Nukaboy

Hey everyone! So I'm running a pretty big PvP server + community and after some months I have made certain experiences with PvP and specifically base raiding that I'd like to share alongside some of my ideas to solve/improve upon these issues. Like we all know PvP is kinda whacky in PZ at the moment and I hope the devs will improve on this aspect in the future as there definitely is a sizeable PvP community around the game that thursts for changes in this department lol THE 2 BIG PROBLEMS: #1 Safehouses make raiding almost impossible but without them offline raiding will frustrate players and make it unviable to have a base in any premade structure On well populated servers EVERY place will get visited after some time so with no safehouse system in place you are guaranteed to lose all your progress at some point. At the same time it would be a shame not making use of all the cool structures on the map for basebuilding. Safehouses on the other hand make base raiding almost impossible as they allow the defender to respawn infinitely and throw their body at them until they eventually break and have to flee or they just log out and the protection become active again. On our server we have the setting activated that safehouses will become lootable whenever the owner (or one of the members) is online. That makes the situation a little bit better but openly attacking a safehouse while the inhabitants are present is still not possible as, like I mentioned above, they will just zerg rush you and your team mates until you run out of ammo and another problems that comes up with this is that defenders can just combat log and leave the attackers with a protected base they cant raid. Of course we have rules against things like zerg rushing and combat logging but there cant be an admin online 24/7 to help out in those cases and its always kinda unimmersive when an admin has to come and resolve PvP situations just because some nutsack couldn't be bothered with reading the rules before and following them. Now you could argue here that I could disable safehouse respawning but I think that isn't a good solution to the problem as its rather annoying if you have to spawn in some random place each time you die in a PvE scenario. Especially if you have a wilderness base and no safehouses at all will make offline raiding a thing again and that just sucks. Imagine coming back home from a long day of work, looking forwards to playing on your favorite server and suddenly all your progress is gone. #2 Stunlocks in gun combat There is a server settings that disables stunlocks in melee combat, why isn't there an equivalent for guns? One could argue here that PZs gun combat is (weirdly) realistic in that sense as whoever shoots first usually wins but it's still a game and gun combat is way more enjoyable when players have a chance to fight back. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: #1 Safehouses make raiding almost impossible but without them offline raiding will frustrate players and make it unviable to have a base in any premade structure I thought a lot about this. There is a mod called "SSR: Safehouses Overhaul" on the workshop. That mod adds a feature that allows to "capture" safehouses and I think having such an (optional) feature in vanilla PZ would solve most issues with safehouse mentionend in the problems section. I'd imagine it to work like that: - Safehouses can be temporary captured when the owner (or at leat one member) is online and not present in the safehouse (have been killed or are away on a loot run etc.) - Server owners can set the time it takes until the safehouse will switch ownership back to the original owner essentially limiting the raid time to like 20 rl minutes This would prevent owners/members of a captured safehouse to respawn in it infinitely and logging out won't activate the offline protection without the need to deactivate safehouse respawns in general for anyone. #2 Stunlocks in gun combat The obvious solution here is to give us a setting that disables stunlocks in gun combat. Now I know the devs have mentionend wanting to overhaul the whole aiming mechanic to a more skill based system. We'll have to see how this will affect gun combat but I could imagine a system where stunlocks only happen on critical hits etc. But yeah thats future stuff. For now the best solution here would definitely be to give us a setting to disable stunlocks in gun combat. CONCLUSION: There's obviously still some open construction sites to make PvP and Raiding viable and enjoyable in PZ but I think the devs are well aware of that (given the content of the Thursdoids) and additions like traps etc. will definitely make base raiding way more fun for all sites (attackers and defenders). The good thing I see here is that there isn't actually THAT much to do to make PvP viable. Something like a capture system I mentionend above is definitely worth its own release but it could be way worse. The base for an enjoyable surivival PvP game is there and I hope the devs will make use of that base and turn PZ into a true gem when it comes to PvP gameplay without annoying things like offline raiding that plague other survival PvP games. I look forward to feedback and discussions on my ideas. Please tell me what you think of them. PS: No I don't think that "Use mod XY" is a good solution for a problem.

Does it make a difference if we play on 41.73 or .74? I thought the fixes were included in 41.73 already. We have not experienced any server crashes on our linux server since but the moment we switched to unstable tracking sites like battlemetrics stopped tracking our server while those on the stable branch are still tracked. If there is no difference except version number I would switch back to stable branch on my server

No. In the new towns added even further west of those places. They are clearly not finished yet missing buildings, proper connection to the main map (one of them), zombie spawns and foraging zones. I'm really pumped for map expansions and all that but I hope they'll finish them before putting 41.72 on the stable branch

Oh okey.. Will they be fully fleshed out once B41.72 goes to the stable branch? I don't like the idea of having two empty towns on my mp server that have no zombie spawns (except indoor zombies), no foraging zones and miss most of their buildings. I'm totally looking forward to more vanilla map expansions but personally would've preferred to get them as a surprise in the final B41 patch. That would've been dope! I'd rather have no new map areas then unfinished ones. Sorry if this comes off as harsh. Still love what you are doing and looking forward to the future of pz! Edit: Also thanks for the fast answer!

It seems like, despite the patch notes stating the oppsosite, that the worked on areas for the final B41 updates might have slipped into this patch. I can't confirm myself as I have not yet tried the new beta branch but according to the Reddit post below they are already included. There are also videos on YouTube showing people walking trough those towns: If that really turns out to be true I hope they will be removed before releasing the update to the stable branch.

I want to give my map that typical vanilla feeling. Are there any sources for vanilla buildings or do I have to recreate them myself?

Each his own I guess but what really bother me with this post is that it completely disregards what the devs said in their thursdoids about the endgame as well the general history and reasoning for why it is in development for so long. Yet this guy has the audicity to call the people behind PZ incompetent. They know that there is no real endgame and thats why we will get one both with the crafting update as well as npcs. By their vision we will be able to play on the same safe for literal years (in real life) with new challenges coming up over time. There are reasons why this game took so long which I'm not going to elliborate on anymore as it has all been said a hundred times until now but after the big chunk of work that B41 was is out now the development will, according to the devs, be much faster now. You know if you don't like the game and its not for you that okey. But at least provide some constructive feedback instead of this useless rand because you, for unknown reasons, reject to use sandbox and tweak the game. With an sandbox game like PZ there will never be 'optimal' settings that satisfy everyone and if you don't like the standard settings with respawns etc. just turn them off damn it... There's even a mod that lets you do this midgame so you don't need to start a new save.. but maybe you were just to incompetent to find out yourself right?

Me and my friends are thinking about starting an mp server and a big question that came up on my side was how we will prevent loot cycling. For those that don't know, loot cycling is when people throw all the stuff from containers on the ground and leave it there. Many people doing this over and over again will greatly hurt server performance in the long run (we want the world to be persistent). Now what I thought off was to add items that are usually dumped to the ground (books, tools, trash items) to the removal list (thats a setting the game provides) so that the game will automatically delete those after some time. The problem with that approach is that this will also remove player based items in bases and thus limit the ability of players to decorate their base with items. Does anybody know a mod or some other way to effectively counter loot cycling like a server plugin or setting etc.? We will, of course, also make a rule that disallows loot cycling and would, if we decide to add items to the removal list, tell people about which items specifically on our discord. But you know how people are sometimes... Some will not follow it because they don't care and it's hard to catch them in the moment they do this so we really need a solution for that problem.