Where is the balance?

[Torlokt]

At every step of this game I have run into one unbalanced system after another. First I started with a Stalker character last month. By the time I made it to Cordon I was unable to progress any further because of Bandit campers like Camping_Cordon. Couldn't do anything to progress, so I made a Bandit.

I progress rapidly with my Bandit, until I get to the Factory. Suddenly the balance shifted and there's constantly Stalkers camping the path to the Pit. So after about a week of forced pvp (I know pvp is a huge part of the game) and trying to do pve to farm resources I finally manage to upgrade my armor/weapons and move on with the main story.

I kill Minstrel and decide to start looking into the sub-factions. I join Covenant and because of this I now can't farm anywhere because there seems to be 10x as many Mercenaries than Covenant.

I notice the devs even temporarily locked being able to join Mercenary. Either there's far too many of one faction or the other and it never seems to stay balanced at all. It makes it extremely annoying to be minding your own business around a bunch of other Bandits when a Merc just decides to show up out of nowhere and kill you with the most broken gun in the game.

[randingo]

The points you have are valid, and unfortunately the best way to avoid these issues is simply speedrunning the main quest rather than dealing with a natural progression of gear upgrades through farming in each area. The bar area is heavily stalker favored & covenant is a rushed faction - that much is very clear when you compare the size & event density of fool's path underground to army warehouses underground, so it's no surprise people don't want to deal with it.

[XxEyeDragonxX]

Originally posted by randingo:

The points you have are valid, and unfortunately the best way to avoid these issues is simply speedrunning the main quest rather than dealing with a natural progression of gear upgrades through farming in each area. The bar area is heavily stalker favored & covenant is a rushed faction - that much is very clear when you compare the size & event density of fool's path underground to army warehouses underground, so it's no surprise people don't want to deal with it.

Yesterday I went online for a while and I started to look at the backpacks lost in the auction, there was a guy who was selling at the same price (regardless of what the backpack had) 10-15 backpacks with pickles, I don't know if the bandits do it very quickly often, but stalkers usually hide either near or between the npc of the camps to be able to kill you... although they are stupid, most of them won't let you take the box and they can't see it so it's a waste to kill you without having looted

[Torlokt]

Originally posted by XxEyeDragonxX:

Originally posted by randingo:

The points you have are valid, and unfortunately the best way to avoid these issues is simply speedrunning the main quest rather than dealing with a natural progression of gear upgrades through farming in each area. The bar area is heavily stalker favored & covenant is a rushed faction - that much is very clear when you compare the size & event density of fool's path underground to army warehouses underground, so it's no surprise people don't want to deal with it.

Yesterday I went online for a while and I started to look at the backpacks lost in the auction, there was a guy who was selling at the same price (regardless of what the backpack had) 10-15 backpacks with pickles, I don't know if the bandits do it very quickly often, but stalkers usually hide either near or between the npc of the camps to be able to kill you... although they are stupid, most of them won't let you take the box and they can't see it so it's a waste to kill you without having looted

I was sitting in the Bar a few days ago and there were 3 or 4 people complaining about a Stalker that has been camping the pickle farming locations and then selling the backpacks for 250k or more depending on how many pickles they had. Kind of overkill for a resource that's only used for a couple of worthwhile items.

[XxEyeDragonxX]

Originally posted by ArtilonArk:

Originally posted by XxEyeDragonxX:

Yesterday I went online for a while and I started to look at the backpacks lost in the auction, there was a guy who was selling at the same price (regardless of what the backpack had) 10-15 backpacks with pickles, I don't know if the bandits do it very quickly often, but stalkers usually hide either near or between the npc of the camps to be able to kill you... although they are stupid, most of them won't let you take the box and they can't see it so it's a waste to kill you without having looted

I was sitting in the Bar a few days ago and there were 3 or 4 people complaining about a Stalker that has been camping the pickle farming locations and then selling the backpacks for 250k or more depending on how many pickles they had. Kind of overkill for a resource that's only used for a couple of worthwhile items.

the problem is that it is very easy to camp pickles in rostok, and woe to you if you have a mission from the mission board to go to the stalker side of rostok to put things... if you are not lucky you will die 10-15 times for campers

[Torlokt]

Originally posted by XxEyeDragonxX:

Originally posted by ArtilonArk:

I was sitting in the Bar a few days ago and there were 3 or 4 people complaining about a Stalker that has been camping the pickle farming locations and then selling the backpacks for 250k or more depending on how many pickles they had. Kind of overkill for a resource that's only used for a couple of worthwhile items.

the problem is that it is very easy to camp pickles in rostok, and woe to you if you have a mission from the mission board to go to the stalker side of rostok to put things... if you are not lucky you will die 10-15 times for campers

It's not even farming pickles that's my biggest issue. Its literally the fact that there's 10 Mercs for every 1 Cov in the north. I had to leave Cov just to have a chance of any type of farming around Fool's Path

[Deximer]

The subfactions are definitely an issue - it should be explained better in game. I knew beforehand from reading many online posts about it that you should not join either faction until you have essentially farmed every piece of gear you want from the mid-tier zones. When you are ready to move to farming solely the North zones, that's when you want to join because then that's 1 less opposition up there since everyone is hostile.

[SadSquidward]

The map "seems" big but in a lot of cases there are only 2 routes you can take to progress , everyone camps there

[BuckyLitch]

Originally posted by SadSquidward:

The map "seems" big but in a lot of cases there are only 2 routes you can take to progress , everyone camps there

+1

[[WW]JustOne]

dont finish quest line cuz u re forced to play on vet server where everyone running with vss, if u think boomstick on cordon was op, this ♥♥♥♥ dont have recoil and have full auto, no spread, hs x1.5 like dmr;s 20% armor piercing + tons of dmg.

[dirtyann]

Well, after about 300 hours into the game, all that you said is valid.

The bar is a cancer, want to farm into the fool's path? Yeah, try to get back to the bar now.
Poeple say join a faction, I prefer covenants, but the tunnels are empty as ♥♥♥♥, there is only 3-4 events and none that gives dopestones, no signal tracking, and almost no metal detecting zones. What a place!

So you could get on the surface, yeah right, the place is riddled with mercs.

So you gotta run 1.5-2km to get to where you want to go into fool's path as a bandit, farm a bit, then roll the damn dices to see if you'll get back with the loot, because every damn exit/entrance and path into rostok is heavily populated and camped by stalkers, no matter what side you choose to get back. It's about a 50/50 chance that you'll run into a squad of pickle farmers or just some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ looking to gank poeple.

Plus the fact that once you killed minstrel, the game puts you into veteran servers already even if you're way undergeared, heck, even the gear that you gain at the end of the main quest is nothing comparable to the centurion, and you encounter a ♥♥♥♥ load of these running with the VSS, they tank literally twice the amount that you can while having a gun that came straight from a cheating software lol it's so OP!

There's no way you are able to get good gear in an acceptable amount of time as of now. Maybe when the rest of the content will be released and the pressure on the bar may get a bit lower, but for now, it's literally a gambling.

[76561199214024258]

There really isn't a shift in balance at the Bar area, it's just that Bandits lose complete map control they enjoyed till then and the map is more balanced, which makes it seem like the balance has shifted after you get used to the easy life, Stalkers are getting camped around Bar more then Bandits do, at least on my server, but now the Stalkers are actually "fighting back" since they don't have to spend extra time running back

[XxEyeDragonxX]

Originally posted by Pivson:

There really isn't a shift in balance at the Bar area, it's just that Bandits lose complete map control they enjoyed till then and the map is more balanced, which makes it seem like the balance has shifted after you get used to the easy life, Stalkers are getting camped around Bar more then Bandits do, at least on my server, but now the Stalkers are actually "fighting back" since they don't have to spend extra time running back

Honestly, I've always seen a lot of stalker camping more in their territory so that the bandits don't get pickles than stalkers camping on the side of the bandits to kill the ones that come back after farming

[dirtyann]

Originally posted by XxEyeDragonxX:

Originally posted by Pivson:

There really isn't a shift in balance at the Bar area, it's just that Bandits lose complete map control they enjoyed till then and the map is more balanced, which makes it seem like the balance has shifted after you get used to the easy life, Stalkers are getting camped around Bar more then Bandits do, at least on my server, but now the Stalkers are actually "fighting back" since they don't have to spend extra time running back

Honestly, I've always seen a lot of stalker camping more in their territory so that the bandits don't get pickles than stalkers camping on the side of the bandits to kill the ones that come back after farming

Must depend on the gearscore you're sitting on.
I'm around 375 now and everytime I go out, I encounter at least 3-4 stalkers on the bandit side of the bar, I get these encounters so much that I have to carry everything to go in pouches and I buy plates and grenades in the subfaction bases to be sure to not lose them going. Then when you come back it's once again a nightmare, you gamble everything everytime.

[Bran1986]

Originally posted by Pivson:

There really isn't a shift in balance at the Bar area, it's just that Bandits lose complete map control they enjoyed till then and the map is more balanced, which makes it seem like the balance has shifted after you get used to the easy life, Stalkers are getting camped around Bar more then Bandits do, at least on my server, but now the Stalkers are actually "fighting back" since they don't have to spend extra time running back

This is exactly it. Rostok is really the only part of the map that is very balanced and where Bandits don't have a laughably lopsided map control advantage. Even then the Bandits still have it on easy mode outside of the Bar when it comes to farming the other areas of the map around Rostok and they have a direct line right into the Forest, which they constantly use to attack Stalkers farming and ambushing Stalkers doing Proto and anomaly events. Rostok is the one place Bandits have to face any kind of balance and apparently they can't handle it.

[dirtyann]

Originally posted by Bran1986:

Originally posted by Pivson:

There really isn't a shift in balance at the Bar area, it's just that Bandits lose complete map control they enjoyed till then and the map is more balanced, which makes it seem like the balance has shifted after you get used to the easy life, Stalkers are getting camped around Bar more then Bandits do, at least on my server, but now the Stalkers are actually "fighting back" since they don't have to spend extra time running back

This is exactly it. Rostok is really the only part of the map that is very balanced and where Bandits don't have a laughably lopsided map control advantage. Even then the Bandits still have it on easy mode outside of the Bar when it comes to farming the other areas of the map around Rostok and they have a direct line right into the Forest, which they constantly use to attack Stalkers farming and ambushing Stalkers doing Proto and anomaly events. Rostok is the one place Bandits have to face any kind of balance and apparently they can't handle it.

You really think that stalkers don't come into bandits zones? They do the same in the pit, dead city, fools path, etc...Army warehouse entrances are camped 24/7 near the wall.

Don't put the flaws on one faction lol, both faction do the same and it really sucks, but stating that bandits do that and us the good stalkers dont do it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bigotry.

In the early game I'd agree that in the swamps it's quicker to go to cordon from the boathouse but the events are evenly distributed.

In Cordon everyone seems to think that bandits have a quick access to the dump, well, you gotta go around the whole city and mountains to use that entrance, so most bandits just go by agroprom instead, way safer and less campers. And I have measured the distances both faction needs to travel, it's pretty much the same overall.

Then comes the bar...this place is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell for anyone and everyone trying to do something. And cherry on top of the cake, if you want to wait to join a subfaction to have a bit of peace in the fool's path, you gotta run 2km every time and gamble which entrance to take because there are always poeple pickle farming or straight up camping everywhere so you end up dying a good bit of the time. Can't speak about the North, I'm trying to finish the grind in fool's path before going but so far, all the things that the stalker's whine about, we gotta deal with too.

So grow up and adress these issues as community ones and not factionwise.