Not so. When you play in a group it becomes obvious very quickly that it is monumentally stupid for everyone to read every book they find without coordination.
I'm not going to disagree about the level of stupidity of this behavior, but given the encumbrance limits and the number of books at the start of game it is going to happen. People are going to take the quickest, shortest, most direct route unless 'explicitly' incentivized to do otherwise. Yes, you can coordinate pretty easily if you have a group that you've been playing with for a while, and you're all online at the same time, and that group is large enough to offset the resource requirements/encumbrance ratio, but that's not going to happen for brand new players, and first impressions matter.
If you and I are competing in any way as a cooperative team then we are dooming ourselves.
When there's a limited number of resources and carry capacity, competition is inevitable because ultimately it's a competition between those resources, carry capacity, and the ticking of the clock. Those crafting skills can be carried around free of charge in the looters head and be employed at their convenience when they're back at base while at the same time maximizing the amount or resources that can be carried back to the group. It's perfectly logical for the looter to not carry everything back.
Feeding books to the right people isn’t altruism. It is self interest strategy.
If you were farming social credits maybe, but it doesn't really have any negative effect on the looter to be able to cook their own food, make their own tools, or craft workstations, at the same point they'd be dropping off the books for someone else to do it while leaving the resources to do so behind.
Then your opinion about playing in a group would have more weight in consideration?
I've stated explicitly that my tests were limited to the constraints of streamer weekend so that I could only test solo and two player, and my speculation was that larger groups would find less of an issue with this. I do also play with a group but for streamer weekend it was deemed best to limit it to those with responsibility for the channel to reduce the possibility of a leak.
Conversely, if you've only played this with a larger group that's used to coordinating you might not even notice this edge case and be completely baffled when others express concerns.
No, I don't know what to say to those that want to stay at home and build, but what I'm not going to say is, "Get better people to play with.", or "Get more people to play with so that it all just works.", or "You have to play in the 'sandbox' exactly how you've been told to."
Since most people build their bases within walking distance of the trader however, perhaps a rebalance of what books are available there might be the solution, or maybe even a mailbox or a tiny library that resets daily like the vending machines...It wouldn't make much difference to solo play or larger groups, but it could smooth over the hump for small and disorganized groups.
