News

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 12:02pm

is this new streak reset update also in place for the daily login bonus or just for manju?

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 12:09pm

Honestly, I thought Eve's explanation was fine.
You can't both demand to have staff telling you what's going on (something people keep saying is super important to them), and the same time be protected from what actually is going on.

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 12:26pm

🌸 SG 🌸 (#36207) - You're right, that does come across completely the wrong way, and I would like to start by apologising for that. It was not my intent, and I sincerely am sorry if my words hurt anyone.

Unfortunately the problem we're having with trying to keep everyone happy and progressing the game is that they often clash - we wanted to make Musing something more than a one click check in, that would be more profitable and enjoyable to people, but that requires it being able to be reset if you miss a day. We can completely abandon those plans and keep it as a 50BP increase a day and a plushie after 31 days but it feels stagnant to keep a game the same for the sake of keeping it the same... when it could be so much more.

It wasn't meant to be "sprung" but I do see how it looks that way - we had been led to feel that people would be extremely upset about the NPCs going (people were okay with that, which was thankful for us after all the backlash we've had from previous NPC updates) so we didn't want to prolong that more than necessary, but you're right, the game change that went with it was announced in a way that wasn't fair to users, and we'll keep that in mind going forward.

No apologies necessary - you make good points, and again our problem is that we have plans that we're in the middle of that aren't ready to be announced (announcing things long before they're ready for release angers and frustrates most people) so we're caught in a limbo of wanting to be transparent about our plans, but also not wanting to release news that will create expectations about things that may morph and change as we begin to go into final implementation stages.

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 1:12pm

this could be solved though if you could have a "earn a pass every X days you log in" though. your game is supposed to encourage loyalty. you do that by not hitting people with a proverbial stick for like. being in the hospital or other real life aspects. (like even something that neither side could control- like a power outage)

The call time and time again has not been for an easy mode, but a don't-get-totally-screwed-for-dumb-reasons mode. You say you hear us, but the response has just been to dig in and act like... oh right, like years before when anybody calling out the site got an angry swarm of staff going "HOW DARE YOU! we work hard!"

Yeah guess what, we work hard too.

We work hard making the money that you use to pay the server fees. We work hard to do art for FAR below a livable or even minimum wage. In the face of fewer site-based events, the community has made their own- even trying to tackle scav once. You get a cut of the money we make for just hosting the ability to sell our services for cash, when many of us could still abide by the tos and sell the services we're allowed to on tumblr. You said "we're too poor to have more usd jobs open" and people stood up and said "that's fine, just pay us in site currency". When you said the pets for this mayday couldn't be as edited as in the past, we went "well sucks, but that's fair". You've been asking a lot from us lately, and I think it's fair that we get to snap back about asking for a little accomodation here.

Because going down the list, let's look at all the cutbacks you've done. You've cutback breeding seasons, you've gotten rid of orange/candy cane customs (and gave really poor payout for the trade-in), you've removed the upgrade talisman from the bp shop, slashbots were nerfed (which left a lot of longstanding users who'd been waiting for things to open completely out of luck with the new rules), teos went from having a chance to drop at 6 to "ha ha, give us money", rock customs came back! ... but then you broke your word about the original lines never becoming something you could only get through a usd item. and then digging back further in the past there's old pendants and coins getting the nerf as well and... oh right, that thing where a bunch of artists got banned and others left because there was a communication breakdown. And if I want to go seriously digging (I don't, i'm at page 92 of news posts already) I could bring up older issues as well. And yes, many of the staff were not in admin positions then, but they were mods and you'd hope that after a few years they'd get a bit better at taking on criticism.

let's be real here You have done a bunch of improvements since then, but looking over the list it keeps being that some improvements get made, and then something comes along to upset the userbase or people who've been paying into the game for a long while. In fact an older post goes:

"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 all know the site isn't doing that hot. Like many of the mayday pets were still there up until late on the last day, which means a lot of them probably either went for 25$ or even just site credit. That's a canary in a coal mine there, previous years and I remember the rush taking out a good half or three quarters of them by the 50$ mark at the latest. But this? This means fewer people dropped money on the site, and more of the artists you hired didn't make you as much money as you needed. The push for nearly everything being in the usd market also is a sign of this. You need money badly, because the regulars just aren't paying in anymore, or if they are, only when they get the most for their value. (like me. mayday has been the first time i've paid in... awhile. like i'm thinking "sometime last year i gave you money, i think") It's quite a change from when i was willing to chuck twenty bucks the site's way every couple of weeks because i was enjoying myself and i wanted to support a game i liked.

Now more and more people have entered into the phase of "hey, what am i getting out of this site" and that's bad, that's real bad. Because when someone is doing cost-analysis? They're already halfway to giving up the site and moving on. To make up for that loss and bring people back you're going to have to do two things: provide incentive for new blood to come and stay, and stop taking a torch to everything older players loved about the game. I mean you CAN also just listen to everyone trying to say everything's fine, but can you send them a bill for the entire server costs?

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 1:20pm

Eve (#2775) - I feel like perhaps a good way around the whole thing not wanting to announce too soon but also not being too sudden would be that most times there's a significant change, well.. First of all, vaguely noting "some changes to the existing games" in this month's Coding Corner probably wouldn't have given away too much but would have let us know to expect Something. There was the mobile preview but that let us know to expect one or more new games, not changes.

But past that, maybe wait until it's ready to be implemented, announced it some 2-4 days in advance depending on the nature of it, and then put it live, as long as it's not something urgent. That gives members a chance to prepare for the changes and offer some feedback, and if feedback is particularly strong it would give staff a chance to step back and consider if any last minute changes are warranted, as opposed to having to address things after it's already live.

As far as the game potential, I'd personally be (a little sad about but ultimately) okay with a reset accompanying an increase in payout, as said increase would feel like a "better" reason to reset than just getting it to work as it had but with reset risk added.

(I'd also partially suggested-- apologies if already seen but just in case it got buried in the swarm of comments before-- returning Musings to the way it worked before and adding a new game with higher payout but a reset, to have one safe ongoing check-in and one higher-risk-higher-reward game, as opposed to having to choose one or the other.

Not said before but as some additional thoughts now: maybe a character like Greta or Querel could be the face of that (Greta's Grumbles? Querel's Quibbles? xD), perhaps with some random chance effects like boosting or lowering your 'streak' or throwing an item at you and resetting it, etc, such that risk is even more an active part of the game and if you miss a day, oh well, it might've reset on you anyway, etc? :o I understand added effects would take a bit to do, but at least the base game would be a reskin of Musings, so hopefully that wouldn't be too bad? Of course I also understand if it's just not something Staff would be interested in implementing, but I figured it might be a different sort of compromise worth mentioning.)

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 1:20pm

edit: that post took a bit to research so I didn't see the part where you apologized until after I posted. I stand by what I say on needing to improve in the future and find a middle ground for the short term, but also thanks for that. A lot of the frustration and salt has been the kind of stonewalling feeling I've been getting.

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:07pm

Yes, we have had some financial struggles recently, sadly due to discovering a lot of bad practices of previous administrations and trying to amend them. However Mayday was a huge success - you're correct that a lot of people didn't make first day purchases, however a substantial amount of people made second and third day purchases which helped far exceed our usual amount made. That money has been put into constructing the future of the site, paying off outstanding debts, and has helped put us back on our feet. Of course finances are a constant battle for all companies, and will always will be.

We do our best to listen to what people want, but to give what we're asked to bring back, to fix, to institute, means that things people don't want to change must be amended. People want a more secure economy. They want something other than Adventure to bring in currency, they want something other than breeding and customs to do - and we're doing our best to accommodate for all that while keeping some staples alive.

As I said before, we don't believe in change for the sake of change, but nor do we believe in staying static when something can be made much more.

We know we're asking people for a leap of faith, and we do try to accommodate where we can, but there has to be a point where we go "We understand, but if you want us to do anything you've asked us to do you need to concede on this one single point". It is one game, with a small amount of BP, whose only significance is that which the users have placed upon it - a significance we were not aware that anyone had! If we had known there was a deeper emotional link other than collecting free BP then we might have considered other options, but we don't want to have a string of similar games just to keep one as people remember it being. It would be putting more free things into an economy which is already at a point where it needs dire help - which you yourself have stated many times, and that we have never disagreed with.

For now we will continue trying to figure what's causing the game to glitch for some but not all.

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:14pm

(.......... I need a Spoiler tag code is that a thing we can get. OTL My posts get too long before I know what's happened I'm sorry.)

Conium[treat4treat] (#39365) - Er... With all due respect, harping on everything that could have gone better with no apparent effort to understand the other side does not tend to be a very conductive means of bringing improvements, particularly when you directly admit you went specifically digging for things to harp on. (Backing down a bit after noticing the apology might help some, but doesn't change how volatile the previous post felt.)

I know you're frustrated, and rightly so in many regards, but that list sort of comes off as "all these unrelated things that some or most people didn't like clearly prove you need to give in on this issue, for some reason, or else". And, as was said in the other comments, it has gotten to a point where every time anything goes wrong or isn't well-received, people accuse that one thing of being a huge part of why the site is dying, so it loses its punch.

In actuality, the site's waning activity is far more likely to be a combination of factors, not only issues you've mentioned, but also the "closed community" nature of registration that serves as a double-edged sword, the drive to always give old members new pets to collect meaning we have literally thousands of pets making the "gotta catch 'em all" drive unrealistic for most members and as such always risking people losing interest in a big part of the game, breeding queues being backed up making another major feature less desirable, and more. Some things staff may have prevented or could potentially fix in the future, and I'm sure those they can they'll do their best to as they're able. But some of it's just circumstance or unfortunate side effects of normal progression.

And then, for instance, one reason breeding queues get backed up is because payment feels low, sure. (I say "feels" because when I was doing LBCs for USD, I got fast enough at them after so many years that it was actually a totally fair wage for the amount of time I spent on them; I just only got a few hours of work a week.) But other reasons? Include that people after all these years still make incredibly difficult to breed PSDs that make LBC, PLBC, and HBC a nightmare. People breed pets that "don't" go together (or at least not obviously) without notes of what they're thinking and then get mad when artists can't read their minds. Or people put long detailed notes and get mad when the artist does only some of what they wanted despite repeatedly being told it's not a commission. People go on rants about how awful and ugly their babies are and how they don't want to bother breeding again, so artists get frustrated and quit. It's not all on Staff.

But, you know?

We can keep tally of everything that's ever been done wrong, or we can focus on what we can do right now. The game is a current thing, and discussing options for that aside from the two extremes is something constructive. It may not change anything about the current situation, but understanding why this or that option won't be taken beyond 'no' is good for members. Understanding why people reacted this way is good for staff. Conversation, rather than strings of accusations, yields benefit.

Remembering staff does great stuff too also helps. Like, look at the pool party! What a great idea! The time limit presses people to not delay it indefinitely, but while it's going on it's helping the backed up queue, letting artists make money, helping the site make money, and so-forth! (I have to note, by the way, that you sounded like you were complaining about the commission panel fee but it's... Original art-- SBC, PBC, and SCC stuff-- can always be sold for full profit. The relatively small percentage that the site takes for other work is compensation for using site-provided bases and services. That is entirely fair and mutually beneficial.)

It isn't like Staff are a bunch of money-grubbing big wigs maliciously exploiting members. They're members themselves, and human, and while we may often have high expectations for people in authority that isn't a license to endlessly criticize and expect it never to get to them. (Which is why, for instance, I called Eve's attention to how harshly that one response could come off but made it clear I didn't think she meant it that way.)

Please try to remember the people behind the colorful names and think how you'd feel if someone came in blaming you for everything you or your predecessors had ever done wrong and expecting you to just automatically know how to fix everything without any sign of yielding and little to no appreciation for positive aspects. It's clear you care a lot about the outcomes of decisions like this and about the site and passion is good, but it can also be harmful. Calm and constructive bring conversation.

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:15pm

Mine reset on me too. Yesterday when I visited again Muse wouldn't talk to me. When I visited today I only got 100 BPs. It isn't a huge issue for me though, just thought I'd mention it.

Posted on: Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:30pm

🌸 SG 🌸 (#36207) - Just wanna come in and correct the SBC/PBC comment. If an artist is taking a commission based on already existing pets (Breeding commission), they have to use the panel. That's not a direct profit there~