Fallout 76 Addendum

After several rounds of technicians coming to our place, I determined that much of the problem with connecting was due to shoddy internet. With that repaired, I have been able to put the game through its paces more easily. There are still disconnections, but they are much more infrequent. Given that, here are a bunch of random thoughts from my playtime, including advice for new players.

• Think of the difficulty of things radiating out in concentric circles from Vault 76. I bee-lined the main quest and so ended up way out of my depth pretty early on. It really does pay to exhaust the locations in one area before you move on.
• The lighting and environmental effects are so good.
• I don't like that they attached crafting to perks. While you can swap out your perk cards easily, it becomes annoying to create builds for crafting and builds for adventuring. I think crafting should have been moved to its own leveling up tree. 
• I'm sure implementation of this would be a pain, but they need an auction house. I was wrong previously about selling things. You can set your own price, it just seems like people are generally setting things too high. I did encounter a nice player who set all their plans to 10 caps. An auction house would at least provide a real economy to interact with and competition to drive down prices.
• The in-game vendors are just insane with their prices. I have earned maybe 3000 caps total and am nearly at level 40. Plans for things can run to 875 caps. Ridiculous.
• People have criticized the lack of NPCs, but I like that aspect. It feels like a detective story, piecing together what happened to people after the war. This year will bring NPCs in the Wastelanders update, but I fail to see what's so exciting. I want more quests.
• Dump everything that you aren't using into your stash, scrap everything you can. Even ammo has weight, so go through your inventory and slim way down. I was always near my weight limit before I committed to carrying the basics - two or three weapons, armor, necessary ammo, and a fair amount of food and water. The less equipment you have the more room for junk, and you need a lot of junk.
• Let people travel to other player camps for free. Sure it creates new fast travel points, but it would encourage players to use the whole map for their camps instead of clustering around familiar areas.
• Let players join Events for free. Right now it costs caps to join based on fast travel distance (at least from what I can tell). You want to do everything to get players playing together.
• The amount of content is pretty amazing. There are creatures I have yet to encounter. I haven't even tried to make my own suit of power armor. I've never been in a nuke zone. There are systems I haven't interacted with, like sharing perk cards.
• You really have to adjust your arsenal to fit your enemies. They all have different attack styles and weaknesses. Don't think that because something is your level or even below that you can solo it. Boss-type creatures will largely wreck you. Mirelurk kings, for example. Watch out for groups of enemies, even low-level ones. 
• This game's equivalent of dragons are called Scorchbeasts. They are dangerous. They will follow you across the landscape. I hate them.