0xA: A nuclear missile hit balance. Balance have been destroyed

[Binky]

Yeah, a base reduction of all of these spawns is needed. I think there was just a moment when someone though ‘hey these are pretty cool’ and ramped up the spawn a lot, which is fine, but it’s kinda not been balanced back out, even with some guarding monsters

As I say though, I think either way will work - either dropping the frequency of ‘special’ item/map spawns or hard nerfing the spawn lists for such events.

[Rivet]

Nothing has been done to increase the frequency of map specials. The issue is that they were very common to begin with; seeing ‘more of them’ is confirmation bias in action.

[Uneron]

If they are more common or not, right now they are extremely easy to find. I usually stumble across a heap of dead guys during my first or second day, same goes for the helicopters.

Those map extras should be reduced by a factor of 5 or so.

[Mrnocamera]

Wait, you go a day before finding a corpse lootfest?

I walked outside the shelter and found two bunches of scientists and a few military corpses.

Mutagen roulette is fun when all you have is a pipe.

[vache]

I don’t think there are more corpse spawns, but it definitely seems like since the loot tables for these corpses has generally expanded to include way more powerful items than to include less powerful items, that these corpses are now even more of a boon than they used to be.

[Dominae]

I think damaged gear should be more common on the loot-pinatas that are corpse piles. Right now it just looks like a group of people (soldiers/scientists/drug dealers, etc) just all fell over from a collective bought of heart failure while carrying their awesome gear.

“Hey these guys died of old age” should be replaced with “omg WTF ate these dudes”.

Military corpses would “feel” better if there were empty shell casings strewn about, their guns were empty, and their armor shredded. Survivors should find the remains of a firefight, not what amounts to mannequins from a “best gear of 204x” Pentagon display in a field near the evac shelter.

Scientists shouldn’t be dead with pristine, out-of-the-package lab coats or scrubs on. Broken flasks of spilled mutagens instead of shiny new ones every time should be commonplace.

Making “a broken” version of some things might be nice. Drug dealer corpses with broken wooden bats, or broken katanas. Imagine getting your skill high enough to repair a katana, make it better, then use it to fight with … a “quest” of sorts once you find one snapped in half, as opposed to just finding one in all its uberness on the side of the highway.

Finding perfect-quality weapons and kevlar vests in a helicopter crash feels fishy too, especially since Cata’s version is a mangled mass of scrap metal that doesn’t even look like it was a vehicle prior. If literally nothing remains of the fuselage how did that dead soldier’s pants and chest rig come out in brand-new condition.

[BeigeSand]

[quote=“Dominae, post:49, topic:5472”]I think damaged gear should be more common on the loot-pinatas that are corpse piles. Right now it just looks like a group of people (soldiers/scientists/drug dealers, etc) just all fell over from a collective bought of heart failure while carrying their awesome gear.

“Hey these guys died of old age” should be replaced with “omg WTF ate these dudes”.

Military corpses would “feel” better if there were empty shell casings strewn about, their guns were empty, and their armor shredded. Survivors should find the remains of a firefight, not what amounts to mannequins from a “best gear of 204x” Pentagon display in a field near the evac shelter.

Scientists shouldn’t be dead with pristine, out-of-the-package lab coats or scrubs on. Broken flasks of spilled mutagens instead of shiny new ones every time should be commonplace.

Making “a broken” version of some things might be nice. Drug dealer corpses with broken wooden bats, or broken katanas. Imagine getting your skill high enough to repair a katana, make it better, then use it to fight with … a “quest” of sorts once you find one snapped in half, as opposed to just finding one in all its uberness on the side of the highway.

Finding perfect-quality weapons and kevlar vests in a helicopter crash feels fishy too, especially since Cata’s version is a mangled mass of scrap metal that doesn’t even look like it was a vehicle prior. If literally nothing remains of the fuselage how did that dead soldier’s pants and chest rig come out in brand-new condition.[/quote]

The finding broken gear thing is a good suggestion. Balancing item finds is kind of silly because it’s all random, but if you have to reach a certain skill level to make things useable, it makes it harder to to go god-mode on day 5. Naturally it would just be things like cbm’s, really good weapons, and maybe the occasional mutagen recipe vs. straight-up mutagen…

[EditorRUS]

S - Scientists
H - Home and Helicopter crash place
D - Drug dealers
B - Basement with ungerground lab
N - Houses with basements

[infectedmochi]

FWIW, a PR has just been merged that reduce corpses spawn rate: here

[Ironstone]

I’m not going to wade into the main argument that nifty stuff is too easy to find, but I HAVE to say something about the comment that piles of dead bodies are too common. This is the apocalypse, people have been turned or killed. If anything we should be finding more corpses instead of less. Shouldn’t we find people who survived long enough to barricade themselves in a house before bleeding out? Corpses too mauled to turn and get up? Fallen soldiers in ones and twos with their ammo and weapons taken by their comrades as they fled?

Maybe we need more “map specials” where the loot isn’t so good. That way we find the ravages of the cataclysm around us but don’t have to worry about finding uber gear in the first week. That way we can have the flavor of the zompocalypse without worrying about it being a cake walk.

I also disagree that there are too many basements. Basements are pretty common things in houses you know. Perhaps the amount of useful stuff could be lowered or diluted with more less jackpot style spawns. Personally I think we should find the odd tool, or bicycle, a washer and dryer, maybe a family game room complete with pool table.

[vache]

The problem is, the lore doesn’t really support the idea that your average joe managed to avoid being turned. The only way the military/scientists managed to not get turned is because they had more knowledge of the nature of the zombification and knew how to avoid it, and the drug dealers were just in their drug dens or drinking energy drinks the whole time.

[Binky]

Maybe we need more “map specials” where the loot isn’t so good. That way we find the ravages of the cataclysm around us but don’t have to worry about finding uber gear in the first week. That way we can have the flavor of the zompocalypse without worrying about it being a cake walk.

I think this hits the heart of the matter. The problem isn’t that there are too many map specials or basements/corpses (although EditorRus’s example does show that it’s still a bit too high), it’s just that when you find them it’s guaranteed good loot. I’d suggest to cap them off at middle range items (so no automatic weapons for soldier corpses, no CBMs for scientists) and edge it into the lore that the wandering groups you see tried to make a break for it, and weren’t able/allowed to take the good stuff with them.

[GlyphGryph]

Fusion Blaster arms have always been fund on drug dealers corpses, and were intentionally put there by whales.

So there is that. Certainly not “new”.

They were originally intended to be a primary source of dangerous-but-also-kind-of-crappy black market military technology. More carte/mafia/yakuza, less corner dealer, if you catch my drift.

One can argue that they shouldn’t be that sort of thing, but you can’t really argue that anything has changed on that front, except that they are now more dangerous.

[Binky]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:56, topic:5472”]Fusion Blaster arms have always been fund on drug dealers corpses, and were intentionally put there by whales.

So there is that. Certainly not “new”.

They were originally intended to be a primary source of dangerous-but-also-kind-of-crappy black market military technology. More carte/mafia/yakuza, less corner dealer, if you catch my drift.

One can argue that they shouldn’t be that sort of thing, but you can’t really argue that anything has changed on that front, except that they are now more dangerous.[/quote]

I’m not (and not many other people) seem to be bothered about things having changed in the spawn list, just that it’s now become a loot pinata every time you find a special map tile. CBMs, automatic weapons and kevlar all seem to be way too good to just have lying around. If a player gets one or two lucky map tiles, they’ve basically got some of the best items in the game - and that’s not an exaggeration.

[GlyphGryph]

That’s always been essentially the way it was though.

I’m not arguing it shouldn’t be changed, I’m just arguing it’s not new.

[Dominae]

I’m not (and not many other people) seem to be bothered about things having changed in the spawn list, just that it’s now become a loot pinata every time you find a special map tile. CBMs, automatic weapons and kevlar all seem to be way too good to just have lying around. If a player gets one or two lucky map tiles, they’ve basically got some of the best items in the game - and that’s not an exaggeration.

I’ll say it to you Bink’ because you know if it comes from me, it isn’t in all seriousness …

!Dude, no one is making you pick that stuff up and use it. If it is “too powerful” for you then just ignore it and don’t use it!

Anywho … Risk vs Reward is wonky in a lot of the game and thankfully it gets tweaked now and again. I’ve been poking fun at the loot pinata corpses for a long while, and usually got griped at for suggesting changes (“it isn’t realistic to limit what MILITARY corpses have on them! they should have MORE loot technically!!” was the usual one, I believe). So it all comes back to the “challenging game vs freeform easymode sandbox” argument that splits this place into camps.

The addition of enemies spawning with the corpse spawns is awesome and adds at least a hurdle to overcome to get the loot, but it still comes down to this for me: If you wander around long enough, keeping safely away from cities (and often you can just stroll down a road safely for miles and miles and miles), you WILL find a crazy cache of loot on corpses that will basically break the challenge factor for you. There are just some fundamental strategies that always work, and “going for a casual walk and ending up a walking arsenal” is one.

[vache]

More broken down cars with zombies around it on the roads would alleviate the problem a bit too. The issue at the heart of it is that epic loot being easy to attain. You can make the epic loot harder to attain, or make the loot less epic, or some combination of both.

Also, I like the broken and torn and damaged items instead of pristine new items. The only thing I fear from that is a huge expansion of crafting recipes to “Repair broken _____”.

[Binky]

[quote=“Dominae, post:59, topic:5472”]I’ll say it to you Bink’ because you know if it comes from me, it isn’t in all seriousness …

!Dude, no one is making you pick that stuff up and use it. If it is “too powerful” for you then just ignore it and don’t use it! ;)[/quote]

Also, I like the broken and torn and damaged items instead of pristine new items. The only thing I fear from that is a huge expansion of crafting recipes to “Repair broken _____”.

Yeah I think it’s a steady balance, but I think it can mainly be done by just capping off the loot spawns at a mid-level. Having badly broken items instead of new ones could keep the ‘realism’ factor of military soldiers would be moderately well equipped, and scientists would have science stuff, but most of it could be unusable or only good for parts (say a gun mod on a broken rifle or a pistol in need of repair). This would still give some reward, but wouldn’t be a loot pinata with kevlar, cbms and so on.

I’m not arguing it shouldn’t be changed, I’m just arguing it’s not new.

Agreed, it’s not particular new, but I do think it needs changing. In the past (way, way back), ammo was a lot harder to come by and it couldn’t be made by hand. This meant that you often got many guns with no usable ammo, which in turn reduced the usefulness of such spawns. Again, I realise it’s not new, but I do believe now is a time to change things.

[EditorRUS]

So, here’s an idea.

Let’s see what we have right now:

1. Corpses are spawned in groups of 4-6. I don’t really understand how it’s possible to die to 4-6 humans at once.
   I think some of these corpses should have some kind of “story”. I.e.:

2. That was a soldier group of 3 soldiers. They were attacked by 5 zombie bears. They could kill 2 of them, but, unfortunately, they had no time to reload and had to run. One of them couldn’t run away and get killed (first corpse). When other 2 soldiers reloaded they could kill 2 zombears, but, a zombie necromancer appear and resurrected all the killed zombears. Unfortunately, the soldiers didn’t have anymore ammo and decided to split and run as fast as possible and meet each other at gun store. But neither of them could run away and get killed by zombears.
   And, as result - one soldier corpse lies after a vehicle and guarded by 2 zombears. Other ones in nearest house and bar and guarded by zombears and zombie necromancer. All the shit will see our player if find them. Their clothes are stratched and ripped.

3. A group of drug dealers were driving somewhere. But, they were attacked by a robot who shot at their gasoline tank and that caused a powerful explosion and killed every dealer almost instantly and seriously damaged other machine. The robot also have got serious damage, but remained alive.
   So, to show that story we should have a group of dealers spawned near to fully destroyed machine. Also, we need to add some fires to builiding near and damage vehicles. All their (dealers) stuff burnt and almost destroyed. And, of course, there should be a heavily injured robot.

And so on.

At least it should be interesting.

2. Corpses spawn to near to each other. It’s hard to come up with idea why they were killed and how.
3. There should be some traces that shows why these corpses appear.
4. Corpses stuff is almost undamaged. Therefore, it means that they’ve got sudden BRAIN EXPLODE and fallen (V2, please) down.

[Dominae]

Just had to share this: http://imgur.com/a/kRUZQ Completely anecdotal and probably never repeatable. What can be seen though, is how crazy bumping into a crashed chopper and supply drops are for a game’s difficulty level.

That is a crashed military chopper within a dozen steps of my evac shelter, which contains a full set of military clothing that fits )including torso & leg pieces that increase carrying capacity, plus all those extra clothes), a Bionic Implant, and SIX different kevlar or MBR vests. All of it is in pristine shape, and the only danger I had to deal with was NOT scratching myself on the wreckage while I collected everything.

Two map tiles south of that were crates (air-drop I suppose?) containing 2 full pages of food and water. There was no danger getting to/from these either.

The shelter basement was fully stocked with various items, including food and water. There were 2 zombies, 1 regular and 1 shocker. I lured them upstairs and bashed them with a makeshift crowbar without serious injury and with zero points in any skills. Seeing the shocker was a cringe-worthy moment, but once I got it upstairs and tripping over furniture there was no issue.

East of me is a mansion, with like 6 kitchens and a massive library. Half the rooms contained firearms, mostly old-timey stuff, but running through a huge mansion clearing out z’s with a bunch of pirate pistols was … interesting. There is no pool there, though (or bathroom of ANY kind weirdly enough, wtf rich people don’t poop), so I will have to wander to town to collect drinking water (or just grab everything from the aforementioned supply drop to last me a while).

There is a cabin in the woods to the north. I don’t think I saw more than a half-dozen of them in all my 0.9 play throughs, to be honest. I saw lots of farms, and other special areas, but no cabins. Boom, there is one on my initially known map area.

Hurray for an awesome start! Boo because I might as well not play it because the challenge is shot to hell. lol