SailorWolf

In 2053 a AI program in Japan will become self aware. A year later out of sheer boredom it will add NPC's to PZ.... 6 months later it decides NPCs were not needed and replaces them with a Zombie Overlord.

I for one appreciate the challenge, but what gets me is the flavour. Why is this chopper here? Who is the jerk following me around? Are they observing me? Are they actively trying to kill me? Why not shoot me?
 
I find the lack of story behind it to be more frustrating than the hordes it brings.

Restless sleeper could use a adjustment...I'm a restless sleeper in real life and can work 8 to 10 hour days without being dead tired. Also sleeping pills should help with restless sleeping....at least it does with me, I take them when I know I'm going to have to work a 12-14 hour day.

My base by the river in West Point...it by the dock and boathouse.
 
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=349495796

I take all guns and ammo I gathered and go zombie hunting or drink bleach and jump off the tallest building I find. Depends on whether being bit pissed me off or if I just didn't care and want to get a new character.

I did a search for 'crawlers' and I didn't come up with anything that clearly states my suggestion, apologies if it is already suggested but buried in a thread somewhere.
 
I suggest that zombies that fall from higher floors/levels should break their feet/leg bones, just like we do, and that they should become crawlers because of their mangled/broken legs. Or at least some of them should.
 
Zombies don't feel pain, and I guess some would be able to structurally shamble on with a broken ankle (slower mind you!), but ones with a broken femur or both ankles broken should become crawlers IMO.
 
 

Got spammed with the logo pic on Steam and was like "Wtf not more Day Z / Dead Island crap... and what's with the boring front pic?" *Hides*
 
Then somehow I came across the game on Youtube and was like "Zomg that's not FPS..." and "Zomg it looks good!"
 
...went to steam and downloaded some demo, bought it a day after.

Taking a rotten zombie's pants on the spot because you have such a decadent sense of fashion you absolutely have to wear that color.

Not bothered by broken windows  I'm always "Yay I cut myself..I hope glass is embedded in my arm :)" But so far just cuts...even got to the point of not looking for a unlocked window. I just break one out and climb in lol.
 
Would like to see player made doors work better when placed on the backside of a house. Made one today on a little base I set up and it's hard to get it to open from the outside....you have to pull up the drop down menu to open it  

Haven't played Zomboid for a while, but the last couple of times I played, I played in West Point. Sure, finding building supplies is a bitch, but there's generally more loot and !!FUN!! to be had given the building density.
 
I tended to set up a base about here. Build walls between the three buildings, barricade the downstairs windows/doors and hang sheet ropes out every window. Plenty of space, and you don't need to fortify everything from the ground up. As an added bonus, given the parking area to the north, it's easy to follow the road east into the centre of town and back again without getting lost.

West Point for fishing. Oh, and the river acts like a wall to protect your land. Plus the mall is closer there.

Hey guys, this is my first post on this forum. I've been playing PZ for a few months and absolutely love it. I truly cant wait to see where it goes. Here are a few of my thoughts on late-game difficulty (mostly plagiarized).
 
Zombies: increase their grip strength and allowing hordes will help complicate late-game. I liked the earlier idea of have massive hordes passing though the map occasionally.
 
Animals: Packs of feral dogs in the urban areas, bears and mountain lions in the rural areas. Wont be many at first but as nature reclaims what man has taken their numbers will increase.
 
NPCs: I think a lot of the difficulty of late game will come from NPCs. Dealing with the emotional toll on you group, as well as conflicts with other groups, will definitely help make things harder as time goes on. It would really complicate things when one of your group goes to loot the local gas station and comes back with 30+ zombies in tow. Of he got bit and didn't say anything.
I also liked the idea of random packs of raiders, looters, and bandits passing through, with some deciding to hang around town for a while. Some would just want to loot the town and avoid conflict unless provoked, where as others could be vicious killers just as interested in hurting people as they are in taking their stuff.
 
Farming: I think the growth periods could stand to be longer, and crop yield could be a little lower. But I think we need to keep NPCs in mind. Your 1 month stockpile is a 1 week stockpile if you have 3 other people with you. I think sustainable levels of farming should be a lot of work and be a little tedious. This way you have to make the decision to shut yourself in and farm or go out and continue looting, not both. Once you have more members in the group they can take care of it for you, but they wont have time to do much else. I also agree that seeds are a little too easy to find. It would be great if they were still in houses, just much less. The really stockpiles should be at the farms and hardware stores, necessitating a longer ranged looting trip to go get them.
 
Weapons: I would like to see some more diversity. Machetes, hatchets, pipe wrenches, combat knives, etc. I also think ridiculous weapons like chainsaws should be included. It will totally get you killed, but some people learn the hard way. For that matter i think katanas should be included. If you didn't spend your entire life training (not just swinging it around your back yard), you probably don't know how to use one correctly. Plus any katana you run across in modern Kentucky likely came from a flea market and isn't suitable for actual combat. I think these would make interesting pitfalls for players to fall into.
 
Random Encounters/Events: Storms, fires, gas main explosions, sewer back ups are all pretty much guaranteed to happen in an apocalypse. Especially as time goes on and the infrastructure isn't maintained (i.e. erosion).
 
I had a different way of think about late game boredom. Your character is basically a reflection of you, so for the player its boredom, for the character it is soul-crushing despair.  A lot of people have said they farm for a while, then get bored and eventually go out in a shotgun rampage. I think that is "How you Died". Your character cracked after a few weeks cooped up in his house, that ran into the streets and got himself killed. Also, people who get bored and quit, their characters are basically committing suicide because they just couldn't take the boredom/despair anymore.
 
Thanks for reading, I hope I didn't ramble too much. 

After over 200 hours of game play I've learned this game will be as boring as you make it...doesn't really need fixing. If you build a base and hide in it...it gets boring. Which I can't do, I'm always off looting and killing Zeds...which in the end kills me  . Had a sweet double wall base by the river,tons of seeds, fishing pole,lures and rain barrels...walkway build from one house to the house next door. But I want in the gun shop so went in search of a sledgehammer in the other town...got bit and died. 980 zed kills and maybe 3 months of food stores...didn't have to go anywhere. Could have live til I died of old age
 
Now that I've been playing alot I've changed my goals in the game from how long can I live to I many zed I can kill before they get me and I'm having fun 

I understand more needs to be added just saying right now the game is as boring as you make it. I've only been playing for a couple of months so it's still new to me. My last base was the best I've had and I built it with hordes in mind....because if you have 100 or 200 zeds show up in the middle of the night to attack your base it's gone. There would be nothing you could do but grab what you can and get the hell out. (Well with the ammo and guns I had..I could survive one attack and not lose my base maybe)
 
I think adding NPCs and a little story line would go a long way along with hordes (but not huge ones). With only getting to play a couple of hours a day after work and on my days off....spending hours building a base only to have it ripped to the ground would make me give up on the game.  Maybe 3 modes of play would work, one for new players, one normal and a insane mode for those who want to die within 2 hours of starting a new game.
 
But my point has always been why have all this cool stuff like building, cooking and farming if the whole point of the game is to kill you? Take it all out, make sleeping a must... put hordes back in and make the best weapon in the game a butter knife...oh make the hordes spawn at your door everytime you go to sleep. That should cut the game down to under a hour of playing time 

I understand more needs to be added just saying right now the game is as boring as you make it. I've only been playing for a couple of months so it's still new to me. My last base was the best I've had and I built it with hordes in mind....because if you have 100 or 200 zeds show up in the middle of the night to attack your base it's gone. There would be nothing you could do but grab what you can and get the hell out. (Well with the ammo and guns I had..I could survive one attack and not lose my base maybe)
 
I think adding NPCs and a little story line would go a long way along with hordes (but not huge ones). With only getting to play a couple of hours a day after work and on my days off....spending hours building a base only to have it ripped to the ground would make me give up on the game.  Maybe 3 modes of play would work, one for new players, one normal and a insane mode for those who want to die within 2 hours of starting a new game.
 
But my point has always been why have all this cool stuff like building, cooking and farming if the whole point of the game is to kill you? Take it all out, make sleeping a must... put hordes back in and make the best weapon in the game a butter knife...oh make the hordes spawn at your door everytime you go to sleep. That should cut the game down to under a hour of playing time 

After over 200 hours of game play I've learned this game will be as boring as you make it...doesn't really need fixing. If you build a base and hide in it...it gets boring. Which I can't do, I'm always off looting and killing Zeds...which in the end kills me  . Had a sweet double wall base by the river,tons of seeds, fishing pole,lures and rain barrels...walkway build from one house to the house next door. But I want in the gun shop so went in search of a sledgehammer in the other town...got bit and died. 980 zed kills and maybe 3 months of food stores...didn't have to go anywhere. Could have live til I died of old age
 
Now that I've been playing alot I've changed my goals in the game from how long can I live to I many zed I can kill before they get me and I'm having fun 

Id love to see....
*Backpacks on my character
*New weapon models. So everything dont look like a bat
*Id love to see more character customization. Maybe like wearing a hat, or a bandana, or coat etc
*More combo items. ( like the nail bat...etc)
*And Last Stand Maps to be played in Multiplayer mode!

I think zombies would be sound based..so if you set off a alarm in a house it would likely form a small horde. Then the noise from the small horde would draw more zeds making it grow and begin to snowball into a huge horde. That would force a player to either deal the small horde right away or let it grow into a large horde and end up on their doorstep one day.

on one hand this sounds awesome on the other hand i really hope indiestone will give players more than just kill them

i really hope they flesh out farming etc a little bit more so that there is some kind of end game

it would be really unsatisfying for me just to die while knowing its because the devs dont want some kind of endgame

aside from that cut out all features and make a game like isaac ... its kinda senseless to have features like building but players cant use it because you want them to die instead of toying around with features the game have to offer

TLTR: really love that the game is going to be harder again but please do a propper endgame anyway and flesh out the existing features

I'd rather have NPC's (both good and bad) than a rebalance.  I think that would add not only more difficulty but, more importantly, more fun as well.  Just getting back into PZ after a long time and from a few other topics I see NPC's will still be a thing.  Can't find any info on an ETA though and I'm hoping this rebalance isn't taking priority over NPC's. 
 
"Just play online if you want other survivors."
 
Never tried it, never will.  Not giving anyone the satisfaction of killing someone who just joined the server.  This is why I avoid most games that allow griefing.  So yeah, let's get those NPC's in there already please.  I got this game last year looking forward to the NPC's.  A year later I check in and now the big news is "rebalancing"??

tl;dr summary of the below: More than re-balancing is needed. PZ needs more events that increase the difficulty as the game goes along.
 
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I see a fundamental conflict in the game design that will pose some challenges with increasing the difficulty of the late game.  The primary conflict being that as an rpg game, players expect their characters to develop and progress over time.  This means that starting at Day 1, the longer a character survives, the more a character has. More stuff. More skills. More dead zombies.  Lowering any of these doesn't necessarily change this fundamental dynamic. Meaning the "Beginning" game will always remain harder than the "Late" game phase for the simple fact that characters will have more in the "Late" game.
 
I'm not sure you can make any global balance changes to the game that can alter this dynamic. For example, let's say you make building a safe house a Carpentry Level 4 skill.  You haven't actually made the "Late" game harder, all you've done is made the "Beginning" game phase last longer. A character with Level 4 skill will be significantly more advantaged later in the game than when he or she started. So more than global balance changes are needed.
 
Global balance changes also need to be balanced against players' expectations of progress.  Making it insanely hard to go from Cooking Level 1 to Level 2 will reduce player satisfaction in the game. Players will feel like they are forced to "grind" skills to make any progress at all. Players need to feel they are getting rewarded for making good decisions.
 
I think the Water and Power events offer a template for a solution. These are triggered events that increase the difficulty of the game as time goes on. The game is easier in the "Beginning" when you can get water from any faucet than in the "Late" game when water is shut off and your sources of water are limited.
 
The upcoming "Erosion" feature may also increase the difficulty with the Winter season if Winter becomes harder to survive.  I think the "Late" game can be enhanced by additional events that make the game harder while preserving a player's sense of progress by getting more (stuff, skills, dead enemies).
 
Event ideas:
Stagnant Water. Water becomes stagnant a couple months after start. Characters need to start boiling all water or risk illness. Growing Hordes. Hordes grow or bigger hordes migrate into the game over time. Maybe every three months the hordes grow in size and power representing the natural clustering of zombies attracted to each other's sounds. Wild Predators. Wild, feral animals migrate into the game over time. Spring could be especially dangerous as wild animal populations explode due to the lack of humans. Bears and wolves could pose a unique threat - with their sense of smell and speed being better than an individual zombie. Plus bears can climb shit. Now picture a bear with rabies. Now picture a rabid, safehouse climbing bear with a taste for human flesh acquired from eating human corpses. Spring Storms.  Existing and player built structures could be damaged or destroyed randomly during Spring storms. Meade County, Kentucky has had five tornadoes since 1987. Storms and high wind could knock down walls.  Lightening strikes could cause random fires. Summer Diseases.  After a year of the walking dead spreading filth and rot across the map, diseases and infections could appear in game. Players could face bacterial infections like Bubonic Plague that require rare antibiotics. Or viral diseases like Malaria. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of diseases already found in Kentucky. I am personally fond of Tularemia, a zoonotic disease from rabbits. A simple tick bite can result in primary septicemia (blood poisoning) in 3-5 days. Violent NPCs.  Perhaps a year into the zombie apocalypse, nature has culled the human population of our most civilized members. New NPCs migrate into the world with a decidedly more desperate and hostile nature. Gone are the NPCs who were willing to band with you to survive at the beginning, and in their place emerge raiders, warlords, and savages. I don't think it hurts the game if players know more bad events are coming in the future. It builds upon the sense of dread and terror knowing these events are coming. But it also provides a sense of accomplishment for surviving for long periods of time.

Sorry to point this out and all but why give us all the skills to keep us alive and build a cool ZA base to live in....if you want us dead before 2 months has passed? Seems pointless to me unless you are going to start us with piles of lumber, food and weapons at the start.... oh yeah people cried cause they lived to long and got bored. I thought that was the point live in a ZA for as long as you can...my last start I was in the hotel in the thick of zombies and could only find a damn pencil but I survived. If you want to make the game harder you don't need hordes or damn respawns of zeds every 2 minutes...just give the zombies a better grip. Oh here's a endgame for you old age
 
Yes I'm the sailorwolf from steam which I'm blocking any updates to the game so I can keep it as it is now cause I want to fish and build a cool base to live in. I love that about this game it's something SoD doesn't have but sadly this game has no story line/ mode at this time so I don't see a point in endgame talk. I have a little over 100 hours on this game and have got to see myself died like 5 times...I have lived for almost 5 months this time and i'm loving it. Just change that last part to "and this is how you survived" I take risk still my current plan is looting the gun shop...I have a fob set up in West Point it was a long run and hard fought. Setting up a jump point at the trailer park was a crazy battle...It's just my point of view  but the game is already as hard as you make it. So if the people crying "i ain't dead yet" are hiding in a house then walk down main street with a butter knife death will find you all soon enough.
 
Yes you want to make a unbeatable game but us as gamers want to beat it and if you make it unbeatable then you will hear crying about that.... welcome to the world of game making. Maybe make a easy normal and hard mode and let us the game player make the choice instead of like every other game maker and just force us to live with all the preteens crying they are bored. Thank you my rant is finished

As with everything you guys do I have tons of faith.
Just the one thing with this, as others have said, it will be hard to balance.
If I've set up base in a quiet area or a farm in the middle of nowhere then for the zombies to actively come and hunt me down would feel too scripted. 200 zombies just happened to stumble on this secluded safehouse? I think the veteran players would soon tire of that sort of thing.
I'm sure you'll get the balance right. Complete faith!

This is what i mostly mean, the zombies become an annoyance more than a threat that killed the whole country, while we can just keep farming away corn in our gardes while we say hi to undead john and martha living in the next house since 4 weeks in.
 
As for the "offensive talk down", i apologize but i didnt mean it to talk you down (also english is not my first language), people actually have a different play style in this game, a friend likes to loot a house and the rest of the day just inventory manage his entire base for some reason, others just dont loot at all but the very basic tools and then just farm.
Also i am not saying i am a master at the game, i am sure you have way more hours than me on Steam for sure.
 
Back at the disscussion part of the game, part of why the older builds and older players find the new builds more easy is because we have SO many new ways to gather food and stuff, also because we have freedom.
 
I guess most people remember about how there was a limited stock of food in the pre-alpha demo, how when you looted the first 5 houses you started to think "shit now i will have to travel to the store building, where there is always a horde there", so you had to start thinking about a way to lure the northeast horde to the south street, but you needed the hammers and nails in that store, so you had to think how to loot tools and food before it rots away in about a few days.
And if you brought a zombie chasing you, god help you defend your safehouse at night,
 
Here is how hordes were Sailorwolf
 
Watching either of those near your safehouse made you shit your pants, i dont remember if with the grey alien zombies you could ran pass them or not, but zombies need a better grip for sure.
 
Also since the map was like, just a single cell it made you fear that you were really closed insde a city where there was no escape, that is no longer possible in the current game, i hope something along the lines of a quarentine gets added when the NPCs are in so we get a similar feeling like that again.

To be honest SailorWolf, I don't think I've found a more supportive community than the PZ one - I really think you just took those comments the wrong way. Stick around a while and you'll see mate - we're a pretty good bunch here!
 
Like any forum, there are going to be disagreements, and the odd little war of words, but they're usually resolved pretty quickly, without much need for the old "ban hammer" (much to the moderators disappointment probably.... )
 
Anyway, as far as your concerns, I do see your point, but PZ is about "This is How you Died".  I guess as a side affect if the many cool additions to the game, (farming, trapping, fishing etc), have made surviving long-term a little easier, and the devs are now trying to get back to the roots of the game a little. Not all players will play PZ the same way, and there's nothing wrong with a player enjoying seeing how big a fort they can build, or how long they can keep their character alive etc for example.
 
For me, and for some players, the problem is that the end game often devolves into almost a "farmville" type existence, and zombies end up being an irregular annoyance, rather than the constant threat that maybe they should be... (IMHO anyway).
 
Let's wait and see how the changes affect the game. The great thing about PZ is that fact it has the Sandbox mode - so even if the changes to the base-game don't suit your gameplay style, there's nothing stopping a player, (and also nothing wrong), with not playing the "Survival" mode, and tweaking the game to suit you.
 
Anyway, hope you give the forums a chance, now back on topic.... (sorry Rath!)