I've done two play throughs and I have been short on ammo for the first week (default days). If my first playthrough I had very little 9mm and a little more 7.62. In my second playthrough I had more 9mm than 7.62. In both playthroughs, the 7.62 ammo I received had to be saved for emergencies like bears, dire wolves, and dog hordes. In my second playthrough I had finally amassed a small cushion of 7.62 and that cushion disappeared after clearing the Bear Den on a quest. I have serious doubts about the ability to consistently obtain "hundreds of rounds" in the first 2 days. I haven't included shotgun shells here because I've found the pipe shotgun to be less useful than the blunderbuss. And shotguns seems to be somewhat rarer drops than in A19.
In terms of the pipe machine gun being better than the AK, it has a lower magazine capacity and I've never had enough ranged mods drop early enough in the game that mod capacity on the pipe machine gun matters.
Everyone I've spoken to on twitch has had the same issue of too much ammo early game - whether or not they are rushing quests.
But for a few examples, I'm on my 4th run of the alpha and here is my
day 2; I have 200 shotgun shells, 300 9mm, and over 100 7.62. Here's a random youtube from a player not rushing quests at the end of
day 3; He's sitting on having looted ~200 7.62, ~200 9mm, and 150 shotgun shells. Efficient questing does seem to be a large source of the ammo flood in the early game, but even with just a handful of quests and good looting you'll still end up with a lot of ammo early on. Variance is one thing, but I'm on my 5th world of the alpha with ammo beginning to pile up as early as the morning of day 3 consistently; each game I just stopped using melee entirely by day 2.
This could just be variance; we're hearing from the people getting super lucky 10x in a row and the people getting super unlucky 10x in a row while all the average case users are just staying out of the issue, but having such a gap of play experience does merit some looking into by the devs to make sure nothing needs retuning. All content creators I've checked out have been getting consistently flooded with ammo, so maybe it's a skill thing which TFP think needs no action because it doesn't affect the average player base, or maybe there is some glitch somewhere that is causing me and other streamers to see loot bags roughly 1 in 20 zombies, while a developer (madmole) says that loot bag drop rates are around 1 in 50.
And consider that with loot bags always having a stack of ammo in their first slot now, this makes a huge difference. Consider, on survivalist difficulty a shotgun can 1 or 2 HKO any unarmored zombie. With a 1 in 20 drop rate and a 1 in 3 chance of the bag dropping shells, that means on average every 60 zombies you kill will give you between 100~150 shotgun shells, while only needing between 60~120 to kill that many zombies, then you'll also be getting 200~300 9mm and 100~150 7.62 for free. Where as, if it were closer to the 1 in 50 that a dev said it should be, you'd be losing on ammo and wouldn't go infinite from just killing zombies efficiently. Again, it could just be luck, but I measured and recorded over 40 hours of my gameplay since then and was consistently getting slightly better odds than 1 in 20 for loot bags which is massively more frequent than 1 in 50.
As for shotgun shells being not included, I still managed to pick up a pump action shotgun on day 3 in that playthrough (and auto shotgun day 5) which I would consider early enough to be relevant, but I can see how some people just don't like shotguns, different strokes and such.
