I see that I did not make myself clear enough in my
previous post, because the most important thing I was trying to illustrate apparently got lost. This is probably my fault, because I constructed the previous post in a poor fashion. I will attempt to fix that here.
What I was trying (and failing) to say is this:
Crawl food, currently, attempts to regulate two completely different activities that should not be connected in this way. Because food is attempting to regulate both tactical actions (spellcasting etc.) and attempting to act as an incentive for active exploration, it automatically fails to regulate either of those things (see previous post for explanation). This situation is unfixable, except by disconnecting the two different types of "food". I admit I skimmed this topic, so it is possible someone else had already brought this up, but it is important and not something that I have seen brought up in the past in other topics. (Or, at least, not something I see brought up as a clear problem that needs to be fixed. Asking for food removal is not asking for one removal, but rather asking for two. This is important.) I should have said this first and more clearly in my previous post.I also believe that the real complaints are with the implementation of food (which is very bad) rather than with the ideas behind regulating the two different things that food tries to regulate.
The rest is less important, but something I feel strongly about, so some more detail below:
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The devs have clearly decided that both a tactical limiter other than MP is worth keeping (this is why spells still have hunger costs), and that some sort of exploration incentive is worth having (this is why you can starve to death). Well, or they haven't thought about this at all, but I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that food does two separate things to at least one dev in the past. So I think they're aware of the fact it does two things.
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I have no real opinion on the former; I think it's entirely reasonable to have MP be the only limiting factor for spellcasting during a single fight, and I also think it's reasonable to have some other resource act as a limiter also. Probably I would lean toward eliminating this type of food entirely, but I'm pretty sure at least one dev would like to keep it around. So, no comment from me.
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The latter, having some sort of exploration incentive so the player cannot just stand in one place, is something I do have a definite opinion about. The devteam has a firm stance on "grinding", which is that activities that are grindy are things that should be actively prevented by the game (debate on this deserves a separate topic, if you want to discuss it). Personally I agree with this stance, but really any discussion of it deserves a separate topic so I will not expand upon that here. Food attempts (and fails) to partially fill the role of exploration incentive. The reason to have
something pushing the player to actually go around and explore levels is pretty clear, and if you don't see why then DoomRL is a great example of a game that has nothing pushing the player to explore and suffers very clear problems from it.
Here is where I run into terminology problems in my previous post. I use the terms "food" and "clock", without really explaining what I mean. I certainly don't believe that keeping food in the form of "item you find while exploring, and occasionally you press two keys to increase a somewhat-hidden value that kills your character if it reaches zero" is necessary or useful (this is what people complain about). I do think that keeping food in the sense of "thing that you find while exploring that gives you more time before your character dies, even if it's not supposed to do anything if you actively explore and play the game" is useful. Note that it doesn't actually have to be an item your character picks up; you could just automatically gain nutrition for revealing tiles, or something.
It's not technically necessary for an actual clock (i.e. number that ticks down with inactivity and kills you directly if it reaches zero) to exist to create a situation in which active exploration is definitively better than sitting around for hundreds of thousands of turns. Crawl attempts to do this in some other ways, one of the more obvious being out-of-depth spawns increasing in frequency with time spent on a particular level. However, it is my belief that the non-food clocks in crawl fail to properly incentivize exploration in all areas of crawl, so I think having an overall "food clock" is worthwhile, even if just to prevent the most extreme abuses. Perhaps eventually crawl will reach a point where any sort of food clock would be completely meaningless, as it is moving in that direction already, but it has not achieved that yet.
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I will freely admit that it's very likely that boring-but-marginally-beneficial activities (i.e. grindy things that I don't want to do) existing decrease my enjoyment of a game to an unusually large degree. I never actually did any pudding farming, and rarely did any polypiling, but the fact that those are
possible in Nethack still significantly decreased my personal enjoyment of the game. As far as I can tell, this is not a common thing, and certainly it bothers almost everyone else less than it bothers me.
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I said this below, but it's important here too:
Okay I thought I said this but apparently I didn't say it in plain language: the act of having to press buttons to eat food is something that should be removed from crawl (at least, as far as the clock function of food is concerned. Having to consume items to deal with the tactical-limitation function is okay, in the same way that !magic and channeling
in combat are okay). I believe there should be something that successfully performs the intended clock function that food tries to perform right now, though I understand why other people do not think that that is necessary and acknowledge that almost no one else would really care much (I said this last bit already).