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Site Update
Good evening everyone! It is with a heavy heart that I come to you now. Unfortunately we have to make several financial changes rather quickly. I want to be completely open about everything, so I am going to try to address all of the points that I feel need to be discussed.
I was discussing finances with Slash recently and he discovered a major source of the financial issues that we have been having are due to the site making 30% less income these past few months than in previous years. This is understandable, as many have noticed the active user count has gone down substantially last year, and many countries are in a pretty bad state economically and people are nervous about spending. There is a lot of concern about the stability of the site with how behind several aspects have become.
We have been working on catching up on these things to try to earn your faith back. We are in the process of more changes to help streamline background productivity (such as getting breeding helpers, the commission panel fees, etc). We know that it won't happen over night, and that many of our changes will also upset the user base. We do not want to disregard your feelings, but please understand that everything we do is to benefit the site in the long run. We have a lot of damage to repair, and it is a very long and tedious process. I personally spend almost every waking moment when I am not at my offline job, investigating options and discussing changes with the staff to keep pushing forward.
That being said, some of the changes we are making are:
- Alidae Egg, Transitional Fossil Egg, and Grand Edit Potion are having their Prediction Payout dropped to $10. When an Egg and a Grand Edit Potion are combined they will pay out $15. Any breedings submitted before Tuesday February 14th at 11:59 pm will not be effected by this pay change.
- Offering different payment options for USD breeding teams.
- Shrinking some of the larger USD breeding teams. (However, if we end up with enough artists taking different payments we won't have to do this!)
- The GCC and MDT teams will be shrunk. If you are on one of these teams and are interested in receiving GP or working out another payment system please pm me, Kaiyo (#489). If there are enough people willing to accept different payments I won't have to shrink them.
- The monthly site contests are going to have the USD pay dropped starting next month. It will still be offered but it will not be the same amount.
I appreciate everyone reading this, and I apologize again for these changes. Many of them will be temporary, such as the artists adjustments. Over time we may be making more adjustments, but we hope that these changes will be enough to cover the expenses, and we may be able to bring on another artist or two with the new payment methods for some of the backed up breeding teams.
If anyone has questions please feel free to ask, send me a PM if you would like, I will try to answer whatever I can. I want to be completely open about this situation, and withholding information does nothing for any of us. However, due to certain restrictions, there is some information that I am not permitted to share.
I do not come to you today with only bad news, however! The Commission Fee Panel is now live! You are now able to pay your own fees, select which ones you pay and when. There is a minimum of $5, so if you don't have that much in owed fees you won't be able to pay it yet!
It will work the same way it currently does in regards to dates, and all fees of the prior month must be paid within one week of the new month. So January must be paid within the first week of February, February within the first week of March, etc. Of course, this month is an exception since the feature is new and did start late, however please make sure January fees are paid quickly!
If you have any questions regarding your fees, please send me a pm! Only ping to the news comments if it is a general question about how something works.
Posted by 🐼Kaiyo🐼
(#489) on Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:19pm
- MissMally
(#473)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:35pm
Will shrinking the ticket teams actually help the finances though? If the same number of tickets are being submitted them the payout wouldn't change, just the options for who to choose which makes for longer queues. All teams are paid per pet finished so it's exclusively the items that dictate the payout not the artist count.
- 🐼Kaiyo🐼
(#489)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:37pm
NyctiCorax (#1965) We are working on some site transitions, and after that I am going to reopen the applications and explain what happened for everyone. But basically we ended up having an issue with our mail and we couldn't get any e-mails, or at least half wouldn't come through, however we didn't learn about that for another month or so. So we lost a lot of the applications due to this. I am hoping in March to open them up again, but I gotta clear out the old ones, so everyone can start fresh. I want to wait until after the transition I mentioned because new mods also mean a lot more training, which is time consuming and our attention is really captured by our changes atm.
- Moons
(#71383)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:39pm
It probably doesn't help the site that countries outside of the US may have to pay much, much more money to have access to the USD items. In Canada the conversion rate to US is so bad that I don't think I have ever spent money on this website, because a lot of the items that I would be interested in are on the higher end of the spectrum. Whereas other websites I can contribute a bit here and there for cool items, I don't find that I can do so here because $30 USD becomes $40 or more for me and unfortunately I can't spare that much. And typically (breeding/custom) items that you can buy with GP are fairly expensive, so I end up not being able to go that route either.
I personally actually like that the prices are higher than most sites because I know artists are being paid, but the conversion to USD is killer and unfortunately not something we can do much about. :c In any case I hope things gets better and if I do have some extra money I would definitely spend some here.
- 🐼Kaiyo🐼
(#489)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:40pm
❄MissMally❄ (#473) They will because it will spread it out longer. Right now we have at least 20+ gcc and around 40 mdt tickets almost every week getting done. Most artists typically only do 1 or 2 a week even though there is more in their queues, so it will push the queues back a bit but allow us to spread out the pay more.
- 🐼Kaiyo🐼
(#489)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:41pm
Moons (#71383) That definitely did not help, when paypal decided to start using the conversations it fumbled a lot of our artists and user base but there isn't much we can do about that :( I really wish that I could change that, it has effected many many people that I know personally.
- Azthmutt
(#15665)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:44pm
Well crud, I'll have to figure out payment options then since I'm on the GCC team. I'm unsure what to think of doing since I am sorta using my payment as gas money ;w; but I'll defiantly try to figure out how to help .
- 🐼Kaiyo🐼
(#489)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:45pm
Honoo (#15665) Feel free to PM me and we will discuss the options I gave my breeding artists and see if any of those will work for you <3
- NyctiCorax
(#1965)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:48pm
Ah I see, that's sad about the email, but it makes sense. I do realize the time constraint problem, that sucks. In the end it should be getting easier though, as there's more people to help out? I hope the transition stuff goes smooth! I don't know what the staff end of things looks like, but it sounds like there's indeed a lot to gain there.
(Ironically I've been talking about something similar at my job today. They keep messing up paychecks, which means they have to pay someone at office x extra hours again each month to have to figure out what's going on with those. And then it all happens again next month... You'd figure they'd try to change the system after a couple of months.... At least here I know there's a team of people who actually want to see things change ;P)
- 🐼Kaiyo🐼
(#489)
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Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:54pm
NyctiCorax (#1965) It really is, I was so not thrilled then I had to contact Slash and it took us a good week to figure out what was wrong with it. Right now the staff side is messy xD And I am personally a bundle of nerves, writing this news post took a heavy toll on me and it's just.. intense in staffworld right now.
Omg that is... really bad lol.. That is exactly why I did these changes, give or take. We could do sale after sale but.. those are just bandaids. We need a more permanent fix, something more stable and consistent while we get through the rough waters.
Posted on: Fri Feb 3, 2017 2:34pm
Heavy, but understandable. I'm hoping it truly will help the site get up a bit again.I think one of the bigger problems with funds is that a lot of people are not willing to spend on the site at the moment, for example on breeding items because of the long waiting times. There was a bit of improvement, but now the waiting times for a lot of the coins are really quite long, and tbh I think people would rather wait and make gp to buy a coin from someone else than use money on it with the long waiting times. I get the idea that many people are waiting on the site/staff to make things better before they are going to spend any money again.
Also, is there any news on mod apps and any other helper positions. I know there are a lot of people who want to help out with whatever they can do (including myself), but don't know how to help. It's been a while since there's been moderator applications, but there hasn't really been news on them, which just makes people wonder what is going on with those really, and if they're not being forgotten. (I think not.. but well, you just never know if there's no word about it..)
(I know more mods will not really help the financial problems directly, but eventually it might help if some of the less important tasks can be delegated to more people..)