Reduced Encounter Rate on Explorer Difficulty (Patreon)

Some requests for the Explorer difficulty have recently come up again. I don't really want to discuss this too much since I don't want to spend too much time on tweaking these things.  I realize lots of people have different wishes of what they want at what difficulty level and some even wish for the ability to completely pick everything (but then others would feel overwhelmed by that) and then one is happy and the other are unhappy and so on and so forth. And for things like Explorer dificulty where which I don't play myself and I generally have very little feedback on it becomes even worse to make any judgements if there is really problem here or not.

So I hope I can just answer that with this poll and then move on. 

Question for this poll: For those playing on Explorer difficulty or those not playing on Explorer difficulty but would want to do so if it weren't for this, is the reduced encounter rate a plus or a minus feature for this difficulty?

The general design idea of Explorer is to give the player more room to dictate the pacing, which includes giving him more freedom on resources. Which is why I included the reduced encounter rate, which gives you more freedom to spend your time/hp/mp on other things. The reduced gold drops are (over)compensated by the doubled gold drop rate.

On the other hand, I also realize that some players want the increased freedom, in particular to not face soul-break ending but don't like being "cheaters" and then won't pick the difficulty because not facing the proper amount of encounters feels like cheating to them.

I will note that will definitely not happen is the introduction of several other difficulty modes. Separation of Explorer/Hard into their own difficulties already made it significantly more difficult for me to assess these kind of things as my data is fragmented over all the difficulty modes and I need to make a poll like this every time to even have a clue of whether things are right or not. Likewise there won't be a choice system to pick every single rule. So please don't drive the discussion in these ways...