[2023] Lets talk about the state of the game a bit.

Originally posted by Black Puppet: I dont quite understand your paragraph about player choice and cheese. No one says you cant cheese the game. Its TFP whos track record is to delete cheese from the game. If players wanna cheese they will. Anyone who says its bad, is a hypocrit cause they cheese the game in other ways.

Stealth Archer for instance is a viable alternative to play the game. Its super easy and cheesy. So is gunz blazing. So is hiding in a cheese base. So is making a proper base.

The main problem people have with cheese, as I pointed out as well, is that people continue to meta the crap out of the game to the point where:

A. No one is original anymore and builds the same base and
B. TFP ends up nerfing the game because everyone metas

This happened multiple times already. Its also why the block changes started, not just to reduce clutter as everyone claims. Upgrading blocks was the easiest way to gain XP fast. Now we cant do that anymore and if we are able to upgrade it isnt an easy and fast process. Color me surprised, you cant spam upgrade for quick XP anymore. Its almost like it was an exploit to level fast.

With one notable exception, Almost every 'cheese' tactic that's been fixed has been some kind of bug or something unintentional..

Zombies used to be unable to dig down, so players just dug a few blocks down and put a hatch over their head- Ez cheese. The devs have always intended for zombies to be able to destroy anything in the world though, but they were having trouble making the AI target up and down properly- So they just couldn't. Go figure, when the devs make it work right so the zombies can attack up and down too, people freaked out because they took away the cheese; Players felt like the devs were 'attacking' them.. But it was just an inevitable change that was going to come sooner than later.

Similarly, The myriad 'force field' block layouts were very much an unintended effect, so they got fixed.

The only anti-cheese change that 100% absolutely was done because of players was the vulture spawns if you hop on a vehicle on horde night.


Noone is original because originality is hard. Noone wants to go through the dozens of failed base types to find what does or doesn't work; It's way easier to just look up what works and what doesn't. People meta because Meta is best- And best is what people want. Same reason people absolutely froth over not being able to craft Q6 weapon, and because they cant craft Q6, they decide crafting is completely pointless and never craft anything, just using ♥♥♥♥♥♥ equipment till their beloved Q6 drops.

Same reason everyone drools over strength so much; It's so much better, can't pick anything BUT strength because strength was 'Best', Strength was 'Meta', And picking anything else is hard because, again, Originality is hard. Doing your own thing is hard, it's risky, you might die, you might lose some gear, you might have to rebuild your base.... Same reason so many people are convinced traders are an absolute necessity when you don't ever even need to talk to one. Traders are easy- Traders are risk free, Traders are efficient and rewarding.

This is not a 7DTD specific phenomenon either. Players in WoW back when talents were a thing wouldnt do their own cool things, they'd just look up the best builds.... Players can, and will find the objectively 'Best' way of doing something, and then a huge portion of whatever playerbase is just going to copy-cat that one person who found that 'best' way.

Noone wants to take risks. Literally as a species we are efficiency driven and risk averse. If there's an efficient risk free answer, 99% of the time, that's the path someone will take.


And the whole point of going after 'meta' aspects is that a well defined and completely unchanging meta is a signal for something that is wholly imbalanced. Strength was 'Meta' because it was WAY better than the other trees if you look at things objectively. It had perks that everyone wants; You had to actively choose to gimp yourself to pick any other tree. Except INT, but only because of Daring Adventurer and Better Barter, those two skills specifically were also considered Meta. Literally from like, A17 till now, The Meta has been full strenght, just enough INT to max out BB and DA. It hadn't changed in years- That's how imbalanced the trees were.