Hoards are not the problem

[oynlengeymer]

After some more testing I feel like its not so much dealing with the hoards that is frustrating (although beepers need to be removed from hoard spawns for multiple reasons imo)

What the issue I'm finding is with this new local spawning system of regular puppets, is that if you kill one it is almost always instantly replaced close by. if in for example at a police station, there will be one wandering the perimeter that can hear you looting and then trigger a hoard. So you kill it, go back inside and there are instantly close by foot steps outside again.
Seems like in these kinda locations it will always place the new one on a same or very similar path.

So you risk it with stealth to try and loot but it hears you, calls in a hoard or if you are quick enough you manage to kill it an it is replaced again. rinse and repeat.

If I remember correctly, these replacement spawns seemed to be put in the game a while ago, then they seemed to be removed when the sleeping in houses puppets were introduced. The sleeping ones have been removed which is good, but there need to be a longer timer on replacing the puppets, like there used to be, so we can clear a building, bunker or even small town and get ten or 20 minutes of peace to loot the place.

The radius they spawn being smaller is working well and my game loads faster and performs better now. So with tweaks I hope the devs can find a way of having this small spawn radius fire based on map location grids, meaning if a player is in a location, it doesn't fire again till they move out of that grid. I don't mean a whole map grid we see, like B2 etc I mean the small accurate location grid that is used when we Ctrl C our location. In a small town the radius of our location should allow a single time spawn in.
In a large town it could fine maybe 4 times as we move our location through the town

At the moment, it seems to be set to fire constantly and I hope this is only to push testing and trigger the hoards more often.

I understand we needed more challenge and the hoards do that, as well as the new ways they can get inside, that part is great. But we need a balance between challenge, fun, immersion and frustration.

[Splina]

it's not the horde itself the problem...but the poorly designed spawn

and the fact that all old spawns were REPLACED by this...which is just bad

this should be an EVENT on top of the old existing ones...not a replacement -,-
that's the biggest mistake

[Jack Jester]

Originally posted by Splina:

it's not the horde itself the problem...but the poorly designed spawn

+1

[Caleon]

What do you mean by replaced? I disabled hordes in my world and there are still puppets in the streets and buildings like police stations, they just don't call their family when they attack me.

[Splina]

Originally posted by Caleon:

What do you mean by replaced? I disabled hordes in my world and there are still puppets in the streets and buildings like police stations, they just don't call their family when they attack me.

there are some, not like before

there are no pupets inside buildings anymore, no sleepers and nothing in the wild

so they just left "basic" ones wandering in towns (i assume to be able to "call for help" and removed all others - so replaced by "hordes")

[CrankyOldMan]

IMO

They needed not in any way change how the puppets were. Walking around in the towns, in the wild or laying down in the buildings was fine! Made the game feel lived in or alive!

They needed more pve and they could have got that by just adding a horde spawn when the puppet screamed.

The horde should spawn at a distance and come to the source---it was alerted---it was called.

That would give a player the chance to silence the screamer and then decide flight or fight!

I love the opening doors or jumping through the windows aspect!

I don't love seeing a suicide spawn or any puppet spawn next to me or another player in the police station, inside the qounsit that was just cleared or 3 feet behind.

The suicide spawn inside houses, the police station, qounsits, on top of the tall yellow light poles at the airport, on top of the hangers at the airport, on top of the qounsits everywhere, UNDER THE GROUND EVEN-and then they pop up in your face cause you can't see them.

I feel like I am at a arcade watching my great nephews and great nieces play whack a mole.

Oops one popped up here, oh look one popped up there...unrealistic 100%

[Six]

Originally posted by CrankyOldMan:

IMO

They needed not in any way change how the puppets were. Walking around in the towns, in the wild or laying down in the buildings was fine! Made the game feel lived in or alive!

They needed more pve and they could have got that by just adding a horde spawn when the puppet screamed.

The horde should spawn at a distance and come to the source---it was alerted---it was called.

That would give a player the chance to silence the screamer and then decide flight or fight!

I love the opening doors or jumping through the windows aspect!

I don't love seeing a suicide spawn or any puppet spawn next to me or another player in the police station, inside the qounsit that was just cleared or 3 feet behind.

The suicide spawn inside houses, the police station, qounsits, on top of the tall yellow light poles at the airport, on top of the hangers at the airport, on top of the qounsits everywhere, UNDER THE GROUND EVEN-and then they pop up in your face cause you can't see them.

I feel like I am at a arcade watching my great nephews and great nieces play whack a mole.

Oops one popped up here, oh look one popped up there...unrealistic 100%

X100

[-M*A*S*H-]

Originally posted by CrankyOldMan:

The horde should spawn at a distance and come to the source---it was alerted---it was called.

That would give a player the chance to silence the screamer and then decide flight or fight!

I love the opening doors or jumping through the windows aspect!

+1000

I played the Days Gone game, the hordes are really well done
Either you avoid them or you face them (adrenaline rush guaranteed)

Go to Youtube to watch gameplay videos of players facing the hordes

This is the system that should have been implemented on SCUM and not this rotten system of spawning in front of the player and in police stations

Plus in Days Gone you have wild animals that have mutated
The bear for example is particularly monstrous with the barbed wire on its body as well as the piece of wood that crosses its back

On SCUM the animals look like Barbie's farm
Where are the animals that have mutated??

The game is supposed to take place on an island where there were terrible scientific experiments.

In fact, the whole environment of SCUM is too clean, too polished in general, it's a TV game at 1:30 p.m. for a retired audience and stay-at-home mothers, not a TV game at 11 p.m. for an informed audience lol

No acid rain, no tornadoes, sudden temperature changes, different dangers that appear regularly and force players to understand that they are in hell and to react according to the situation
All this controlled by the production of the TV show

It's like those merchants who are too clean in the safe zones, it's just laughable
Why not put a system of parallel markets with NPC clans in these safe zones where to obtain everything the player needs by carrying out quests
Always keeping the possibility of paying with banknotes and gold
By adding simple panning for gold in rivers this would be a plus

With a reputation system with different NPC clans that allow you or not to do business with them
It's up to you to find the right balance in order to make friends with everyone or otherwise be forced to betray other players (or NPC) from time to time to modify your reputation

The life of a prisoner in survival mode in an apocalyptic environment like in the film New York 1999 but with the addition of zombies and other genetic mutations

Happy New Year's Eve tomorrow everyone

[insettoinfetto]

Originally posted by Splina:

it's not the horde itself the problem...but the poorly designed spawn

and the fact that all old spawns were REPLACED by this...which is just bad

this should be an EVENT on top of the old existing ones...not a replacement -,-
that's the biggest mistake

So you liked the old one?!?!?
You mean sleeping zombies that I could kill with a kinfe?
Or the one trapped inside buildings that we can oneshot?
No, it was boring and annoying.

And the wandering ones were just slow moving targets.

To me horde system is something promising.

[insettoinfetto]

Originally posted by CrankyOldMan:

IMO
They needed not in any way change how the puppets were. Walking around in the towns, in the wild or laying down in the buildings was fine! Made the game feel lived in or alive!

Honestly not to me. For me was boring.
Totally removing them would be a better idea.

And btw before this was much easier to guess the presence of another player.
Now it's a lot harder, except for the spawning of the horde.

And another thing that I suggested some time ago about sounds.
The more silent the place is, the more scary is, the more immersive is.

Originally posted by CrankyOldMan:

That would give a player the chance to silence the screamer and then decide flight or fight!

You can do that. But the point is.
In a survival game fighting everything that moves sound bad to me.
In a survival game you should avoid any unneccessary fight.
Like a horde spawn. No meaning to me staying there and waste ammo or arrows.
Just run. Hide. wait. Come back.

The HS is dynamic and world feels active.
The old one was boring.

Originally posted by CrankyOldMan:

I don't love seeing a suicide spawn or any puppet spawn next to me or another player in the police station, inside the qounsit that was just cleared or 3 feet behind.

This is part of the development and the tweaking of mechanics.
A "bug" do not make the whole system bad.
It just need tweakings.

[Squash]

If in SP you can customise if more waves of hordes come or if they are just one instance.

I have also tested and now perfected it to match the old puppet experience of few in towns, but have no enabled hordes so when i do finally work my way to get a gun and fire it ,there is a 60% chance a horde will trigger. But the horde i ahve set to just 3 puppets for most MTZ's.

EncounterHordeGroupBaseAmountModifier - this is how many per wave are spawned.


EncounterHordeBaseCharacterAmountModifier - this is the total of the horde, with he above setting splitting it into waves.

Setting the top one to 1.0 and bottom one to 0.5 will produce 1 wave with about 2-3 puppets for a MTZ (town).

Adjusting the NoiseCooldown also helps (1.0 being about 30 seconds delay for sound triggering hordes).

EncounterActivationChanceMultiplier:
--this helps create % chance of spawning horde when firing gun. I have set mine to 0.60 for a 60% chance. I tested firing a gun and only on the 6th time it triggered them.

I have personally adjusted this to create scalable difficulty once i have a weapon. I have set the normal encounter manager puppet cooldowns at 3.0 to allow time to clear towns/buildings. This for me is a good balance.

Whilst different from old system, once you get to hang of the settings you can adjust to your playstyle and match the old experience if necessary.

I must admit thoug the names of the encounter settings need changing. The 'EncounterHordeGroupBaseAmountModifier' should be 'EncounterHorderRespawnWaveAmountModifier or something.

[Splina]

Originally posted by insettoinfetto:

Originally posted by Splina:

it's not the horde itself the problem...but the poorly designed spawn

and the fact that all old spawns were REPLACED by this...which is just bad

this should be an EVENT on top of the old existing ones...not a replacement -,-
that's the biggest mistake

So you liked the old one?!?!?
You mean sleeping zombies that I could kill with a kinfe?
Or the one trapped inside buildings that we can oneshot?
No, it was boring and annoying.

And the wandering ones were just slow moving targets.

To me horde system is something promising.

absolutely !

with a knife? i doubt...unless there was a "takedown" mechanic which i'm not aware of...
or if you talk about 1 vs 1 with a pupet...well, that's what you do currently anyway to not make noise...so what the..? -,-

traping them in a building was something what allowed a new player to... well...survive
was easy, agree, but isn't any game suposed to be easy in the beginning??
i agree now with them being able to bash open doors...but NOT with the window jumping mechanic. Doors is just enough..because they require some time to bash it
boring and annoying...once you learn them and probably play too much... :) take a break..
but you must think from a new player perspective too :) Is all this fun for someone new, who doesn't know anything?? Don't think so...
heck ! not even for me and i'm not exacly new...i just hate the idea of having absolutely everything against you from the very start !

wandering ones..that's exactly how it should be ! You always had a chance to not spot them due to bushes and whatever...AND have the chance to get rid of them before they ruin your day in the same time !
what was wrong with that, excuse me ???

the horde itself is not a bad idea, again
just the execution is execrable for now...

[oynlengeymer]

please dont hijack this thread talking about how you don't like hoard. This is about the current radial spawning of regular puppets. the two issues are different. And As I have said, this will ofc be tweaked. Give your constructive feedback that devs may read rather than spewing the same negativity over and over

[oynlengeymer]

Originally posted by -M*A*S*H-:

On SCUM the animals look like Barbie's farm
Where are the animals that have mutated??

The game is supposed to take place on an island where there were terrible scientific experiments.

In fact, the whole environment of SCUM is too clean, too polished in general, it's a TV game at 1:30 p.m. for a retired audience and stay-at-home mothers, not a TV game at 11 p.m. for an informed audience lol

No acid rain, no tornadoes, sudden temperature changes, different dangers that appear regularly and force players to understand that they are in hell and to react according to the situation
All this controlled by the production of the TV show

What are you even talking about? acid rain and mutated creatures? go play Stalker or Fallout

[oynlengeymer]

Originally posted by Squash:

If in SP you can customise if more waves of hordes come or if they are just one instance.

I have also tested and now perfected it to match the old puppet experience of few in towns, but have no enabled hordes so when i do finally work my way to get a gun and fire it ,there is a 60% chance a horde will trigger. But the horde i ahve set to just 3 puppets for most MTZ's.

EncounterHordeGroupBaseAmountModifier - this is how many per wave are spawned.


EncounterHordeBaseCharacterAmountModifier - this is the total of the horde, with he above setting splitting it into waves.

Setting the top one to 1.0 and bottom one to 0.5 will produce 1 wave with about 2-3 puppets for a MTZ (town).

Adjusting the NoiseCooldown also helps (1.0 being about 30 seconds delay for sound triggering hordes).

EncounterActivationChanceMultiplier:
--this helps create % chance of spawning horde when firing gun. I have set mine to 0.60 for a 60% chance. I tested firing a gun and only on the 6th time it triggered them.

I have personally adjusted this to create scalable difficulty once i have a weapon. I have set the normal encounter manager puppet cooldowns at 3.0 to allow time to clear towns/buildings. This for me is a good balance.

Whilst different from old system, once you get to hang of the settings you can adjust to your playstyle and match the old experience if necessary.

I must admit thoug the names of the encounter settings need changing. The 'EncounterHordeGroupBaseAmountModifier' should be 'EncounterHorderRespawnWaveAmountModifier or something.

Interesting info for server admins, Normal Encounter Manager Puppet CoolDown is I guess what my post is about. Sadly, I'm only playing on Official Multiplayer server.

[ᴍᴜꜱʜ-ᴄʀÆᴍ?]

Originally posted by oynlengeymer:

... but there need to be a longer timer on replacing the puppets, like there used to be, so we can clear a building, bunker or even small town and get ten or 20 minutes of peace to loot the place.

This will fix 90% of what is wrong, this cooldown setting is just absolutely required, otherwise it is immersion breaking nonsense!