And we have our answer!

After almost two weeks and 364 votes, the players have offered a pretty resounding answer to my question! Thank you all for taking the time to offer your feedback!

I'm pretty happy with how it came out, honestly-- this is a very clear response, and it doesn't look like, besides these two sore spots, things are necessarily too frustrating in the game. I've also gotten a lot of interesting feedback, I'm very happy to see people taking advantage of the comments section on the survey and here on the blog.

One of the trickier parts of designing the game for me is that it's pretty hard for me to "see it as it is." When I open MVOL, I hardly see what it says, how it presents itself, for everything that I intend for it-- I know the intention behind every design choice, which is a crucial piece of information anybody else playing won't have, so I see the entire thing in a different context. I barely have to read any of the screens when playing to just kind of speed down the trees and get to this or that scene I want to check. I doubt I'll ever be able to really enjoy the game like others do ^.^;

So outside feedback and impressions can really be invaluable here. I get folks telling me they really like this or that aspect of the game, and I definitely appreciate that, but surprisingly enough, I don't get much hate mail. Not that that would be very helpful-- it's hard to nail exactly what aspects I need to hear most about. I try to encourage open and frank discussion of my game, but the forums don't see much activity these days, sadly. So at this point, the responses I've been seeing have certainly helped me get a bit of a better picture of how the game "works" for people! So, all that said, thanks for your feedback, guys!

As far as the results themselves: I'm actually a little surprised the pink collar got a much stronger response than either of the others. I'd guess that the blue collar would have outstripped it entirely before [Hug] was added, however. I'll definitely be looking into making the pink collar more accessible. I've been considering ways to make the collars more naturally attainable so that people don't have to go looking for guides to get at them, while still making them a fairly noteworthy achievement.

As for dominance, this is a bit trickier. On one hand, Lith as a character is slow to take an assertive role, and really won't try to retain dominance if challenged. On the other, I don't want to make it too hard to get into that side of things, especially if you're committed to that style of gameplay. And the more I've thought about it, the less it seems like a very problematic system to abuse-- I worry about folks being able to "max out" this or that too easily or too quickly, but that's not as much of an issue here, with how Dom Lith has unfolded. So I expect I'll be fiddling with both these systems-- I have a peculiar idea in my pocket that may just do the trick for making Dom Lith stick around a bit better.

So, overall I'd say this poll worked out well! Now, if I could just kick the habit of delaying and overinflating my blog posts, we'd be set :p More later, folks. Thanks for reading!