What you seem to not be taking in from so many back and forth post is that you could do the very same thing in A16. You could level by doing and you could use your skill points gained for leveling for whatever you wanted, yes even leveling up your armor skill. Every level up brought skill points just as a17 does, you always had the choice to spend these points any way you choose. You behave as if this was not an option or maybe you are just leaving it out for some reason?
And secondly, to address a point of yours from an earlier post. Cement mixers, workbenches, and chemistry stations have never been locked behind rng in the vanilla game. The reason for this is that books were already nearly phased out by the time these features were released. Only the forge and later steel would be gated by rng books. And this was only the earlier alphas before the new skill/perk system was added along with new workstations. At no point was cement gated except by needing the forge until the skill system was initiated. The forges only gate for several alphas after the book phaseout was the mats needed to make it. Functionally there has been little changed in the access to the workbench, cement mixer, or chem station. These items have only been present in the skill/perk system and have always been gated to a certain level in a skill. I don't even mind a level gate for the iron tools. Can't make them until your level up your tool smithing because you are still sh** toolmaker. Totally fine with that. You respond that you would hate rng locking stuff you need and then say that no one should be upset at the forge being gated because you can find them in the world and that is entirely based on rng which seems a little inconsistent.
I don't have an answer to the division either. What I have is frankly way too much time(4331 hours steam tells me) in a game I have absolutely loved through all its warts through now and I too miss the a16 way. Not because I like to cheat or exploit or I just love grinding, I loved it because any game I played I could choose my own way of doing it. I loved the hell out of exploring for days, building for days, trying out many many horde base builds from open fighting on the ground to ultimate builds where I could ignore them if I wanted to. Not that I did, fighting them was too much fun, but I could because by that stage I had earned it. I was the Duke, the lady of the land and all I surveyed. I don't find anything wrong with that. Playing the game out to the max level should give you a sense of accomplishment and a measure of actual safety. Otherwise what it the difference between level 1 and level 300 if it is still just as hard or harder? Why not just avoid it altogether? It was late game that afforded you the option to try out all the craziest ideas you had or to see what kind of awesome you could build. I guess you can say you have that still?
I don't know. I don't find it as fun though I still play. And I miss terribly all my friends that I used to play with because they don't play anymore. Maybe that is the one thing I don't see discussed. We talk about loving it or hating it. We talk about who is in the minority/majority of the complaining versus praising. No one talks about the tendency for people to do neither of those things. Most people enjoy without praising or walk away without complaining. Only the most passionate will actually bother to post so we often don't have a clear
picture of events until after the fact if at all. Whatever way it goes I have loved this game and am grateful to have found it.
He used to talk about leaning with passion.
