Fishing Hooks = OP

Game Talk The Drawing Board
21

Let’s bring out the realism argument here:

Crafting a fish hook a thousand times doesn’t make you an expert in mechanic.

Gameplay aside, grinding was an option to an end, but was grinding itself an option intended by the developer? “You can craft harder recipes to increase skill, read skill book, or just craft a basic thing hundred of time” ? Or was grinding a by-product of the skill leveling mechanic? A flaw?

This isn’t about options or the player choice to do one particular thing or not, this is about fixing an exploitable mechanism. Player should not be able to grind, not because he choose to do so (despite the tediousness) but because the game’s rule/logic say so.

22

For both to be a means to an end (instead of one being a means, the other being a shortcut), both need to have similarly laid out limitations. For books, you are limited by the entry skill level, by the max level you can reach using the book, by the book’s availability, and by the time it takes to read the book.

For training, without the cap you are limited only by time - basic crafting components are trivially easy to find, and have no entry level or max level limits. The “craft as long as possible” function replaces reading. With the cap, you get the same set of limitations. Entry skill level for a recipe, max skill level you can attain with the recipe, the availability of tools and components, and the time it takes. The time is frequently less than what it takes for using a book, especially at lower levels, and components in general are easier to acquire (most recipes being reversible), plus they can be used when illiterate. Books, on the other hand, hold extra recipes, and at higher levels tend to increase your skill faster than practice.

Thus, the two paths to skillgain are more or less balanced against each other.

23

Uh guys, its already merged and in the game, by Kevin himself no less. So the discussion seems pointless.

Cheers again for Sean!

24

I, personally, dont use grinding, but in-game limitations on stuff like “cooking meth through cooking meat” stuff seems like good thing to add. Makes game some more serious, as for me. So - cheers to Sean for implementing (and to Kevin for merging).

25

I hate skil rust system. It’s not only strange and unbalanced, it angers a lot.

I could have describe reasons why, but no. You know them.

26

My solution for the grind would be to make experience gain inversely proportional with the difference between PC skill and the recipe’s required skill.
That way the PC can still craft fishing hooks with 100% success rate, but would gain an decreasingly significant amount of experience from it after overskilling the recipe.

In addition to preventing grinding, the inverse proportionality of experience gain with the PC’s overskill will also encourage the player to make some higher level stuff as opposed to making X items for Y time.

And as far as implementation goes, i doubt this will be any more difficult that adding an equation to the code before the actual experience gain.

27

[quote=“Uneron, post:23, topic:5547”]Uh guys, its already merged and in the game, by Kevin himself no less. So the discussion seems pointless.

Cheers again for Sean![/quote]

Yeah, strange nobody noticed. In newest experimental you are capped ate max +1 above the skill requirements from crafting. (this probably needs some more work).

28

The problem with lot of changes that are in the right direction is, if they are safe to be introduced in game right now, or if they break something, because other things relies on their current implementation.

I just hope there is enough useful recipes you can craft on each difficulty level… but I doubt that.

29

Well, let’s see.

For Fabrication, you can make wood shafts, pebbles and darts from the start, which are useful and are likely to get you to 1 skill with no issues. Maybe spikes, too. And the hooks, of course, but I’m looking for “useful”. Field-point arrows are good fodder to get yourself to level 2, as are crossbow bolts. If you’re lucky to have found a welder at this point, steel frames are good, as are wooden frames - they need far less for assembly. And charcoal works too, if you’ve found a kiln. To level 3, you can ride on batteries, or lead, or - if you’ve a serious stockpile of miscellaneous crap - grenades. There’s some arrows and other small items there. To level 4 you can get with a variety of small tasks, like caltrops, fletched arrows, some reloaded cartridges and miscellaneous gear. To 5 there is a whole lot of reloaded ammo recipes and various tools and gear that, while not necessary to repeat, will provide enough practice due to how many there are. From then on, it’s fairly easy to go higher - there are a lot of different vehicle parts and other constructable and consumable items.

To start off Electronics, you will need to disassemble stuff, and craft lightstrips with the components. Once you’re up to 1, however, you can craft power amplifiers, which you can use for a flashlight, a soldering iron, and noisemakers made from any radios you find. From there, till level 3, you can practice on making actual radios, proper noisemakers, and generally more advanced components, including acid extracted from batteries. On levels 3 and 4 there are a number of items you can craft as well, including the disassembly of any broken manhacks. Further on you can start crafting or uncrafting bionics, and there’s generally a large amount of high-level stuff you can work on, but for the most part Electronics, as expected, does not have a whole lot of things you would want to craft a lot of - therefore training your Electronics will most definitely feel a lot more like grinding, but that’s just what it would be if you were intent on learning it from scratch yourself.

Cooking… I could look in more detail, but skimming through the recipe list I see a whole lot of different items, across all skill levels, most of which will be consumable - which means you’ll have plenty of opportunity, and need, to craft them repeatedly as a matter of course.

Tailoring is a different beast, because while there is a lot of stuff you definitely can do, a large amount of it is hidden away in books. Nevertheless, there is still quite a lot of things to craft that you discover as you raise your survival and crafting skills. While a lot of it falls under the same clause as electronics, I think it’s also fair to say that tailoring is not something you can just accumulate knowledge in as a matter of course, unlike cooking and fabrication. So some amount of repeated crafting will have to take place, plus I’m fairly sure the cap only affects the crafting side - you can still use any piece of clothing to “practice your sewing”, essentially giving yourself a clean slate in regards to technique and improving your skill without restraint.

I think that’s all for the important ones. Survival is levelled trivially as you butcher every zombie corpse you come across to prevent it from re-raising, and mechanics is primarily levelled by working on vehicles anyway.

So yeah, I think there’s enough recipes to work with the progressive skill training even now.

30

Alright, good to hear you have it covered. My guy has skills already, looking forward to check new system with my new toon, once the old dies.

31

Yeah, i ripped a hulk’s face with one. Really OP.

32

Now that the cap has been implemented, another issue comes to mind: what do you do when you run out of recipes?

Take cooking, for example. Once you’ve reached the maximum level the cap allows, you can’t go any further. I don’t have time to check at the moment, but let’s say the most difficult dish to cook takes a skill level of twelve. You can grind up to thirteen, and then that’s it. End of the line. You can’t get your skill any higher now, which means that there is no reward for people that get to that level. You’re capped at thirteen, along with every other player. By implementing this, we’ve killed the idea of unique, super strong survivors, because there is now no method to raise certain skills above the ceiling that this grinding cap has created.

33

I think, in the balance document, 10 is supposed to be world-class. There is supposed to be a level that is considered “you are now the greatest ever human to do this”, and that is the last level. No point in leveling beyond that.

34

Well, the exact cap for a recipe that has a difficulty of 12 is now 16, because at KA101’s insistence I’ve made it so it caps at Difficulty*1.25+1, i.e. at 25% over the difficulty level, plus one. This is to ensure that you can actually craft the recipe with a decent degree of reliability, occasional low rolls taken into account. Thus at skill 4, you will actually be able to train to 6. At skill 8 you’ll be able to train to 11. At skill 12 you’ll be able to train to 16.

The question is, however - for a skill exclusively trained - i.e. used - by crafting, what is the underlying necessity of pushing it further than the best recipe you can craft for that skill needs, with the additional overhead allowance for reliable crafting taken into account?

Remember, this cap is only for crafting skills. Fighting skills, survival, swimming, etc, can still all be trained with impunity, because increasing them to ridiculous heights actually has a definite benefit.

35

[quote=“Sean Mirrsen, post:34, topic:5547”]Well, the exact cap for a recipe that has a difficulty of 12 is now 16, because at KA101’s insistence I’ve made it so it caps at Difficulty*1.25+1, i.e. at 25% over the difficulty level, plus one. This is to ensure that you can actually craft the recipe with a decent degree of reliability, occasional low rolls taken into account. Thus at skill 4, you will actually be able to train to 6. At skill 8 you’ll be able to train to 11. At skill 12 you’ll be able to train to 16.

The question is, however - for a skill exclusively trained - i.e. used - by crafting, what is the underlying necessity of pushing it further than the best recipe you can craft for that skill needs, with the additional overhead allowance for reliable crafting taken into account?

Remember, this cap is only for crafting skills. Fighting skills, survival, swimming, etc, can still all be trained with impunity, because increasing them to ridiculous heights actually has a definite benefit.[/quote]
I was implying this issue in my previous post, actually. Probably would have been smarter to be more clear when I said it. Now that it’s been addressed, I can stop being grumpy.

The only other issue I see is that some people that want to take their crafting to crazy heights can’t do it now. I don’t really care too much about that, though, so eh.

36

Oh yes, more tedium is exactly what this game needs. Lovely. This just encourages savescumming to find all the books you want at the nearest library, you know. Increasing player tedium is going to make them less willing to play the intended way.

37

How many people looked at this thread and started using a fishing hook as a weapon?

38

This is a fantastic mechanic and is just the sort of thing that DDA really needs. Thank you so much Sean it’s really appreciated.

I’ve tested this and the soft cap (allowing a level 6 construction to go up to an 8 for instance) seems great. Progression seems natural as well at that rate, I’ve yet to have to keep making things which don’t add to my skills or find it penalizing me in any way.

To the nay sayers:
This makes complete sense from both a realism, common sense and gameplay point of view. This doesn’t increase tedium at all, it basically makes you have to do more exciting things, find better ingredients and explore, rather than sitting in one place and becoming a super engineer with a rock and a nail. Literally the ONLY thing this stops is exploitative grinding.

39

[quote=“Binky, post:38, topic:5547”]To the nay sayers:
This makes complete sense from both a realism, common sense and gameplay point of view. This doesn’t increase tedium at all, it basically makes you have to do more exciting things, find better ingredients and explore, rather than sitting in one place and becoming a super engineer with a rock and a nail. Literally the ONLY thing this stops is exploitative grinding.[/quote]
This is subjective, but I don’t think having to check a dozen electronics stores to make twenty lightstrips I don’t need or want is fun or exciting, I find it tedious. There are times when there’s a sequence of recipes you can find a use for, like fabrication, times when the materials and variety are so great it’s easy to just casually raise the skill, like with cooking, and times when you have to grind out a bunch of junk you don’t want or need, and now have to search for increasingly rarer materials to make piles of things you don’t want, just to raise a skill to the point where you can access what you do want, like with tailoring and electronics.

40

That would be true if there was a hard cap or if DDA had a scarcity of materials.

As it’s a soft cap, you shouldn’t be in a situation where you’re having to make stuff you don’t want just to see improvement and materials are so abundant that you’re only going to be really having to search for high level stuff that was rare enough anyway. It just means you can’t reuse the same objects over and over.

Also, the way crafting works in the game, you usually want to keep on making higher tier versions of what you already have. Admittedly there might be some things you make tons of over the course of the game (bolts for instance) and they will eventually stop giving you xp, but they will stop rust. If we find the cap is too low or whatever, that can be changed to give more leeway, although I think it’s pretty perfect as is.

I guess the main reason why I think this is must is because it’s so completely common sense that it seems awkward not to have it in. It also allows a much better level of balance, as we can now go forward knowing that players can’t just grind everything up to max in their starting shelter.