Let's be honest here. People love min-maxing in their online video games, even games like PotM that aren't supposed to be about min-maxing.
As such, a good percentage of people will always secretly be using the debug exhaustion information to secretly gain small advantages over others, under the radar of DMs who should not have to waste their time policing these exploits anyways.
Right now, the exhaustion checks seem to happen every 50 seconds.Could this be changed to every 10 seconds, or even every 30 seconds instead?
I think that change would stop players from attempting to exploit the system, and simply turn off their debug information, because it would be too much of a hassle to keep track of at that point.
I think it would be a lot more immersive for characters who run a lot, such as monks, or characters who often make long delivery trips to have their exhaustion level updated more frequently.
Right now, I'm willing to bet that most people exploit this system under the radar, and just won't admit to it, because it's so annoying to slow your character down for 50 seconds every time you want your character to "catch their breath". Especially when it feels like you've been unfairly penalized because you were slowing down, but accidentally ran a bit just as the exhaustion check was happening.
Catching your breath should be updated faster in my opinion, just like running out of breath should be.
Either that, or could a superior system be put in place which updates character's exhaustion levels in a more real-time fashion?
Maybe a client-side addon that everyone who plays on PotM has to install or something?
Any ideas?
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EDIT (June 24, 2021):
It doesnt always work like that, the timer is randomly delayed from when it checks and when you receive the message, it could have already started checking maybe 20 seconds before you receive the message sometimes, so if youve already been just walking for 20 seconds its not like any real benefit has been gained.
In saying that however, the check happens at some point shortly after the clock minute ticks over, which can be gamed with the weather debug message instead since THAT isn't delayed, if it's night time or particularly visually or audibly obscured...
... so its actually a different message people would game for exhaustion, the exhaustion message just tells them whether it worked or not.
What's cool is you can negate the penalties of exhaustion almost entirely with lesser restoration and freedom of movement potions and only worry about the spell failure
From my very recent testing, what zDark Shadowz says here is absolutely true. I didn't receive a message at fixed frequencies, and that makes it difficult to time.
It's still not impossible for players to
somewhat time the exhaustion checks by slowing down for 20 seconds after about 40 seconds have passed since your last exhaustion message, but like zDark Shadowz said, that's really not a huge benefit at that point. You've slowed down for a long period of time. You weren't constantly running, or nearly constantly running.
Again I apologize to everyone for my jumping to assumptions here, and thank you all for your feedback.
