That would be a strumpet. I said "crumpet".
It's an issue inherent in all adult games because it has become the nature of them that the MC is a babe magnet who attracts all girls to him, even ones who are not LIs and therefore don't have a path to an ending with them. Even when devs try to strike a balance by making it clear that the MC and a random side girl have no future together, players still push for it, just as they will sometimes push for girls who were never going to be with the MC to be with, i.e. KRJ.
In terms of "the most talked plot problem", I think it does relate to this very thing because a major issue was the fact that he wasn't the central figure in that moment. M&J both seem to forget he's there for a moment as they have their inexplicably and unbelievably quick reconciliation, and whilst these 2 were/are in a relationship, the MC perhaps should have been the central figure because not only was he the one to clear the air and try to bring them all together, but he was also the person they both developed feelings for and had their "affair" with.
For the MC to not feel central in that moment goes against conventional adult game storytelling, and sometimes it feels like this is what DPC is wanting to do, but it doesn't always seem to work for them. AL tried to do this too with the death of a LI and it proved highly controversial, even if DPC is still happy with that decision, but as much as they keep seemingly wanting to try and reinvent the wheel, I don't think most players want that. So DPC is walking a very fine line here between giving people what they want and pissing them off by subverting expectations and taking some of their agancy as a player away from them.
I've mentioned this before, but the HOT uniform is from a Daz asset called "
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", and both the HOT name and colour scheme are part of that asset.
Also, Sage's HOT uniform in the Ep 5 flashback is from the "
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" asset.
Haven't been in here in a while (unfortunate there's still no update, alas), but I think you're spot on re: choice. Gamers tend to gravitate towards 'player choice/sandbox' games that actually let you have everything (think, say, Fallout 4 or Skyrim) and force the player to make very few choices where options are mutually exclusive (such as being able to do everything in FO4 until the very final quests where you have to make faction choices, if you do it correctly).
This is made a bit of a bigger problem for episodic VN type games like this because we don't know what will come in the future, and people would prefer not to have to have 6 separate saves from 6 playthroughs to see all the paths and do the one they'd like to do. Even in this game, you kind of need 2 (a DIK and a neutral/CHICK setup) to experience the full range of options.
Maya/Josy kind of was the first time this game really forced people into that sort of permanent choice, and people have to make it without actually knowing the long-term/final consequences of the choice. There's a bunch of game paths closed off by being a heavy DIK character (Maya/Josy, Jill is much more difficult), but not much payoff yet on the other side (just some side scenes, as CHICK characters have no real penalties with Sage).
I've been a part of a 3-person poly relationship for many years (about 15 now) and I actually think that BaD comes as close as I've ever seen in the adult VN space to handling it in a realistic fashion, which is to say that it's handled about as realistically as the rest of the storyline (IE it is not hyper-realistic, but it touches on legitimate, realistic truths in human interaction beneath the sex fantasy that it's presenting). I can understand why some people do not like the idea of being forced to accept the girls as a pair or not at all, since it closes off (at least apparently) future options. Now, that kind of relationship can evolve in a lot of directions (in my case, the girls are married now, and my relationship with one of the two is now entirely platonic, but the other is not), and probably in ways that are way beyond the scope of this kind of game. But for now, people are in a binary decision state and don't like having their options closed without knowing the consequences.
This is the only adult game that really forced me to make 3 separate playthroughs (I made a Josy/Maya CHICK save that also pursued both Isabella and Jill, a DIK save that focused on Sage, and a 2nd CHICK save that is the same as the first except that it didn't pursue Isabella, just in case there's a difference down the line w/ Jill based on whether you've been involved with Bella). And it'll probably be a long ass time before it's clear whether those were necessary.
When this game is a finished product, I suspect a lot of the mutually-exclusive choices will not be considered that big a deal, as we see them in a lot of other games where their are path choices. But since we don't know yet what those paths are or look like, it creates a lot of uncertainty for the player who is making choices knowing it's removing options down the road, but not knowing what those options ARE. Maybe all the people who don't like the throuple because it doesn't let them be with Josy or Maya individually will be pissed in Ep 8 when those two have an enormous falling out and the player has to choose one or the other, and by choosing friendship they've already closed the door to the path they really wanted to see.
One thing I admire about DPC as a creator is that they are willing to acknowledge the great complexity of human interaction within the space of gaming and offer people imperfect choices and characters who have distinctive and realistic personalities. IMO, they're one of the best storytellers doing this kind of work, along with EvaKiss, as they appear to have an innate feeling for how people really behave. Everything in this kind of game tends to be uber-accelerated (this game is like 2 weeks of real time, where a lot of these relationships would take months to play out this way in real life), but imo the characters at least behave in ways that reflect the often-conflicting and complex emotions that real human beings experience. And that same sense of unsurety that you get because you don't know what the long-term pathing is mimics the way that you, in reality, don't know what's going on in other people's minds and adds a certain vermisilitude to the storytelling. This stands in stark contrast to a lot of games, even pretty good ones, that are mostly on rails except for the player making certain choices about which character(s) they want to try and fuck.
