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Guns are lures, not weapons.


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I get that not everyone is a sharpshooter, but I don't care how much of a californian you are, if you're standing 5 feet behind a zombie, aim in for seven whole seconds, and pull the trigger, and you miss, there is something genuinely wrong with you. 

 

Every single time I've used a gun in this game it's been way more trouble than its worth. The character will miss 9/10 shots no matter how much time you spent aimed in making sure that the barrel is properly aligned. It's hard to believe that every single resident of Kentucky is so handicapped that they can't hit easy shots. 

 

I spent 60 bullets in one attempt to use a gun, about 10% of my shots hit at all, and not one zombie was killed. I ran out of ammo and had to jump in a car and run down the horde because that just works a million times better. 

 

Is there something I'm not getting or are guns just genuinely the worst?

 

 

 

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You have to stand still and take time to aim properly (bright green highlight on your target means you have a great chance to hit it), also you need to be calm and maybe there are other factors I forgot, but I agree with you and many players too, we use guns just to make a distraction because it's really hard to kill anything  with them if you're not an expert in this skill (except with shotguns) and I also think it's pretty dumb, a zombie is a slow target even if you never used a gun in your life you are sure to hit it if you are like 3 meters away of it, even if it's not an headshot it would be less annoying than not touching them at all.

Anyway, guns are not worth it at all which is really a shame when you know how much they worked on it, I hope they'll change it or I don't know maybe making it faster to up this skill.

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11 hours ago, Axezombie said:

You have to stand still and take time to aim properly (bright green highlight on your target means you have a great chance to hit it), also you need to be calm and maybe there are other factors I forgot, but I agree with you and many players too, we use guns just to make a distraction because it's really hard to kill anything  with them if you're not an expert in this skill (except with shotguns) and I also think it's pretty dumb, a zombie is a slow target even if you never used a gun in your life you are sure to hit it if you are like 3 meters away of it, even if it's not an headshot it would be less annoying than not touching them at all.

Anyway, guns are not worth it at all which is really a shame when you know how much they worked on it, I hope they'll change it or I don't know maybe making it faster to up this skill.

Yeah I know you have to stand still, it's just so weird that characters can be so truly inept with the most basic principles of aiming a weapon, like it's not that hard to hit a large, slow moving target at close range.

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Not just headshots, but brain shots, are not difficult? Against fellow humanoids, former friends and neighbours? While moving in great numbers with the intent to maim and kill you?

 

 

Most guns get 3/5 shots at level 0, which is  already way too generous. If you’re getting 1/10, you’re doing something wrong.

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Panic is a big factor- Popping some Beta Blockers before shooting with anything non-shotgun usually means the difference between hitting them all in the head, or hitting just a couple of them and not killing them, even on high skill levels.

 

That's why I sometimes wish that the "Desensitized" Trait of the Veteran was more of a global skill (the ones like Strength, that go up real slow) that all survivors gained from constantly fending off the Zed. Because while what EG said it's true (of shooting fellow humanoids, friends, neighbors, et al), it'd mostly be at first; The human species is anything if not adaptable- A few months of mowing the Zed and you'd start panicking less and less, until the point where killing Zeds makes you about as nervous as smacking a mosquito.

 

It has never made much sense to me that, unless you play Veteran, took the Brave trait, popped some Beta Blockers, you usually panic with any group of Zed bigger than 3 more than if this was your first time seeing a Zed.

 

Perhaps that's something that could be changed later on?

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4 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Not just headshots, but brain shots, are not difficult? Against fellow humanoids, former friends and neighbours? While moving in great numbers with the intent to maim and kill you?

 

 

Most guns get 3/5 shots at level 0, which is  already way too generous. If you’re getting 1/10, you’re doing something wrong.

I won't lie every time you post I have to wonder how much time you spend playing your game compared to coding it.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but listening to player feedback is a big part of development. You can't just  go off of what something is supposed to do, how the game feels and plays to the average user is important, and as far as I can tell, most people seem to have the same sentiment about firearms. This is also a reason that companies hire QA testers, the stock that I come from.

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Rise your skill by using shotguns, at 4-5 aiming pistols are more reliable.

 

Also  i suggest to install britta mod  + following aiming overhaul mod since vanilla aiming is a meme.

For example, with these mods you can strafe and hit zombies with pistol point blank, but not oneshot it. Spending 5-6 bullets to kill one zombie as an untrained man is pretty realistic imo, shooting point blank and missing is not. In additional, mod adds penalties for extended/folded stocks, recoil that depends on wep's caliber, distance penalty, attachment break penalty, car shooting penalty (the heavier a gun the longer to aim from the car). These mods wont turn the aiming to the easymode level but balance it very nicely instead.

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2 hours ago, PoshRocketeer said:

I won't lie every time you post I have to wonder how much time you spend playing your game compared to coding it.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but listening to player feedback is a big part of development. You can't just  go off of what something is supposed to do, how the game feels and plays to the average user is important, and as far as I can tell, most people seem to have the same sentiment about firearms. This is also a reason that companies hire QA testers, the stock that I come from.


I’m not a coder.

 

Part of the fun of PZ and other survival games is figuring things out for yourself and experimenting. So if you know how it’s supposed to work because someone gives you a hint, you can evaluate your behaviour and try to figure it out, possibly elaborating on what you’re doing in the process if you still have trouble.

 

 Instead, you keep starting at the conclusion and expecting us to just “fix it:” whether it’s getting yourself bit then dying from the resulting infection, misunderstanding that dying fairly quickly is the goal, and failing to use guns, seemingly. With those 3 examples, I’m forced to conclude that you have a very specific vision of how the game is supposed to be and you don’t like finding out people that make said game disagree with you, that something that is very much subjective is in fact subjective. That that is borne from a professed love of the game does not excuse the controlling, confrontational nature of asserting yourself over another’s project.

 

 

For everyone else:


We’ve buffed guns considerably in build 41, to the point where if you stand still for roughly 30 seconds and don’t move between shots, you’ll hit 3/5 times with a pistol pretty much 1/1 with a shotgun at the base rate. It’s fairly close to ORGM, with the exception of shotguns being stupidly op and rifles having sweet spots.


if you need help, please just ask. Describe or show off the problem and we’ll be happy to go though it, and even fix things if they’re broken.

 

 This thread though? This is the snake eating its own tail.

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On 5/25/2021 at 6:31 AM, EnigmaGrey said:


I’m not a coder.

 

Part of the fun of PZ and other survival games is figuring things out for yourself and experimenting. So if you know how it’s supposed to work because someone gives you a hint, you can evaluate your behaviour and try to figure it out, possibly elaborating on what you’re doing in the process if you still have trouble.

 

 Instead, you keep starting at the conclusion and expecting us to just “fix it:” whether it’s getting yourself bit then dying from the resulting infection, misunderstanding that dying fairly quickly is the goal, and failing to use guns, seemingly. With those 3 examples, I’m forced to conclude that you have a very specific vision of how the game is supposed to be and you don’t like finding out people that make said game disagree with you, that something that is very much subjective is in fact subjective. That that is borne from a professed love of the game does not excuse the controlling, confrontational nature of asserting yourself over another’s project.

 

 

For everyone else:


We’ve buffed guns considerably in build 41, to the point where if you stand still for roughly 30 seconds and don’t move between shots, you’ll hit 3/5 times with a pistol pretty much 1/1 with a shotgun at the base rate. It’s fairly close to ORGM, with the exception of shotguns being stupidly op and rifles having sweet spots.


if you need help, please just ask. Describe or show off the problem and we’ll be happy to go though it, and even fix things if they’re broken.

 

 This thread though? This is the snake eating its own tail.

 

3/5 hits after standing still for 30 seconds?

 

This will almost never be a circumstance that will happen. Maybe on the first shot. With any more than a few zombies coming after you, you'll never be able to stand still for 30 seconds anytime, anywhere.

 

Throw in a bit of panic, which almost every character will have at some level and yeah, you're going to miss. A lot. And any hits that aren't kills don't really count for much since zombies don't bleed. Some times it seems to knock them down or make them crawlers but it still doesn't count for much in a bad situation.

 

 

I've been playing this game for a long time, and I've never considered guns to be viable for most realistically encountered situations other than as lures or going out in a blaze of glory after you're infected. They make almost any situation worse.

 

While turning any group of zombies into a massive horde being the main problem, you also have to consider:

 

1. They take up valuable space

2. Ammo is unrealistically heavy

3. Ammo is rare

4. Magazines are bizarrely rare

5. Even the best gun user starts aren't all that good at shooting despite how good they should be, other characters are even worse.

6. The skill raises very slowly, which is hurt even more by points 2 and 3.

7. Getting enough loaded mags (since reloading in combat isn't very viable) to make dealing with the extra zombies you will probably attract is a problem on its own, see number 2 and 3.

 

 

Other than nerfing sound radius and/or adding a level of inaccuracy to where the zombies think it's coming from, I'm not sure the best way to balance them for now either.I have no idea how they are going to be balanced around NPCs. They'll probably be lethal against humans causing quick deaths, and every idiot NPC running around shooting is going to cause insane chaos with hordes. At least it will be amusing at first.

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3 hours ago, BoogieMan said:

 

3/5 hits after standing still for 30 seconds?

 

This will almost never be a circumstance that will happen. Maybe on the first shot. With any more than a few zombies coming after you, you'll never be able to stand still for 30 seconds anytime, anywhere.

 

Throw in a bit of panic, which almost every character will have at some level and yeah, you're going to miss. A lot. And any hits that aren't kills don't really count for much since zombies don't bleed. Some times it seems to knock them down or make them crawlers but it still doesn't count for much in a bad situation.

 

 

This is at level 0, so expecting it to be awesome is kind of pointless: 

You stand still, then you unload a clip with some minimal spacing between each shot. You hit 3/5 shots and likely kill 2-3 zombies with each clip. Then you move perpendicular to the direction the zombies are traveling, lose any that peeled off to follow you, square up, and shoot again. You don't need to space out shots by 30 seconds every time. Panic, by comparison to just squaring up for those 30 seconds and staying still, can be pretty much ignored.  Even non-critical shots still stun the zombie, causing it to pause and giving you more time. 

 

Turning zombies into a massive horde is no problem. It makes looting large areas easy because suddenly instead of encountering tiny little groups that alert each other, now zombies are all in one place.

So:

1. A .45 pistol weighs 0.5 when equipped.
2. You can carry a hundred .45 rounds in 4 weight

3. There are half a dozen high ammo spots on the map + randomized zombie survivors, houses, and cars. There's tens of thousands of rounds..
4.  I don't recall if that's fixed in the public build, but we've tried to make sure they almost always spawn with magazines in or near them
5. You can basically triple your distance and crit count by levelling.
6. You can walk and reload. Since you're faster then them, it shouldn't be much of a risk. 

Not saying they're useful for wiping out tons of zombies, at least not until you've levelled up sufficiently. And, ofc, just fighting them with melee weapons will be more efficient, just at the expense of always being in melee distance. 

A shotgun, since it can hit 3 zombies at a time, is your best friend in terms of levelling fast. 

 

I'd suggest giving them another shot if you haven't in a long time. They're basically just a limited selection of ORGM at this point, with the exception of min-distance for rifles.

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Based off my own experiences, assuming no points in guns means your character is entirely inexperienced with firearms, I can tell you for certain that guns are surprisingly heavier than they appear, or in some cases lighter. Aiming with iron sights doesn't come naturally, and using holos / scopes only adds to the confusion, since they require some finesse to properly use - let alone install, by yourself. This not even taking into consideration the ability to steadily aim, knowing shooting stances, and dealing with recoil. It doesn't take much to get used to all the above, but it still requires practice and a bit of time to familiarize yourself with everything.

 

Overall, I feel like this makes sense with how the mechanics portray it. Is it frustrating? God, yes—but it's not without reason. Once you raise your stats in guns, shooting becomes less of a hassle, albeit still not ideal.

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I have a feeling much of the player base complains about how weapons behave in the game because of shows like The Walking Dead where guns are predominantly used to fight the hoards of zombies. In addition to this using weapons is fun and should not be something that is immediately considered a useless option. My opinion is that it also shouldn't be a frustrating mechanic because this results in everyone just avoiding it.

 

Taking 30 seconds to aim and then have a 60% chance to hit a zombie from blank range does not seem like a particularly useful mechanic. Note that I have not used weapons all that often in my games so I am just going by what is said in this thread. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what was said.

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1 hour ago, yooks said:

I have a feeling much of the player base complains about how weapons behave in the game because of shows like The Walking Dead where guns are predominantly used to fight the hoards of zombies. In addition to this using weapons is fun and should not be something that is immediately considered a useless option. My opinion is that it also shouldn't be a frustrating mechanic because this results in everyone just avoiding it.

 

Taking 30 seconds to aim and then have a 60% chance to hit a zombie from blank range does not seem like a particularly useful mechanic. Note that I have not used weapons all that often in my games so I am just going by what is said in this thread. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what was said.


Except,  once again, this is at level 0 out of 10.

 

At a low level, it should be expected that a skill is frustrating or there would be no sense of progression through gaining levels.

 

We’re simply not going for the Hollywood treatment of guns, regardless.

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55 minutes ago, EnigmaGrey said:


Except,  once again, this is at level 0 out of 10.

 

No skill should be frustrating or there’s no sense of progression by gaining levels, even if we wanted the Hollywood treatment (we do not).

 

Most people in real life are at level 0 in firearms yet I believe they would realistically be able to hit a slow moving target a few feet in front of them without aiming for 30 seconds. But perhaps we are not talking about blank range here. Does the wait duration and the 60% chance applies at blank range or at a reasonable distance?

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56 minutes ago, yooks said:

 

Most people in real life are at level 0 in firearms yet I believe they would realistically be able to hit a slow moving target a few feet in front of them without aiming for 30 seconds. But perhaps we are not talking about blank range here. Does the wait duration and the 60% chance applies at blank range or at a reasonable distance?


Yeah, to say the least, I don’t buy that they could. People have enough trouble with hammers and nails, and that’s both connected to their body directly and a stationary target. I don’t think they’re going to be blowing out the brains of former humans that are trying to eat eat them first time they pick up a gun.

 

You can still get lucky, ofc. 30 seconds just maximizes the chance to hit. If you’re trying to kill larger groups and minimize waste, then you’d want to wait.

 

Chance to hit also improves the closer zombies are to you, up to a point, depending on the weapon type. So no, the the 60% thing is just very general.

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When i tried shooting various guns at the shooting range for the first time in my life, i can tell that accurately aim at targets far away is hard, but shooting at nearby targets shouldnt be a big problem. Speaking gamewise, when you shoot at close targets, you are almost at the same amount of risk as using melee weapon, so why should there be huge accuracy penalty at close range? In other words - you are at same amount of risk while close, waste ammo, make lots of noise and have fairly large accuracy penalty? - doesnt feel right.

 

edit:

In short - shots fired at targets, which are very close to you should be fairly accurate, at any skill level.

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37 minutes ago, Toshis said:

When i tried shooting various guns at the shooting range for the first time in my life, i can tell that accurately aim at targets far away is hard, but shooting at nearby targets shouldnt be a big problem. Speaking gamewise, when you shoot at close targets, you are almost at the same amount of risk as using melee weapon, so why should there be huge accuracy penalty at close range? In other words - you are at same amount of risk while close, waste ammo, make lots of noise and have fairly large accuracy penalty? - doesnt feel right.

 

edit:

In short - shots fired at targets, which are very close to you should be fairly accurate, at any skill level.

Where are you getting that there’s a “huge penalty” from being close? There’s a penalty for rushing too fast and constantly moving. If even professionals in high stress situations have a high rate of misses, you’re not likely to do much better, regardless of how it seemed on the range.

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The only guns in the game as of yet that you can really use to improve the shooting skills are the two shotguns, which is fine in a gameplay sense because the shot spreads out or whatever, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that someone picking up a gun for the first time would be able to handle a 12 gauge shotgun fine & pave the ground with viscera from groups of zombies but not hold a 9mm handgun steady enough to hit a shambling target less than 20 feet away.

 

Yes, I realize that standing still and keeping the aim button held down steadily improves your chance to hit but you're still looking at, in game terms, red or deep orange odds of hitting at all regardless of how much damage it actually lands.

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6 minutes ago, colid_cnake said:

The only guns in the game as of yet that you can really use to improve the shooting skills are the two shotguns, which is fine in a gameplay sense because the shot spreads out or whatever, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that someone picking up a gun for the first time would be able to handle a 12 gauge shotgun fine & pave the ground with viscera from groups of zombies but not hold a 9mm handgun steady enough to hit a shambling target less than 20 feet away.

 

Yes, I realize that standing still and keeping the aim button held down steadily improves your chance to hit but you're still looking at, in game terms, red or deep orange odds of hitting at all regardless of how much damage it actually lands.


Yeah, I’m not a fan of the shotgun basically being a force-push blunderbust. We’re kind of stuck with it because of the way the system handles angles. That’ll be fixed when it eventually gets replaced with one that draws rays for bullet paths. For now, it’ll have to remain comically overpowered vs a pistol.

 

If it’s red or orange, it’s either too far away or you’ve not waited long enough. Regardless, orange is still a fairly high chance to hit. Green is just the top end.

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1 minute ago, EnigmaGrey said:


Yeah, I’m not a fan of the shotgun basically being a force-push blunderbust. We’re kind of stuck with it because of the way the system handles angles. That’ll be fixed when it eventually gets replaced with one that draws rays for bullet paths. For now, it’ll have to remain comically overpowered vs a pistol.

 

If it’s red or orange, it’s either too far away or you’ve not waited long enough. Regardless, orange is still a fairly high chance to hit. Green is just the top end.

 

Yeah, it's rough making it work with the system you guys have in place. All the best to you on development with that better system!

And I will say that's a fair read on it, ranges are a little hard to gauge at the isometric angle and I'm not 100% familiar with how the percentages line up code-wise (plus some issues with the color outlines visually on my end).

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My experience and point of view comes from real life firearm use. I own 9 of various types. I think the first time my dad took me out to shoot, I was about 10 years old. At first I could hit a 12oz can at 8ft maybe 1 in 8 shots and that was probably mostly luck. After some simple pointers about stance, arms, breathing and trigger pulling, it improved considerably. As an adult with more practice, I can hit a man-sized target with a pistol at 25yds (75ft or 22.86 meters) with every shot. Headshots maybe 40% on a good day with the pistol I'm best with (glock 17, ironsights) and 15yds or less (probably similar to typical gun range combat in PZ) headshots are probably 80% all with between 2 and 3 seconds of aiming time per shot. I'm average at best, since I don't think that there is much room to improve at these ranges against stationary targets. But with my .223/5.56 rifle with just iron sights? It's even easier to get accurate shots at longer ranges. A lot easier. A 30-30 with a scope? I don't have access to a range with a long enough lane to make it ineffective. If you can brace/rest a rifle on something it makes a huge difference as well. Shooting accurately with handguns at ranged outside of 10yds is much, much more difficult. With an actual expert, my father who won pistol competitions in the army, even after having not shot for the better part of a decade freaking bulls-eyed (like a thumbprint sized point) his first shot with a .45 at about 20 yds. Even at farther ranges he put those rounds in a pretty tight grouping. Up closer than that and you couldn't actually count the number of shots because they started using the same grouping holes.

 

In a situation like PZ though, if you're scared enough that your hands are shaking or you're moving, yeah you're going to be pretty off target. But it's easier to hit a moving target when you're stationary than it is to hit a stationary target when you're moving. So for non-experts movement would really hurt aiming. But standing still and shooting zombies coming in a direct line towards you, even in the head? I'd imagine someone who has never shot at all would get headshots at ranges greater than 6-8ft mostly by accident, but even with just a bit of practice that would improve quite a bit. It doesn't take that long to make decent improvements.

 

Guns are heavier than they look, sure but the weights I remember in PZ are fine for the guns themselves. But loose ammo in PZ is heavier than it should be. Boxes are probably fine, even generous. But a loose 9mm round in PZ is roughly 250-300% heavier than a real one and in the latest version most guns I've found have NOT had a magazine for them and they probably should nearly all the time. It doesn't really matter how much ammo is on the whole map as having even a quarter of "what is there" isn't a realistic expectation. Just skilling up a little takes a bunch of ammo. That's with the weapon rate increased one step above default.

 

 

But all that is secondary. Zombie hearing seems to be pin point accurate and that is the problem. In my real life experience while shooting outside, it's not always that easy to know exactly where a distant shot came from. The sound carries very far yes, but the way sound travels and bounces around, sometimes you can only determine a general direction. If you were say, even just a few hundred feet from an obscured gunshot, there is no way you're ever going to be able to know the exact spot on the ground where that shot originated from. If you use cheats to make yourself invisible and shoot even once, zombies will move to the exact spot where you were standing when you fired. I think it would be better for both realism and gameplay that zombie hearing, at the very least in regards to gunshots, should have a comfortable margin of error. Sure you're probably going to attract more, that is expected but they shouldn't be able to home right in without being fairly close.

 

As far as accuracy goes it's pretty hard to judge. From my own experience and with taking amature and even first time shooters to a firing range and it takes very little time to make pretty decent improvements. My wife never shot a gun once before we went together, and it didn't take her very long at all to get comfortable and pretty good. But if you didn't have the benefit of someone else's experience? Hard to say, I wouldn't actually know. Then again, fighting for your life has a way of focusing you.

 

I would make zombies select a random tile within 100 tiles (favoring the farther half most of the time) of a shot sound for every 400 tiles they are away - something like that. They should be brought to your general location by the sound, but have to mostly track you with vision. Shooting indoors should also much more drastically reduce the distance the sound carries. My thoughts anyway.

 

As far as where Enigma said "Where are you getting that there’s a “huge penalty” from being close? There’s a penalty for rushing too fast and constantly moving. If even professionals in high stress situations have a high rate of misses, you’re not likely to do much better, regardless of how it seemed on the range."

 

Yeah, even professionals have high miss rates stressful situations, but those are typically when what you're shooting at also has a gun and you can be shot dead without even knowing it happened. Zombies hordes would be scary, yes, but if you knew that you could probably just outrun them or hop in a car and bail, your fear levels would probably be manageable. In game wise, I don't know how much gun accuracy goes down at close ranges, or even if it does. I imagine it does with scopes which is realistic. But I do know that personally, if I were put in a PZ type situation, with a pistol I would wait until zombies got less than 15ft from me for a relatively good chance for headshots and work on a nice pile of corpses for them to stumble on. Close ranges are significantly easier. A way I've described it to people before is imagine there is a long round pole sticking out of your barrel like 15ft long. If you hold the gun out and point it and look at the stick 2ft out from the barrel, it won't be moving much. Now look at it at the end 15ft away. It would be wobbling all over. The slight wobbles in your hand, breathing, and most importantly how you pull the trigger will have a significant impact on the "wobble" you'd have at the end of that long pole. You can see this easily by holding a laser pointer. Point it at something very close and see how little the dot moves. Now point it across your house and you will see more wobbling.

 

 

 

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On 5/26/2021 at 4:00 PM, BoogieMan said:

Magazines are bizarrely rare

 

I can't say I share your experience. In my current game, I have accumulated roughly 40x9mm and 30x.45 magazines from killing about 7k zombies Even got 3 or 4 .44 mags. Not sure how many were looted in houses and how many from zombies.  So lets say about 1 magazine for every 150/200 kills. 

 

On 6/2/2021 at 4:10 PM, BoogieMan said:

most guns I've found have NOT had a magazine for them

were those guns looted from homes or from zombies?  I'd say guns I find on zombies have a mag at (the very) least 50% of the time. Didn't pay attention to those found in homes though.

 

And, to be fair, since mags are infinitely reusable (at least, from what I can tell), ammo scarcity is more of a problem than mags scarcity. 

 

Oh... And that's vanilla on apoc. I never installed a mod yet.

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