Florin

In that antiseptic isn't exactly rare in the game, treating an infected wound with regular maggots would probably make it worse, and I would fall off my chair laughing if I found an item in the game called "medical grade maggots".

Jars ought to be common enough in most households. I've found one jar in total, and I think it was in the lawyer's office in Muldraugh of all places. No vinegar. I love the idea of creating preserves, I've been excited about this since I spotted the jars in the art assets. I hope there will be a way of doing it sustainably.

If they want to ignore my feedback then that's their prerogative. There is no reason for why they can't make exertion tweakable in sandbox so that everyone can get what they want, but you appear to be on a crusade against the old exertion system for reasons I'm still unsure of.

30 minutes running and 20 minutes lifting is almost exactly a gym session for me, and I don't have the luxury of sitting idle for an hour after I'm done. If I did, though, I wouldn't be so exhausted as to require complete rest without even the ability to cook, or clean, or read a book, or reorganise my shelves, or whatever.

I'm baffled by your response. What am I misrepresenting? You inferred that the goal of this change was to stop people from fighting large groups. I said it doesn't accomplish that, it merely forces characters to sit down and rest constantly if they exert themselves. There are better ways to increase the actual challenge of fighting zombies to a point where taking on hordes in melee is undoable without adding more mandatory downtime to the game.

Intuitive means something can be easily picked up by doing it. Without reading the tips most players probably wouldn't even be aware the attack charging mechanic existed. It is completely unintuitive in that it's invisible to the player, aside from the damage you deal to enemies, which without foreknowledge could quite easily be attributed to random chance (see above).

How large groups are you referring to? As I understand it, one of the goals of all of this is to make the player taking on groups larger than 20 or so infeasible. The largest group I've fought in my current game was about 10-12 strong. But you shouldn't be fighting large groups, that's the thing. No changes to the system are going to accommodate that, as previously said. That's fine, but they should make it so that large groups of zombies can actually threaten you, rather than just making your character have to stop and lie down every time they do anything strenuous.

There are several different window sprites spanning nine or ten compressed pngs. But yes, adding cleared windows would not be that difficult from a game art point of view, and it could be implemented without a graphical change to smashed windows if there was a wait on additional assets. Luckily wounds sustained from climbing through broken glass aren't terribly serious right now.

How long does it take to charge a swing before it's fully effective? One second? Five? Ten? How are you supposed to know whether you continue to charge a swing while moving or only standing still? There is no way of knowing, and the game gives you no clues. It's not at all intuitive for a new player. All they can do is experiment and try to figure it out for themselves, assuming they even bother to read through all the tips in order to figure out that charging swings is a thing to begin with.

New game. I always start new games when new builds are released unless it's just a hotfix for the previous build. My problem was and is getting into too much combat. I don't fight very much, but the new build discourages fighting much more than I'm used to and makes any fight with a large group a very drawn-out affair requiring multiple rests to get through. I still feel making people devote time to recovering exertion rather than just letting it occur naturally at a slower pace than before causes too much sluggishness in the game.

Are we playing the same game? I swung plenty of golf clubs prior to 30.7 and never got crippled in-game from a miss. In fact I don't remember seeing the excessive exertion moodle once, nor ever being rendered incapable of running previously. I completely disagree that the old system was 'inherently broken', as well. There are dozens of changes that could have been made to reduce the rate of passive exertion recovery shy of disabling it entirely.

Or get rid of them entirely. That's the real man's way to play, hmm?

Again, I don't understand what you're talking about. "Advocating for a system that, once you became moderately tired, would remove your ability to move faster than a sneak"? I'm not doing anything of the sort. I'm advocating for the old system, where exertion represented short term strain and could be recovered from by avoiding additional physical exertion. Right now it represents the same thing as the tiredness moodle, and when you get winded it's permanent until you spend time staring at the ceiling. I would not argue that characters didn't recover from exertion too quickly or easily in the old version, but this change makes it so that you never recover from it passively. The old system was sound, if in need of tweaking. You should recover passively from being winded. You shouldn't be indefinitely out of breath after exerting yourself until you go off somewhere quiet to meditate. And I don't know what I can tell you about why the change isn't challenging that I haven't already said several times. Walking away from a bunch of zombies, locking yourself in one of the game's many houses and sitting on a chair for a while before returning to the fray is not hard. My current character is a fireman with athletic, strong, short tempered, brooding, light drinker, claustrophobic. I tried a character without athletic initially and rerolled after discovering how rapidly permanent exertion occurred.

You said that if all it took was a bit of time to catch your breath after physical activity then no one would have trouble with physical activity. But this is precisely how the human body works in real life. Exertion doesn't immediately and permanently debilitate you until you relax for an hour. That's why I said what I said. When training, you do as much as you can, pause to rest for a moment, do the same thing again, pause, etc. If you have to sit down for half an hour after each set then you're very unfit. In this case we're talking about swinging a heavy object around for a few minutes or sprinting a couple of blocks crippling someone's ability to perform until they find somewhere to have a nap. That's simply not how it works. The old system modeled exhaustion more realistically.

Are you replying to me or someone else? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Just because you've not lost a character yet (and the build's only been out for a day or two anyways, so...) doesn't mean that it's broken, though. It just means there's more work yet to be done. I'd love to see (and I'm sure the devs would as well) a video of you surviving a period longer than a week or so so we can see what you're doing and work on improving the difficulty there. Regarding hacking a horde to pieces if you "really want to" that's exactly what they're aiming for: not being able to do it in one sitting. Mission accomplished, it's working exactly as intended. It's only if you view hacking a horde of zombies to pieces as a goal of your gameplay that the new system becomes a problem. And that's what you still refuse to acknowledge; the system works fine when hacking hordes isn't your goal. I don't know how to record a gaming video, and my hardware probably can't. As Moose said, though, all you have to do is what people have been doing in PZ for ages - backpedalling, swinging, kiting, etc until you have what you need to survive, then set up a farm on a rooftop and live there until you get bored. Anyone can do this as long as they don't get careless or impatient. I'm not a skilled gamer, I've just been playing PZ for long enough that I know what to do to survive. The main cause of death in PZ is player carelessness. The only difference now is that it takes more time. If the mission was to make it harder to survive then it certainly isn't accomplished by the changes in 30.7. Making it more time consuming for players to hack their way through the game is not the same as making it more challenging for them to hack their way through the game. And that's my complaint. The zombie clumping was a better addition than the exertion change, but it doesn't work properly yet.

EreWeGo - I usually avoid large fights, period, unless I need to clear out an area for my own security. Some fights are unavoidable unless you're constantly on the run, which really only keeps you out of combat for so long. When I say the exertion changes do not add challenge, I mean that I've not yet lost a character in either 30.7 or 30.8 and that the same strategies I used for staying safe and avoiding death still work more or less as they always did. I can still escape any zombie by strolling away from them, and I can still hack a horde of zombies to pieces if I really want to, it just takes a very long time and a lot of resting. I did ask that the exertion changes be made optional in one of my posts a few pages back. I'd be quite content with that. I prefer the game to model short and long term exhaustion as it did previously, but I'm willing to accept that I'm in the minority. I just don't enjoy mechanics that slow the pace of a game.

Yeah, I can kill 20 zombies with an axe without much issue. Knives are better now since they're guaranteed one shot kills as long as your timing is correct and the zombies aren't too heavily clustered together. The bigger problem for me right now as far as exertion is concerned is that you tire too quickly from running and unlike in real life, you're permanently winded until you spend a bunch of time off your feet. I can cope with killing less zombies and camping in houses constantly, but I can't pretend the change does anything for me other than slow everything down. But I've reverted to 30.6 because of other bugs (the duplication of dropdown menu actions and things disappearing when you try to use them).

I'm sorry? That is how human physiology works. Why do you think it's easier to do several sets of reps with a break in between each than to do them all at once?

Isn't helpful criticism; it's just complaining. That statement wasn't just complaining, it was my point that slowing things down doesn't increase the challenge or the enjoyment of the game. But I also said that in irritation at some of the remarks I had read shouting down any criticism of the patch.

I'm quite prepared to give the developers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to balancing these changes, but if no one gives critical feedback then they'll have a much harder time knowing what needs balancing. Yesterday one of the developers told me that the point of increasing the challenge at this stage in the game's development is to make it a more complete game right now, rather than leaving it incomplete until they finish other features. That's fair enough, but right now, the only thing that helps mitigate the boredom of moving from town to town in the game is sprinting. Removing the ability to sprint from place to place begs another way of making these treks without spending an unreasonable amount of time watching your character walk along a road.

I didn't claim that. But not much has been done to show the player how the mechanic works.

'No matter what you do'? The game doesn't even give the player any feedback to let them know they are charging a swing.If people can't be arsed to read the incredibly short tips that pop up EVERY GAME at least one time in your PZ career then I don't really feel bad for them. You can lead a horse to water… A tooltip popup that gives little information (it doesn't even tell you whether you still charge while holding down ctrl and moving) is not a substitute for the game providing actual feedback. You want a game to be intuitive.

I hope you're being ironic. If not, here. As for the rest of your post, it doesn't seem to address much of what I actually write anyway, so there may be little point in my repeating what I've already said, but I at least am prepared to post in good faith, so here's a summary: I don't want to kill everything. I never play this way. I do want unavoidable fights to be fun and not to devolve into a tedious exercise of walking back and forth between the nearest chair or bed until the zombies are all gone. As for walking between Muldraugh and West Point, it takes 23 hours of nonstop walking to do this in PZ. You shouldn't be able to walk for 23 hours anyway, because being exhausted should make you pass out, but in any case, it isn't a major challenge, it's half an hour of walking along a road occasionally altering your course to sidestep a zombie. It's another case of added tedium for no additional challenge. Maybe it would've been better if other forms of locomotion had been added before sprinting was nerfed, but that's not the case. I don't want the game to be easy, or an 'arcade action game', but I don't like to see changes made in the name of challenge adding unnecessary tedium to the game instead. I'm not impressed with the reaction I've received to criticism of the game from others here. It should go without saying that I love PZ, but people who come to the forum to say that they feel a new feature detracts from the game should not be told off and talked down to, least of all by a moderator.

This seems a bit obscure.

Like I've said, I don't want to kill every zombie. I just don't want fighting groups of zombies in the game to be reduced to a situation where you have to constantly duck into the nearest house for a rest after every two or three kills. It also shouldn't be as much of a pain in the ass as it is now to get from Muldraugh to West Point. Perhaps it was previously balanced for the assumption that people could sprint forever, or perhaps the default time dilation is off or the map just has too much empty space, but a six mile trip up the road shouldn't be a three day voyage that requires a tent to get through.