Difficulty Adjustment

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the latest release of Harem Collector. While I have not been able to address all the bug reports, I have made a few changes regarding the accessibility of new content. Namely, Quest for a Cure has been rebalanced for level 12 and Bewitchy Women has been rebalanced for level 15. You can get the new version at the same Harem time, same Harem channel.

Please don’t think of this a nerf, I simply didn’t take into consideration the general flow of the game when releasing new content, and I’ve endeavored to correct that. Please enjoy, and check back next week for a big announcement.

18 Replies to “Difficulty Adjustment”

  1. Hello,
    I’d like to leave some feedback and constructive criticism for you, in hope that it will be useful and appreciated. I had also compiled a list of bugs, but I looked over at the forums, and almost all of them have been reported already.

    The only one left, which I did not see reported, is that during Yamamaya first sex scene, if you reach it by being nice and gifting her, there is a line which does not wrap around, and so the text goes out of bounds. It’s one of the lines at the beginning of the intercourse, when she straddles the protagonist and she is naked.

    Now, back to the feedback. First, let me say that it had been a while since I last played, and there was a lot of new content for me to enjoy. You also improved a lot of things. The city maps are better, there are now two menu entries for quests and relationships/gifts respectively. All these things are good and facilitates the play. I have still not played the two newest quests, but I was eager to write this post. If I find something more to say after those two, I’ll just post again 🙂

    – Character levels. The character progression levels are confusing. I have characters who are lower level than the protagonist, but have more experience points. Also, unless I’m mistaken, characters do not need the same amount of xp to level up. Perhaps this is a remnant of previous times, when each character joined with a certain fixed level. Nowadays characters join one level below the protagonist, so this is now pointless. I would suggest having a single progression for experience, and still have every character join at the level below. Example: lvl 1 is 1000 xp, lv 2 2200, lv 3 3500 etc. for each character, and the amount of xp they already have is set at the moment they join, based on their level.

    – XP gains: as far as I can tell, the xp gained from an encounter is divided by four (or perhaps by the number of characters in party? That would be bad business, encourages you to play with less characters in order to level faster…) and then added to each character, both in party and outside, for balance reason (leaving no characters behind). This is a bit confusing. I don’t know if RPGMaker allows it, but it would be much clearer if after combat the game just said: Each character gains x experience due to the fight.

    – Abilities and balance: while the game is much more balanced than the last time I played, not all characters are born equal. I think this is partly due to the fact that some abilities are really rare, or even unique. Heretical censure, I am looking right at you. That skill is pratically mandatory in boss fights against monsters who heavily use spells. Yes, you can do without, but you’re seriously encouraged to bring Meline, the advantage is just too big. Same for Felix and his cleanse ability. At the moment the only alternative you have is the hero’s powered up encourage. But Felix’s skill is more reliable, can be spammed and can be used out of combat. In dungeons with a lot of status-affecting monsters, Felix is almost mandatory.
    I do not have a real solution for this issue, perhaps give some more characters more costly alternatives or such. Each character should still be unique, but no character should feel mandatory

    – Events and advancing time: you’ve made events and advancing time through them the basis of your game. I like that, but I think you should make day-ending events more common. I understand that a lot of zones, characters and events are missing, but in my opinion you should add more options to advance time, like mini quests. As I envision the game, if you want to leave the players a lot of choices most characters should be accessible rather soon. There can be a few exceptions, but they should be exceptions. That way you can play and reasonably raise the relationship level with the characters you like most. Then, it would be ok in my book if love quests were a lot harder than they are right now. I mean, they’re supposed to give rather big rewards and be important relationship changes, it’s ok if they’re not easy to complete. And finally, there should be mini quests peppered through the game that advance the game time, and are rather easy and quick to code. That way, you can give us a way to advance time and bring up relationship while still using most of your time to code important stuff. A quick example that came to my mind, you could have Meline expand the menu at the bakery (and perhaps the income a bit) by adding recipes. Say, you have items x, y and z that dropped off monsters. You go to the bakery, and have a mini event where Meline creates a new recipe, and then time advances. Something like should be very painless and quick to code and give us more means to advance time…

    – Investments, plus Chimei: as you coded the game, not all investments have the same return. Some are just free money (drug dealer in eastfort, Meline’s bakery etc). Some return 10% each day, mostly the small early ones. Most others return 5%, and finally a few return 2% each day. I question this approach somewhat, especially the 2% one on huge investments (like the orange kid and the golden bars). Yes a lot of content is still missing, but 5% means 20 days to break even, and 2% is 50 days. Even supposing that giving orange kid the philosopher stone brings the return up to 5% or so, you still need at least 20 days after finding that colossal sum of money to start it off. Talk about long term investments 😛 Point is, I have no idea how much more content and how many more events you’re going to add. Since you also have planned sequels, I suppose you will stop adding things to the game after a certain point, in order to start with the sequels. Anyway, I just worry a bit about the seemingly impossible sum some investments cost right now.
    This brings me to Chimei. Is there any particular reason she costs 60000 Sil? Since the changes to levels you made, she joins the party at one level lower than the protagonist anyway. Her skills are nice, but are not that strong that I would want to pay 60000 Sil early for her. I mean, Yamamaya costs 10000 sil to acquire… I don’t think that Chimei is worth 6 times more than her. It’s better to use Sil to make investments in the long term. I just feel that currently there is nothing that justify her costing that much money….

    Anyway, this is it. Sorry for the wall of text, I hope it will be useful to you. I like your game very much as it is.
    Zincat

    P.S.
    A small wishlist I want to leave you, just in case
    – I wish there was a menu page with a list of useful information you collect while playing, for example monster weaknesses, where to sell specific vendor trash (coins etc), elemental magic effects after you read the books and such
    – I wish there were some monster girls in game, whose relationship would increase differently than just by gifting and such
    – I wish there was a more defined way to play a light / dark character, where consistently making “good” or “bastard” choices would majorly change events . Probably not going to happen
    – I wish I could bring my favorite characters in the next game, when you eventually reach there. As of now, I really like Larelle, Alina and Therese. OTOH, I really don’t care much at all for Meline, the twin maids, Randi and Serade. They lack personality 😛

  2. So this has been bothering me for a while and ill come out and ask.I noticed when i switch a version my replay sceenes are lost is there a way to transfer them or?

    1. You need to copy the replay.rvdata2 file from the old version into the new one. Place it in the same folder as the Game.exe you use to start the game.

  3. Zincat:

    Some of your doubts are solved in the wiki. For instance, in Party Dynamics it explains how the Xp is distributed. Basically is as you have deduced, the fewer members in the active party, the more XP that you get.In any case, the daily quests should be played (at least after the first 3 o 4 days with the hero alone).

    About advancing time, there a couple of events that do so and they are not really evident. I again recommend you that you consult this other page of the wiki. In that sense, Yamamaya gives you more time that any other follower, from what I had seen.

    I coincide with you in most of your ideas, specially about Chimei, or the confusing system of levels (Therese started in the party one level above the hero and now is one level behind). About the investments, though, I find interesting that and logical that some of them are more profitable that others. You could find a list of all the investments in the wiki too.

    I hope it helps.

    Greetings.

  4. I ran into something and can’t repeat it, so I’m not sure what to make of it…

    South of Eastfort, around the shore there was an old dude and a skeleton. At the time I was still working on getting enough people (and not sure whether encounter would be a problem) so bailed out and reset to before the encounter. Now that I WANT to find it, it doesn’t want to show up. I wasn’t running any quest outside of *A forge too far* so I doubt it’s related to a quest. The other question is balance-related: for the *X has mission to retrieve something* miniquests, the very first two quests I had were fighting zombies and fighting cultists and their horror friends. When you first start being able to accept these miniquests, those are WAY too hard. I know you can choose to ignore them, but I use them to power up a bit. Is there a way to do a *check* to make sure before accepting the quest to get the sword (or kid, or letter, or whatever) that you aren’t fighting zombies when most of your characters are level two or three??

    I love this game, every time I play it I see more spoofings and silliness!

  5. da fuck is with this new rat. it makes dragons look like a joke. It counters between a third and a half of my attacks and has ridiculous defense. i dealt damage to it as best i could for about half an hour, i used book of hax a lot and finally thought i was supposed to lose against it since i tried a few combat items and they did zero damage. the only attack that ever did more than 100 damage per hit was the main characters attack, using it i could do 300-500 damage when it hit and after doing what i estimate to be around 20,000 damage i gave up.

    1. It’s a hidden boss geared for high-level parties. I’m actually surprised people found it this quickly- I was expecting it to stay hidden for quite some time.

      1. No flower in the gift shop (the Recettear one, right?). But I’ve seen the flower girl change what she sells after timeturner use, so I guess that will do.

        1. Well, she does have random flowers every day.

          That’s why investing in her is neat. Two baskets mean it’s more likely you’ll get the flowers you want.

          Heck, I’d fund a whole flower stand for her if that meant I’d be able to buy those flowers on any day.

    1. Thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying the game. Unfortunately, the wiki is run by a team of very dedicated fans- I don’t actually have a whole lot to do with it.

  6. can you make a warning then for said boss? i was trying to do the quest to get the now female gargan out of my party and i ended up finding it and getting owned, seriously, good thing i still have the contained singularity. and can you … i don know, zombify it or something? its sad when a slightly over sized rat is this much tougher than a dragon and doesn’t have some crazy power up back story. I guess i’m just being a jerk here but the last time we met it was the weakest enemy in game, now it could probably own a level 30 party.
    –The omega pheonix–

Leave a Reply