Yeah... no possibility the dev really don't want to spoil the story. They refuse to answer those question only to annoy the crowd. Seems legit.
Which is why I used the word "OR".
Some devs are absolutely sincere in wanting to avoid spoilers. Some devs are absolutely hedging their bets or using vague answers to hide the fact that a game has NTR because they know there will be a negative reaction to it. Both scenarios exist, and have played out countless times on the board.
And again, like it or not, it contributes to why the term/concept has become such a point of argument. When people are more paranoid about "LOL SURPRISE NTR!", they're more likely to ask about it in a thread even if a game doesn't have it listed in the tags, genre, or developer's notes. Because there's no real expectation that people are going to be honest about it (especially when people can't even agree about what it actually IS).
You know the most devs didn't even on this board and they don't care about the tag rules of a piracy board? Why should any dev specify a tag where even the crowd can't decide which definition counts.
In cases where a dev isn't on the board and maintaining their own thread, that would be where whoever is posting the initial thread, linking to game uploads, etc should be doing the same job. Especially if the dev is posting their own tags/descriptions/explanations/etc on Patreon/Discord/etc. Even devs who aren't
here should be communicative with their intended audience if they actually expect to
have an audience.
This really isn't rocket science.
As for why devs should care about a pirate site at all is because it still signal boosts their work. A lot of the devs who
do choose to engage with people here find that they expand their Patreon fanbase significantly. Sites like this bring attention to games that would otherwise languish in obscurity, and while most users will always be freeloading cheapskates, good games with friendly devs willing to communicate tend to encourage users to support them just to ensure a game gets finished.
The better a dev can communicate their intentions and plans for their game, the more likely they are to find the correct fanbase for that game, and one more potentially likely to actually support the game.
No, the discussions don't start with the NTR fetish crowd.
They absolutely do - sometimes.
There are plenty of cases where pro-NTR people have come into random threads and started asking for NTR in games that don't have it (which sets off the back-and-forth). There are also cases where pro-NTR people have come into threads for games that
have an NTR tag and complain because it's not the right kind of NTR, or because it's not NTR enough, or because it's one throwaway scene and they feel like the tag should only describe games with a heavy NTR focus. I've also seen a few blatantly NTR games where the first few pages of the thread are people complaining about anti-NTR whining when there isn't a single anti-NTR person posting in the thread at all.
The constant NTR arguments are absolutely a two-way street.
Both sides are exacerbating the problem, no matter what you may choose to tell yourself. And there are absolutely assholes on both sides who go out of their way to be as provocative as possible about it.
If you've never seen a single instance where the back-and-forth starts with the pro side complaining, it's either because you're looking at a very narrow and specific spectrum of game threads, or because your own biases have completely blinded you to anyone who agrees with you - because it's always easier to blame "the other guy" whenever anything goes wrong.
in 90% of the time it starts a debate about what's NTR and what not.
Because, as we've already established, this site does a terrible job of defining what it is and what it isn't, and way too many people have different opinions of what "counts" and what doesn't. So you get into weird murky grey areas where someone can say a game doesn't have NTR because it doesn't according to their definition, but it absolutely does based on other people's opinions.
As an easy example, it's easy to say whether or not a game has lesbian scenes in it. Everyone has a pretty good idea what "lesbian"
is. But then apply that to NTR and suddenly you've got a mess. Does lesbian sex count as NTR? Some people will say lesbians can never be NTR. Other people will say that lesbians can be NTR if it fits the other criteria of what makes something NTR. And some people will say a female LI cheating on you with anyone - male, female, or otherwise - is automatically NTR. And to complicate things further, people will argue over whether or not lesbian scenes in a harem context are NTR if the main character is okay with them but the player isn't given any choice in the matter. So now you've got a thread full of people who can't agree on what NTR
is, let alone whether or not a given game has it or not.
Like it or not,
because it's such a complex topic, it's something that is much better addressed in threads than just rubberstamped with a single pithy tag. People might disagree over what is and isn't NTR, but if it's pointed out in the thread that the game has a scene where two female LIs have sex with each other, a robot, and a tentacle monster plant, then it's entirely up to the players to decide how they want to feel about that. And specifying that that scene is either unavoidable, skippable (it happens but you don't have to watch), or completely avoidable (you can prevent it from happening at all) goes a long way to telling a player whether a game is something they want to engage with (and potentially waste hours of their life on).
Discussion isn't a
bad thing. Discussion only really becomes bad when it becomes argument.
And if anything, the only reason the discussion gets annoying after a while is because most people are too lazy to use the search function, so the same question keeps getting asked over and over and over and over...
There's only one way to stop this cancer: remove the NTR tag generally, ban the word NTR like they did it with the word childporn (q.e.d) and ban all the dudes who starts a discussion about it.
If anything, that would probably make things worse. Because without a shorthand term people would be even more curious as to the content of any given game, and just find different ways to talk around the ban (potentially making things even more confusing). And if mods got
really draconian about banning everyone who even hints at asking about the subject, a lot of people would just move to a different forum entirely and this one would eventually wither and die (or just turn into an extremely NTR-centric site).
Realistically, what the site actually needs is clearer terminology and more informative/diverse tags. I understand why they don't want to get that granular with things, but without it there will always be a conflict whenever NTR comes up.