It's not always a matter of patience. I tried it, but nothing made sense, I didn't understand any of the acronyms the tutorial was throwing at me and in the end decided to just give up on it. It's not 'follow 2 min tutorial and youre good', it's 'learn how to run developer builds on Renpy' and if you're not in the mood for learning complex things like that - because youre, for instance, wanking to a porn game - you're gonna get frustrated and give up on it.
I appreciate it may sound simple to someone who does it all the time, but to me it's just an incomprehensible mess.
It was also incomprehensible to me at first too, I learned to do it 2 months ago, without any guide. Hence why I posted a guide step by step on how to do it because I didn't want people to have to go through the hassle I had to go through. I wanted people to understand how easy it can be, I guess I failed. But apart from posting a video of pictures, I cannot have the guide more precise and easier to follow than that.
When i spoke about " patience ", I meant that if it annoys you or is hard to follow a detailled (yet short) guide, it will also annoy you to find bugs that mess your " just fapping " experience. And it may therefore not be the best choice to get the dev branch. Although bugs are less and less present in the dev version right now.
You appear the helpful sort so I'm p sure you're not being patronizing out of malice. You're probably still in the shiny phase of mod fandom. Just get to know your audience and who you're whiteknighting in future. But w/e. I know the game. I know its systems inside and out. I know about trancing. But new players don't know all that and there's no effort to explain WHY they're being blocked when all they want to do is fap. That's what should be done better. I know the mod authors are entrenched in their mechanics so I'm not trying to change those, but they need to explain when they've changed something and how to progress w/i those changes. IDGAF about Starbuck's characters' "taboos", but some effort should be done to explain their blockers too especially since they differ from random NPCs
I'm glad we agree options are good
1. I'm talking purely about the sandbox of sex with characters. Not any of the stories, especially not the bolted-on ones created by mod authors. The family taboos being forced onto rails is a mistake because it makes sex with those characters less sandbox and forces players to adhere to the mod author's values, which are not universal
2. I play the vanilla game with my own personal alterations, which could barely be called modding but I know what I'm doing and I'm happy with what I've done. I don't use this mod but I monitor the discussion here because I offer support to the vanilla game in its thread, along with having written a few vanilla guides, and I like to know when a question is likely a mod issue so I can direct them here instead of wasting vanilla threadspace. Since I don't use this mod I have no interest in fixing the problems I've identified, nor does Trist need my amateur input as far as coding goes. As for "fixing" the family taboo on-rails problem. It's not on rails in the vanilla game. That's a problem CREATED by the mod authors, so it's up to them to address it - whether by rollback to the vanilla system (unlikely) or just INFORMING the player what the solution is without the players having to ask HERE every other page. But nobody's going to do that because they're all sure it's fine the way it is or it's someone else's problem; like the player's for not being an expert already lol. The mod has too many cooks eager to meddle but when it comes time to fix problems they've created they leave those to Trist because everyone should just shut up and be grateful they're "creating" for free 9_9
I do agree that not having enough information to make it clear to the player can be an issue as well as not having alternate ways to do some stuff, I'm not saying people can't suggest stuff or point out things they believe to be flaws or issues.
That being said :
1) Even the old sandbox experience isn't a universal value / taste either, no values or taste will ever be universal, for example there is not really many men scenes where men can fuck women (apart from you doing it, I mean) and not a single gay or transgender scenes in the game either yet (which I hope being a part of the change that allows to add it to the game), or, if you're only talking about women, there's no asian ethnicity either, Vren didn't implement these values / tastes either.
But it takes time to add more stuff and more values and tastes to the game. There's not even foot fetish stuff to the game
yet, while being one of the most common fetishes out there. So yeah, it will never be perfect or include everyone, sadly. Which isn't a reason to not do better, I agree, but :
2) The Reformulate mod is a mod, and isn't forced to follow to a T Vren's original vision and to avoid adding stuff because " it wasn't Vren's vision ". Like I said above, not saying people can't suggest stuff or point out issues, on the contrary.
What I meant about the game being free and people working on their personal free time, is that when you said " Do better ", to me it came across as if you were stating they owe it to you to do it your way because Vren did it in a way that to you feels better and therefore they should be going that way. And I disagreed with that because given that the game is free and people are not paying the devs, people should not expect to be owed anything.
But now that you've explained more and stated that they don't have to follow your way but at least should fix issues that arose from doing it their way, it's indeed not coming across the same way, and appear more nuanced and balanced and thoughtful.