Repetitive behaviors do get really boring. It may be exciting to care about character’s well being at first, but then it becomes just another “‘e’->‘y’->wait 10 seconds->done” that you have to do every x minutes.
DDA has a lot of wonderful stuff for new players already. But 80% of all this stuff becomes meaningless when you realize it is just another variable to track.
So if hygiene is to actually mean something, it should be considered not just as something people do, but something ‘@’ (or a sprite) on the screen does.
For example: health system (vitamins beat everything), martial arts (2-3 are good, rest is filler and a noob trap), armoring (almost everything below 90% coverage is a noob trap).
Except the above aren’t very tedious - once you figure out how to do it, you can do it right. It only hurts new players who don’t know the best solutions. A badly implemented hygiene system (ie. one concerned only with simulation and not gameplay) could hurt everyone by being a major annoyance.
tl;dr Simulators also need gameplay[/quote]
Hold on a second… are you actually defending those elements of the game where 80% of the options are complete crap? Like, you think that’s actually a good thing, and there should be more of it?
Because that’s generally regarded as terrible, terrible design. Godawful. Only slightly better than leaving in game-crashing bugs because the established user base knows how not to trigger them.
If an option is not worth taking, it should be made to be worth taking or it should not be there. Niche uses and specialities are fine, as are deliberate challenge options (provided they are clearly described as such), but “noob traps?” No way.
The only people who are justified in thinking that’s a good idea are the kind of superpro jerks who respond to new players with “git gud, scrub,” or if you’re Wizards of the Coast and you need useless filler for your booster packs.
