@Hex Bolt's Simple Slavery Plus Plus is an infinitely superior core product compared to the original, with improvements to the original design in every facet.

I want to make that perfectly clear – SS is in much more competent hands now and works better than I ever could have managed and I do not think DFW should be connected anymore since it is not being maintained, so please understand that I mean no disparagement when I say:

For me, the closest Simple Slavery has come to realizing its full potential started in November, 2016 and continued through April, 2017. It faded from there until the end of the original incarnation of SS on May 21, 2018, when @Lozeak took the reins after my real-life-induced burnout.

I say this because, in my mind, the stages of a complete slavery experience include four distinct stages:

1)      capture, by whatever means

2)      real time transport to the auction, preferably via a leash/chain

3)      the auction itself

4)      a slavery outcome

Up to this point in the story, Simple Slavery had successfully integrated steps 1, 3, and 4 (with a sort of partial credit to 2 to Maria Eden for a small scene that included the bandits who had captured the player selling her to a band of Khajit slavers), but all the capture mods relied on a fade-to-black transport of the player to the auction cell.

That all changed when I discovered the fabulous @legume and his Devious Framework. Originally, I reached out to see if he wanted to connect it with Simple Slavery in the same way as all the other mods. What I discovered was that he had already thought of that and was WAY ahead of me:

For the next two months, we (and by “we” I, of course, mean Legume) worked on the details of this exciting new project. Eventually we realized we really needed something else – we needed one of the defeat mods to handle the transition from defeated to captured, giving DFW a moment to slip the leash onto the player. For that, I reached out the equally fabulous @Goubo, author of Defeat, who happily threw in his expertise (and even gave me an early version of Defeat 6.0 to play with, which sadly never got completed and released).

It did not take long for the connection to be made from there, and Simple Slavery 5.0 was born in a blaze of hope and excitement. As with everything Skyrim related, it either worked flawlessly or it didn’t work at all. Not because of any trouble in the code, but just because it stretched the limits of Skyrim’s follow package which, as I’m sure you all are aware, is finicky at the best of times.

Here is where my problems began: the Simple Slavery code became far too complicated for me to understand. Where once was a simple and straightforward page of random selectors of different mods and action scenes now stood an incomprehensible complex of functions and arrays I could not begin to unravel.

On top of that, some people did not want the leash function, mostly because they didn’t want to add DF to their already-stretched load orders. So it was necessary to either have two different versions or have some way to switch off the DF functionality via a fomod.

We tried the latter, but it seemed to work only sporadically. And, somewhere around mid-April, Legume quietly faded away, followed by Guobo a week or two later. Left to my own devices with code I was afraid to touch, I dragged out an old pre-DFW version of SS, updated it with the new outcomes that had been added during that time, fixed what bugs I remembered had been brought up in that same interim, and released it as a separate mod.

In short, I had exactly what I had been trying to avoid – two versions of the mod to update each time an update was necessary.

To make matters worse, I was back to working 16-hour days in real life and had very little time to even read the forums, say nothing of actually working on the mod (or any of my mods, for that matter). I staggered through a year of trying but failing to keep up before announcing my semi-retirement from making mods and handing the only one anyone seemed interested in maintaining off to someone else.

Lozeak kept it going for two years before stepping away himself, at which point Hex Bolt made the mistake of being way too helpful in SS+’s support thread, thus prompting the suggestion he take over the entire thing.

And thank every Aedra, Daedra, and god there is that he agreed to do so. 😊