Can anyone give me a rundown of whats happened? I played V.0.34 from this forum a while back and didnt realize it was a very old version. What happened, why does it seem like every is against it now. Anyone can either link me to another comment or give me a quick tldr?
I'll try based on my limited knowledge.
At a point the head developer, Helius, made the decision to take the game from a single player with the gallery mode that you see in version 0.34 and change it to a multiplayer game. The reason given for this was because they had to release the game on steam, and steam has been very consistent with denying and pulling games that feature content like bestiality, rape, and lolicon which this game has all three. By moving it to multiplayer, they argued if an issue came up with steam, they could pull the content in question to cool things down. Naturally, a lot of the community supporting them was wary of this both because it was unlikely this would work to satisfy steam, and because of the privacy and longevity issues of having so much of the game's content based around third party servers. The spicy content would also not be made available in the gallery mode, soley the online mode.
Despite the real concerns that steam would force them to start pulling content like the loli character, they continued to sell costume packs and use her and other spicy content in advertising on patreon. Now almost a year later, she isn't in the beta with lots of other content that will likely be pulled by steam telling them "it could be an issue down the road." The developers never give clear answers on this, keeping everything vague.
At some point, they also decided to add Easy Anti Cheat to prevent greifing on the multiplayer.
Since then there have been several changes made to the game to intoduce a grinding game play loop to unlock scenes, characters, monsters, cosmetics, etc in the multiplayer. You have to grind for likes from other players, unlock blueprints, research points, etc. There is also an internal store to the game you purchase with likes that has cool downs to prevent users from just grinding likes and buying everything. There are also daily challenges to complete to unlock content. The entire thing has been remade towards a microtransaction and gacha grind fest angering lots of the backers. They have also talked about introducing a fee to be paid for accessing the multiplayer, then season passes 4 times a year to get new characters and other content, that is also available via grinding in the game.
Its turned into a microtransaction game with paywalls to encourage people to buy the game passes instead of grinding. While you cannnot purchase in game currency (yet), it is clearly being designed for that.
Then add on poor communication from developers, snide attitudes towards backer's concerns, constant thread locking, banning, and disimmsing on the steam forums and their discord. And the constant technical glitches and poor performance because the game has not been properly optimized.
All in all, they had something great, then changed its direction for bullshit reasons, and now are changing the entire game to a gacha grind multiplayer game to make as much money as possible from horny players.
Edit: I'm sure I'm missing stuff but this is what I remember mostly.