However, after reading all these testimonials it strikes me as exceptionally odd that someone can become so narcissistic and egocentric over their writing, at least from a personal perspective. I've dabbled in writing over the years and am hopelessly unaware of how one can come to obsess over their own work in this manner.
Man, the shit I've written isn't good by any means, but if someone offers me genuine criticism I'm not going to turn it down and scream hysterics because of it.
To try and answer that question - as well as give a bit of perspective on why I am so negative about not the game as much as the lead writers - the problem stems from the Fenoxo Forums, I believe. As you maybe know Fenoxo (or Fen) is the guy who started it all back in the day with CoC 1 and then TiTS, basically a bit of a pioneer since CoC 1 arguably is the foundation of many games that try to create the lewd equivalent of a text based RPG of old. For obvious reasons he acquired quite the following, and since Savin has been on board since the early days as well he benefited a lot from the loyalty and admiration of Fen's fanbase.
I think for good reasons, Savin is a really good writer & a great writer of smut as well, so it is by no means that the man doesn't have talent or experience or just in general is clueless, quite the opposite. The Observer, too, has been with them for quite a long time & started out as definitely promising, with a genuine, appealing writing style and a certain knack for visualizing things through his choice of words.
The problems, in my eyes, began when Fen decided that he wouldn't be the lead of yet another project (even though it would have been the sequel to his original gem) because a. he had a lot to do with TiTS and b. had grown increasingly tired of writing smut over the years, therefore decided to be more of a hindrance for the sequel & also just not up to write things matching the standards of quality he had set for his games.
Making Savin the lead seemed pretty logical at that point in time & at first things worked out pretty well. The issues began to rose when TOBS was given free reign over whatever he wrote (as was Wsan, but Wsan at least writes stuff fitting for a CoC sequel, with choices to make and player control over their own character) and, when he began to loose his mind and create his completely own story inside the story (that then also did not at all connect with the rest of the game, only by forced interactions with basically random NPCs to simply try and justify that nonsense). Unsurprisingly TOBS was met with quite a bit of criticism by the players, and that's where things went down the drain.
See, since the Forums had existed for quite a while, and people really liked the games as well as the minds behind them, it turned out that the constant praise had inflated The Observer's ego to a point where he took any form of dislike of his - purposely derisive - content as a personal attack. To the point where he resorted to consciously write stuff he knew a vast majority would dislike, and he left no room for doubts that he did it just to piss people off. By that he then ruined his own content, causing basically 90% of the players to turn on him and his content.
That's where Savin made the fatal mistake of thinking that it was his job to protect his writers from negative feedback instead of diving into the issues and look for the root of the problems. I don't know if he actually thought it came out of basically nowhere & that TOBS was getting heat for no reason, or if he, deep down, knew who was at fault and just couldn't tell his old friend to get his act together. From there on it became basically impossible to voice criticism on the forums, either a bunch of zombie fans jumped anyone trying to voice his thoughts (even if it was in a polite manner and without going after any individual writer) and just claimed that the game was without any flaws or room for improvement, further cementing the by then pretty delusional impression of the lead writers that they are (as I wrote before) something like the Tolkiens and Martins of smut, or Savin himself (or guys like TOBS) deleted the criticism.
Nowadays there are, as others explained here before, clear double standards for what the lead writers do & what the other people can do, arbitrary rejection of content, a very clear maliciousness towards the players in general, with some of the writers writing stuff just because a majority of people hate it, the attempt to make the player character as irrelevant and weak as possible etc. pp.
It's actually just kinda pathetic and extremely childish, the typical product of people closing themselves in a bubble just to never hear anything negative about their work.
