More serious reply:
When I say “hostile”, I mean it feels like the designers’ vision* for the game is hostile to the casual (solo) player. I don’t mean they’re hostile to me personally, or to the players in general. Just that their vision is of a world so harsh you MUST band together and struggle to survive: an interesting concept, but not, I feel, compatible with the reality that it is just a game.
Things like thralls needing rare, difficult to get meat or they DIE for example: Exotic meat etc is not available in the vicinity of my base - so I have two choices: Move to a new location (a defacto wipe) and spend most of my playtime hunting meat, or quit the game**. Not using combat thralls is not an option, because offline purges are a thing, the solution to which according to the powers that be are - combat thralls.
I am not against the idea of thralls needing food in principle - it’s not a bad idea per se. But the current implementation as of TestLive is fairly horrible. I wanted to keep an open mind about it, because maybe the feeder pots and the relatively easy availability of fish might mean that my playtime wouldn’t be reduced to desperately hunting for meat. The reinstated decay timer is already rather harsh, but this is a level of magnitude worse.
I don’t even use that many thralls - I have eight combat thralls and three dancers, and was planning to push that into maybe ~20 total at some point. Right now I’d be able to keep exactly zero of them, because the location I picked doesn’t have their favorite food available - and apparently they’d rather starve to death than touch non-luxurious food.
Now I know the TestLive is a test (it’s in the name…) but the last few patches have not exactly had much use out of being on TestLive, at least not as seen from the players’ perspective.
*the designers having a vision is great, I just wish they wouldn’t push it quite so hard - private servers is not the solution to everything!
**hyperbole you say? Not really. If I can’t use thralls, I can’t defend against purges (useless though they currently are), so I can’t have a base… and it’s all apparently by design. It’s the last part that gets me. Bugs might eventually be fixed - but a game design that’s contrary to anything but large, very active clans - not so much.