Encumbrance is too low

I am certainly of two minds about this.

On one hand, for realism sake, no human can effectively carry much more than twice their weight (also max human bench press, like Anthony Clark putting up 800 pounds, but he was nearly 400 pounds.) and max dead lift is about four times body weight. (Savickas recently put up over 1000 pounds, but he is another 400 pound beast.) So, bigger avatars should be able to carry more, but we don't get the visuals for that, just the STR rating. So if your maxed STR 50 avatar can carry 400 pounds, great, as long as he weighs 300 pounds. And I don't buy the lower gravity thing, first there is muscle and bone density, then there is different gravity just means the 400 pounds is more stuff, not less weight.

On the other hand, that said, who give's a hoot about max realism in game? I wanna be able to lift a truck. As Soulcide said, "I'm the Avatar!" And if we move to more realism, then let's talk about resources. I can carry dozens of bookshelves (or dressers etc.) which should be several hundred pounds unless made of aerogel and the 400 logs needed to craft them - which would be several thousand pounds and should make a dozen houses, but only yields 100 gp of bookshelves. Which now that I write it is a totally off topic rant!

Worst of all with these two mindsets, after all the math is argued over and we reach some balance of playability and immersion - I tend to think it's about right now. I am frustrated at low levels by how little loot I can carry, but it works itself out later. I don't want it decreased, as that impacts play. But if increased much, it would impact immersion.

 

Here was another thing about encumbrance I forgot about since it's been a while.

When I was playing at the Steam level (because I didn't feel like setting up a house yet), it was a pain in the posterior having to trot back and forth between Owls to hunting grounds so often because of the limited inventory. The additional strength went a long way in making it better so you could stay out longer and play a bit more until it was time to go back and make the bank deposit, sell off the stuff and increase the bank size.

 

There was some discussion about this in the Tower of the Shuttered Eye exploit thread: there's a cap to how much encumbered you can be, or how much it will affect your movement. So as long as you can still move around enough to fight when you're at that cap you can add as much additional stuff to your inventory as you want.