Even if it’s the greatest idea on the planet, I don’t understand why you would make it mandatory. Obviously some of us already don’t care for it.
Are you just going to say “tough shit” someday, and remove it from the options?
Yeah… this change is seriously seriously bad. It’s basically changing it into a completely different game. And it appears to be a very tedious one… I can’t imagine having gotten into the game in the first place if it was so tedious. I’m kind of wondering if the trouble is that the current developers are so familiar with the game they’ve forgotten what it is like to first step into the game? I mean, when you’ve played for a long and gotten so adept at the game, things that are extremely difficult don’t seem that way anymore. I think the game was difficult enough as is.
I really wish the team had decided to continue to expand the game rather than try to reinvent as something radically different. I’m more than a bit sad that I won’t get to see it developed. I’m anything but optimistic considering what seems to be the “pooh-poohing” of any complaints. I can’t imagine that I’m going to be bothering with the game if it keeps going in this direction, without offering the players choice.
Okay… I do have admit, it does make me a little bit angry. But mostly I’m just disappointed at this turn of events. Say it ain’t so. 
[quote=“An0n3, post:21, topic:546”]Even if it’s the greatest idea on the planet, I don’t understand why you would make it mandatory. Obviously some of us already don’t care for it.
Are you just going to say “tough shit” someday, and remove it from the options?[/quote]
Actually one of the only logical and consistent answers I have gotten has been in regards to that. It generally came in two forms.
Removing it entirely reduces the amount of bug reports related to it. Which is lazy, a trend I have noticed because of stuff like “The reason the spawns make no sense is because it apparently took you a year to leave/get to the shelter” which doesn’t make any sense. But eh, while in any volunteer code team, the excuse “We are just volunteering” comes up, and it usually is bogus, but in this regard it makes more sense to cut off the amount of tech support they are doing to focus on doing volunteer code. It doesn’t jive when used to avoid fixing problems but here it does, because it is removing problems they will never realisticly be able to fix.
Secondly, and far more compelling, is having two spawn types does increase the chance for stuff to get in each other’s way, and if static goes permanent then anything new will not be tied to the safe time spawner. We saw it with child zombies. Technically they are still seriously bugged because they spawn on the map right away on parks in dynamic spawning. But no one has bothered to fix em because static is going to be the one true mode from now on. More and more stuff like that is going to make the option for dynamic less and less of an option, and will only aggravate things further. That said, the issue of child zombies does raise the question of how half assed people are willing to be… if they are not ready for static and dynamic is still an option, perhaps they should do something as a temporary slap patch in dynamic, up to removing them from it for now.
And speaking of child zombies, it really does color my perceptions of the team on how that all went down. Even when overtly bugged by being a holdover from a mod more than a few devs were very resistant to the idea of making a small child weaker than a normal human zombie because “It was possible to avoid them.” The problem is “It is possible” should not really be the line that is drawn for what is included. It should really be drawn at “It works, it is fun, possible, and good.” Nobody expects perfection of course, but replacing effort towards quality with excuses and work around is troubling and colors future major changes.
Statics of course, should happen. It is just the design behind them is extremely troubling and so far Gryphon is one of the few people who actually recognized that they really are not as good as they should be. My main point and worry is how haphazardly people have been, how it isn’t really being designed. It is being coded. There isn’t a lot of direction and while the guy in charge of coding it is super cool and has a fantastic attitude about the concept of design and is really open to ideas on how to make it better, a lot of other people involved, and I mean a lot, are not. And a strongly worded form post is harder to try to ignore, not in a malicious way but in a personal “Coder’s compass I must face this problem and accept it exists” way, than an IRC channel argument. I get people may like them, but there is a major difference between reasons why something is good as opposed to reasons why it is technically workable. That list of defenses did not defend if statics were good as they are at all. It defended that the game technically worked, which really wasn’t the biggest question.
Everyone wants the same thing, a great game. DDA is by far the best version of cataclysm I have played. But essentially, there is a major disconnect in philosophy between how the game is currently set up and how some devs really want static spawns to go down and even people who are not quite as… fanatical about how the game should be played are generally extremely sensitive to any sort of strong negativity even if there isn’t any real malice towards the people who designed it.
I want static spawns to work out. It is why I am being a huge fucking bitch about how they are right now, because from everything I have seen, and by every read I could get out of people I interacted with (and sometimes it really wasn’t reading so much as overtly being told) that statics are really going to be this hostile to both anyone who enjoyed being able to start the game as a scientist or a scavenger, and continue to get less and less friendly to new players to the point where you need to be an expert player to even learn the new metagame. I don’t want this awesome sandbox zombie survival to turn into “Start a shitty dungeon crawl to get to the shittiest houses after days of training and then you can start questing to get to a store” linearity. That is the biggest flaw with static as it is now. It makes the game linear and hurts some of the best aspects of cataclysm, some of the strongest themes.
EDIT: Fox put it better than I could.
I don’t mind changes to a game or strategy. But I like Cataclysm, not this new game. And the reason people are so aggressive is because soft complaints have been “Pooh-Poohed.” A designer should not say “Fucking deal with it” instead of trying to even remotely defend their choices. And yes, that has happened to me when I brought this up.
^There’s a lot of strong language there that isn’t exactly warranted.
Cataclysm:DDA is a labor of love, something people are putting together for free. I want to first have gratitude to the people making the game for continuing to put in they work they do. I hope I don’t come across as insulting to the devs when I make a criticism about the project.
I just don’t think THIS is a good decision, want my opinion to be known, and would like to know more about the thought process that is making and encouraging this change.
I think, for me, my view is mostly on line with Glyphs. Dynamic spawns was more fun that static is in it’s current state, but static spawns will open up a lot more options for us down the road.
I don’t personally base build much, I like the whole having to move around so will pretty much push back against any change that allows ‘safe zones’ of any size to exist without serious ongoing support and work by the player (or npcs).
However I do find it strange that the main complaint is static spawns are too hard, if anything they make the game a complete walkover. As long as your faster than the zombies you can just keep luring them out of a city knowing that once you have pulled them out they will NEVER go back. This is made much faster if you have a noisy bike or the like you can just drive through town pulling them all away.
As it currently stands I propose the following changes:
a) Static spawned creatures are alter so the tougher ones in a tighter area on cities, towns and specials. This will make the outskirts of areas safer to begin with.
b) Elements of the dynamic spawn system are used to allow a slow influx of creatures from off grid submaps to migrate on grid. That way we can slowly diffuse tougher creatures into outlying areas are the game progresses, and allows clear areas to slowly become hostile once more.
I figure this is minimal work and if it would solve most people’s problems I’ll take a look at making the changes this weekend.
I think one issue overlooked is how difficult this makes the game feel for new players. You needed to die a lot beforehand in order to learn the game. Standard fare for a roguelike. I’ve been playing for only 2 weeks and now the game’s learning curve feels more like I’m at the base of a cliff.
And I worry as to how many new players who would be willing to try the game as it was are going to be too put off by the difficulty in .3.
so its like Dwarf Fortress.
Static spawns suck currently and I’m not convinced they won’t suck in the future. Mostly because I’ve not actually heard solutions to the (very major) problems with it, just “Trust us, it’ll end up cool.”
Then again, I lost all of my faith in the dev team when HP Ignorant became default, so this is not a surprise.
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.
I’ve never understood the animosity against this. Was the switch from a numerical default to a health bar analog really that terrible? Especially when it’s only a single point to get it back? If we also increase the number of available points, and the cap on positive traits, by 1, will this leave people okay with it?
This was my idea, and I take full responsibility, and I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people saying they like it better as the default, but I don’t want to leave people in the lurch - if it’s a problem, and we can work out a way to fix that, I’d like to try.
I’ve never understood the animosity against this. Was the switch from a numerical default to a health bar analog really that terrible? Especially when it’s only a single point to get it back? If we also increase the number of available points, and the cap on positive traits, by 1, will this leave people okay with it?
This was my idea, and I take full responsibility, and I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people saying they like it better as the default, but I don’t want to leave people in the lurch - if it’s a problem, and we can work out a way to fix that, I’d like to try.[/quote]
Yeah. That’s clearly a hyperbolic response.
Seriously, people, there is an appropriate response to disliking a change in cataclysm, and “losing faith in the dev team” or “feeling mournfully alone, as if on a cliff overlooking a churning sea of despair” is just way over the top. It’s just a game!
I do find the specific detail of the health bar very useful, to the point that playing without it would be bothersome, because I like to keep my health fine-tuned to very-near full, without wasting bandages to completely fill it up. I guess the question is more “Why take it out?”. What do you think is being added to the game by making numerical health an option, instead of the default?
Perhaps if there were some way to make the health bar a little more representative (so 8 stages instead of 4 - maybe have each star go from dark green to light green before disappearing?) it would be less problematic.
Anyway, I’m sure there was a rationale behind the change, so I’m happy to hear it. Making the game harder =/= making it worse. This could be a good change, for all I know.
For most players, it didn’t make it any harder. We are planning on increasing the number of divisions, as well (there have been a number of proposals in chat over the last week, of varying popularity). The reason was primarily focus-based and thematic. A lot of people were getting hung up on the numbers when the exact numbers weren’t super important thanks to the effect ranges for pretty much anything. Many people were using it as MORE of a free point than truth teller or ugly, since they actually preferred to play with it - more enjoyable basically.
But it was always an option, and remains an option. But from asking users (here, on 4chan, etc) we had evidence that playing without it was more enjoyable for most people. If the actual problem is just the loss-of-a-point, that’s easy enough to fix, though.
If it could go in the options menu, I think that would be cool. Making it a positive trait suggests that it’s a perk to be able to see the numerical values (and you seem to be saying that your reason for removing it was that it wasn’t really a perk at all).
Anyway, that makes a lot of sense now you’ve explained it. Thanks 
Objection. Making the game harder, depending on how (and, more to the point, where in the character’s progression) the game is made harder, can very well make the game worse. Making the start more difficult can make the rest of the game inaccessible. Quick example: Successfully attacking fungal spires, ant queens & triffid hearts closes up spawns for their respective groups. That’s a demonstrable long-term objective for players to achieve, and at least the anthills & triffid roots aren’t a joke. (Haven’t fought fungus yet.)
Those places can be difficult, because they’re not a place a beginning character or player would have any real reason to approach. Rather, you’d approach either from desperation or curiosity; exploration outside one’s comfort zone can be risky because the player should be able to realize the danger and take the necessary precautions/evasion.
Cities, on the other hand, have useful gear and the starting NPC generally asks the player to do something in the nearby town. [If the static-spawn crowd has a reliable way to save the dog, I’d love to hear about it. For me, it’s either initial-90, darkness with strobing the flashlight because the bloody dog can’t be told to heel, or get a new map.]
I haven’t had much luck getting a character through the first week in one of the .2 versions (sometime in March, I think). Bear in mind that the existing resources for helping new players–namely the Whales wiki & its guides–reflect the older versions.
On static spawns:
- It’s my understanding that any given dynamic-spawn location had a finite pool of creatures/“points”* that it could spawn, so a player could depopulate areas over time. (Critters despawning due to player-escape merged back into the pool and refunded their points.) One couldn’t guarantee one’s success, though. Thus, I don’t feel the WYSIWYG of static-spawn is a significant improvement; certainly not enough to warrant losing the 90-minute opening window.
*In that higher-powered critters, such as brutes/hulks, deplete more of the pool than a spitter or a basic zed.
- I hear a LOT about how static spawns are supposed to be tighter around town centers, you have a chance on the outskirts, fire, bottlenecks, etc.
A) Please reconcile the bottlenecking-suggestion with the push to nerf window-kiting.
B) Not everyone enjoys setting fires, and the thought of burning a house & its inventory just to get rid of a group of zeds strikes me as unfun.
C) Kevin & Benedict may have some idea of what constitutes a town center v. outskirts. I know that I don’t, and given what I’m reading, I’m not the only one. I’d appreciate it if those advocating for static spawn could display map-screencaps; using those, show us where one might expect to be “outskirts” and when one gets into the dangerous “center”. If you’d like, I’ll see about getting my map from the 02Feb character and posting it so you can circle places you’d expect various static spawns to show.
[It has one mid-size town, a smaller town adjacent (no connecting roads), and a large urban area on the far side of a river.]
Re HP Ignorant:
I despise the change for a few reasons.
- It took away the precise knowledge of HP–as someone pointed out, that’s handy for managing First Aid/Bandages/FA skilling. Players who were comfortable not knowing their precise HP could voluntarily give up that information for a disadvantage point. Now, players who want a better handle on HP mechanics have to pay for the privilege, and I don’t get paid for not knowing whether I’ve actually been hit. (Combat feedback, at least in the old version, isn’t always clear. Separate issue though.)
To answer your question: yes, GlyphGryph, giving us back the point and the room in the advantages to take it would cure this reason. Increasing the default starting points to 7 and making HP-visibility an option would also work.
- The thing that really bothered me about it–and I’d guess the reason that one poster lost faith in the devs–was that GlyphGryph just up and implemented it not that long after xe originally floated the idea, IIRC. I know that I registered a Strong Oppose on the forum and wasn’t even asked for reasoning or otherwise engaged–GlyphGryph just made the change and threw in a wink.
By comparison, that’s actually a fairly public change: the devs have made quite a few alterations without notice and comment. (Or at least notice/comment on the forum–I typically don’t use IRC and certainly don’t have access to chat-logs, etc.)
I find the anger and language used quite odd here. The ad hominem attacks are quite unnecessary, rude, and overall are a terrible way to discuss issues if you want to be taken seriously.
The reason the negative feedback is being poorly received here is because of the language and attitude they are being expressed with. Plenty of negative feedback, discussion, and criticism has occurred, and been well received. Even the devs have criticised aspects of it and expressed desire to change the way it is handled. The reason -these- criticisms are being received the way they are is, because as you said, you’re “being a huge fucking bitch about how they are right now”. I’d say that’s a bit harsh and an overstatement too, but being that you’re willing to say it about yourself, perhaps some reflection on the tone of your posts could be helpful.
Losing all faith because of a 1 point trait is completely over the top. The calls of static spawns making it completely unplayable or astronomically harder I just don’t see. If anything, I find it makes the game easier.
You can change the starting level of points in the options. HP-visibility is an option by taking the self-aware trait.
It does limit the maximum amount of traits you can take - personally I would be interested in seeing that an option that you could change.
I think people are confusing an ad hominem with any sort of negative comment directed at a person. It is an Ad Homenem for me to say “Dev so and so is a poopy head.” It is not an ad hominem to state something negative about a person which could actually influence the debate, such as “Some people have shown poor attitudes or ideas towards the subject.” One is a pointless and baseless attack, one is not. Ultimately I am not alone in my feelings that some devs have been dismissive or hostile to people opposing THIS change, because some people seem to have gotten too attached to it. I have logs of it. The problem is that even when you tiptoe on eggshells people get really defensive about it. And at the end of the day, the language here has not been “Incredibly hostile” and most everyone in this thread has given reasons for what they believe in. Is it warranted? Maybe, maybe not. It does not excuse completely ignoring valid points, which is what has been happening.
And yes, I have lost faith in a lot of the dev team, while gaining respect for others. That happens not when people make bad choices, because no game or developer is perfect. It is when people seem to make bad choices for bad reasons, and refuse to confront these choices or analyze them seriously. As other people have said, it isn’t that static spawns are a bad idea, it is just very few of the devs you talk to have any sort of plan to make em workable from where they are now. The head coder has a few from the last I talked to him about it but at the same time there isn’t a lot of focus towards improving it or making it a more tight experience, and even some opposition to this idea. I know Gryph isn’t in that crowd but at the same time if there is hostility to an idea it does need pushback. Sure it is a labor of love, sure these are volunteers, but if people really feel like they are making a big mistake they should try to stop it, and try to get people to understand just how bad they feel the change is.
I have specifically avoiding naming names to avoid turning this into a shitslinging contest, but at the same time most of my feelings from static spawns have come from the, frankly, very childish interactions I have had with people involved.
It is valid feedback because my only problem with them right now is the fact certain people involved have, in my experience, shown these attitudes that could be extremely bad for the game. But at the end of the day it is not an ad hominem. Relaying that someone has overtly said “Deal with it” is not an ad hominem. It is not a baseless personal attack, it is relevant to the discussion.
Also can people please stop talking about HP ignorant? Yeah I get I have been the saltiest guy here but this really isn’t a place to bash on devs for anything you want to bash em on. I get I am being a bit of an extremist here but you really are losing focus, and more to the point one of those little tweaks that is a nerf to a specific thing rather than a core gameplay overhaul that affects literally everything else in the game.
Pretty loaded discussion here, and I personally feel like adding my little opinion on static.
For one, I feel that Static will be the way to go forward as it will open up a lot more possibilities in the future in terms of adding roaming bands and whatnot. It’s more ‘‘movie-like’’ too in a sense because if you can clear out a place, it stays safe.
But on the other side it’s clearly not yet in a state that you can call it ‘‘better’’ than Dynamic Spawns.
The obvious reason which I agree with Anone is that it pretty much throws you into the game the same way it did with Dynamic Spawns, and that’s a bad thing.
The first day of spawning in the game was very clear, run like mad to the closest place of civilization and try to get some sort of semblance of a loadout to survive the following days.
Right now you get thrown into the game with the same idea in the back of the mind, you got a shirt/shoes and jeans, and maybe if you get lucky something in the basement of use. And you gotta survive…
You can’t run into town to get some stuff anymore, because the horde is present and ready to skullfuck anyone who gets close. And well, there is nothing truly wrong with that because cities are supposed to be more populated than the rest of the world.
But as of right now, the majority of loot to be found is in the cities. And outside the cities the game is pretty damn barren. There is an occasional farm and treatment plant, and whatnot. But nothing in the way of really getting lucky and get something that will help you kill zommies.
At the end of the day, you are still getting pressured into stepping into towns to get a proper loadout, because it’s the only place you can get stuff. There are no hardware stores in the countryside, and there aren’t grocery stores either.
Again, must reiterate that static spawns is the future and will give the designers more ability to make a more balanced game.
But right now, it’s not balanced.
There needs to be something that makes surviving more viable, but not a total cakewalk. There need to be location with loot which aren’t completely infested with zombies.
Once the designers can find a way to make the game more balanced and more viable for Static Spawns, then DDA can truly become fun again.
Maybe have some more loot to start out with other than the clothes on your body. Add a baseball bat or a different object as a form of defense, and have the shelter carry some rudimentary forms of food to be sure that you can survive the first day.
Bear Grylls mode should still be viable, but with just the clothes on your feet it’s not possible to survive in the woods. And the option to punch trees down into blocks hasn’t (and will not be) implemented.
I am supportive of the idea of static spawn (maybe with a bit of dynamic spawn added to keep it viable).
But it needs quite a bit of work before it becomes better than the Dynamic Spawn system.
And well, I don’t truly like Dynamic either because you can’t let out a fart without having 15 zombies suddenly popping in behind you to wipe your ass with their teeth.
Finally, HP Ignorant being made default is something I approve of. I find having the ability to know your exact HP a bigger pro than not knowing it being a bigger con.
I just want to comment and say that this is honestly to be expected. Very few of the devs are actually working on this as their primary focus at the moment, and thus don’t have much in the way of plans, simply because it doesn’t really impact the area they were working on.
I do wonder, though, dezzmont, who you think the active devs are that have been hostile? Would you mind sending me a pm, so we can continue this conversation in a less public setting?
You can change the starting level of points in the options. HP-visibility is an option by taking the self-aware trait.
It does limit the maximum amount of traits you can take - personally I would be interested in seeing that an option that you could change.[/quote]
That said, some gaming cultures would dismiss a point-increaser for increasing the starting points. I’ve heard that this isn’t one of those forums, but it’d be nice to have that stated explicitly in the options. The reason why I’m asking GlyphGryph to increase the default starting points is to bypass this potential problem.
(I realize that mine was a long post, though I think it clearly stated that my problem was depriving players of the option/disadvantage, exacerbated by the lack of discussion.)
I’ll agree that -vantage caps ought to be configurable in the options too. Discussion about whether that constitutes cheating can happen in another thread.