craters, destroyed cars, red skid marks, and goo.
The only real danger would be having one of them fall on you.
Terrafirma and just plain old newton, will handle the rest.

Water might as well be concrete at that rate of speed. Ask anyone whose
bungee cord snapped, OOPs, You can't. I'll let mythbusters disprove that
one. Anything that still has motility after that should be noting more than

a crippled, cracked, crunched, crawler.

 

[theFlu]

My prediction, which aligns with Newton's, for that scenario is
a lot of pock marks, craters, destroyed cars, red skid marks, and goo.

My experiment with a decent correlate to the scenario would indicate that - even without any parachuting equipment - the zeds would at best lose a little less than third of their HP. It'll be fine

 

[Vaeliorin]

That DestroyArea there is a bit of a weird design. Lets obsess over that for a bit. Why? Well, they didn't want zeds to be infinitely loopable by simple droppers. So they added a mechanic where if they fall, they'll rage at the nearest blocks for a while. Technically works. If they made it conditional by some means, people could exploit That, so it's just random. But for some reason it is also applied to zeds that fall from their pre-designed traps within POIs. This neuters the traps, as you'll get about 10 extra secs for free. Props for keeping it continuous, I guess, but it defeats the purpose of the traps.

Can I play with it like that? Yeah. Would I like it to be disabled for the dropping zeds, to improve the droppers.. yeh. Even if I dislike the droppers in general, that'd make them at least better towards their function as a difficulty element, and thus also add to their horror effect; you won't be scared of a clown car for long..  

The funny thing about this is that it doesn't actually stop simple droppers, you just have to build them a little taller and the zombies never go into DestroyArea.  While I personally don't build infinite loop bases, I sometimes build bases where the zombies will fall if ragdolled, so it's nice to be able to keep them from randomly attacking bits of my base, mostly to save on the annoyance of repairs.

 

[theFlu]

The funny thing about this is that it doesn't actually stop simple droppers, you just have to build them a little taller

Ye, I avoided that part intentionally, kinda referred to it with the "conditional exploiting" ... felt like it might be a tad too harsh to point out that it didn't actually solve much, just broke the sleeper droppers ...