I do recall Savin being VERY touchy about anyone modding his characters.
What drives people to threaten to sue people over a free mod i will never know, but there you go.
Eh, some people get really attached to their creations; rather than viewing them as a tool in a story or a way to make money, it's some personal fantasy of theirs that they don't want touched. For such cases, seeing someone else change it in a way they don't like feels more like someone messing with their spouse or kids than it does branching off a story.
I don't really understand it emotionally, except in the most obvious of cases (such as completely reversing the entire intent of a character), but I guess I can understand being possessive of something personal that you put to paper. Though personally, I don't think I'd publish something like that at all...
Do you mean this -
You must be registered to see the links
That... Actually seems kind of tame to me, compared to the artist drama that I usually see.
"Group A wants one thing, group B wants another; author sides with Group B, and Group A gets snippy. Author proceeds to conflate well-intentioned constructive criticism with bad-faith concern trolling, and starts blocking Group A entirely after someone starts leaking nudes. After tuning out critics and listening to those praising them, author proceeds to focus entirely on things that personally appeal to them, deciding that they have enough support already and it's a waste of time to code for a broader audience."
I mean, I personally thought that CoC was a bit of a mess, and I do actually wish that it had more demon content, but this complaint is more an issue of project structure than anything else - Fenoxo was the sole coder (so far as I know) and project lead, while there were a variety of writers. Someone was always going to feel left out, because people had different opinions about what CoC should be, and a single person was given the authority to enforce their vision. Of course people are going to be upset when a month of work isn't put in the game, just as others would feel upset if a bunch of events they felt had no effort put in were added to the game just because they catered to a particular fetish.
Combining the project lead and coder made things worse, because that encourages the lead to start turning down
everything that would mean too much work on their part for content they don't personally enjoy, but... This kind of conflict was honestly inevitable so long as a single person was in charge. It would have to be changed to a purely collaborative structure to avoid such a fight, which doesn't seem to be their actual issue.
I don't know whether the complaints have any merit or not (looking at it, large portions of it read more like someone just irate that their own preferences are being passed over in favor of donors, and I'm not interested enough in following internal project drama to see more) but... If Fenoxo started catering to his fans and blocking people who made complaints he didn't like, that's not particularly unusual for an author. Perhaps it ended up hurting the quality of the project, but... If a large number of writers had their own community, and were irate at his behavior, why didn't they code their own game? CoC's code was rather infamous for its poor quality, if I'm not mistaken, so if there were so many writers being passed over in favor of the author's fetishes, Fenoxo wasn't providing something irreplaceable - there was plenty of room for a competitor, if his decisions were so unpopular.
This is not as good as the first game.
In fairness, CoC had several more years to build up content, and I think more people are interested in content for TiTS than CoC2, but... Yeah, progress is kind of painfully slow.
It has a better foundation than CoC did, but it really needs a lot more content to help one overlook the older design philosophy.