Ralathar44

Imagine trying to explain Dark Souls to a new player. Yet Elden Ring is a smash hit. Same story with Terraria or even Valheim. Those chew new players up and kill them until they learn. We went through 10 years of coddling gamers and pretending they are idiots. The average gamer is 30+ years old, their kids likely game or can get help, and youtube tutorials are everywhere. There are also plenty of "noob friendly" games to play if someone wants simple stuff in the genre. Gaming is thankfully moving out of the phase where we assume every new player is a brain dead invalid. Much like Elden Ring you can play 7DTD without understanding all the nuances and do the loops, you'll learn the nuances in time. Your average player didn''t know the nuances of Apex Legends or Fortnite or DOTA 2 or Rust or etc. They just enjoy those games anyways and learn as they go.

I totally get that, but as mentioned it does mean that focusing vs being a generalist makes a difference and I also really like that. So I guess you could say I like the fact that it really makes choices matter more than I dislike the fact I have to play around it. Making choices always comes with tradeoffs by necessity. That being said i wouldnt worry about cooking. Not only will cooking max out pretty fast but most of the places cooking is in the loot table do not conflict with other magazines. You're not gonna be finding 50 shotgun magazines in cabinets, but you WILL find cooking magazines in cabinets.

Ironically that variability is good. As long as the bottom bound is high enough to ensure decent progression or the player is given some sort of agency or safeguard allowing them to keep progression at a decent level. People play alot longer when things are highly variable vs when they are much more homogeneous. The times where you get the towns without the crack a book or mailboxes or etc are what make the times you DO get them feel so good. This has alot to do with psychology and the methodologies of reinforcing habits. Variable Ratio Schedule of Reinforcement is heinously effective. tl;dr uncertain rewards. But you do need a minimum success rate of returns to maximize it. See casinos and the "wins" where you get your money back alot today vs just losing all the time like it used to be. It's well known and used constantly in gaming, though it's hard to find good publicly available examples. Talking about that kinda @%$# publicly just has a bad look so game dev normally tucks that one away in back corners in recording limited lectures and meetings never intended to see the light of public. The Jimquisition has covered it a few times and snuck away or dug up some footage before though :P. Essentially as long as there are sufficient protections against being RNG screwed you're good. And one thing I've learned about this update is that you kinda do wanna focus if you want to progress fast in an area because the loot pools get in each other's way. You'll see this really take effect when you start completing magazine collections of stuff you've perked in, other perked stuff speeds up. On the other hand if you're jack of all trades you're master of none for quite some time. So I think alot of issues have to do with people spreading themselves too thin.

You're the first person I've ever heard complain about any of this so its clearly not a common issue. I don't see anything egregiously out of place in the gunplay and not only do I not expect this to be Call of Duty or Battlefield or Destiny but I also think its not only fine but healthy for different games to implement their gunplay in different ways. As far as melee animations....communicating to the player accurately where their attack will land > else. Most other games with all the animation variations don't have near the same level of precision. And even something like Dark Souls or Elden Ring that lives off of its melee combat very successfully doesn't give you a left right left cadence when you take individual swings. We're not doing combos in 7DTD, we're getting in individual swings where they are safe. Which is actually very classic old school Dark Souls lol. Combos, for the most part, are not really a thing in actual martial combat. Certainly you'll follow up an attack if you see an opening but you're not gonna left right left kick dragon punch hurricane kick lol. You add in individual extra strikes only as appropriate to the situation. Go watch some MMA for a decent idea lol. The same extrapolates over to weaponry. I'm not gonna say "muh realism" but I will say that designing combat this way is another valid style and not everything has to be some sort of fantasy RPG where you bust out some sick 5 hit sword combo. We have the modern Final Fantasy games for that. Or Devil May Cry or God of War.

Look, while im all for adding a little magazine progression outside of looting and trader to soften things a little, (my own suggestion earlier being that 1 magazine knowledge point be given per perk level and to all underlying skills per attribute level) but end of the day the scavenging is supposed to be part of the core loop. Asking to be able to progress well without scavenging is alot like asking to be able to progress in Borderlands well without spending points in your skill trees. You can't just let someone bypass a core loop entirely without invalidating that core loop. It no longer becomes core, it becomes optional, which radically changes the design of your game. 7DTD without scavenging is just a tower defense building game where you can completely turn off the town defense aspect. If someone wants that....go to creative mode. That's the place for them. Spawn magazines for every X milestone they think is appropriate or find a mod that does it for them if they're too lazy to do it themselves but somehow not too lazy to complain about it. 7DTD or the devs are not trying to be dicks, but the game cannot be all things to all people. It has to have a concrete focused design. No matter how much people throw around terms like sandbox, sandbox games still have a focused concrete design and core loops you have to go through. Which is why Minecraft, Skyrim, Just Cause, Goat Simulator, Grand Theft Auto, etc have their own very defined and unique feels.

Then IMO its a bad introduction area because its so easy to wander into the higher danger zones which new players will totally not be ready for lol.

With intellect build and daring adventurer I had the trader offer a Q4 steel pic at Teir 2 quests. Ironically this is before the capstone for T2 that gives a workbench. So the trader rewards were way ahead of even the other trader rewards lol. On a completely separate note I'm not sure I like the current Navezgane. You start out near Joel and without a long long run you're gonna end up with the same general starting POIs every time. You've got snow to the north, burned forest and Wasteland to the south0, and east/west are long distances before you get to other areas you'd want to settle. POIs are fairly sparsely put outside of the city and all the cities are located in increased danger zones...with the easiest being the burned forest. Desert is not a real option either. This leads to some very samey repeat play throughs unless you're very comfortable with tackling increased challenge areas. And even then you have a good long hike starting out to do so in the nearest POIs in them. And if you decide to stay in the Pine Forest your early, mid, and even late game options for POIs are strikingly limited. You'll see almost all of them in 1 play through. It's good at introducing challenge areas and getting you into them, but RWG seems like a vastly superior experience atm.

Anecdotally I was finding magazines at good pace with an intellect/perception build, Had Quality 5 stun baton shortly after day 20. Iron tools 3. Almost to chemistry station, good foods, etc. Only thing lagging behind really was vehicles with mini bike a couple magazines from unlocking. At this point I was offered a Quality 4 Steel pick from the trader. Granted I had daring adventurer 2 but that was still an entire tier ahead and i was nowhere near making steel but progressing quickly. It definitely felt off. Especially because It was a Tier 2 quest, later on the capstone reward offered me a workbench as a reward lol. I was like "clearly tht should have been a Q4 Iron Pick, not steel.

I think I agree with what a friend of mine said and maybe we need a bigger % of POIs that are not dungeons. Just for variety. I love the dungeons, but I can understand some people feeling like its a little overkill atm. The non-dungeon POIs would prolly need lesser loot rewards because they're easier, but I think people could live with that.

It's definitively not the best armor though. If you measure it by the job of being armor its the worst armor in the game hands down. Even if you're concerned about mobility and stamina and sneaking with mods leather and military are just as good. Now cloth armor may be best at a particular role, but even that I contend is no longer correct. It WAS correct back when mobility and noise mods were usable and you could get bonuses, now military and leather are highly competitive in that area. In fact in this update it is even worse because injuries happen much more often and its got the least injury resistance. Its the best armor in the game only by ease of crafting and cost. And if we're going by that then the Stone Axe is the best pick and best Axe in the game :D. As mentioned before this is only true until mods. Once you add mods in leather and military do the stealth and mobility job just as well. There was a time long ago this was not the case because cloth armor could also use those same mods to be even faster and stealthier, but they wisely removed the use of those mods from cloth armor multiple updates back. So baseline cloth is more mobile and sneaks better, but with mods its just an inferior version of leather and military. I should know, I used to be one of those people who would wear cloth armor end game :D. But after those mod changes there is no reason to.

Aye, I get your intent, I'm just saying that it definitely is a large impacting global balance change and it could have larger ramifications than you may realize, often to specific weapons or tools. These would be difficult to identify without alot of testing or just letting the individual players get upset at the nerf and bug report it if their weapon/tool is affected more than feels good. Ultimately its a preference thing and something is being lost no matter where you move the air in the balloon. I'll play either way ofc, I just push back against the idea that these kinds of solutions actually solve the problem. They do not. At bet they reduce it somewhat while potentially causing new problems :).

This is now like 3 separate conversations. Choose 1 at a time and we can do this. Otherwise its just going to be huge walls of text :D. Qaulity upgrades have been covered. So I'd say either choose mods or cloth armor. Though with hyperbole like "Cloth shouldn't be the best armor in the game" (misleading at best, just flat wrong at worst) I would prolly avoid the cloth armor conversation :D.

Nope, I actually did think of that. You're not thinking of this with balance brain. First of all it is a global balance change, you're changing the balance of literally every weapon and tool lol. Q5 stone gets nerfed by 8% globally, which might not sound like much but if you cross any hit thresholds it becomes substantial. And that's going to happen across the range of quality/weapons/enemies/tools. So it won't be 8%. Let's take the common zombie. Lets say pre-nerf it took Q5 stone 3 hits and a power attack on the ground to kill...all headshots. Now it takes 4 hits and a power attack. That's effectively a 25% nerf for the most common weapon in the game. Players are going to notice their stone tools are weaker. It also STILL runs into much the same problem as currently. Right now its a question of "x is literally better than y", but even if you squish everything numerically you're forgetting about the repair costs. Stone Spear does not have repair kits required to maintain. If Iron upgrades are only a tiny bit better (and with the mod amount differences they'll prolly still be worse) then its not better at all unless you have infinite repair kits. In a game state where the water economy has been hit and glue and duct tape have significant value then Stone Spear is still going to be the better choice for smart players until roughly the same quality break point...iron 3. This is even worse for Stone Axe since its good for everything and now Stone Not only that but you've made this change at a cost. Quality now matters alot less. Not only might you still skip Quality 5 stone to Q3 iron, you might just skip qualities more in general now because it takes 2 qualities to make the difference of 1 now. 5% vs 6% for two compressed qualities.

I didn't think someone would be able to make a suggestion that would actually bother me. I have opinions and preferences ofc but im normally ok with rolling with whatever even if I argue for one thing or another. But congratulations, you've suggested something I would actively hate. This would be a monumental nerf to stone gear and a moderate nerf to iron gear. We'd go back to how it was, where you'd upgrade to the next tier ASAP and quality meant nothing, only low tiers would be much weaker. Right now Stone stuff is not bad and iron is pretty good and steel is basically just bonus awesomeness. This would make stone stuff actively bad, iron good, and steel seen as required progression. Mods make a huge difference in durability, damage, and stamina efficiency. This would also put alot of stress on progression. You wanna make people @%$# themselves about magazines more? Go around nerfing the low tier stuff significantly. And I'm not even touching armor. Cloth is the lowest tier armor but its not the "worst" armor. Its a highly specialized armor for stealth. You'd just be nerfing it for no reason when this update already makes it notably worse. And again you'd be putting stress on progression since now people would feel leather is alot more needed and thus be alot more worried about magazines. No, no, 100 times no to this suggestion. Thanks, I hate it lol.

Then either we have to nerf down everything below steel 3 to make room for that additional power gap between each tool or we have to make the character even more overpowered at high end. You cant just manifest the power ranges that don't overlap out of nowhere. As mentioned above, this is very much not a tweak, tis a global balance affecting thing.