TL;DR: Learn by loot is a dangerous slippery slope in PvP, non-organic in PvE and kills the vibe of RP, also can read a book to make a truck with no welder, but can't figure out how to make a glass jar? or use the left over can from chili as a container to boil water in? If you don't want us building bases, just say so and take the blocks away. I'll give it a shot, but some of these "improvements" don't give me a lot of hope
I posted some on YouTube about my concerns of the new "learn by looting" system, it opens up a dangerous precedent in larger public servers, there are people who are perfectly happy destroying someone else's experience in a public setting because it benefits them in-game, while these unscrupulous characters would surely exist in real life, you offer them an easy target by making experience obtainable only by loot. the city locations will be prowled by people looking for the new books and hording them or drawing in those looking for these books only to be shot and killed and subsequently looted by these people making toxic players who are good at player killing, king of the hill so to speak. this hardly inspires a sense of good gameplay to me.
In PvE, it changes the dynamic of how people MUST interact with the environment, in single player it is already difficult to maintain a base and scavenge, but if I don't want to go out of the house to scavenge and focus more on building a bunker to protect myself and survive the next blood moon it is a viable option with blade traps, turrets and mines, but now, alone that is not an option, you have to go loot, you have to play a certain way, with this requirement, base building in solo is not viable once higher tier zombies start showing up (I don't use looping traps, nor do I use un-navigable blocks, there is no enjoyment to solving a dangerous puzzle if you remove the danger) so base building is going to go away in solo and in multiplayer, you better hope you have graceful allies willing to loot while you build because god forbid humans can figure out again how to make a rifle on their own, you have to find it in a book. I could build an equivalent pipe shotgun right now with what I have in the house, I imagine it would take time to figure out the pump action, but if I'm left to my own devices and had someone bring me the tools I needed, I could figure it out.
In RP, I generally (In 7 Days to Die) play the engineer, not very talkative but devilishly smart and harsh, think Dr. House if he was an engineer. with the new loot to learn, it take some of that away, with the first starting quests, you get 5 perk points, we use that to say "this is what we were good at before whatever brought us here." I normally dump all of it into Intelligence 5 and the last goes to advanced engineering 1, as time progresses, I continue on mainly int skills (Grease monkey, Robotics, Ect.) but if my chara wants to learn another skill, he has to either go out to do it or get help learning it from another chara. my GF usually plays hunter/gatherer, so if I want to learn to hunt better I either go hunt or ask, in RP for her to help me learn it. With books, it's possible to RP that, but the mechanics would feel all wrong, and if we have specialized people, they will never have a book to give, because they use it, or they sacrifice their own xp to give it to you which is not helpful in a RP during game sense at all.
I'll say the idea is laudable it has merit, but there should be an alternative way to gain experience. maybe not placing blocks and upgrading them, if you want XP in shotguns, make shotgun parts and if you find a book, that just makes it faster because you have a refence to look at. It allows for tighter specialties and opens the door for the bad ass zombie slayer, the cool collected hunter but also make the cold inventor and Hardened construction worker possible. and to make this more "balanced" have them stay at the work bench till its done, like a shotgun part takes 5 min to make, if you leave the bench you are not actively working on it so it pauses until you return or it provides very little xp.
As for the jar part. I wish I had something good to say about the glass jar part. so there is no way I can figure out how to make some kind, any kind of receptacle to boil water in, not a one? Okay, in game without jars, I can think of three things I can scoop some water into a boil.
1. cooking pot - it doesn't travel well but as a base builder this isn't an issue
2. Can - I just ate some chili, now its a drinking glass/boiling pot
3. beaker - it's designed to boil things
I understand, its a game, but in a post apocalyptic world like 7 Days to Die, I can understand people figuring out a generator, I can accept a flying robotic aid, I can reasonably conceive of people figuring out how to make concrete. But in a world with all of that, I can't figure out how to make glass? a skill we humans have had for centuries? FFS there are better ways than this to make water harder to access or less safe to drink, add durability to the jars, tier one, breaks after a use or two, tier two, maybe three or four so on so forth, I don't mind filthy toilet water being the only thing we find, or find the water cooler that been rotting in the office for 10/20 years has gone foul but water and food are fundamental to human survival and we have been packing and bagging it for years now, it would be the first thing I figure out how to transport around, and while a glass jar would not be the first pick, it would function in the moment and I would make sure I knew it was at least safe from basic contaminants.
another way to make water harder, rather than removing jars which in my opinion is foolish, make natural sources of water corrupted water. something in the water caused the zombie apocalypse and a simple boil won't kill it, hell make it immune to chlorine, fluoride and many common sources of purification for story reasons and you have to make a purifier with like lead (gets rid of the zombie problem but has a host of its own problems) Carbon, or late game options like silver/copper or ethanol purification (Requires Chemistry bench). I don't like being pigeon holed into someone else's game style. now not only is building a base not incentivized, gathering isn't incentivized, but now I forced to scavenge to meet the basic requirement of water?
Fun Pimps, I'm starting to like you which is a hard thing to accomplish, but please this is not the direction to go, because you are making a game, advertised, promoted and sold as a sandbox zombie horde survival game. People here and else where have fallen in love with the idea of building an impenetrable base but nothing I see here inspires people to build, or even have a home base if they don't have the tools or means to do so, and why settle down when water is going to be a perpetual problem, you will always have to go further and further to find more places to find water so there is no reason to settle down and if you get to a point of building a 4x4 you just drive during blood moon and there goes the action of even caring about a base of operations. and if there is not a base of operations, why even bother with the dew collectors because no one will really be anywhere long enough for them to matter. With that in mind why bother having the blocks to build the bases or have ways to improve the base in general or have a blood moon at all because without a well established base what chance do you have to fend it off except in one of the places you looted out. Ah wait iron scrap doors are the best doors in those building and they are mostly made of wood so, I guess I'll die.
it would certainly start living up to the name but it would not inspire a lot of continued gameplay. because "well I had a good weapon, I had a lot of scrap that was helpful, too bad I'm a Kilometer away and still have a fair number of zombies between me and my body, so, I guess Square one? no wait, I looted all of these buildings already, and they don't respawn loot for three days, so I'll starve before I get anything productive... " It spirals from there making till it is decided that, a single player simply starts over, or a multiplayer drains resources from a stockpile of his faction which may simply not exist because there is no base. if you don't want us building bases and play a zombie looter, give zombies loot drop, xp for the weapon you used to kill them and take away the blocks to build a base.
I will give this A21 a shot, maybe it won't be as bad as I fear maybe there is something that I don't see, that multiplayer servers will share in the spoils with everyone (I wish I had that much faith in online randoms) and water will not be impossible to come by late game. it doesn't inspire a lot of hope though and hope the whole "water is too easy to find" doesn't stick around. it is a survival game, yes, early game, water should be hard to come by but as you grow and advance that should become easier, not harder, and in the same advancement, zombies will take more interest in you, shifting the survival part from "I need water" to "there are a thousand zombies out there."
now as a note to developers, I know how much goes into developing a game, and understand that you guys are moving from block water to voxel water changes how natural water works in the game, but doing drinkable water this way is not immersive and not conductive to fun gameplay in a lot of ways and please, I hope you don't plan on leaving it this way.
ound: 
