I'm also going to add that I went and looked at the other projects D&A were doing, out of curiosity:
The Golden Elementalist - picked up 3 months ago, last chapter release 2 months ago with ch3, another unrelated group translated the 4th chapter. would be interesting if they claim this group is sniping them too.
Emperor and Female Knight - picked up 3 months ago, latest update was 4 days ago with chapter 20. Officially released by tappy shortly after they started scanlating, and the official release is actually ahead of them. Would be interested if they call out tappytoons for sniping them too.
Valentine Kiss - picked up three months ago... then ignored for 2 months until they released the 2nd chapter a month ago and then quickly released chapters 3-5 in the past two 1/2 weeks.
The Duchess with an Empty Soul - picked up two months ago. chapters 3 & 4 were released nearly a month and a half after chapters 1 & 2. when NNG started scanlating, you could definitely see an uptick in uploads because it went from glacial pace to suddenly trying to match NNG's scans. In the past two weeks, they've suddenly released 13 chapters for this title. Eleven of those chapters were released in the past 24 hours as this writing.
Bouquet for an Ugly Girl - picked up two months ago, left untouched with just the first chapter since.
The Problem with my Love Affair - this one is interesting. They picked it up from a previous group, but I don't know if it's a collaboration or not, since I can see that one member of the group that was originally translating it is also part of D&A. Anyways, whether or not if they sniped it from a previous group or if the other group has abandoned it, they picked up with chapter 17 two months ago and released chapter 18 three days ago as of today.
Priscilla's Marriage Request, Vanguard - both of these are fairly new projects that D&A picked up within the past few days, but I'm going to include them here because of something I noticed while listing all of these.
According to their MD profile, D&A started translating about three months ago and they're already 'claiming' seven titles as their own and released 54 chapters. This sounds impressive for a small scanlation group over three months, but when you break down their work, it turns out that 37% of their scans is Emperor and Female Knight, 33% of their scans is Duchess with an Empty Soul (20% of it being released in the mass dump), Valentine Kiss is 10% and the remain four other projects they're working on all make up the remain 20%.
I also don't think it's any coincidence that Emperor and Female Knight and Duchess with an Empty Soul are the ones they focus on the most, and how badly they reacted to NNG's scans, because those two titles are the ones that they receive over 20,000 views on for the first few chapters. Duchess with an Empty Soul received over 35,000 views for the first chapter alone. Compare to The Golden Haired Elementist, their first project, where it's under 15k views and they seemed to have abandoned it. And as I said earlier, it's really strange they made such a big fuss about being sniped when they're the ones who are scanlating Emperor and Female Knight, which has an official english release that's also ahead of D&A.
Before people say that they're offering a service for free and they don't have to scanlate things: yes, I agree. They are fully in their rights to quit a project because they feel frustrated that they aren't being appreciated for their work. It's fine to say that. But they're not saying that; instead, they're insisting that they deserve to have complete control over a title, and I can't help but feel that they have ulterior motives. I would not be surprised if they were running a patreon or asking for donations on their Discord, which is understandable since it would be nice to make money on the side... But the fact that they're so defensive over the project that is clearly their most popular, along with the fact that they were able to drop 11 scanlated chapters at once, make me think they were deliberately trying to stretch out their releases and were withholding them for... why? I can't imagine what for, aside to make people beg them for more.
The more I think and look at this, the more the people behind D&A seem rather egoistical and arrogant. It comes across to me that they not scanlating things because they love it, but because they scanlate to be popular and liked. But they're welcome to come and explain themselves if I'm misunderstanding their intentions.
