Remove 300% and 200% hunger levels

[VDZ]

The mechanic of 'hunger', which reduces the efficiency of your food as you eat too much, with ways to mitigate this effect as a form of progression, is fine conceptually, and it adds an interesting variable to food items which affects how useful the item is (theoretically in a subjective manner even; items having different values for different players is a good thing). However, in the current system, hunger is an extremely dominant factor, almost eclipsing all other variables involved. Otherwise great food can be complete trash if its hunger value is slightly too high. But far worse is this: by not keeping your hunger at optimal values, you are crippling your character progression. (I think this is also likely the root cause of complaints about having to eat for energy; it's not about having to eat so much, but about how the hunger impact of eating food for energy cripples your character.)

This is not an inherent flaw in the design of the mechanic, but one aspect of the implementation: The Ravenous (300% food efficiency) hunger level. The developers have mentioned before that it is intended as a catch-up mechanic to help players who play less to gain stats faster (relative to time spent) than more active players. However, there are several flaws with this:

• Characters start out at 300% hunger. This means the 'bonus' is available to all players, including more active players, from the start.
• Careful management of food intake can keep players in the 300% range. In particular, very efficient food, which requires a lot of effort (activity) to obtain, allows for quick stat gains at little hunger cost. Active players have readier access to these top foods than inactive players, allowing them to stay at 300% easier despite being more active.
• Should players be at risk of slipping out of 300%, salt crystals can be consumed to push you safely back into the 300% range. Salt crystals can be obtained either directly (requiring exploration to find them and playing at the right times to harvest them) or through trading (for which you need valuable items to trade). Both methods strongly favor more active players.
• Questing can also push you to a better hunger level. This requires either constant significant time expenditure or setting up road systems. Both strongly favor more active players.

In practice, this means that the more actively you play, the easier it is to stay at the better hunger levels. (I'm not going to go further into that to prevent derailing into another discussion, but setting up and using alts is also a time-consuming way to improve hunger utilization.)

What this also means is that, for sufficiently active and skilled players, 300% is the real base value, not 100%. 'Ravenous' does not provide a 200% bonus; instead, 'Content' inflicts a 67% penalty to FEP gains. Anybody eating food at 100% is doing it wrong. Furthermore, with going from Content to Ravenous taking several literal days, the problem is self-reinforcing:

• The 67% penalty means you need to consume about thrice as much food for the same stat gains.
• This means it costs you thrice as many food items. Because of this increased quantity, it becomes far harder to still eat efficiently (as you need to expend roughly thrice as much effort or spend thrice as much value in trading to retain the same level of efficiency).
• Except not even the above is true. You see, consuming thrice as much food means you also get thrice the hunger impact. That means you had to spend 3x the value or time, to get only 1/3 of the efficiency you would have gotten at Ravenous.

It's very easy to drop to 100% (particularly by just consuming food to make up for energy expenditure), but very difficult to get back to 300% without playing actively. (Unless you simply abstain from playing entirely for several days, you'll still need to consume some food to gain back energy spent from regular activity.) This has one other impact, insignificant in gameplay but very important in play experience: Eating food feels bad. Every time I eat something suboptimal I cringe, thinking how much I'm screwing myself over by eating a food with so much hunger value. (As a reminder, 1% hunger = 2 hours to recover naturally.) You cannot casually eat food in this game. It's one of the most optimized processes by advanced players, with spreadsheets and entire websites dedicated solely to letting players make the most optimal decisions. For eating food.

The solution I see to this is simple: Delete the Ravenous (300% food efficiency) hunger level. That step would already massively nerf food optimization and make eating less of a crucial decision that screws you over hard if you do it wrong. Rather than eating at Content costing 3x for 1/3 efficiency (i.e. 9x difference), compared to the top level it would cost 'only' 2x for 1/2 efficiency (i.e. 4x difference). That, of course, only reduces the problem but does not eliminate it; as such, I think Famished (200% food efficiency) should also get the axe. This would leave Hungry (150% food efficiency) as best tier, making Content relatively cost 1.5x for 2/3 efficiency (2.25x difference). With Hungry allowing for reasonable automatic recovery, it could be a feasible option for less-frequent eaters. The difference is significant but not completely dominant, and the speed of recovery allows players to stay on that level by simply not consuming that much food. (Of course, recovery times may need to be tweaked a bit to balance for the new situation; arguably going from Content to Hungry is too fast, though at the same time it must be kept in mind that advanced players just circumvent recovery times in general.)

With 300% and 200% gone, people can eat more casually without crippling their stat growth, and autistic spreadsheet management for optimal food consumption is only needed for truly optimal progression, rather than being a strict requirement to not completely ruin your stats as it is now. Eating could be fun again, much more food could be viable (because depending on the style of play, high hunger values may not be that much of a problem anymore), and you wouldn't have to worry about that food item you can now easily make with the resources on hand being too suboptimal.

[AriZona]

-1
Too convoluted and unnecessary.

[VDZ]

-1
Too convoluted and unnecessary.

What part of 'reduce hunger from 7 tiers to 5' is convoluted?

[DDDsDD999]

Didn't read because too long but yes, and also remove salt.

[VDZ]

Didn't read because too long but yes, and also remove salt.

Well, I think removing salt is not necessary if 300% and 200% are removed. Salt is crazy good because 300%/200% are crazy good. Without those, you can only move up to 150% with salt. It's good for salt to be useful, it just shouldn't be as crazy as it is now.

[wonder-ass]

the whole purpose of the mechanic is to catch up. just remove salt and any way to regain hunger and its fixed.

[SnuggleSnail]

I don't want to have to do math when eating. Optimally gaining stats should be obvious.

[VDZ]

the whole purpose of the mechanic is to catch up. just remove salt and any way to regain hunger and its fixed.

Then the advantage of remaining at 300% would remain, and any food that doesn't have a low Hunger value would remain trash. Characters could start at 100%, but then we'd be back to Legacy-style character creation where you create a character earlier and have to wait X time before the character becomes viable (back then it was the 3.6x multiplier to LP gain that required idling to full Change).

[MagicManICT]

I don't want to have to do math when eating. Optimally gaining stats should be obvious.

It's only obvious once you learn how all the pieces work together. Just learning all the pieces is a mountain to climb.

I support the concept here, but the system needs to be dynamically reworked. We had monster character stats up through w7*, but it wasn't locked behind such an obfuscated system, plus qualities soft-capped out around 200 until trolls were introduced. Even then in world 5, the metal qualities weren't anywhere near what we've seen in w10 or since.

*(back when brick walls could be bashed, there were dedicated bashers with enough STR by month 4 or so... would have to dig into the archives to find the first posts bragging about it)

[MadNomad]

remove all but one hunger levels

in order to keep salt useful make salt usable like pepper on food and it should increase the highest stat by a %(for example 100% at q10), every time you pick salt you should get 10 stackable units