For those who might be wondering... How the game is doing...
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Well, a lot of that is to be expected.
For all of their experience in making games, this is really the first time they are trying to make a multi-player game. And many of the issues you raise are standard when any company goes into this for the first time.
Balance issues and "nerfing" are also very common. Even games like WoW and Guild Wars to this day have to do things about this. They put out something new, and realize it is over powered or upsets game balance and have to then adjust it.
The same goes for weight issues. Because in this game the tools for picking locks are essentially consumables, they simply forgot that most players hoard them like crazy. Instead of having just 10 or so and selling off the rest, most of us keep all that we find, knowing that while we can often open 9 or 10 locks without breaking any, we then may break 4 on a single lock. Even in Fallout 4 I only started to sell them off once I had over 100. Not the 10-20 that they envisioned we would have on hand.
And for the developer room, that has happened to other companies in the past. In fact, they actually trolled a lot of those players quite well recently. Some who got into the developer room and got backpacks (intended to increase your weight limit) later discovered that they went and increased the weight of the item itself to 100 pounds. Now instead of wearing it to carry more, you were actually able to carry less.
And in the last month a lot of people have returned, now that most of the balance issues have been eliminated and the storage limits increased twice. The first big DLC event was very well received, and the newer ones are also being given positive reviews.
Now that there is a more aggressive PvP system in place, many of us expect to see the community largely dividing into 2 areas. "Survival" more for PvP, with those that want a "kill or be killed" game play. And "Adventure" for those that want to concentrate almost exclusively on PvE gameplay. And a lot of the mechanics you mentioned were actually holdouts from older Fallouts that had to be adjusted.
Specifically carry weight. In older Fallout games you could go over your carry weight, and you just moved slower. That was not a problem, you were the only player in the world. But this was being exploited in a way that would not work on other games. Players would make mules and load them with literally tons of stuff, and use them basically as unlimited storage boxes. This was not possible in say Guild Wars, where each player had a set storage capacity based not on weight but number of items. Most games use "item slots" to limit storage capacity, not weight. In games with stacking, 1 item is the same "weight" as 250 of the same item. You have say 100 storage slots. 100 arrows stored one at a time is the same "weight" as 100 stacks of 25 arrows.
But they could not do this, and remain a "Fallout Game". Because crafting and the large number of components is such a big part of game play and crafting they decided to continue the way they had already done the past decade or more. Although I wish they had followed the Guild Wars concept of part of your storage being only for holding crafting items and nothing else.
So they set a maximum weight that was still way over what a person could reasonably carry (is something like 2,000 pounds now), and if your character was over that you had to dump the excess. This mostly targeted the dupers, and while they were furious. But most of the community largely did not care. But we have seen the storage box increase from 400 to 600, then now 800 pounds. And rumors are that it is going to increase soon to 1,000 pounds.
The game is still not perfect, I doubt it ever will be. But the same can be said for any multi-player game. But the game has come a long ways in the last several months.
