Florin

From the perspective of someone who disagrees with the change and has tried very hard to explain why, it strikes me more as a case of those criticising it being dogpiled with every manner of down-talking from "you're doing it wrong" to "you are a cancer".

No, it's easy to assume different sounds are just flavour, since they often are. A wind up animation would be ideal, a meter above the character's head that fills as the swing charges would suffice.

'No matter what you do'? The game doesn't even give the player any feedback to let them know they are charging a swing.

I'm doing what I've been doing for as long as I've played PZ. The short term and long term fatigue system makes more sense than having two moodles that represent the same thing. It's how it works in real life, you don't need to rest for an hour to recover every time you overexert yourself and get winded, you only need a minute or two to catch your breath. And people who do taxing jobs all day don't have to sleep for 12 hours to recover from them.

Yes, very good suggestion.

Sounds to me like your problem is that you're playing PZ wrong. You're playing it like an arcade action game, and it's not. If you're exhausted all the time, you're probably doing something wrong. Don't condescend to me. You have no idea how I play. I play like I've been playing for years, since story mode still existed and massive groups of zombies would appear practically out of thin air: by avoiding combat when possible and fighting when I have to. I've survived for in-game years doing this, so you'll forgive me for not realising that I've been "playing it wrong" this whole time. But now along comes a patch that simultaneously makes zombies group together and makes it painfully tedious to fight zombies in groups, and suddenly people like myself who were under the impression that this is a game where you fight zombies, can't do so anymore without taking a nap every few minutes. It's not challenging, and it's not fun.

Actually NPCs will likely make the game harder as well as easier. While I agree that we'll probably need a further rebalance then, it makes no sense leaving the game unbalanced for the meantime. NPCs aren't going to be released tomorrow.Fair enough, I guess... I wouldn't know how far off they are. But I do think a lot of the complaints about how easy it is to reach a stable plateau in the game will be silenced by the lethality gun-toting NPCs ought to add.

If I don't rest fully I simply tire faster and have to rest again sooner in the next round of fighting. The problem is obvious when fighting groups of zombies. You kill a couple, leave, rest, come back, kill some more, leave, rest, etc. Mowing through hordes a la Conan might have been silly, but calling time out on your zombie fights every couple of minutes to go have a quick cat nap isn't much better.

I don't know about my frame rate at the time, but using a baseball bat/nail bat, I have trouble fighting a group of six to eight without getting exertion moodles. This is just kiting them around and swinging when safe to do so. Sometimes I can't even kill a single one before reaching high exertion and retreating to rest. Axe works better and can kill more zombies, as you'd expect, but exertion still occurs quickly. I know you don't want people cutting down hordes of zombies effortlessly, but the effect of this change for me has been to turn every fight into a multiple-round slugfest with rest breaks in between each round. I already avoided fighting in the game as it's usually a waste of time and resources, but when you do have to fight, you don't want it to be like this.

I understand the intended purpose of the recent changes to exertion, but having sunk a bunch of time into 30.7 I feel it makes the game very stop-start and kills the frenetic pace of combat. I find myself fighting for a couple of minutes and then walking away from the zombies to go find somewhere to idle for a few minutes while I alt tab and do something else, and I don't think that was the aim. So I have a few suggestions for ways to make exertion matter that don't involve the 'rest' mechanic: - Make it represent short term exertion that can be recovered from as it was previously, however - Penalise or nullify recovery from exertion whilst panicked - Make the player's capacity for action before reaching exertion, and ability to recover from exertion, much lower as tiredness increases This (hopefully) would keep exertion as a sort of stamina pool that grows smaller and harder to replenish as overall tiredness increases, and would also force the player to do more than take a couple of steps back in order to catch their breath, without making them idle their character for four minutes 'resting'.

And they can. But it makes no sense to kick up a big stink about how the game isn't hard enough when it's still missing things crucial to its challenge. This is like performance tuning a car that's missing a wheel.

Alright. Played 30.7 for several hours, two months into the game, and I can't deal with the exertion change anymore. It doesn't make the game challenging and certainly doesn't make it fun. Making the player retreat after every ten minutes of gameplay to spend four minutes "resting" is a really bad design choice. Please, please consider altering this, or making the game mechanic optional (if it isn't already).

No, no forced tutorials. Games get uninstalled and reinstalled. No one who knows how to play a game wants to sit through a mandatory tutorial.

Gameplay shouldn't ever take a back seat to realism, however. This change just makes the game plod more.

Don't call it "casual". It doesn't matter what you call it. Add a tooltip or somesuch that pops up the first time you start a game, with a message akin to "If you've never played PZ before, it is strongly recommended that you choose the beginner preset". A lot of games do this with their tutorial. Development endorsement for starting out slow helps people feel less wimpy about it.

I dislike the change to exertion. It just makes gameplay more sluggish; the much-lambasted 'fight, back off for a minute, resume' mechanic is now 'fight, back off to the nearest house, sit in a chair for an hour, resume'. Too much added tedium for little real added challenge. It also makes traveling across the vast map even more irritating - before this patch it was possible to travel between Muldraugh and West Point in a day at a constant sprint, now it's impossible to make the trip in under two days. (And if we must talk realism, West Point is less than six miles up the road from Muldraugh, which wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to walk.) There's no point in having two different moodles to represent the effects of long term exhaustion, either. If you don't want short term exhaustion being represented in the game anymore, then just remove exertion entirely and combine its effects into the tiredness moodle.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I don't believe ramping up the challenge based on how the game is right now is a good idea, because key features are still missing. Namely NPCs. The lack of challenge in PZ would be mitigated a great deal by forcing the player to deal with competitive scavenging, gunfights and safehouse raids outside of multiplayer. Hopefully you won't find yourself having to roll back a bunch of these changes once NPCs come into play. That being said, stuff like zombie migration should happen regardless.