Pr00ch

Learn-by-doing is the answer, and has been since 2018... frankly, it seems like someone on the dev team has some personal vendetta against it for some reason lol. I genuinely return to A16 from time to time and despite the mountains of new content that have been added in the current build, I find it more fun to play. Sure, it wasn't a perfect system, but it just needed some TLC instead of being ripped out and replaced with something fundamentally worse for a survival game.

That'd be true if there were no attribute gates. Otherwise you simply can not diversify without effectively locking yourself out from content. Some perks require 7-10 points in their respective attributes, which cost 2 points each starting with 6, and 3 points for level 9 and 10. Because of this massive overhead that the gates require, by the time you'll reach the high attributes required to unlock the perks which let you access the diverse features of the game, you will already have progressed so far that it's no longer necessary. You will reach that "endgame" state, where zombies are any longer a threat, looting any more has no added utility, you have all the food you could possibly need, etc. All that happened really is you progressed to the endgame without even being able to access a chunk of the game. i.e. a whole lot of fun. It has just been arbitrarily locked, denied. It would have been great to use those features when you actually needed them. But at this stage, there is simply no point to it anymore. All that's left is turning off the game - you effectively finished it. Yeah, "charismatic nature" even being a thing in singleplayer is pretty telling, especially with how long it's been this way. It's a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the leveling system, and by extension the direction taken by whoever is in charge of designing it.

Absolutely spot on, the level gates are probably the single worst thing about the leveling system right now, along with the seemingly multiplayer-centered balance. It's obviously just a duct tape fix, but mod out level gates, set the points per level to 3, and the game becomes exponentially better. It is just baffling that in a survival game of all things, you are railroaded to "specialize" instead of diversifying your survival techniques, i.e. doing a little bit of gardening, a little bit of looting, a little bit of construction, and this, and that.

Ha, I envy you. A14-A16 was some of the most fun I've had in video games. Now all I feel is "eh"

Just another one in a series of perplexing design choices. The game really did peak in A16, and it's been all downhill from there.