I’m talking about comments like this, which you yourself made:
way smarter heads on the team manage to win out over some truly stupid people
I don’t want to wade back through this thread and find every ad hominem in there, and you’re obviously not responsible for all of them, but it is happening.
Just saying. 
1) Static spawn does make the game astronomically harder. Unlike in standard, you are virtually naked against a horde of regulars and specials to get at even the most basic household items.
This is simply not true. You have as much access to basic equipment as any player in dynamic mode ever did. Houses on the outskirts of cities are, if anything, more accessible than they ever were. At most you’ll have to fight off five-ten greens to get unlimited time to loot a group of 3-4 houses.
By contrast, it used to be the case that after the initial grace period, entering the city was either suicidal, because of the sheer number of Zs, or involved creeping in at night, or through the sewers, which basically rewarded effort, but not skill.
Getting higher level gear requires different strategies, than before, yes, but to say it’s harder is also wrong. Provided you have some basic stimulants, you can outrun everything below a brute. This makes it trivial to clear areas of the city, provided you plan for a number of contingencies (escape routes, buildings with back doors, nearby forests). Doing your stategy of gearing up like a hoplite may also work, but it’s a lot of effort for a relatively easy task.
It is too hard to be fun, too hard to be worth the time, too hard to get access to some of the most important features of cataclysm that make it different from any other roguelike out there. At the end of the day, you can say "You can try to work around it" but right now you have to fight big mobs (Making starting with REALLY good combat skills mandatory or require ages of training, and making low str and dex characters unplayable to the point you may as well remove the option to start below 10) to get at basic things like pots, pans, scissors, sewing kits, bandages, or water containers.
Calling it “working around it” is silly. That’s like saying that completing Half Life 2 is “working around the problem of the enemies they put in the game.”
It’s not a workaround, it’s gameplay. The gameplay has changed slightly, but not fundamentally. Cataclysm is still a survival sim, and you can still access all the content you once could. You just don’t have an hour and a half to sprint to every accessible location worth looting before the game even challenges you.
If you don’t like that, then what were you expecting to happen in the long run? Being able to loot everything from the word go was never intended to be a feature of the game. Whales always used to say that he’d reduce the amount of loot in cities once NPCs came alone, and he never intended to keep spawns as they currently are either.
2) There are no valid strategies other than combat and vehicles. All 3 of your strategies involve combat, and worse, two of them don't work because odds are good you are going to see some zombie brutes in that horde you try to set up a trap against or syphon off. And even then most of these strategies, as my good friend put it, are not fun. At all. Most people I know admit it is possible to play but also note it is no longer fun to play. It is no longer a game. It is work.
No. That’s simply not true. One of my strategies involved any combat whatsoever, and it was selective and targetted combat, rather than the “greek hoplite” mode you seem to be saying is the only way forward. The other two involved contact with Zs, yeah, but that’s not combat!
I also think it’s strange that you find approaching cities tactically to be less fun than grabbing all your loot without any kind of challenge. Dynamic spawns basically made the cities a game of hide-and-seek, and there was nothing else to it! Combat wasn’t an option, as you’ve said yourself. Zombies spawned at random, so you couldn’t use terrain to trap or block them. You couldn’t lead Zs away from the areas you needed. Your only option was to try not to get noticed. That’s fun, but it’s a two-dimensional game, if that’s the only viable approach.
As for your frustration about brutes scuppering your plans, I think that’s a sign that the game is developing. Any game which allows you to apply one basic strategy and win repeatedly is quickly going to become boring. Games need to throw a spanner in the works and make you adapt. If anything, I think there should be less of a move towards making the outskirts of the town safe, because it’s essentially giving players a free pass to all the gear they can reach. Hell, it’s already less dangerous in the outskirts than it is out in the open countryside. That’s just ridiculous! We need brutes and necromancers and shockers to scupper our plans, otherwise making plans wouldn’t be necessary, and the game would be dull.
And I also have an issue with how everyone is saying the vehicle/commando approaches are >bad<. Believe it or not, I thoroughly enjoy combat in cataclysm. I find it more engaging and fun than crafting or base-building. I like seeing my character progress in skill and equipment, and I like taking on challenges more effectively over time. It’s not like the combat approach is shallow and repetitive - combat in cataclysm is, currently, the most developed and complex part of the game. Why is it a bad thing that it’s become a viable strategy?
Likewise, I think vehicles are one of the best designed features of the game, and are miles ahead of any other roguelike vehicles that I’ve seen. I’m glad that they’re no longer a moving storage space, but have some practical and concrete applications. These two aren’t the only two strategies, but I think it’s telling of a good design choice, when two new gameplay elements go from being frustratingly impotent to incredibly viable!
3) It makes living in or near towns early is no longer viable at all. There are no ifs and or buts.
Living near towns is now easy. Zs only spawn within the town limits. In fact it’s much easier than it once was, because the problem of Zs spawning 5 map squares outside the suburbs is gone.
As for living in towns, it never was viable. With dynamic spawns, living in towns was essentially an uphill struggle for no tangible reward. People who chose to live in towns were doing it for the “iron man challenge”, mashochistic, ball-crushing joy of seeing their character slowly bleed to death from a zillion papercuts they could never sleep to heal from.
Just because you can do something with extreme luck doesn't mean that it is repeatable or actually a realistic option. Playing a townie is now like playing a mutant. You can't really do it without hard work. But where as being a mutant is a luxury right now being a townie is the ONLY way to get access to most of the game. So yeah, you can still be a townie, but only after playing this lame ass greek hoplite sim and even then only if you get really lucky on the spawns.
I can repeatedly and consistently clear out towns using any of the strategies I’ve outlined, usually within the first two days. I can also go unarmed to the outskirts of towns, smash a door in, and escape with a kitchen-full of food without any repercussions. I’m not sure you’ve played with static spawns on as thoroughly as you claim, if you are finding the suburbs as dangerous as you claim.
In dynamic spawns, on the other hand, it was very much down to luck as to whether you’d meet Zs your character was capable of handling. It was more than possible never to meet a hulk, in an average lifespan, for example. The game is fairer and more consistent with static spawns - luck is far less of a factor than it used to be.
4) The design is as shitty as a design can realistically be. It is as oppressively unfun and unintuitive to the cataclysm game as is humanly possible.
The game is based around stuff. Static spawns limit you to a pool for like 6 different kinds of stuff until you get a great throwing skill and 50 spears. It is a design that took an awesome sandbox game and added a boring and truly awful linear segment to the front. A design can be called bad when most of the people in my experience who are shown it find the game almost physically painful to play.
Ironically, you seem to have done the exact thing I described, of claiming the design is shitty without giving me any substantial reasons why. It is demonstrably not the case that you cannot access the cities in the early game. I have done it, and others have done it. It just requires intelligence and strategy. It absolutely does not require brute force and high investment in combat skills. That’s only one of many approaches.
It’s also ironic that you’re accusing static spawn of encouraging linear gameplay, when the thing you are sad to have lost is the ability to enter towns early on and grab “stuff”. That sounds suspiciously like a “linear segment” of the game, to me. In fact I can’t remember a single game on dynamic spawn where I didn’t take advantage of the grace period to run into town and loot a sports store. I don’t know anyone who would seriously pass that option up. When a game lets you acquire everything you need in an arbitrary time space, with no repercussions or effort involved, that’s poor design.
But at the end of the day [b]I, and no one I know who played cataclysm played it because they want to mindlessly attack zombies for a few hours.[/b]
Thankfully static spawns have come into effect, so they no longer have to.
This thread came about not because statics are utterly unwanted, but the devs, aside from a few, are kinda keeping it an open secret they are going to end up as they are right now and maintain an extremely negative attitude to anyone who actually enjoys how cataclysm actually flows right now. Hence the need for a push-back thread asking "Do it, but please realize that if you do it like THIS the game is essentially ruined for a lot of people, and that your idea of power gaming is seriously fucked up."
This attitude is so prevalent, any sort of negative thought towards really deep seeted intents is seen of as “bickering” or “fighting.”
To be fair, nobody in this thread has claimed anything other than that static spawns require a lot of work and balancing. I’m not sure why you think they are always going to stay this way.
Maybe some people have said so on IRC, but I see no reason to believe them when Glyphgryph has explicitly said that this is not the case.
I find some of your counterpoints are trying to dismiss what people are actually trying to say ("It isn't fun or worthwhile") with something else ("Well technically everything is still doable").
Obviously “fun” is a subjective concept, and for some people this is less fun. I’m not trying to demonstrate that the game is “still doable”, though, I’m trying to expose the wider variety of strategies available with static spawns than with dynamic spawns. I’m trying to show why dynamic spawns encouraged one approach, rewarded an early-game bumrush for supplies for no reason, and made combat - a highly developed and fun part of the game - an exercise in futility, if not suicide.
