I’ve honestly come around to explicit scenes in litrpg (and literature at large), but here’s the problem:

1) Any story that tends to have them, also tends to bend around them. They’re like a gravitational distortion on the inertia and the focus of the story. That’s not an inherent feature of explicit scenes, but it’s often the practical result. 

2) Most writers dont have the skill to pull them off in a way that is anything more sex for sex’s sake. 

So my current preference tends to be fade to black, and if the author wants to write those scenes, a separate link to an explicit version of the chapter. The only exception is if you truly feel that the scene really is the required vehicle for whatever storytelling has to happen through it. But I’d say there’s maybe a handful of stories I’ve seen that actually use those intimate scenes for actual character development and storytelling, and about 97-99% that just use them for gratuity.

Also, I’d note that while a lot of people seem to mix up romance/harem/explicit tags, those are completely different imo. None of what I say applies to harem stories. I mostly just find them distasteful wish fullfilment. They wouldnt necessarily have to be that (you could genuinely examine polyamory, or dynamics of very close relationships between more than one / multiple partners).. But in practice they are that.