First of all - I'm personally completely fine with explore charges as they are and don't really think we need to get rid of them or anything. I think they charge plenty fast and I appreciate the attempt to beat back botting; I'm mostly suggesting this as a pebble sink idea I had - something for those who want to sit there and go 'brrrr' but that everyone who's fine being more casual about explore doesn't have to interact with or use at all since the current system still allows them plenty of exploring.

Functionally - just an item or option that lets you refill your explore charges for a pebble fee. Since botting is clearly still possible with the 'feed all' button my current idea is to have it be an item in the mm and you're only allowed to keep so many on hand at any given point, maybe 5 or so idk just throwing out a number, and so once you run out of refills you have to briefly pause and go get more from the mm which takes you off the campaign page and forces you to interact with another part of the site to make it more challenging for scripts to get through. Maybe you also have to activate them in your inventory and solve a little captcha to do so??? Idk - that might be too much, just trying to throw out ideas for how to keep it so that charges still help prevent scripts from auto-campaigning but also introduce a new pebble sink that I know -looks pointedly at LW discord- -with love- would get used a lot lol

And while that may be a bit complex for an item just for the sake of keeping scripts from taking advantage of it I think it wouldn't be unreasonable since the current charge system is perfectly fair imo anyway - as I said they refill plenty fast as is imo so if someone finds it too tedious then they don't have to use it at all and they're still able to do plenty of campaigning, especially with increased drop rates the higher tier of ng+ you're at.

Not sure what exactly the price would have to be to help balance out pebble influx from campaigning, that would probably have to be something calculated looking at data of average pebble profit gained from campaign over different areas for the 75-80 explores you get out of max charges (since by the time you get to the end of the bar you've usually gotten a few more), and probably ought to scale depending on what level of campaign it's being used on? Maybe it's available in the mm for a nominal amount that correlates to regular campaign, then if you're on ng+ you have to pay an extra fee increasing depending on what level of ng+?

Idk, just throwing ideas out there, lmk what everyone thinks!