Sidenote to all non-discord members: The next version will release on Friday, May 15 as I need to implement some backend for the first 1 on 1 scene coming in V0.8.
V0.7 made a (retroactive) change to how the elegance requirements for chat options scale. Since I get fairly limited feedback, it is hard to gauge whether these hit the mark and are aligned in a way I designed them or not.
Since I have no control over when a player plays a given chat, the elegance requirements scale to where the player currently is. This is to prevent them from becoming a non-factor and be relevant in the current chat, even if that chat is played well after having unlocked the chat. Especially once all content is added, a player might choose to not play a chat / certain girl until much later, hence the scaling.
The way the system previously worked was that it always knew exactly where you were in the story and scaled the values up accordingly. The system was designed in a way to have the same chat option be the same difficulty to unlock, regardless of when the chat was played. The thought behind this was to prevent players from spamming "Up your Rizz" until they could trivialize the game, which would make for a horrible gameplay loop and force the player to not play how they really want to (by forcing them into many rhythm sections back to back at the start) if they wanted to play optimally.
After seeing a screenshot of a bug report, I noticed two things: If a player wants to play this way, I should not discourage this behavior. And more importantly: this system was poorly communicated. Or rather not at all communicated. So the player never knew that no matter how many times he played the rhythm game, the chats would always be the same difficulty.
I want to keep disincentivizing "optimal" play by spamming rhythm segments at the start. But also don't want to discourage players who enjoy playing some rhythm segments in-between the chats or who might feel they need a bit more edge in the conversations and want to gain MORE (and not equal due to scaling) elegance by upping their Rizz more.
That's why I made some changes to the system. It is sophisticated enough to scale correctly, so it can be clever enough to scale back a bit, too. Now, it still scales the elegance values to where the player is as to not trivialize the chat, but it will do so with more leeway. To keep things simple: the further you are along the story, the less the system will scale the elegance value in case you play the chat far later than intended. It's more complex than that, but that's the gist of it.
With this new system, I hope to strike a balance between the goal I had initially and accommodating players who just enjoy the rhythm segments or want a bit of an edge. I might always adjust this system in future updates, so share your feedback if you have any.