Thanks for the feedback. I'll assume you're playing with a properly installed v2.2.6.2.
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Anyway, I hope I changed your mind with this post: we make these updates as a hommage to the original version, and we think the playerbase is to be listened carefully, at least as much as the dev team's intuition and reason.
Well, firstly, thank you for taking the post seriously. It was admittedly a fairly late-night frustration post and I put very little preparation into it. It was largely off-the-cuff and unresearched and probably not super helpful to you. I'll try to expand a little bit where requested.
Firstly, this was absolutely in a custom game with a custom slaver, so the skills decay may be a bug. As I said, I'm coming back in from a long hiatus so I didn't know that was a super recent change until I saw the dev notes.
My prior experience with the game was fairly extensive, starting with an outcasts beginning and completing all forum quests for items and eventually moving into white town and training highest-tier slaves. I never did quite finish the patrician content, which is part of the reason I thought it might be fun to dip back in and finish the game. I mention this to illustrate that I have at least a basic functional understanding of the mechanics.
On further study, I suspect the slaver skills decay is probably at the root of most of my complaints. Both my slave and assistant failing to perform lessons/tasks that they've previously been well trained in can be easily explained by the fact that my charisma or likewise fell from S/A to C/D. I didn't realize my stats had been decaying, or in fact, that they could, so by the time I noticed that could well have been the root cause of the differences. That said, I personally find energy management and optimizing training by deadlines to be the most satisfying part of the game. I personally think that while making a physically weak character need to keep up constant training to be a realistic chore for roleplay purposes, the actual reality of having to regularly annihilate a nameless gladiatrix is not a particularly fun task. It's generally more fun to see numbers go up or turn green, and much less to do the same thing over and over to keep a green number from turning red. There's a reason a lot of games will gate that kind of thing behind a 'hardcore' mode or somesuch in order to let someone opt into the extra management.
I think a tangential point to my post is regarding the experience of a new player coming into the game or a returning player whose familiarity is not what it was. I'm not sure I'm the person to champion the ignorant newbie, though I'll gladly admit to not understanding the systems intimately. My success with the game was largely a result of trial and error and trying to make sense of the tutorial. I 'found something that worked' and kept with it until I made it, which I found fairly rewarding. I'm not sure I ever got to the level of understanding of some of the people here who can say things in the vein of "with two thorns of rebellion and a temperament of C+, your best course of action would be..." I feel like there's maybe not enough room currently for new players to succeed with sub-optimal play. In particular, I feel that managing a slave's mood and despair is a very finely tuned system that can easily snowball into disaster for new players. It's very easy to get into a cycle where you order the slave to do something, she refuses, so you punish her, she gets depressed and even less likely to agree, etc.
The hardest part of learning slave management is knowing what to do first with a slave who doesn't want to work with you. It sets up for an inverse learning curve where the difficulty is all front-loaded and gets easier as the slave gets more skilled. The tutorial is quite well written and does explain all of the elements of the aura, but it tends toward warning you about despair and spoiling and other more advanced secondary mechanics rather than telling you how to make a slave obey. I suspect most new players are actually coming here and looking for other people's day-by-day guides to see what to actually do.
To snip a section from the excellent write-up by Krustus:
1. We can go sparring in the Arena with Tatiana and Johny. Building her Nature/Temperament and starting our own Fighting Training.
2. We can start going hard on Tatiana, letting her do lessons she won't do and build Guilt this way. She is compliant enough that physical punishment should be effective without her fighting back. Helping us build her Taming, Fear and Awareness.
3. We play nice, take her to the Spa, build her Mood up and Train her. Building up her Merit, Mood and Awareness.
Every one of those Options is viable and has different Pros and Cons.
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I suspect those paragraphs have done an awful lot of heavy lifting as far as teaching new players the game.
In a sandbox game like this, I don't think having objective tick-boxes or excessive handholding is the way to go, but having an in-game source of advice could be invaluable. A new NPC at the guild perhaps that could take a look at your slave and give general, actionable advice for instance. "She won't agree to do anything until you teach her some taming and awareness. Go ahead and let her refuse, then show her the lash." or "eh, might want to go easy on this one. Looks a bit sensitive. Maybe try buttering her up and asking her to do something easy like cooking." This could also be offered by an assistant giving similar suggestions, provided the player has one. A newbie contract could give you a guild-provided assistant to help you and suggest what to do for training, with the caveat that the assistant/guild would take a significant cut of the profit. That would let new players have an option to learn the mechanics and game world before diving in with no training wheels. Even leaving the game as it is and simply adding a little more direction/feedback to the practical examination in the tutorial could serve this purpose.
The game already does an excellent job of keeping you on track once the slave is obedient by the listed objectives when clicking on the rank. It's very easy to have a C- slave and click on the C- to see "Raise this slave's sexual skills." Maybe simply adding a note for disobedient slaves there could work without lots of implementation work. I think it could just be a hair more explicit about what you SHOULD do in addition to what you shouldn't.
I really think this game is excellent, and that the ongoing development has been worthwhile. There aren't really any other management games quote like JoNT out there, and I respect all the hard work that's gone into it. I wasn't being very fair or constructive last night, and I apologize for that. Thank you for taking it seriously.
