There are xp rich activities that if spammed will propel your gamestage faster than you can keep up. Killing every zombie you encounter and triggering screamer hordes to kill as many zombies as you can is an example of xp-rich activities that will cause the gamestage to possibly outpace you. I'd say that spamming quests as opposed to simply scavenging POIs on your own is also towards that end of the spectrum. Remember that your bonus reward is not just cash and gear but it is also XP on top of what you earned as you did the quest. Speed running quests is going to ratchet up your gamestage-- possibly faster than you may be comfortable with on horde night or if ferals and radiated start popping up before you are prepared for them.
Getting back to topic...How would you solve the problem of spammed quests? Even if the trader travels you will still have a marker to return to him to gain your reward. What's to stop you from taking a new quest right away? Would you not get a location to return for that quest and have to find the trader to turn in your package for your reward? I don' think that would go over very well. The only way to stop quest spamming is to limit how many can be done per day. Some people will not like that restriction.
Like I said before, time. To be honest, if you are running 3+ quests a day though you have broken away from what the game is encouraging to maximizing rewards and, as you have pointed out, balance is not made based on that playstyle. 1-2 though seems like something that is generally encouraged and does not require actually trying to maximize anything.
We already have time limiting our quest spamming ability, you just do not have enough time to complete 10 quests a day. With a mobile trader, it is unlikely you are going to burn through a lot of quests because you have to locate the trader first. There does not need to be a pointer either, just find the trader again (any or any that belong to that faction if we had those) and then you can turn it in. Other methods should be involved too that I think need to happen if traders are changed or not. For instance, all quest POI's or POI's that have a treasure room should have a minimum of 3 variants. We are not talking about massive changes to the individual POIs but extremely small and minor changes that change the destination room and path. That way, any POI you are going to go loot, you may end up on the roof or in the basement. It would make approaching POI's after the first time more variant and less like a dash to the loot room whilst still giving you the universal destructive environment. Hey they could use the change to get rid of those silly lights someone leaves all over every single poi to tell you exactly where to go
That would make speed running a poi more difficult without artificial barriers or even targeting that type of playstyle. You could still speedrun as well, only a few variants and knowing the general layout does not change, but at that point the game is not encouraging it, you are doing it because you simply like doing it. The average player is going to do more searching. It gives the rest of us a reason to dig around a little more in POI's that are well known to us as well as there will be a lot more variance with minimal work. It is far simpler to relocate 50 or so blocks than it is to design a POI.
Most importantly, this change would, IMHO, be a positive change that really has nothing to do with limiting quests or scaling the benefits back but rather adds something to the game and has those effects as add ons. Also it would be something that would not take a tremendous amount of effort.
Unfortunately I do not see them doing that though as most POI's are not envisioned with branching possible routs. It is still possible but I would have expected to see different approaches taken if that is what they had in mind.
I do like the idea of having expensive items that are out of reach now, but that the player can aspire to obtain later. It gives the player a goal - something to work towards - beyond an explicit quest to go here and do this. And to be fair, the game has this to a fair degree now. It's somewhat dampened by the 3-day loot refresh, though. Still, I think the sheer number of items for sale is worth addressing in its own right. A trader shouldn't have more than a dozen melee weapons to choose from (keeping in mind it's rolled separately for each player). As I've said before in other contexts, too much luxury of choice tends to work against the sense of it being a survival game.
Bah, expensive items just means they are trivial to get later. I HATE the fact that there are items located behind walls like the trader. I am forced as a player to max my intel AND use traders because one of my favorite areas to explore in the game is setting up complex electrical designs/traps and solar is the pinnacle of that. I want to use solar on my base and that necessitates all kinds of other crap that I may not want to get into.
This is not an area of '10% more efficient' either. It is locking me out of any contact with solar. I hope the remove anything that is trader specific, solar should be hard to get and rare but it should not necessitate use of the trader.
Its more like the stupid move was to only halfway finish the loot overhaul. In A20 the pipe weapons use regular ammo and appear in loot so already most of your complaint is going to be fixed. You will use up ammo and the pipe weapons are interesting and once they get gamestage modifiers to locations there will be a lot more choices for interesting loot. They just did not get it all done so we are playing with a half-done feature.
Ah, the problems with complaining about alpha.
Sometimes us players forget that features 'suck' because they are not realized yet and there is nothing that the devs can do to fix that aside from not having open alpha.
