TigerStripes wrote:'Sanitizing' the existing material to somehow 'work with each other' is neither realistic or beneficial - you'd be demolishing content wholesale to try and build connections everywhere, forcing players to take the 'collect everything in one game' playthrough so they can see all the content. I'll readily admit that there are some characters and material that doesn't really work or even breaks canon (such as Omio's), but I honestly don't want to go through the at least 50+ hours of labour to deal with them. And since I know there are players who enjoy that material and its creators spent a lot of time and effort on it, I have opted to leave it in rather than remove it from the game.
This sort of matter has always been my region of expertise, so I'll expound upon it a bit for some of the readers.
One of FS greatest strengths over other erotic games is it's collaborative nature. Countless different writers have contributed to the game over the years, resulting in an overwhelming volume of content. Of course, this has a lot of drawbacks, and my self-appointed job has been to come in and fix a lot of issues that have cropped up over the years.
The specific issue Samsquatch is raising is one of these drawbacks. There is an abundance of ideas and available story threads, but "Guest Contributor" rarely -- if ever -- provide a complete and satisfactory arc to their creation -- often times, they just want to add a monster that they think would be cool, which is fine, or they simply lose interest half-way through. Moreover, a guest is generally discouraged from creating any story arc which affects the game in a large, earth-shattering way.
As for established writers, they're generally tied up with commissions which gives them very little room to expand upon story threads which need it. This is where I fit in; I don't get many commissions, so a lot of my work entails updating/improving existing content and story threads.
My main focus over the years, however, has been ensuring that each encounter is a "Minimum Viable Product". What this means in the case of monster encounters is to ensure they meet the absolute bare minimum for a satisfactory experience. Before I came here, a lot of monsters failed to meet what I considered the bare minimum of quality content, and I've largely resolved that by this point.
As a result, however, I'm starting to run into something of a "Development Asymptote", a point in which the amount of work necessary to improve upon or expand content becomes increasing taxing in order to ensure these improvements remain substantive. I also have my own projects I want to work on, separate from the existing content which needs to be improved.
I do agree that a lot of story threads needs to be expanded, which is why I'm working on the Ash dragons to facilitate that. But another drawback of a collaborative work is the inevitable complications in social politics, and subsequently I have to work to resolve those long-standing issues by completely replacing these monsters before anything else can be done.
Which raises the ultimate ethical problem regarding established writers adding to, modifying, or even completely replacing guest artist work. Because establish writers more or less "Run the show" around here, we're wholly in the right to do whatever we want to a guest writer's work in the name of the game as a whole, but just because we're in the right doesn't mean we want to create an environment where we can simply be dicks to whatever guest writer that comes along.
So, in the name of those ethics, an inordinate amount of time needs to be invested when assessing a pre-existing writer's work and how it's approached. A lot of questions need to be asked: How old is the work? How active is the writer right now? How integrated is it within the game? How much needs to be changed with the encounter?
And that invites further sub-queries: If it's an old work, does that mean I have more free reign to alter it, or will people be upset more because of how established it is? It seems fair to alter a writer's work who hasn't been around for a long time, but how will new guest artists feel about the idea that their work will be meddled with if they're not around all the time? An encounter may not seem heavily integrated, but my playstyle may be incorrect and other player's interact with it all the time, so how can I identify that? Is it more ethical to make small additions "pretending" to be the writer by attempting to copy their style, or to simply re-write the entire encounter from scratch?
This is just a taste of the questions that run through my head when dealing with this issue. I spend a considerable amount of energy considering the moral dilemmas presented by this situation, and the most important thing to keep in mind here is I don't always get it right, in spite of it.
Ultimately, what you can take away from this diatribe is that I am working to fix the problems you feel here, but as one guy wading through a veritable Ulysses of interactive smut, it is an exceedingly time-consuming effort.