Yeah, due to the garbage linear loot system I never touch safes anymore till after a certain GS because they will be filled with garbage. I really want them to go back to a18 loot where getting a quality 4-6 item was rare as hell even at high gamestage, and the loot was random, you could get lucky and find a pump shotgun on day 1, or a steel tool, Now? the game is so frigging boring, there is virtually no reason to loot things early because all it'll have is stone tools or scrap armor. I play dead is dead myself so the linear loot system hits me even harder, as it doesn't have the randomness a18 had, its the same... boring...progression every damn game. When a18 exp came out I was playing it for 8-12 hours a day, every day as I loved it. A19? I think i've played less than 30 hours total of a19, because the loot system just completly ruined the game for me that they have in a19. It was that big of a change and that hated of a change by me and others.
It seems in general the new loot system is hated by the majority of players as I see almost no one saying they actually like it, so I really hope they go back to how a18 was, and leave it at that, and just add the new items into it. It could be done in a a19.1 patch or something since it'd just be copying the loot.xml from a18 and adding the new items into it, which there aren't THAT many. Maybe tweak it a bit so its a bit harder to find steel tools etc early, but do not remove the option entirely.
The game was better back in a16 for a few reasons, learn by doing, which I will admit needed some tweaks, i'd rather it be just for weapons and mining tools only, and the level in those skills determines the perks you can learn which also ups the quality of the tool you can craft. A16 also gave the player choice, if you wanted to live in a hole in the ground and skip horde night? you were allowed to, in a18? Nope they took that away as now zombies can dig, a19, zombies can now swim and they somehow can swim faster than the player char, so the float on water option for dealing with the horde is now gone too. Then you have how they screw stealth builds, first they have the trash piles on both sides of a door in the intended path of the stupid as hell every damn poi is a maze crap, then they have rooms where second you walk in everything aggro's and gpses to you no matter how high your stealth skills are.
I used to build underground bases in a16 not to avoid the horde, but because of the structural intergrity system, and how buggy it was. You go one block over the limit and it took out the entire row instead of just the most recent one placed, worse, it'll probably cause a cascade that takes out your entire base, all due to 1 block. I used to try to build multi floor tower bases, and every single time when doing the last floor, if I go 1 block over the limit, it not only ruins that floor, but it also took out the 2 floors below for some reason, floors that according to console commands should have been perfectly stable enough that 1-4 blocks shouldn't have taken it out from falling on it.
All in all A19 is 1 step forward on graphics, 10 steps back on everything else for me. The game is losing its sandbox playstyle due to being forced by the devs to play in certain ways. I really wonder if the devs ever actually play the game, without using any cheats to see just how boring a19 actually is. Try playing dead is dead in a19, its boring on the 2nd time as its exactly the same as the first time due to the way loot is now. Compared to a18, where you could at least have a chance of getting something nice and rare like a steel tool on day 1 (it'd be quality 1 but still better than iron), the change of that happening added so much fun to the game, and it was happy feel-good times when you got a lucky loot drop early. Sadly this cannot happen period in a19 the way its setup.
