I want to put it out here that I have only read the last twenty or so posts. I'm not weighing in with an opinion on this whole thread. I've also never played the game. Nevertheless, I feel moved enough to say three things.
1. Many MUDs use hunger and thirst for "realism", and I feel it's just one more command you have to spam, one more thing to track. I believe its original point was so that you, the player, would think of your own hunger or thirst while playing, but I feel like maybe that ship sailed a long time ago. As a long-time MUDer, I can tell you that I've never felt the urge to drink or eat when my character does; I've also never dealt with the sort of crippling game addiction which could cause me to literally become starved, dehydrated or dead from it, so take that as you will. I also realize this game isn't a MUD. Most of the time, I feel like hunger and thirst just end up being another mechanic, spam for the sake of spam, but sometimes it works. I don't know if this game pulls it off or not, but perhaps food and drink items should be rarer but also restore much more hunger? After all, if you die at 100% hunger, you shouldn't need 40 burgers or whatever to go from 99% hunger down to 0. That would kill you outright, lol. Honestly, some foods can literally keep you alive for days (starvation is an extremely slow process), and if you drink properly (i.e., don't gulp, don't slam an entire bottle of water), you can rehydrate yourself pretty well on only a smallish amount of water. So yeah, maybe a compromise here, if it's even needed, is to increase how much food and drink items replenish, but make them rarer/more expensive?
2. Vision. Oh boy, I know a lot about this one. I work for a browser-based RPG where we run into this all the time. I do think it's important not to screw your players over, and not to listen to everyone yowling the same yowls about unfairness when something that was broken got nerfed. At the same time, I feel that the only responsible way to develop a game is to have a strong idea of where you're going first. Unless you're deliberately trying to have your players make your game for you - which is usually a bad idea, I'll get to this later - it's often best to have a fairly solid vision of what you want before you even start. If you don't, then figure it out fast, and then build on it. If that means powering up some stuff, do it. If it means nerfing, then nerf away. If it means removing stuff outright because it doesn't fit your vision, sometimes that has to happen. You are going to lose players sometimes because of decisions that you make, and that might suck but it's one of those unavoidable pitfalls of game development. You're also hopefully going to gain more players who appreciate the cohesiveness of your vision and come to really respect both your product itself and the work ethic that drives its continued improvement.
Now, to hit on players and their opinions. I'm going to piss off a lot of players when I say this, probably; they won't want to hear it, but it doesn't make the observation any less true. I'd say eighty to ninety percent of players don't know the first thing about the nuts and bolts of good game development. They have opinions on what they like. They know what they don't like. Many of them can even tell you why. But most players can't help but take a change that isn't in their favour personally to some degree. If they loved the machine gun, and you removed it due to lag, they'll get angry because something they loved was removed, and never mind that it was wrecking the game. So what I'm getting at here is that if you make a poll for players to vote, and you get feedback thereby, you aren't actually going to get much of anything useful from it, I'm afraid, because players don't think like good developers. They're selfish, shortsighted and often entirely ignorant of what goes into game creation and development. I respect the hell out of players, since without them, a game is absolutely nothing; in that sense, they're the lifeblood of any project, and they deserve respect, courtesy and integrity. But please don't kid yourself about how good most of them are at actually improving your product. On the game I help run, we get player feedback every day, and I'd say seventy percent of the suggestions we get are busted from point 1. The ones that aren't, though, are often startlingly good, and we're always willing to listen or talk about stuff.
So my philosophy here is this. If player A makes a suggestion to you, ask them for details. Engage them in conversation if you can, if you have the time and resources to do so. This will quickly give you an idea of how much thought has gone into the player's feedback, and should give you a guide-post as to how much you can put stock in that player's opinions down the road. A poll, by its nature, doesn't make players do this; it just tabulates votes, which is not a good measure on whether or not you should or shouldn't do something.
Okay, enough out of me for awhile.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1