Your reasoning there is exactly what we've said in the past, many times. The scarcity in DC is intended, especially for energy weapons. Buying them isn't the way to go, you've gotta go kill for them.
We did go overboard on the scarcity but it was a conscious decision.
:(
Alpha and Beta have specific meanings and it has nothing to do with how playable it is.
If development is in a state of flux, things being added and removed, changed, overhauled etc. it's alpha.
If features have been frozen and you are ironing out bugs, it's beta.
The bugs you are ironing out in a beta might be GAME WRECKING, doesn't change that it's a beta.
Currently Roy and I are looking over the vendors and leveled lists and it is probably going to change drastically as we try to move back toward a more vanilla approach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Alpha just for reference, notice it mentions a feature freeze.
TL;DR ALPHA AND BETA ARE NOT MEASURES OF BUGS OR PLAYABILITY
The problem when you bring into the "realism" or "lore" argument is that the very idea of a 19 year old kid beating several armed security guards to death, escaping from the vault and then taking on an entire army of power armored soldiers single handedly is silly.
From a game play perspective, the "should energy weapons be rare" question runs into the same issue of the 10mm vs 9mm pistol change in TTW.
From a lore perspective, the pistol should be a 10mm one. But that would make the 9mm obsolete.
From a lore perspective, lets say you want energy weapons to be rare. So then you have players skipping several tiers and only using energy weapons in the late game when they have played long enough to get everything under the sun. And then nobody uses the low level energy weapons like the laser pistol, etc.
From a purely gameplay perspective, you could make energy weapon and ammo rare. Ok, but then whats stopping the player from spamming the wait button to get vendors to refresh? Pretty much nothing, so it does nothing except to inconvenience the player and encourage them to mod the game, while creating numerous balance problems.
As it is, i feel that guns are vastly superior to energy weapons in TTW, mostly due to the availability of things like HP rounds that shred enemies like albino radscorpions. Playing a guns character, by level 6 i had a sawed off shotgun, chinese assault rifle, lever action shotgun, .44 magnum revolver, 10mm pistol and hunting rifle. I was stuck with only a laser pistol for way longer than that in my energy playthrough. Plus the damage bonus from cowboy/grunt makes certain weapons much better than their energy counterparts.
Guns > Energy weapons in NV entirely, we didn't make the Grunt/Cowboy perks, we didn't design the balance of the E Weapons. We didn't even come up with the idea of E Weapons are rare. Look at what you can get for energy weapons from Chet in Goodsprings, or Old Lady Gibson outside of Novac, or from the 188 gunrunners? The answer is very little. You know when you get E Weapons in NV? When you get to Vegas and buy them. In DC you have to go kill for them. You want Laser Rifles and Plasma Rifles? Go kill Talon Company. Or progress far enough to fight the enclave and take their stuff. After the Enclave appear you can get trading rights in the Citadel.
If you are really desperate, must have E Weapons NOW and don't want to go look for them, Flak and Shrapnel stock up to skill 50 E Weapons, but not very often.
Your argument of save scumming and cheat modding may as well be telling us: every vendor should have an unlimited supply of everything so that I can play exactly how I want to.
Now as I've said, repeatedly, and apparently you haven't read: WE KNOW THAT THE VENDORS NEED WORK. THIS IS AN ALPHA. NOT EVERYTHING IS PERFECT.
But honestly, I'm basically okay with the weapon distribution. I'm not okay with the rarity of ammo, mods, and ammo crafting supplies.
Guys, not to rain on people's parades here, but IMHO the availability of guns and weapons in the Capital wasteland should be crappy from vendors. The place is an active warzone, people aren't lining up to sell off weapons and ammo when right down the road there's a group of mutants or raiders looking to kill you and take your stuff. It's a sellers market to be sure, but with so few caravan's just getting basic needs is difficult. The Mojave in contrast is at least on the "civilized" end of the post apoc spectrum, minor raider attacks overall, a sparse large open landmass with many caravans making the rounds. FO3 vs New Vegas are at odds style wise, FO3 is "scrape out what you can to survive", while NV's seems more like "make it big and the worlds yours for the asking."
Wish we didn't have to nitpick every single thing. I've never had any issues with vendors. Everything felt natural to me. But one could make an argument for each side of vendor selections.
Im not against the idea of a mod if someone wants to change vendors...but I don't think Vanilla TTW needs to cater to the people who don't 100% agree with every single detail.
Everything seems ok to me. I usually use the cash from my run out of vault 101 at the beginning of the game to buy a Varmint Rifle from Moira. She has always had something I could use on my play-throughs. I take whatever I can get form her and head for Minefield to snag the Sniper Rifle from Arkansas.
If anyone is really having trouble finding weapons there are mods that work fine with the current TTW. Project Nevada adds a whole slew of weapons to the game. If you can't find any of those on vendors (I don't know if they spawn there or not, I've never bothered to look) and you're having trouble finding weapons, install MMM and jack up the spawn rates. Eventually you'll have more weapons than you can shake a stick at.
... I didn't mean for this to be a discussion/critique thread. More of a readme. But I suppose that's just the way it works.
I'm going to have to agree with both Jax and Anvil on this though. How things are now are not how they necessarily will be by the end of development, and even if they stay the same, scarcity makes sense in DC.
It also makes sense, in many ways that you are a new person to the communities, unrecognized and haven't proven yourself to anyone at the start. Which also makes it sensible that vendors and others aren't going to trust you or share with you their entire stock until you prove yourself.
It's very much that way in the real world, and would be even more so with limited resources available. This is pretty much the approach I think we're taking, scarcity at first with gradually improving offerings. Just like Vanilla FO3 and NV, more so NV. As you level things get harder, also need to take into account the difficulty settings. There needs to be just enough for people who play on the more difficult settings as not everyone plays an easy game where they become the messiah of the wasteland in a matter of hours.
As stated in many threads before, there is a great deal which has to be taken into account when balancing things.
I'm playing with vanilla settings for finding ammo (PN), never buy ammo - and my char has basically been swimming with ammo since a long time now. On the first couple of levels she had to conserve ammo for some weapons, but had no issue getting by on just looting ammo and breaking down/making ammo at the Reloading bench. So I find the balance rather fine as it is (I hate being out of ammo - makes the game feels pointless to me) and will use lower setting via PN during my next playthrough.
As for energy ammo/weapons, it has felt a lot like FO3/FWE to me. My chars skip Laser Pistols anyway and focus on energy weapons more first when getting A-23 and after having topped out the Guns skill.
