Piety Decay

[Nekoatl]

Excluding Uskayaw's unique approach, my understanding is that piety decay exists to discourage players from entering a new floor and just camping the staircase for thousands of turns waiting for monsters to wander into view, but from my perspective as a non-competitive player, it feels like what it actually does is punish players for using autoexplore and doubly punish players for having rest on autoexplore enabled, which seems to go against the goal of not rewarding tedious behavior. If monsters still can pick up and use items that the player has yet to see, that would seem to be a more effective deterrent to the camping strategy IMO, but if there is legitimately some reason why piety decay should still exist, can we at least consider pausing it while on floors with no monsters (excluding those trapped in unopened vaults)?

[andrew]

Frankly, the job it supposedly does is now being done by the Zot clock. Of course, piety decay is a tighter but less strict clock; does the game really need both (except for Dg, and Ru, and Gozag, and Chei)?