[quote=“KA101, post:20, topic:1878”][quote=“acidia, post:15, topic:1878”]Honest question time… and more about the creatures than you will probably want to know…
When I was adding these I was a little uncertain of how the community would respond. They were, like the npc mission alludes to, a counter to the ‘raid at night’ live in the woods strategy. As long as you only stick to a small patch of woods then the danger of encountering one is relatively low. It is when you have a new character and are covering large amounts of wooded/swap territory that it becomes an issue. Pretty much it was to curb stomp ‘elves’ who run about with their little bows until they have enough skill to slaughter entire towns of normal zombies.
Jabberwock is the animal/human “flesh golem” but what would you think about encountering Legion which is the pure human “flesh golem”… Jabberwock is sinewy and lean while Legion would be massive and slow. Both have the advantage of multiple ‘heads’ integrated into their body so they have more HP than a typical zombie of comparable size… but Legion would be designed to counter vehicles.
Storyline wise, the flesh golems arise from the mass graves and corpse pits where the biological matter became inseparable and simply fuzed corpses together.
As a hint, the best counter to them is probably running straight into town or a building… they stop to destroy walls and can lose your trail while doing so.
Although it offers a fun challenge, ya’ll don’t really think it is excessive now do you?[/quote]
I don’t mind the possibility of fighting Legion–would be interesting to see a Castlevania reference. What I do mind is
a) Corpse Pits at last check aren’t actually flammable (I expected them to be flammable ), so having things spawn from them (even if only in flavor-text) seems chintzy.
b) Critters being added specifically to counter X strategy gets really irritating–it’s an incentive to not discuss working strategies because some jackhole dev will screw it up. I didn’t appreciate Smokers countering melee, and I don’t appreciate Jabberwocks being designed to counter survivalists. To the degree that Legion would be designed to punish Deathmobiles, I oppose it.
c) A critter with a magic knockdown ability (anyone know if it trumps Judo?) seems excessive, not fun. The possibility of having one show within week 1? here’s hoping I didn’t like that map anyway.
Re fire as “OP”: Uh, it kills you pretty good if you get in it. I don’t think fire needs any sort of nerf.[/quote]
There’s nothing wrong with additional-counters to add a new challenge and difficulty to the game otherwise if the game becomes too easy or easy to abuse you get bored with it. Also Jabberwocks are really easy to escape from as long as you don’t get knocked down from their roar and traits like parkour expert,quick helps (Not sure if poor hearing will save you from it’s roar or a higher int) and wise movement tactics to delay them they are still stupid so yeah.
Designing monsters to specifically counter a strategy that is being “abused” instead of dealing with the cause, is bad game design. It leads to relying on it as a crutch to shut down “unwanted” player advancement, which leads to side effects and railroading. The only way you can advance is the devs want and there is no choice in the matter. Which leads to the fact that a developer has full control over the game in the first place and can simply disallow the unwanted behaviour if it is troublesome enough to design counters to it. It is better to make it clear for the player that “No, you can’t do this.” rather than devise “traps” to kill off players “abusing” the game.
In the end, I am not sure what a new player is expected to do anymore. Going to the city is supposed to get them killed in the early game, so zombies keep getting buffed. But, going to the wilderness is now supposed to get them killed in the early game too, so powerful monsters are being placed there.
There should be relatively safe areas where a new player can fight monsters, loot and learn the game. As walking out of your shelter and being instantly mauled unless you are experienced enough to know all the little exploits is not conductive to getting said experience.
That being said, the jabberidon’tcare isn’t really crossing the line. I’m just venting at what seems like a very bad direction.
[quote=“Bladerock, post:22, topic:1878”]Designing monsters to specifically counter a strategy that is being “abused” instead of dealing with the cause, is bad game design. It leads to relying on it as a crutch to shut down “unwanted” player advancement, which leads to side effects and railroading. The only way you can advance is the devs want and there is no choice in the matter. Which leads to the fact that a developer has full control over the game in the first place and can simply disallow the unwanted behaviour if it is troublesome enough to design counters to it. It is better to make it clear for the player that “No, you can’t do this.” rather than devise “traps” to kill off players “abusing” the game.
In the end, I am not sure what a new player is expected to do anymore. Going to the city is supposed to get them killed in the early game, so zombies keep getting buffed. But, going to the wilderness is now supposed to get them killed in the early game too, so powerful monsters are being placed there.
There should be relatively safe areas where a new player can fight monsters, loot and learn the game. As walking out of your shelter and being instantly mauled unless you are experienced enough to know all the little exploits is not conductive to getting said experience.
That being said, the jabberidon’tcare isn’t really crossing the line. I’m just venting at what seems like a very bad direction.[/quote]
The Jabberwock is made much much rarer now in the nightly version unless you have a mission for it because it pops up every-time there is a huge patch/ decent patch of forests, also Cataclysm isn’t an easy game like some RNG’s are and not to mention RNG games have that it’s not fair I died to X reason and most RNG’s are hard or unfair at the start.
It only becomes easy when you die a lot of times to learn the game and become experienced so playing it for the first time being new unless your some genius or have survival knowledge then you will last a lot longer than most new players will.
on a side note look how easy it is to abuse zombies by using a smashed single window and killing a horde by abusing that window in a real situation the zombies would push each other inside so it will only buy you a little time before they all surround you. (don’t know when this will get fixed though)
Just reduce the window penalty to movement to 150-200. Fixed. Alternatively, some monsters really need to look for alternate ways to reach you rather than piling up behind the other ones (walk around the house until they find another window/door to climb in through.)
Met three Jabberwocks so far, all three died by frames that smashed into them with around 70 mph.
So far, best strategy to survive for me is: find something for storage, get 2 - 4 emtpy bottles, find a gas station or mine entrance, fuel up, find a car with working engine and get the hell away from everything.
After that’s done: find a nail gun or a gun shop that’s not in the center of town.
Anything else: Oh, a Jabberwock, let’s drive through!
I’m not really a stationary person. Clearing towns or living in the woods for weeks = not my style. So, if you ask me, Jabberwocks can stay as they are.
Full disclosure: I don’t play the nightlies because I’m fond of my characters and don’t like to find bugs the hard way. The problems with inventory items getting assigned the same letter have been enough to scare me off: I make a lot of Clean Water and don’t look forward to having to go thirsty come day 5.
“Abuse” is subjective, as is “too easy”. Not everyone can put hours on end into the game, so what’s “too easy” to you may be rather exciting already to me. Unfortunately, you’re hitting on a basic problem of open-source roguelike development: the players who spend lots & lots of time on the game 1) rapidly skill up, 2) get bored & demand greater challenge, 3) get their demands resolved, 4) GOTO 1. Over time, this cycle makes the game increasingly difficult for new players to enter, as Bladerock discussed.
IIRC the Jabberwock has 140 base speed, which makes it 40 points faster than a typical human such as the starting character. In a loose forest, yeah, maybe an experienced or desperate player could kite it and escape. In a dense forest, I’d imagine that one would eventually run into a wall of 7s and be forced into melee. Vorpal2’s already indicated that successfully melee-ing a Jabberwock implies that the character’s pretty optimized for melee, and you can’t ask all characters to focus on melee skills. As for the roar: Amigara Horrors are tough-but-doable if you can avoid getting paralyzed. But that doesn’t make them suitable for dumping on new characters.
Asking players to take chargen-only traits to counter one critter implies to me that the critter is pretty stanging powerful.
Re driving-as-the-only-weapon: Yeah, and that’s why acidia wants to make an upgraded version. X-(
Proposed solution: Jabberwocks & their NPC missions to spawn only after 1-2 seasons (so Summer/Fall, year 1). This way, starting characters don’t get clobbered, but the woods* eventually become Dangerous.
*Since Jabberwocks come from mass graves, etc, it might be a good idea to associate them with FEMA camps–currently the only location of mass graves–and charge the zed pool a fairly hefty amount for them. An Ominously Empty Area could be a good way to tip players off.
[quote=“acidia, post:15, topic:1878”]Honest question time… and more about the creatures than you will probably want to know…
When I was adding these I was a little uncertain of how the community would respond. They were, like the npc mission alludes to, a counter to the ‘raid at night’ live in the woods strategy. As long as you only stick to a small patch of woods then the danger of encountering one is relatively low. It is when you have a new character and are covering large amounts of wooded/swap territory that it becomes an issue. Pretty much it was to curb stomp ‘elves’ who run about with their little bows until they have enough skill to slaughter entire towns of normal zombies.
Jabberwock is the animal/human “flesh golem” but what would you think about encountering Legion which is the pure human “flesh golem”… Jabberwock is sinewy and lean while Legion would be massive and slow. Both have the advantage of multiple ‘heads’ integrated into their body so they have more HP than a typical zombie of comparable size… but Legion would be designed to counter vehicles.
Storyline wise, the flesh golems arise from the mass graves and corpse pits where the biological matter became inseparable and simply fuzed corpses together.
As a hint, the best counter to them is probably running straight into town or a building… they stop to destroy walls and can lose your trail while doing so.
Although it offers a fun challenge, ya’ll don’t really think it is excessive now do you?[/quote]
It’s hardly excessive, but I think it’s pretty boring. It’s just a tough monster that you really don’t want to melee. It dies pretty easily to a good ranged attack, although that’s hardly its own fault. I do like that the high speed and situational roaring makes it easy to keep it at a distance, but hard to outright outrun.
I’m fine with hard counters, but I don’t think this one is well-suited to your purpose. In my opinion, the strategy you want to counter would be better addressed by making weapon type more important than skill when it comes to doing damage. It would also be important to somehow make kiting and funneling techniques more dangerous, so that a weapon that kills monsters quickly is more than just a timesaver.
It’s not really a problem. Most commercial single-player games bend over backwards catering to both new and challenge-averse players.
Am I the only one, who hasn’t yet been killed by a jabberwocks? Before I have a vehicle, as soon as I see it I turn around. After, well… I just run it over. A vehicle is THE priority to me.
Before their spawn-rate was fixed, Jabberwocks seemed to counter the strategy of “leaving the emergency shelter.”
The other day, I had a fifteen-minute-old character sprinting for cover from acid rain, and suddenly getting double-teamed by a Jabberwock and a cougar. I survived dropped a skewer under the Jabberwock, lit him on fire, then put an arrow through the cougar, but my legs were broken.
I decided that this character deserved to live, dammit, but I couldn’t find a hospital, so I implemented makeshift arm and leg splints in the nightlies. (There were already item definitions for them, so I made them craftable [common materials; 2 survival, 1 firstaid] and added the code to make them slowly mend your broken limbs to 1hp, at which point normal healing can take over…)
Not sure if changed yet (compiling atm) but if a light and a single paper wrapper can kill it, it seems a bit OP. I like the idea of a molotov being a great counter to it, as long as it isn’t perfect.
Also, perhaps there should be some form of weapon that is rare/artifacty but inflicts instant death on the Jabberwock? Some form of Blade with a cool name. Not for gameplay, but for nomenclature reasons.
I should add that as much as they were a counter to anything smokers were actually counters to /ranged/ characters, not melee - since you can’t shoot at them, or any zombies within their cloud.
They still have some difficult in melee of course since the smoke chokes, but it’s not like there’s any shortage of mouth gear to counteract that and they go down pretty damn easily.
Of cours the real reason they were added is because they were cool and required a changeup of tactics without being all that difficult.
Yea I always found that weird. They have that smoke and the trait HARDTOSHOOT so I was wondering how they stopped meleers when all I did was put on a filter mask and punch their faces out.
Re: Design direction, if the jabberwock had been billed as an anti-elf measure, it would have given me pause, because I don’t think that overall strategies should be “countered” by additions to the game. With the spawn rate in 0.6, it probably is a pretty effective counter to that playstyle, as they spawn way too often. As was noted this was reduced to approximately 1/overmap, so there’s a very good chance of a given character never seeing the things.
My reasons for merging the changes were that it’s a very interesting monster and it populates the otherwise fairly barren forests with some danger.
Towns aren’t “supposed to get you killed”, they’re dangerous, but you’re supposed to be able to creep your way in, get some supplies, get used to the situation, clear out a little area, etc. Are things perfectly balanced to do so? no, but that’s not by intention. There are only a few devs interested/willing/able to work on the high level balance issues, because it’s actually some pretty hairy code to make things happen properly. I’m not sure what you mean about zombies getting buffed, because they haven’t had any significant buffs recently, then again recently for me is like the last three days of game development, my perspective is somewhat warped.
We need to fix up the tutorial to provide this, because the game proper is by intention “straight into the deep end”. We have plans for having the game be progressively more difficult in a progressive way rather than all at once, but frankly the expected lifespan for a new player will still be about 15 minutes in-game, because that’s dictated by the scenario. The world just ended, and unless you’re an exceptional individual it’s going to end you too.
A possible addition for the Jabberwock would be for it to roar periodically at random, which would let the player not get ambushed by them, but it would force them to leave the area to do so. I never saw it as a monster that should be ambushing the player, which it seems to be doing regularly. Then again my balance perspective when merging it was from the mission, where you’re warned you’re going after something incredibly dangerous.
Okay now i am almost a little crossed, everyone keeps talking about the Jabberwock, how it keeps killing them and how it counters survivalists/elves. But i have yet to run into one! And i am about as survivilistic/elfy you can get!
SO, now i have given myself the challenge to hunt down this elusive beast and slay it! Wish me luck!
[quote=“Accursed91, post:36, topic:1878”]Okay now i am almost a little crossed, everyone keeps talking about the Jabberwock, how it keeps killing them and how it counters survivalists/elves. But i have yet to run into one! And i am about as survivilistic/elfy you can get!
SO, now i have given myself the challenge to hunt down this elusive beast and slay it! Wish me luck! :D[/quote]
Suggestion: bring a vehicle.
Don’t worry, i have packed for war! >:) … Sadly enough, as the log i have written (just for fun) can attest to i forgot to bring anything else that could be useful. <.< But rest assured, i will find the Jabberwock and slay it! >:D
It’s not that difficult to kill actually. I had one lurking around my base early on in the game, so I lured into a pit while being on Adderall and beat it to death with a pipe!
And don’t get me started on what happens when you get power armor. Jabberwock essentially becomes another petty, weak monster.
