tymmur

If someone knows a free installation wizard that can make multiple choices with pictures like in screenshot below, please do tell.
and if it is possible to make the wizard work with xdelta3 (if it doesn't have his own patcher)

(yes, it is calientes mod for skyrim )
 
PS.
I put a poll on OP. Choose wisely

Marketing should be primarily directed at growing the audience - those very same people that are random VN buyers on Steam are the ones companies should be aiming to attract - as long as they can do it without alienating the existing core audience (VN community members).  If removing honorifics convinces those casual VN players to buy more, then it is the correct decision.
 
The poll is not inaccurate - as long as you don't attempt to overstate the results.  The poll represents the enthusiastic folks of the common VN communities, and they like honorifics.  At the same time, a poll of all Steam owners of VNs would likely have different results.  How different, we don't know, but dismissing the very real limitations imposed on the poll by the chosen polling method does not make them go away. 
 
Ideally, it would have been great to work with Steam and send a poll link to a random sample of VN owners... but it's unlikely that Steam would agree to work that closely with someone not associated with a VN publisher.  Or even with, for that matter - privacy is big these days.

Let me explain it from the purely statistical perspective.
Polls done measure the opinions of the group questioned.  In order to get a good sample, honest pollsters attempt to ask a broad range of people.  Asking the opinions of people in California may do a good job of telling you what Californians think about something, but it does very little to tell you what the French think about something.
In this case, the poll was made available to people on Fuwa, reddit, and a few other VN communities.  Therefore, this poll can be viewed as a decent representation of the opinions of those communities.  However, these communities do not represent the entirety of the population of VN buyers or players.
Second, the poll is a self-selected poll.  That is, rather than randomly selecting people from the available populations, it allowed people to choose to participate.  Self-selected polls are very vulnerable to differences in enthusiasm.  People that feel strongly about something are much more likely to go and participate in these sorts of polls than those people that do not have strong opinions.  This is why there is an entire field of statistics dedicated to polling methods: because careless polls produce inaccurate results.
 
An accurate description of these polling results is that, amongst the populations of the larger VN online communities that chose to answer the poll, there is a bias towards keeping honorifics.
One can attempt to draw conclusions about the larger populations from that sample, but your accuracy goes down the further out you extrapolate.  Extrapolation to all users of the polled VN communities is reasonably likely to be accurate.  Extrapolation to the population of all VN owners is much less likely to be accurate.  Extrapolation to the general English-speaking population is very unlikely to be accurate.

To put it really simple, say we have a room with 10 people who all bought VNs in the past and we ask those people. We get that 2 wants honorifics, one is strongly against and 7 don't care. In other words that poll gives:
20% for 10% against 70% don't care Now we ask everybody in the room to answer if they like. 6 of the don't care are like "why bother. I'm happy either way". The result from the now self-selected poll gives:
50% for 25% against 25% don't care It's the same people and the same question, but the results differs greatly. While the numbers are made up, the poll in this thread is of the latter type and it's important to remember to not treat it as the first type, hence claiming "it's the eternal truth. We did a big test and got this result".
 
I know I didn't add much new information with this reply (if anything). However since the quote is the core essence of how trustworthy the poll results are, I feel like it would be best to try to explain it in a way, which makes it easier to understand. The quote itself is fine, but the choice of words are keywords from statistically analysis and I fear people with no training in statistical analysis whatsoever will have a hard time understanding "academic talk". We have to remember that some users are of university level, some dropped out of school and the majority is somewhere in between. Figuring out how to write to target all those levels at once is tricky to say the least.

Considering they could be jailed for releasing uncensored genitals, I would assume that's not the case. I assume there are many who wants to do so, but figure it ain't worth the risk.
And no, don't make this thread go off topic with Japanese censor law bashing. We all agree they are silly and adding 10 posts about it will only act as trolling or spamming this thread since that's not the topic here.

I wasn't worried like that at all. After all I have known the result for a few years already
 

Considering they could be jailed for releasing uncensored genitals, I would assume that's not the case. I assume there are many who wants to do so, but figure it ain't worth the risk.
And no, don't make this thread go off topic with Japanese censor law bashing. We all agree they are silly and adding 10 posts about it will only act as trolling or spamming this thread since that's not the topic here.

Considering they could be jailed for releasing uncensored genitals, I would assume that's not the case. I assume there are many who wants to do so, but figure it ain't worth the risk.
And no, don't make this thread go off topic with Japanese censor law bashing. We all agree they are silly and adding 10 posts about it will only act as trolling or spamming this thread since that's not the topic here.

Considering they could be jailed for releasing uncensored genitals, I would assume that's not the case. I assume there are many who wants to do so, but figure it ain't worth the risk.
And no, don't make this thread go off topic with Japanese censor law bashing. We all agree they are silly and adding 10 posts about it will only act as trolling or spamming this thread since that's not the topic here.

If I am to take a guess, then it's because of the amount of people in the target demographic. If it's a nukige, it targets anybody who likes the screenshots/characters and that's it (assume they are fine with nukige). If it's a story driven VN, you both have to like the characters, the settings and the story. Each step filters out some people. Also some people just want instant gratification, don't want to read and just want H scenes to pop up.
Take for instance Maitetsu. In addition to the love reading requirement, the target audience would have to not dislike loli characters and at the same time not be bored with talk about trains. This will naturally make a smaller target demographic than a nukige.
I suspect that (at least generally speaking), the more strict the target audience filters are, the more the readers will enjoy them if they match the filters. This could explain "why didn't title X sell better? It's awesome" kind of statements we see once in a while.

The official patch has been released. It's probably not what most people want, but it seems the best we'll get officially: https://www.fakku.net/forums/games/maitetsu-fixes-and-updates
Long story short, the version that was initially released was the version Lose intended to release, and is in fact the version of Maitetsu they'll be selling in Japan in an upcoming re-release. Fakku and Sekai Project both sat down with Lose and they came to a compromise. Some of the ecchi content like the upskirt will be restored, but none of the main story nudity will. Nipples will remain hidden.
It seems rather absurd to me that they're unwilling to show boobs in the main story but are perfectly okay with including hardcore pornography featuring the same characters. I don't understand Lose's thinking here.

So your patch is your safety valve, which you use to blow off steam. We knew that. I already pointed out a visualization of the patch way back on page 3
 

So your patch is your safety valve, which you use to blow off steam. We knew that. I already pointed out a visualization of the patch way back on page 3
 

You are absolutely right. We can't make story heavy VNs popular, but we can get somebody else to do it for us. That's our only hope.
 

Bandaid is just a different kind of mosaic. Just add badaid removal to your current patch. It's not like anybody will go "remove the mosaic, but keep the bandaid". We should be careful not to set a standard of bloating the number of patches. It does however make sense to keep the demosaic and restoration patches as two patches, partly because the goals differs (genital visuals vs bugfix), partly practical reasons because they are made by different people. It's much easier to release an updated patch if you don't have to coordinate with anybody else.
And yes it would be nice to remove the bandaid. Granted it's not as lewd as whatever gets the demosaic treatment, but it's still an eyesore. We all know that's not how people take baths and it's added purely to annoy us. Considering the angle, the view without a bandaid will most likely end up being more cute than lewd, which is fine.

Bandaid is just a different kind of mosaic. Just add badaid removal to your current patch. It's not like anybody will go "remove the mosaic, but keep the bandaid". We should be careful not to set a standard of bloating the number of patches. It does however make sense to keep the demosaic and restoration patches as two patches, partly because the goals differs (genital visuals vs bugfix), partly practical reasons because they are made by different people. It's much easier to release an updated patch if you don't have to coordinate with anybody else.
And yes it would be nice to remove the bandaid. Granted it's not as lewd as whatever gets the demosaic treatment, but it's still an eyesore. We all know that's not how people take baths and it's added purely to annoy us. Considering the angle, the view without a bandaid will most likely end up being more cute than lewd, which is fine.

That's a number of good arguments. It seems like it comes down to a definition issue of "more popular". I was thinking changed number of sales while you point out effects, which would require a complete gamechanger. Apparently for once I did not think big enough.
Sadly that's not true. If they profit to allow spending $20k more on development, they still won't do it unless they expect to earn more than $20k extra on the improvement itself. If they sell a million copies as base and a million and 5 due to increased quality, they end up paying $4k for each extra sale, which is a loss. Now if half of the customers would refuse to buy unless they spend the extra $20k, then it would be like you just stated. However sadly that's not how it works in real life. Just look at steam releases. Why should a publisher pay twice as much to get a better quality translation considering the high amount of people who gives thumbs up regardless of translation quality? Extra spent on the translation will not be reflected in the overall steam review score.
You are right that more money allows higher quality, but it's not correct to say more money ensures higher quality. For that to be true, we would have to make customers way more picky about what they pay for.

A personal reason for me is that more people would mean a higher possibility for physical releases from companies like MG who look into sales numbers before deciding to make physical copies, this is however something I doubt a lot of people care about. Other than that I guess it also could help out when companies are about to go bankrupt, since there seems to be a declining market in Japan. Other than that I am not really sure what benefits we would gain, atm I think we are in a really good period for visual novels in regard to the titles being released in english.

+ Higher chance for classic VNs, with expensive licenses to be released in the West.
+ Higher chance for quality localizations (the larger the market, the more feasible it is for companies to invest a lot in translating VNs and not cut corners).
+ Less stigma and inaccurate, negative presumptions about the genre (if anime was able to go mainstream, VNs also might get demystified with time, even considering all the limitations for their spread ["people don't read" etc.]).
+ More people to talk about VNs and share your experiences with (I guess most people don't care that much, but I personally think that consuming media alone, without anyone to share it with is depressing as f***). Obviously, I'm super-biased when it comes to this point, because my blogging and stuff... I guess I'm not just an "end user" (just as many other people on the forums, who actually have ties to the publishing companies).
+ Less risk of the market actually dying out - there's more and more stuff getting released, if the publishers don't work on expanding the niche, it might easily crash at some point, burying the chance for many games we would like to see to ever get an English release.
At least that's my take on it. Obviously, there are risks, like questionable content getting more scrutiny, but as I see it, there's enough of quality VNs that deserve to be released in English and enough of talented EVN creators for me to think that a bigger market for them can only be a positive thing.

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I think the connection is clear. Popularity means more sales and more sales means more money. And the quality of a product is almost always directly connected to the available money. High quality games like The Witcher 3 or GTA5 weren't just created with air and love. Just for The Witcher 3, there were more than a thousand people involved in development, design, QA and marketing.
And currently, one of the main problems is that most VN developers have a very tight budget due to overall low sales. It's usually enough for some sprites, a few backgrounds and most important nowadays - the H-scenes. But a good story VN needs a lot more stuff drawn. A typical moege has maybe up to ten drawn characters. But good story VN's like Kara no Shojo, Fate, MuvLuv Alternative or G-Senjou can easily have 40 or even more. And you need a lot more event CG's for a good story VN than for a simple moege - and event CG's are expensive. And expansive story VN's usually also take a lot more than just a year to develop.
There's a reason why games like Fate or MuvLuv Alternative with a huge amount of special effects and characters aren't done anymore.
And it goes without saying that lots of money gives you the opportunity to hire the best artists, writers, translators and editors.
TypeMoon would probably be the only VN developer with the possibility to make a REALLY high budget VN. Apparently they made about 2 billion dollars revenue with Fate Grand Order in two years. That makes even games like The Witcher 3 look like small fry in comparision. Unfortunately, TypeMoon doesn't exactly look like they ever want to go back to pure VN's again. So that's that. 
MangaGamer actually had an all ages site, but it was apparently used very rarely and they therefore decided to make Steam their All Ages store front.

07/30  - Released the patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 03 without mosaic!
DOWNLOAD

07/29  - Released the patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 02 without mosaic!
DOWNLOAD

Thanks for the info. I was thinking of asking you directly the question you did just answer but didnt wanted to annoy you with my noob questions. I am already using your Freemote tools ( viewer, psb build, decompiler) which are great and powerful. And without it this patch wouldnt be possible. It is an honor to meet you here :). I will put credits in the op.

To tell you the truth, even the full featured version Emote Editor won't be able to edit PSB (or json from PSB), since PSB is "compiled". Emote Editor only accepts MMO (project file, or json from MMO), which contains many metadatas while PSB removed them. I would like to let my FreeMote recover MMO from PSB but that is hard like - as you said - hieroglyphs. The workaround of editing animation right now, is rather to understand and edit json, or to use scripts calling Emote API to make additional animation.
Edit: The latest preview version of FreeMote is able to (partially) recover that "hieroglyphs"  - which means it's (almost) possible to edit PSB animations.