[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]Fire
Nerf fire damage. Nobody dies from it, only the zombies and they are already pathetic.[/quote]
I’ve died countless times from bad applications of the flamethrower. Not exactly what you are talking about, but I think that it is a very reasonable approximation of what might happen to you in real life. Which is a design goal for this game.
Have you ever tried to kill a triffid queen using fire? This kills me a lot when it decides to just run at me and a forest springs up around me, trapping me in my own inferno.
Also it’s the only sane response to the fungal infestations making the world a bad place for cars.
[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]Abundance of items
Abundance of items is very helpful at the beginning of the game, but items should be gone with time. Bring back acid rain with an early warning message or just make weak, item consuming monsters (acid blobs, item chewing monkeyman, aimlessly wandering, building destroying, item stomping, neutral golems, anything) everywhere. As time goes, new places should be less chance to spawn items as the monsters already eat them. I know it is forced and silly, but i think self sufficiency is a major part of the game, and it is currently defeated by the large amount of free items.[/quote]
I think that this is a case of all or nothing. The acid rain cannot possibly be bad enough to destroy most items, because if it was, every living thing would already be dead. We live in between a very small range of pH balances, which, if upset to that degree, would result in nearly everything dying.
Also, I like going around and scavenging. I make year long trips in the game to visit distant lands and steal everything that my car can hold.
More to the point, I don’t want to be competing with crappy item destroying monsters. They are spawned there, so they’ll win in their attempts to get to the item before the player. I am however, a fan of magpies, why not have some monsters that run around taking items back to their nests? That at leasts allows the player to potentially find those items again.
As for item quality, I think that might be okay. For a player with decent skills, it is remarkably easy to fix nearly anything that they come across. I think that more to the point, it might be fun to have additional levels of reinforced. Nah. I don’t think that it works very well in this game. There aren’t any merchants to appreciate the fact that your survivor’s backpack is of masterwork quality. 
I think that the argument that factory made is the best quality is silly. They work on reproducible production, they want consistent quality, not the best. The best is often made with techniques that aren’t easy to automate in production. They also don’t guarantee that the design is competent. I’ve bought many a factory made product that was bad just because the design was inherently bad to begin with.
My point is that given a standard design, the quality of production only helps to a certain point. This point can’t be exceeded without changing the design. That being said, there is also a philosophy in design that focuses on expedience, that it can be put together by someone without a lot of experience and expected to function well.
This results in rudimentary products like this which is a reasonable way to measure radiation without having to come up with components that would be unlikely to find in your home.
Theoretically, this is plausible for many of the sort of things that we produce in game. I know that it’s fairly easy to make backpack like storage items out of sticks alone. This is a case of sophistication versus the ability to produce from limited resources.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make with this is that a frame of sticks isn’t something that you would normally refer to as a backpack, therefore I would argue that a frame of sticks isn’t a low quality backpack, it’s a frame of sticks, with a different use case, weight, durability etc.
Also we should have field-expedient Kearny fallout meters in game. I know that they aren’t as rapid or precise as normal geiger counters, but they are sufficient to tell if that place you’re standing is radioactive enough to be concerned.
