Because its ultimately a survival game. If everything is there for free then there is absolutely nothing to achieve (for people who aren't going to be taking part in PvP).
Does being a survival game entail being boring? I mean, people generally are having fun when they either are making progress or are struggling against a difficult obstacle to make progress. Now consider this - a large part of this game is fighting. Actually, every single activity a player can undertake to make progress (gain exp, get new items, gain fame or influence) requires fighting - about the only thing you can do that doesn't involve killing stuff is being a 100% doctor, and even then without fighting you have no people to heal. Fighting makes you expend ammunition and drugs real fast. You're saying that ammunition and drugs should be hard to get and require crafting aside from the occasional TC or PvE reward that only the best players (who don't really progress getting these rewards because endgame is about teamplay, not building up your survival equipment), but what progress is the player making when crafting these items? They're going to be lost the moment the player does something interesting anyway. That's not building on the survival theme, that's assaulting the playerbase with boring gameplay they neither want nor seek.
I have no problem with PvP activities delivering enough equipment to fuel the next few battles, such as the ammo rewards in TC, because those people will eat through lots of stuff
Well, these rewards are still far from compensating for what you have to bring to make a reasonable attempt at winning in TC - and even if they were enough, what about the losers? Back to where they started? But they don't want that, they already went through the entire survival-figure-it-out phase, they just want to try again and have some payback. So again, you're forcing people to reexperience gathering stuff (which gets easy really fast, but never stops being time consuming) instead of doing what they want to do. More grind, more bad gameplay, absolutely no survival stuff because once you learn the ropes nothing is a threat and even if you die you're way past the point of caring about that.
I'd even extend that to harder PvE (the only thing we have to facilitate this are encounters at the moment) where beating harder encounters should deliver you enough stuff to fuel your next few attempts.
Same thing really as with PvP, except this one is slightly easier on you, but more repetitive. You expend a lot of stuff, risk dying, receive negligible rewards when compared with the effort required to have a go at it. And once you're out of bullets (and you will be, fast), it's back to the same old grind you've learned to do effectively a year ago and are getting sick of. You don't even have to die/fail to be forced to do it.
But having something like stealing from encounters which was little risk, little effort and poured huge amounts into the game and could be done by anyone with absolutely no limits was rediculous.
I agree with this one, but having to do boring, easy work before you're able to actually play is no solution. Why can't the basic ammo and drugs be just readily available at the base facilities once you reach the stage of building your own outpost? I'm talking hiring a specialist that's going to stand there and give you some with X hour cooldown. You'd still have to be wary of dying, but at least your experience of the game would be way more fluent. Yes, that'd make those supplies as common as water and sand are irl, so NPC vendors shouldn't trade in them - but then again, the only other option is grind, and nobody really wants to grind just to play (because you can easily grind for hours and make no progress because of a single screwup).
