36 minutes ago, meganoth said:
Zematt above has explicitly mentioned that he has an issue with missing containers. And my impression is different, I also see many players specifically complain about the jars being gone, and also many that complain about both.
According to Roland water jars were specifically removed to remove jars 😉. I.e. to make all jars, bottles and cups "equal". A second objective was to make water a somewhat valuable resource instead of triviallly infinite. For that they had to put a shackle on the infinite sources called lakes. Maybe there are other ways to do that, but TFP came up with this rather straightforward way.
So no, they could not have kept the mechanic. With endless bottled water from lakes they would have to throw lots of complications in the processing of this water to reach similar goals.
My point was that a lot of people complain specifically about the jars being gone but is that really the issue for them? Or is it that they can't get water from lakes and jars were how you did that and so the lack of jars is equated to the lack of gathering water from lakes. Yes, there are some who specifically mention that not getting a jar back is immersion breaking because, where did it go? But that applies to all containers and you don't see a lot of people complaining about the other containers, which suggests that this is just a tangential complaint to the main complaint that they can't gather water.
I know they wanted to remove jars and also that they wanted water to be harder to get. My point wasn't that they could have let you gather water and still meet the goal. My point was that a lack of jars doesn't mean a lack of gathering water. It's meant to show that jars != water mechanic. If they didn't want to make water harder to get but only to remove empty jars, they could have made it act the same as getting gas from a gas pump... click on the water and you get a filled jar of water. Use the water and no empty container. As was commented on by others, this would make equivalency for both empty containers and gathering the resource. So the mechanic works without empty jars. The point I was trying to make was that most people who are upset about not having the glass jars are *most likely* only really upset about the lack of gathering water and are connecting the lack of empty jars with the lack of gathering water even though they are two separate things.
Obviously, they had other objectives that just removing jars and so making equivalency in that way wouldn't actually work with the goals they had. But it shows that jars aren't necessary for the old mechanic to work.