Your ideas are very precious, my dear friend. However, Developers also need to be understood. I think the fans don't know what they want. Establishing a person and also in such a risky sector (All your efforts can be garbage at any time.). It is a very, very difficult task to put this fiction into the game. Congratulations to the developers for bringing us such a great fiction and such hot characters. Have fun.
I take your point. The Devs do a lot of work that we rarely think think about, and I certainly hope they don't take my concerns as an attack on their skills or their work ethic. If I sometimes skip over the many things they do right in my haste to address what I view as mistakes, it's only because they usually make handling the normal problems of writing the game look so easy I assume it can go without saying. The last thing I want to do is belittle their game.
That said, I do think the Devs can lose sight of how much more they know about their story than we players do. Not only do they know all those juicy future spoilers, but they have also been there for the previous iterations of the script that might have had different context or went into far more detail on certain topics that was eventually cut for time. It can be easy for them to miss how the final result (or beta, in this case) looks to people without all that background knowledge.
And I think something like that happened here. The Devs never intended to deny players a chance to solo romance Debbie or Lily, and (bugs aside) they made sure to keep the option available. But with so many other moving pieces in the episode, and so many more players interested in the threesome/foursome options, fully fleshing out the solo paths was a natural choice to streamline when the deadline loomed.
As I said before, in and of itself that was the right call as far as prioritization of resources. The problem is that what from the Devs' end looked like proper escape hatches for monogamous Lily/Debbie fans (essentially having the MC leave the party before the girls can fool around) look a lot more like traps from our end.
We're often told that harems make no sense in this game because they would obviate choices and (at least on a large scale) contradict the personality of the various girls. And I, for one, agree. But I don't think it's fair to ask players to accept that logic and then
also expect them to automatically realize that leaving a drunken Lily and an "All's fair in love and war" Debbie alone will naturally end in chaste behavior simply because the game has a no "forced infidelity " policy. From our end, the in-game reasoning strongly suggests the 'solo' choice would actually make the problem even worse, and we don't have the Devs-eye view to realize otherwise.
Combine that with the problem we mentioned before: while the big lewd scene is THE payoff for the group paths, the aftermath acknowledging the MC's relationship with his chosen girl is the only payoff for the solo paths, and that aftermath was postponed for a future episode. I certainly wasn't expecting a lot of lewd scenes for the solo paths here, but I was expecting that my MC could finally call Lily his girlfriend openly. Unfortunately, the actual choices leading to that eventually (having the MC behave like such and ass that he gets tossed out, or intentionally running away so that the threat to his relationship can dissipate on its own) are practically the exact opposite of that.
The end result is something that to the Devs may well look like a fair (if regrettably rushed) resolution for those on solo paths that didn't require an inordinate amount of time or resources. But to the players it's not only missing both the satisfying (non-sexual) payoff they were expecting, it even calls into question whether that payoff will ever exist.
I'm not saying this to castigate the Devs for giving short shrift to my favorite girls, or even saying their ultimate resolution is bad. I'm saying it because in reading both the summaries and the Dev responses, it seems like there's a disconnect between what they were trying to accomplish and how those efforts come across in the game. I'm happy to take
acewinz at his word that the listed choices will keep the solo path going and any seeming violations of that will be addressed in the future. But not everyone follows the Devs on the internet.
I'm hoping this can be changed before the final release of the episode because I'd rather the game be able to stand on its own now, rather than wait for a future episode to set the record straight. As is, I don't think it can do that for Lily/Debbie soloists. I know this only affects a small minority of players, it's a topic that will matter a lot to them. Better to nip the problem in the bud now, if that's possible.