TIS position concerning Gun noise nerf

[Peon]

So I am not really sure if this happens only in multiplayer since I haven't really tried single player after the MP update but Gun noises have been reduced to ridiculous levels.

My 35 days character has over 12k kills and that's only because I've been spending a lot of time leveling professions. Before this change I was advocating that guns were useless because for every kill you brought 10 new zombies into the fight. My first time trying to use a shotgun in PZ was in an empty field in the middle of nowhere with barely 6 zombies on screen and it ended with me fleeing in panic after several hundred kills and using all my 10 boxes of shells. I barely used unmodded firearms after that experience and every time I did it, it was for fun and never ended up being effective at clearing anything.
Now the situation is the exact opposite of that. My M9 pistol doesn't even attract zombies at full range (meaning I can shoot a zombie in a pack without said pack hearing it).  My shotgun is somehow quieter than my character shouting. It made the game quite trivial and the permanent difficulty of PZ is not there anymore. I managed to loot most keys locations in louisville at record speed by just driving at a place, running around to aggro nearby zombies and blasting them with a couple shells without being in any real danger. Before this change this wouldn't have been possible. Doing this would have pulled all the zombies over several appartement blocks and made the area insanely dangerous.

I know firearms being how they were was a conscient design by TIS and I agreed with it. It was both realistic and kept the game hard even for a fully geared character. Now the late game experience is cheap and easy, I barely use any melee weapon anymore on my 10 STR character because it would be less efficient and riskier even after I found several katanas and pickaxes. Eventually I will run out of ammo but at this point I will have centuries worth of supplies in my base and no real reason to go look for anything.

Hence my question: What is the reasoning behind this total change in game design?

 

Is it a technical issue with multiplayer? I can see how dozen of people firing at the same time in different location might crash a server due to the sheer numbers of zombies moving. If that is the case will it be fixed or is this a technical limit that is here to stay for the foreseeable future? 
Is it a design decision to incentivize PvP? (If it is I disagree with it)
Is it a balance decision to make firearms viable? (If it is I disagree with it, at least to this extent, you should try shifting the dial from 100 to 80 before turning it all the way to 10)

 

Also do I risk crashing my server If I mod the old weapon range sound back to what it was? 

Sorry for the grammatical mistakes, second language here. Keep up the good work, and happy holiday to all. 
 

[Irken Empire]

There's a bug in MP which makes some random zombies close to you ignore the shots when fired.

[Peon]

I have 12K kills, probably around 90% of that with a shotgun. This is not a bug that makes SOME random zombies ignore the shot, I can guarantee that (I mean there might be a bug that does that and I believe I've witnessed a few instances of this but that is not at all what I am talking about). I spent dozen of hours doing it, I know it's more than a few zombies not being pulled as they should. Right now a situation that would have pulled thousand of zombies before (like firing a shotgun in the mall carpark) just pull at most 50. This is not a one time occurrence, it is a every time occurrence over close to a hundred instances. It's like the shotgun noise range of 200 has been turned to something like 20 or 30. 

[BoogieMan]

How did you find enough ammo to shoot 10,000+ zombies?

[Peon]

20 minutes ago, BoogieMan said:

How did you find enough ammo to shoot 10,000+ zombies?

Let's just say that it would be hard for any newcomer in the server to find a weapon that is not stashed in our base. We emptied every single gunstore and police station and some of the non conventional spots like the military appartements in March Ridge or the first building of the prison. There's quite a bit in Louisville too (look for the surplus store and the pawn shops, I even found several katana in those). We play with Raven Creek so we found some over there as well but most of it is from vanilla content. At some point we had over a crate full of shotgun shells. 

[Papa Juliet Whiskey]

I was messing around in sandbox settings, trying to figure out how many zeds there might be in a town by flipping on godmode, unlimited ammo, and unlimited weapon durability, and killed nearly 10000 zeds in sp in a small rural town before the game crashed, and thay was a few days of literal nonstop shooting. I was using m1911, and it frew everything in. 

 

This was in sp, so I assume it's an issue with mp at the moment.

 

They didn't stop flooding in for me at all.

[Peon]

So I looked further into the issue and found this answer by EnigmaGrey on the steam forums: https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/3198117312257169750/
Seems it will be fixed soon