Forlorn Muskeg Poachers Camp tree change

[eric4x4]

I made it to the Poachers Camp for the first time since the CE update and I noticed something that really bugged me. Previously one could use the tree to climb to the top of the train car, which made hunting the bear in that area much safer. The tree that leads to the top of the train car has had a limb added so that now you cannot climb on top of the car.

Was this intentional? If so, I have to ask why, since in real-world mechanics, there is literally a friggin ladder that one could climb to reach the exact same spot. Also, I have a freaking hatchet that *should* make short work of that branch and restore access to the top of the car.

So again, I have to assume this was either intentional to remove access to the top of the car, or a cosmetic change that should be reconsidered for the sake of gameplay and not breaking the immersion factor.

[RegentRelic]

The working theory is that hinterland is adding ladders in the next update.

[RegentRelic]

Working ladders. You no the ones you can climb up.

[eric4x4]

36 minutes ago, RegentRelic said:

The working theory is that hinterland is adding ladders in the next update.

While that is cool, I'd really like to know why they felt the need to change this specific tree.

[RegentRelic]

Maybe because they thought it looked better and weren't thinking about it or they never noticed you can walk up the tree on to the train. It could be that they want to force you to use the ladder, and they changed the tree now for, reasons. Maybe they just don't want you to go up there. @Admin why would you do this to us I liked sleeping up there on clear nights because I am afraid the bear will come into the poachers camp even though I know he can't.

Edited December 3, 2019 by RegentRelic

[dbmurph22]

Hi Eric, I can delete this post if it makes you too upset - just let me know.  I've been annoyed at plenty of things, so I get it.  Still, this is what the situation made me think of and I thought it was humorous...also I'm probably older than you).  That said, I hope you get it figured out or at least find out why.  I know small changes like this can affect greater strategy and tactics.  Good luck.

 

 

[eric4x4]

25 minutes ago, dbmurph22 said:

Hi Eric, I can delete this post if it makes you too upset - just let me know.  I've been annoyed at plenty of things, so I get it.  Still, this is what the situation made me think of and I thought it was humorous...also I'm probably older than you).  That said, I hope you get it figured out or at least find out why.  I know small changes like this can affect greater strategy and tactics.  Good luck.

 

 

Maybe that is all my post will accomplish, but as someone who spends a decent amount of time there, it's just annoying. I never ask anyone to delete anything, it's a free world. 

 

It just seemed like a really odd change to make if it was intentional, especially since wolves can climb trees now.

[dbmurph22]

Yeah it seems kind of random, huh?

Hinterland getting their full

on

I guess they are always tinkering with details of who knows what and where at any given time.

Hope you find another good bear shootin spot.  The ones in ML and PV are pretty easy so maybe they were cutting it down a bit.  GL

Edited December 3, 2019 by dbmurph22

[turtle777]

I never noticed you could climb up. 
 

Just shoot the bear and retreat into the train car. Done. 
 

-t

[hozz1235]

On 12/3/2019 at 3:58 PM, turtle777 said:

I never noticed you could climb up. 
 

Just shoot the bear and retreat into the train car. Done. 
 

-t

It wouldn't surprise me if you could now be chased into the car.  I heard someone else was attacked by a wolf that entered a hunter's blind...

OP: I think there is another tree on the other side which you can use to snipe from...if I recall correctly.

[eric4x4]

6 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

It wouldn't surprise me if you could now be chased into the car.  I heard someone else was attacked by a wolf that entered a hunter's blind...

OP: I think there is another tree on the other side which you can use to snipe from...if I recall correctly.

There are multiple trees where you can safely perch, even from wolves, if you climb high enough.

 

My only point in posting this was to try and figure out why the devs decided to invest time, energy, and effort into altering this specific tree so that the train car roof can no longer be accessed. 

[peteloud]

I would always climb up the tree and on to the roof to look out for a bear.  If I saw a bear I'd wait on the roof for a safe shot at it.  That seemed a sensible and realistic setup and action.

A couple of hours ago I happened to be passing the red freight van and saw a bear in the distance.  I stopped and waited until it came close.  Being unable to climb up the tree to the roof I tried to shoot the bear from the small snow covered hill in front of the van's door.  It was a quick shot then I raced back to the van before an angry wounded bear attacked me.

Shooting from the roof was satisfying. Shooting from the ground and racing back to the van is a poor and irritating strategy.

[dbmurph22]

Having to shoot and run and hide, then shoot and run and hide again is not ideal.

Though being in a forsaken hellish snowscape is not ideal as it is.

[dbmurph22]

That said, I get the term "satisfying."  One feels like an elegant, efficient way to game the situation and the other feels like a stuttering, chipping away method of gaming the situation.  I kind of wish there was an alternative to finding a perch or finding a safe retreat spot for killing bears, but maybe that's just the natural conclusion/strat to this type of subsystem of the game.

[ManicManiac]

On ‎12‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 2:01 AM, eric4x4 said:

My only point in posting this was to try and figure out why the devs decided to invest time, energy, and effort into altering this specific tree so that the train car roof can no longer be accessed. 

I think it's most likely because they felt that it was not intended for the player to be able to camp out on top of the railroad car... so they fixed it.

Edited December 7, 2019 by ManicManiac

[Guest jeffpeng]

This is, as every so often, just my very much opinionated opinion, but I don't think we should be able to hide out on tree trunks, under rocks and on train carts to "hunt" wolves and bear from a safe distance. You also can't claim reaslism here. You really think a bear would just jump up that tree trunk to rip you a new one in real life? Of course it would. But it can't in this game. So .... to make things fair.... we shouldn't be able to hide up there, either. Beating the game is not about finding ways to avoid playing it.

[eric4x4]

2 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

This is, as every so often, just my very much opinionated opinion, but I don't think we should be able to hide out on tree trunks, under rocks and on train carts to "hunt" wolves and bear from a safe distance. You also can't claim reaslism here. You really think a bear would just jump up that tree trunk to rip you a new one in real life? Of course it would. But it can't in this game. So .... to make things fair.... we shouldn't be able to hide up there, either. Beating the game is not about finding ways to avoid playing it.

If a realistic approach was their intent, then they should also do away with the "safe" zones on every porch and enclosed area on burned out buildings should go away as well.

Also, there is nothing unrealistic about climbing a ladder that a bear couldn't, at least not without offering me one hell of a coup de grâce shot to the face to kill it.

[ManicManiac]

38 minutes ago, eric4x4 said:

If a realistic approach was their intent, then they should also do away with the "safe" zones on every porch and enclosed area on burned out buildings should go away as well.

Allow me to defer to the source on this:

Raph from Mailbag Dispatch #40:

Wait wait -- please don't use "realism" as an argument for or against a game mechanic (or any tuning around it). You've played this game long enough, or been in this community long enough, to know not to do that. We don't design for realism, and we don't use it as a metric to determine how something should or should not work in the game.

[eric4x4]

And that is why my original post, before we got off on the "realistic" branch, was to inquire from people who might actually know the answer as to why there was a need to change this particular fallen tree. I wasn't really looking for conjecture from people who are guessing.

[ManicManiac]

 

@eric4x4

and I think the answer is fairly evident:

20 hours ago, ManicManiac said:

I think it's most likely because they felt that it was not intended for the player to be able to camp out on top of the railroad car... so they fixed it.

As to your assertion of not wanting conjecture/guesses... then it would have served you better to drop this in the mailbag.
After all, the only ones who know Hinterland's intentions would be Hinterland.
 

Posting on a forum invites discussion...  

Edited December 8, 2019 by ManicManiac

[peteloud]

jeffpeng,

". . . don't think we should be able to hide out on tree trunks, under rocks and on train carts to "hunt" wolves and bear from a safe distance. You also can't claim realism here. . . . "

I disagree completely with what you say.    If I was out in the wilds, as in TLD,  I would be looking for opportunities to kill animals for food from safety or to protect myself.  I think that climbing up the old tree on to the roof of the red truck was both realistic, sensible, and showed an awareness of in-game opportunities.

[Guest jeffpeng]

11 hours ago, eric4x4 said:

before we got off on the "realistic" branch

You got off on the "realistic branch" in your OP:

On 12/3/2019 at 2:02 PM, eric4x4 said:

since in real-world mechanics, there is literally a friggin ladder

 

12 hours ago, eric4x4 said:

I wasn't really looking for conjecture from people who are guessing.

In this case I recommend you write a ticket to the support. But I feel like it doesn't take a lot of "guessing" to figure out intent when an additional branch spawns from a fallen tree that prevents you from reaching a spot in the game that allows you to hunt the most dangerous predator in the game without fear of retaliation. They clearly don't want players to do that. 

11 hours ago, peteloud said:

I disagree completely with what you say.    If I was out in the wilds, as in TLD,  I would be looking for opportunities to kill animals for food from safety or to protect myself.  I think that climbing up the old tree on to the roof of the red truck was both realistic, sensible, and showed an awareness of in-game opportunities.

In fact you are exploiting that bears aren't "smart" enough in the game to climb trees or knock over cars, and that their pathfinding algorithm doesn't work well enough over terrain such as fallen trees or even slight steps. While I do agree that I would prefer such an approach in a real-world scenario the game obviously is a game. As such it doesn't do the game good if there are ways to simply circumvent any form of retaliation from predators. There are ways to hunt bears without being mauled (yes even with a bow) and they do not include hiding at a place the AI cannot reach.

I personally do not use tree trunks, ledges or other elevated positions to hunt. If players do that that's fine for them. But I think we don't get to complain if those "exploits" are removed one after the other, and throwing "conjecture" extrapolating from HL's recent stance on considering even decoy baiting an exploit I think we'll see more of that in the future.

Also 

12 hours ago, eric4x4 said:

they should also do away with the "safe" zones on every porch and enclosed area on burned out buildings should go away as well

Those aren't safe zones. Those are instances of the path finding algorithm simply being not smart enough. A good example is the gate at the dam. Animals cannot cross that despite being open. It's not neccessarily designed that way. It's just that the pathfinding AI is working on a very different model from what you actually see, and this makes it impossible for it to reach certain places you can reach easily. 

I've made several references on the forums to why certain things will never be properly implemented with TLD. Pathfinding is one of them. It's not neccesarily that the people at HL don't know how to do it, it's that they (or I) wouldn't know how to do it with the limitations they are given. It's a combination of the extraordinarily difficult terrain in the game, computational limitations put on the game having to run on Jaguar consoles (whose computational capacities are equivalent to a modern midrange smartphone) and being written in a language (C#) that compiles to interpretive bytecode rather than being actually compiled to platform native code (Like C++ would be), which puts a very tight limit on how well you can do highly iterative computation like path finding does require.

[acada]

For the original question. You can consider it like natural movement of the tree. Maybe it just slid a little during blizzard. Of course you can contact DEVs through their support portal. I had so and sometimes there is response (if it is bug in their eyes as well).

As for realism in the game. I do not want DEVs to add more than it is already in the game. For example IRL bears are able to force open cars. So hiding in cars would not be an option. Same for hiding in fishing huts. Charging bear should be able to disassemble it in minutes. Wolfs can go trough door. If the door is closed, few minutes of biting and he is in. Heck most doors in the game would not stop bear. They seems like think planks.

[hozz1235]

21 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

You also can't claim reaslism here

You must remember that Raph has stated countless times that realism does not always win out in TLD.

[Guest jeffpeng]

3 minutes ago, hozz1235 said:

You must remember that Raph has stated countless times that realism does not always win out in TLD.

Maybe it's my apparent lack of understanding and expressing in the english language, but my obviously misconstrued intention with this part of a sentence was to emphasize that you/we/I are not getting to claim realism to make a point if it should be possible to get on top of that car exactly because HL has stated multiple times that realism is neither a design goal nor too much of a consideration when evaluating game mechanics - so yes, I do remember.