dtgreene: I haven't tried any modern version of the upgrade patch, but reading the notes for 3.1, there is one change I would suggest:
Allow the gameplay changes to be toggled individually. I wouldn't mind having an increased overworld encounter rate, but I *would* mind an increase in the dungeon rate, and I am not sure about changing the food consumption rate.
Hey man, thanks for the feedback!
First, let me defend why I went with this approach.
I didn't intend to affect all three of these when I first implemented the gameplay patch. I was merely trying to address one of the more common bits of feedback about the game - namely that finding monsters, particularly boats, was really hard. What I found in playtesting was that by merely doubling the overworld spawn rate, dungeons just felt really empty. I had to search pretty long to find a monster, or potentially go further into the depths than my party was prepared to do just to increase spawn rates.
The monster spawn rate in the overworld is low - about 5.1%. The patch increases this by just a hair more than double to 10.5%. The spawn rate in dungeons is even lower. On the first level it's 1.5% (approx every 65 steps) up to 6.6% (approx every 15 steps) on the bottom level. Dungeoneering is supposed to be a potentially dangerous but lucrative endeavor - look for chests while fending off monsters that grant both experience and chests. When exploring the overworld looks more lucrative and dangerous to the player than dungeons, then it suggests that something is out of balance.
So while the new spawn rates applied by the patch shouldn't affect the amount you have to grind, its intent was to reduce the time spent searching for grindy encounters.
And that brings me to the other topic: food. All this time spent searching for monsters consumes food, which costs gold. When you can't find monsters to drop gold, you end up wasting all your food exploring. Since there's no monsters to drop gold you can't buy any food and that's how a new party dies.
Food is a mechanic that's designed to extract gold proportionate to the amount of exploration. This is fine once your party is strong enough to fend off monsters in lower levels of dungeons where there are more chests. But it's unfairly penalizing to new parties (which technically makes it a regressive tax). This was my other discovery during playtesting and one that I felt sorely needed adjusting in order to improve game balance.
When I played this game the first few times many years ago, I would get around this problem by basically grinding the roster: creating sacrificial characters for nothing more than their gold and food, which is basically a cheat. Recalling this only reinforced the feeling that this was a game mechanic imbalance. Thus, this adjustment was designed to prevent a new player from having to resort to those kinds of cheats and hopefully make the gameplay more interesting and less penalizing.
Having said all that, I don't think it's unreasonable to want some form of customization. I've seen other game patches that provide a "recommended" set but allow you to check off ones you don't want. (Morrowind's UCP comes to mind.) So there is a precedent for this type of thing in other places, and I'll consider this in future patches.
Anyway, apologies for the long-winded answer, and I really appreciate the feedback!
