I've enjoyed the storms ever since they were introduced; for me, the best part is the challenge— being caught off guard by a storm and having to quickly clear an area to take cover, or having to run away because there are too many irradiated or tough zombies that you can’t kill easily, and having to find another POI with the storm raging and the zombies chasing you, trying not to die and to lose them from sight by throwing rocks and hiding.
Along with permadeath, that’s what gets my heart racing and the adrenaline pumping.
For me, I don't feel confined, and I leave storms on... however, I don't particularly like them. I deal with them, but I don't enjoy them. They can get in the way when I'm trying to do something specific. If I need to cross a long stretch of biome to get to a trader when I'm attempting to open a trade route and a storm is raging when I get to the biome, I'm stuck having to stop what I wanted to do and find something else to do. So I'm not being confined, but I have to do something else, which is annoying. If I'm trying to build a base and a storm starts, I have to stop building it or else limit what I do to just what is inside. This again doesn't really confine me, but it does mess up my plans.
If I'm not doing anything specific, it's not a big deal. I can do a quest during a storm. I can scavenge a POI during a storm. I can mine during a storm. Things like that aren't really affected by a storm and you pretty much just ignore the storm, making it not really important to have anyhow. About the only time the storm offers any "benefit" is if you're fighting storm zombies for increased loot bags. But we already get way too much loot on default settings, so I don't really want to be getting increased loot bags to begin with. So that's not really a benefit for me.
As far as finding somewhere new to explore... I've played this game for a lot of hours. Other than when we get some new POI with a new version, I have done every POI in the game (not counting remnants, which aren't really worth exploring anyhow) many times so it isn't like I'd find something I wasn't already very familiar with.
So although I deal with storms and don't disable them, I don't particularly like them.
Of course, they have their downside—or as I like to say, they have a side that’s a “necessary evil.” Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where it’s just a nuisance—for example, dawn is breaking, you’re getting ready to leave your base, and a storm hits. Obviously, there are other things to do, but that wasn’t what you wanted at that moment. Or maybe you have nothing else to do and all you can do is wait, but as I said, it’s a necessary evil because if the storm weren’t like that, the experiences I mentioned in the first paragraph wouldn’t exist.
It’s like when you break your leg, and you put a splint on it, but you’re surrounded by dangerous zombies and can’t run very far or jump. If there were no consequences and the player could simply bandage their leg and carry on as if nothing happened, it wouldn’t be any fun, in my opinion—even though the debuff might be a nuisance at other times because you have to wait.
I’m currently playing a game in a single biome, the Wasteland, and there you can’t “tank” the storm with bandages and first-aid kits.
Unlike the other biomes, where if you allocate a point to “Living Off the Land” and craft bandages, you can go wherever you want without worrying. This takes away the urgency of seeking shelter (depending on the player’s situation), which is a downside in my opinion.
I usually set the storm frequency to 150%, but I recommend lowering it to 100% because 150% means a storm every day, almost at the same time, which makes it predictable.
I've suggested several times that there should be more options for the storm so everyone can enjoy it in their own way.
