Is there a reason to have less than 10 quality?

[Fostik]

Right now, all new players are forced to ruin baseline nature qualities lower than 10 being affected by their low skills.
Is there a real reason to punish newcomers that hard? The moment, when newbies will figure out there are quality determining everything, and they must raise stats to stop ruining qualities takes long time with no reason, while they will waste hunger with food and curiosities ten times worse than natural values.
Consider totally removing this pointless newcomers repel, make it so that all base skill values will be 10, or items with quality lower than 10 will have stats as it's q10.

[vatas]

Sense of pride and accomplishment progress.

[evilboy666]

What new players?

[VDZ]

Sense of pride and accomplishment progress.

This, but unironically. One of the first things you want to do is raise your stats to make sure everything you craft is at least q10. It's a small step, but an impactful early game milestone. An experienced player will get to it in no time by grinding discovery XP, but that's no reason to remove it.

[Kamekono]

Maybe, but I think everyone should at least start with 10 Survival.

It's nonsense that you need to waste all those points to grab a q10 anything from the ground.

(on a side note, it's super dumb that people use q1 stinging nettle to make shirts and pants q1 in order to avoid the negative agility it would give you at q10. Negative bonuses should decrease with quality, not the other way around)

[LadyV]

It represents skill of use. You can know the basics of how to take a piece of wood and stone to make an axe but its a bit before you learn the proper way to use an item and build it properly. ie. You choose a weak branch or a brittle stone. Similarly you pick a poor quality foragable.

All items are abstracts of larger things. A dandelion on the map represents a patch or group. A tree has many branches but the smaller number represent whats usable...

And yes a sense of accomplishment.

It can be frustrating holding you back but there is already a problem of people rushing techs. Till that's fixed it is the only gatekeeper early on.

[MagicManICT]

It's nonsense that you need to waste all those points to grab a q10 anything from the ground.

But are you really "wasting" those points? That there is the flaw in the thought you're having. If you need points in survival, then it's not a waste. If you don't need points in survival, then does it matter what quality you pick it up at? You're not likely to keep q10, either, unless it's a bulk item you need or very rare find. If I'm making a farmer and don't need to forage or survival for anything, then I'm probably not going to put any points into it, and probably not go out at all with the character other than to complete credo quests. Maybe that's just me, though.

(on a side note, it's super dumb that people use q1 stinging nettle to make shirts and pants q1 in order to avoid the negative agility it would give you at q10. Negative bonuses should decrease with quality, not the other way around)

Just to answer the side note: I don't think you have to get it clear down to q1 to eliminate the agi penalties. I think 6 or 7 will do (just need to get the penalty so that it rounds to 0). The downside to this is you softcap any gilds you put into the clothes, so it does have some balance.

[Rebs]

If you ask for this the devs will just get rid of baseline Quality and randomize it from 1-10.
Imagine having to search for q10 trees/stones.

[VDZ]

(on a side note, it's super dumb that people use q1 stinging nettle to make shirts and pants q1 in order to avoid the negative agility it would give you at q10. Negative bonuses should decrease with quality, not the other way around)

Just to answer the side note: I don't think you have to get it clear down to q1 to eliminate the agi penalties. I think 6 or 7 will do (just need to get the penalty so that it rounds to 0). The downside to this is you softcap any gilds you put into the clothes, so it does have some balance.

It's still a dumb mechanic, though, and gives bigger problems in other areas, for example armor for weaker characters: raising the quality also raises the AGI penalty, making the armor actually worse in practice unless your AGI is high enough to not care about the penalty.

[Apocoreo]

Teaches new players about hardcaps intuitively.