I understand part of your frustration. Once you reach a certain point in the game there is little incentive to keep playing and the sense of survival is lost because you have so many resources stored in your shelter. I miss the real sense of looting/fighting to survive that exists at the beginning of the game.
However, "Make the damn playing field equal," you say. Speaking as a relatively new player there needs to be some balancing to give 'noobs' a fighting chance, especially if you want the game to grow in popularity. How can new players expect to survive facing armor-wearing, PSD spamming sweats? And also too many sweats out there just seem to enjoy noob hunting to boost their stats. (I believe you have killed me on a few occasions). I frequently get PSD'd and then hunted down in the opening minute of a game and you can be sure it's usually a 'veteran' player. I'm all for balancing but it has to work both ways. Perhaps a separate encounter option for experienced players only would work. But then I suspect many veteran players would still want to hunt down the 'noobs' in the regular encounters in order to boost their stats and rankings.
