Hey everyone, Conash here. Things are going about how they usually go, so I wanted to take this blog post as an opportunity to ask for some feedback as I’ve done once or twice before this time about the praise system in HC. I’ll do my best to make this easy to understand, but apologies if I don’t succeed!
To start with, I should probably explain how the current happiness system works in brief. Basically there are 3 types of Happiness, ‘Furniture’, ‘Personal’, and ‘Gift’. Each of these are impacted by different things and give affection bonuses independently and all. Originally when the first draft of this system was thought up there were going to be five kinds of happiness to better account for every type of interaction but that was deemed to be way too much. Scaling back however raised a few…. other problems in regards to praising specifically though.
See, when you praise girls at the end of the Manor Invasion, a bunch of things that need to be taken into account, the most important of which here are the bonus for praising the girl and the penalty that other girls get if they feel like your praise was undeserved (such as if you praise Violet or Lilac for example). When putting the system into action I kept going back and forth between thinking that it’d fit better under ‘Personal’ happiness or ‘Gift’ happiness.
Setting aside what might seem more thematically fitting, the issues with it being under the ‘Personal’ happiness is that together with the day end sex scenes it could render various interactions with specific characters (like saving Doll during the manor invasion) as having no impact on the game which part of the point of the happiness system is to make those sorts of interactions have a bigger impact rather than smaller. On top of that ‘Personal’ happiness is the hardest one to influence due to how few sources there are of it for anyone currently in the game, this means that the penalties that can be gained from praising certain characters would hurt the player a lot more harshly, and harsh penalties is something that we wanted to avoid entirely since not everyone likes to play games with the wiki open.
On the other end of the table, putting praising under ‘Gift’ happiness makes the praising system a lot less significant, as while it might help reduce your chore list if you’re fine not getting the highest possible bonus everyday, it does also mean that for many players they might not notice any difference by praising characters. One advantage to it though is that the praising penalty you might incur becomes VERY easy to overcome as you can rely on giving gifts to remove it as an issue, though if you fall behind on giving gifts you might start to feel it.
Ultimately, I ended up choosing to put it under the ‘Gift’ happiness, but I’ve come to feel that was a mistake made in the moment of needing to get a lot of everything else done, though it is one that I can actually pretty easily fix thanks to how I designed the system. As such I would like to hear people’s thoughts on if I should change how praising works to go into ‘Personal’ happiness, stay where it is, or any other ideas you all might have. Hope I didn’t bore you all with this talk, but given that I believe I already made a mistake once on this, thought it’d be good to get some feedback on the whole issue from the people who play the game before I make any big changes to the system!
I’d say to put it under personal, since it’s a rare enough event.
My take on it is that, ultimately, where it goes should be based on how hard do you guys want to make the game.
If it’s supposed to end up being more casual then go with the potentially less punishing option. If it’s supposed to actually require some planning, however, then the other one it is.
An idea you’ve probably already considered is splitting positive and negative responses to praise. Praising someone who deserves it could lead to strong personal happiness, since they feel like they matter, and if that happens to bump up against another source of personal happiness than so be it. Peeps can only have so much job satisfaction, yo.
On the other hand, the superficial joy of praise you didn’t do much to earn could be more of a fleeting thing, along with the passing annoyance of seeing someone else get your accolades, and be classified as gift satisfaction for both parties.
Or you could make being praised a source of personal satisfaction in every event, and just tag the dissatisfaction as gift. That way the choice is powerful, but you still allow the player to avoid game-long penalties with a “sorry I didn’t appreciate you enough” gift.
I concur with Saika.
For me,Praising someone may/can vary depending on the other slave’s Affection. Example if you praise Elaiya(Neutral) She get’s +5 Affection points while Melise(Trust) gets -2/-3/-4 Affection points depending on how much you notice said slave.It can be like this:
>Praising a slave which has (Dislike) As affection: Gets +3 affection points, -1 for Neutral,-2 for Like,-2 for Trust and Love/Respect doesn’t count as you already did their Love/Respect Quest and they completely trust you.
>Praise someone with (Neutral), +5 Affection points,-2 for Dislike,-2 for Like and -2 for Trust
>Praise someone with (Like),+4 Affection points,-2 for Dislike,-1 for Neutral and -1 for trust and so on.