This stuff is not locked in stone. As hardware changes or other optimizations happen, it can be changed.
This statement is a bit concerning, to be honest. Yes, as long as TFP is around and willing to do updates to this game, they can change things based on hardware changes in the future. However, once either TFP is no longer around (not saying anything negative here, but eventually all developers will close shop) or they don't want to make changes to an older game anymore, then it will no longer get such a change. It would be better to have the option available and then you don't
need to change it. Even if people aren't able to actually count zombies during BM without looking through the logs afterwards doesn't mean they want fewer zombies. I understand the need to reduce numbers if people have older computers that can't handle it. But that should simply be an option that people can choose for their games. Let those who can handle larger numbers of zombies have them. Just my opinion. I never set it that high myself, so it doesn't affect me, but I don't see any reason to limit the zombies for people who want them to be that high. It is optional, after all. People who set it that high should understand the risk of having a lower frame rate, so it's on them, not the game, if things don't work well.
Add back learn-by-doing, everyone agrees this was the superior system and the magazine system is deeply flawed.
No, not "everyone." As you comment in your second post, this is a debated topic, which means a lot of people don't agree with you. If that's true, then "everyone" clearly doesn't agree. And you can't even say that all players who have played from the early alphas agrees because there are plenty of such players here who don't like LBD.
LBD is a flawed system. Yes, there are people who like that system. But it's still a flawed system. It forces people to spam an action over and over just to advance. It doesn't take skill to spam an action (unless the action itself requires skill). All it takes is time to do so. One of the reasons a lot of people like it is they can easily set up a script to do the action repeatedly to very quickly advance in the skill or ability and have max skill or ability without any actual effort. But for everyone else, it means spending a lot of time doing that action over and over in order to be able to get better. A lot of people do not like being forced to spam an action repeatedly in order to advance.
Note that LBD is still in the game, just not for crafting. Yes, it's the minimal RPG XP version of it, where you do stuff to get experience and then use that "general XP" to unlock perks to improve your ability in a certain area instead of having "individual XP" for each thing. But it is still there. You can't get better at farming unless you do stuff to build up XP and then use that to unlock LOTL perks. No, it isn't tied solely to farming actions. You can get that experience through all actions and then
choose to use it for farming improvements. That's actually providing player choice that Skyrim style LBD does not offer. Where the game no longer makes use of LBD is crafting. For that, you need magazines now.
As far as magazines, that is different from before. That's true. I can't say they are a great option. They have their own problems. But lets look at A20, before magazines were added. How did you learn to make new things? It wasn't LBD. You had to find schematics (the same way you still do with mods now). But it was easier because you only needed one copy to be able to craft it. And if you found a second, the next person in the party could also craft it. No need to advance one player at a time. That is the change, not really LBD to magazines but schematics to magazines. Of course, that was just from A20, but many people who are crying about magazines and LBD are using A20 as their comparison. And most of the LBD debate started with the introduction of magazines after A20 rather than before A20 (or at least, most debate previously had died out before A20). For those who preferred an older style, then yes, that's an issue with LBD, though most of that debate died out before A20 and only resumed after magazines were added, which suggests that for many players, they were fine with schematics and just don't like magazines, meaning it's less about LBD and more about magazines.
Schematics were nice. They let you learn things in a random order, allowing you to have a different game each time. But you could have really horrible RNG and never see a specific schematic you want until late game, if ever. Magazines remove the RNG aspect of never being able to find a schematic, but everything is now unlocked in the same order every game. That makes each game less interesting because you don't get any changes between games. That is definitely a negative effect of magazines. Magazines also require a
lot of looking around to find enough of them to unlock stuff, which can be a pain. Though with schematics, you still had to spend time looking around in order to find the specific ones you wanted. At least with magazines, you have a good idea where to look for a specific magazine, where schematics were far more random and you just had to look everywhere until you found what you wanted.
Magazines aren't a great option and given the pros and cons of schematics vs magazines, I think schematics are actually better. You might never see a given schematic if your luck is bad, but you get variety in your games. But that doesn't mean that I think LBD is the way to go for crafting. I never think LBD is the way to go for crafting in any game. And for every other ability in a game, I prefer a general XP option rather than the Skyrim option of spamming something to upgrade that specific ability.
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