[2023] Getting tired of the TFP and their game......

Originally posted by Rain: --- MORE BUGS!
--- MORE BUGS!
--- MORE BUGS!

Bugs are just a part of playing an unfinished game still in development. Demanding that the developers not do anything because it might introduce new bugs goes against the whole development process.

----NOT AGAIN!!
----NOT AGAIN!
----NOT AGAIN!
----NOT AGAIN!
----NOT AGAIN!
----NOT AGAIN!

I hate to break it to you but developing a game involves reworking systems until either you feel you've got it right or your publishing executives impose a deadline on you and force you to push the game out as is. TFP has no executives from a publisher forcing them to meet their deadline with whatever they've got. As an independent studio they can rework systems as much as they wish until they are satisfied. We paid for the opportunity to play while they experiment and develop their ideas.

Demanding that they not change any more systems while the game is in the midst of development is just not a realistic demand nor is it a realistic expectation. I can guarantee you that there will be more changes coming in A22 because they are not fully satisfied with some of the existing systems and even though they've worked on them over the years they are going to change them again before the game goes gold. Development is the essence of change AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN.

It is understandable that some players might become fatigued with the long process this has been and those players should step away from the game for awhile until they aren't feeling burnout any longer. But burned out bored players are definitely not the people who should be trying to demand a type of game development that doesn't involve change.

Drinking Water Rebalance <---------WHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not sure why they decided to tackle the early game water survival part of the game. But they did and I'm so glad they did. It is a vast improvement over the water survival gameplay we've had so far.

Removal of Secret Stash <--------------WHY???????

Secret Stash was massively OP and now without it the game is incredibly balanced between finding something cool to buy at times but much of the time crafting your own stuff. The game is much better with Secret Stash gone.

ROADMAP TO GOLD AND BEYOND <------LISTEN TO THE USERS!!!!!

WHICH ONES??????????????

Steam Workshop Support <------PRIORITY 1, cause most modders have good solutions!

Modders do have great ideas and very creative alternatives to the vanilla game features and they are already making mods available without Steam Workshop. They've already announced that Steam Workshop will most likely be the last addition and may not even happen until after gold release. The current way that mods are accessed work well enough to get us through until Steam Workshop. Why add that before anything else on that list when we can already play mods right now?

And PLEASE kill all those bugs, connection issues and glitches FIRST before you start anything else!

Wow, all these different things you want done FIRST. They are fixing bugs and improving performance and adding new features and changing legacy features all at the same time. They've got a big team now-- multiple teams actually-- so the work can be divided up.

They are close to feature lock if they haven't already gotten there so they are in the final stages of bug fixxing and then everyone will be getting A21 to try out the changes for themselves and decide if they are good or bad.

Originally posted by Tanuki Tales: I mean, I'm more likely to download a mod from the official steam workshop than possible sketchy ransomware that I'm being told is "totally legit".

I'm curious.

How exactly did you come to the understanding that Steam isn't ransomware?

That Windows/Mac/Linux is "Totally legit"?

That Google Chrome/Opera/Firefox/Whatever you use to replace the awful Edge Browser isn't "something sketchy"?

That your GPU drivers and third party GPU controlling program are "trustable"?

How did you come by this knowledge?

Straight up, Anything and Everything you've ever downloaded could have been a trojan/rootkit/ransomware/some incredibly awful thing that just totally bricked your PC. So, How did you come to the conclusion that any of it was safe to download? Why do you think it's safe to install games from Steam, let alone install random miscellaneous mods from the Steam Workshop that anyone with a steam account can upload to?

What exactly makes a well known site like Nexus mods or Github 'suspicious' or 'sketchy' in your mind, and why doesn't that line of reasoning apply to Steam or anything else you have?


Steam Workshop is Awful. It has so many downsides, and very few upsides.

• It's incredibly limiting; You're not allowed to include certain filetypes(arguably for good reason- Really though, it's just because steam doesn't want to pay for the screening such file types would need.)- This straight up limits the potential complexity of a mod. You most likely won't see a mod like Darkness Falls on the workshop for example- It changes and adds too much, likely using filetypes that would be disallowed.
  
• It has zero version control- You can't opt to stay on an older version of a mod because it's new version does things you don't like. You also can't opt into an older version of a mod if you prefer to play on an older version of the game.
  
• A mod uploader can just up and remove their mod at any time, and that automatically removes it from your installation too.
  
• For multiplayer games it complicates things- Running games and servers CANT update; Which means if any single mod on a server updates, players who were forced thanks to zero version control can no longer connect to the server until the server shuts down, lets its mods update, and relaunches.
  
• No mod load order; Meaning it's more difficult to prevent or correct mod conflicts.
  
• Version compatibility- Workshop filtering is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful; It's often difficult to find and ensure any given mod works with the current version of the game, there's often 2, 3, 4, 5+ copies of a mod on the workshop for different versions of the game and usually with no particular indication of which goes to which. It relies on the uploader to properly tag their mods using the limited tag options.
  
• And so many other things.

As for upsides it has precisely two, as far as I'm concerned
1: Installation is (mostly) fool proof. Click subscribe, Launch game.
And
2: You're downloading the mods from an allegedly "trusted source"(Put in quotes because of my initial questions above. Do you REALLY trust Steam? If so, Why?), So Most* of the time, there's no issues.
*Steam itself isn't perfect; Some games with workshop allow you to ship .dll files which is always a potential threat. That said, I've never heard of any major issues personally.

And both of those "benefits" fall utterly flat in the face of the modding community.
1: Mod installation even without a workshop is for many games pretty damn fool proof. 7DTD in particular is just drag and drop- Download the file, put the file in the mods folder, and in most cases you're done. It's not hard. And even then, most games also have some kind of modloader to simplify it even further. Just like 7DTD does.
and
2: The major mod repositories are, typically speaking, all also "trusted sources". Nexus Mods for example afaik has never had any major scandals. It's not perfect; There's some people that don't like them and their decisions.. But they're very careful with their files- They have to be, or the modding scene becomes dangerous and they can't flourish. Same with Github- It's the single largest coding host on the planet, with over 100 million developers and 370+ million unique repositories. They're not going to just let any old script kiddie make them look bad with ransomware downloads.

So the two biggest 'boons' of the steam workshop aren't really benefits to begin with. So it's just a bunch of losses.

Originally posted by Rain: They also should take a look at this:

https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie?tab=popular+%28all+time%29

What's the point of looking there?

Now, I'll preface this by stating I am speaking very, very broadly in what follows:
The single most downloaded mod on Nexus for 7DTD is the SMX UI- Just shy of 800k total downloads, of which 129,995 are unique downloads- So these 130~k people have downloaded the mod 8~ times each, due to mod updates.

The game has sold 14~ million or so copies; So that means about 0.92% of purchasers have downloaded the most downloaded nexus mod. (130k is 0.92~% of 14 million)

Which is great- For that 0.92% of users. But, You're basically implying here that the devs should run over and start copying or emulating the work of modders, when the most downloaded nexus mod doesn't even represent a whole percentile of potential users.


Now, stepping back from the very broad talk..

Mods exist because no single game can EVER please 100% of it's userbase 100% of the time. There is no perfect game, and there never will be- You're always going to have people who disagree about how things should be. A good game is one that pleases Most of it's fanbase most of the time.

Where Modders come in is for the users who aren't pleased by the game as is- They have some nitpick or another that keeps them from enjoying the game tot he fullest. These users can then get mods to remedy those minor nitpicks- A new UI, replaced inventory icons, make it so zombies cant dig, etc, etc, etc.

But the point here is that while modders do please a small crowd pretty well- They aren't the thing driving game sales. In 99.9% of cases, The game has to be good in the first place before it'll draw a significant modding crowd.. And trying to conform your good game to be more like mods that please a small minority of your users is just going to piss off the majority while pleasing the few- Which is, Quite frankly, A stupid move.