The thing is, I think that users get fed up. As one that has been here for only 3 years, I still have witnessed my fair share of lags, glitches, etc. It is because we love the site that we want to site to improve. Sure, there are always people willing to spend. But I think it's best for the site to have more users who want to spend in order to make the site survive and to continue improving the site too.

However, I disagree. I don't think that users should have to accept lags and glitches if they want to play. I don't think that users should be expecting things to go wrong all the time. It shouldn't be normal! I'm glad that Subeta is owning up to what happened and attempting to improve, but I have faith that they can do better.

They may have to keep old code as part of their records or something. Hopefully obsolete scripts does get labelled differently so it doesn't get any use in the future. That is probably one of the more important lessons they can learn from this.

Stocking duplication only happened because the old code was ran. Surely if you run an old script that was replaced by something different, something is going to go wrong.

I don't think they expected anything to go wrong, so they could safely not have any programmers on. Maybe next year they'll be sure to make sure someone can be online. I don't want to tell staff that they can't all go on vacation during the holidays though, I think they deserve to spend time with their family. They will learn from this though and that's all that matters.

As for the whole "Subeta is a business" thing: they handled it like any business does. Pacify the people complaining with an act of goodwill. there were what 2k users on? That's 50k in CSC that went out + whatever GAs cost. it's not like that'll equate to 50k in losses though. Have you ever been to a restaurant or store when their computers were down? I was at a hotel and their key scanner was down so they couldn't use it and we didn't get our keys right away. Service really struggles and things slow way down, but at no time to I go "hey this should have never happened, this is a business!" I'm a fairly understanding person, and I realize that a business does not ever want things to go wrong, but sometimes they do and they handle it the best they can. I don't know what more Subeta could have done without relying on hindsight to tell me what exactly should have been done. Sure, it sucks it happened. Things are always sorta disappointing when they go wrong, but I thank them for doing what they could when they could.

But if you went to this hotel on multiple occasions and had this happen repeatedly, I am sure you would stop staying there.

I used the hotel as an example. There's a lot less that can go wrong in a hotel. Coding is full of bugs that can happen. Have you ever played an MMO? Every patch, there is something that isn't executed as it should be. it's the nature of coding.

Agree wholeheartedly with here. She summed up my feelings on the matter nicely, so I'll try not to be redundant.

I too appreciate the transparency and the attempts at compensation, but I was literally saying the same thing to someone the other day: this is a business and in no way should there have been no one around to fix the problem. Nothing should ever hinge on one person, especially if they are not going to be around. There should be back-ups and contingency plans in place in case something goes wrong, and there wasn't much of that during this entire fiasco.

A huge part of the reason I quit playing Subeta for a while was because I got fed up with the site being broken and in fact there were a few months where I straight-up could not play the site at all because of the way my internet interacted with it. (Basically, anytime Subeta would throw up a downtime page - which is a lot - my internet service would for some reason save that in the cache and there was literally nothing I could do about it. So basically Subeta was just a string of downtime pages for me and for months on end until we changed internet services.) This didn't happen on any other site, so that was extremely frustrating and made me wonder what was going on in Subeta's workings that would make it do that.

That being said, I did come back to Subeta because they treat their userbase like adults, they do listen to us, and they put out really great quality work. I know they can do better and I know they can improve. If I didn't have faith, I wouldn't keep coming back. Comments like this aren't meant to pick on the "poor staff", because we love this game as much as those of you who want to offer compliments rather than criticism. I can't speak for everyone else, but I criticize because I care about this site. If I didn't, I would just leave and take my money elsewhere without a word.

Some things were out of staff's hands here and I understand that, but there was also a lot that I feel could have been prevented if there had simply been better precautions in place.

I'm sure we'll see the Manchu revamp soon. It takes time to revamp an entire species. If it can avoid the development hell some species went through (IE, Hikei went through, what, 5 polls?), then it's all for the better.

I hope we'll get an elephant or pig pet species in time too! ^^

[edit] Ugh, y'all are killin' me here. Subeta's a business, awesome observation; so that means they have to make revenue. Ya want things improved 'round here? Keep throwin' your dollars at the site then. It's the only way Keith can continue to afford to 1.) pay his employees and 2.) hire freelance coders to rework some of the older features or introduce new ones, while he continues to work on a site recode (I assume that's still coming, I know that can take quite a long time depending on what needs to be done)

Change doesn't happen quickly. It only does if there's enough revenue to spread around.

Just wanting to put this out there, but even if Grace had been on her laptop, I don't know if this was unavoidable. Sure things could have been fixed sooner, but only by what, 5 days? instead of monday/tuesday when the trees get released, it would have been last wednesday/thursday? so the 30th/31st? that's nothing too game changing.

I think my only complaint is the lack of Gelatin War again. We didn't even have a battle week.

Regarding everything else, well, the only thing to do now is learn from mistakes and feedback. I am very grateful for the attention and support from staff during the last days of the year, even with the attack and the trees, and would like to say thanks. Maybe I'm being a bit too optimist, but I believe 2016 will be a good year for subeta. I guess I'll just wait and see.

We didn't have the gelatin war because the plot occurred when we would have had it. I think they possibly could have held the gelatin war in June/July when we were wanting the plot and nothing was going on, but this year was a pretty good year for battling all around. I hope we do get one next year!

[edit] I experienced little to no lag during the plot this year. I don't think we get near the lag we used to because of traffic. That is a noticeable improvement.

No, but we did get a whole lot of new opponents to beat up. Especially the Freyalise Crew for Keelhauliday. :)

Yeah, it was relatively stable for holidays and the plot, with maybe occasional issues here and there. Sporadic and unnoticeable to me.

We averaged about 1.2k to 1.6k users online at the same time during those events, and the site was fine. To say Subeta's not made improvements is a complete fallacy I don't freaking understand.

All of these purchases were done in December, I actually got nothing during Black Friday because no pet slots

IS MY LICENCE TO COMPLAIN VALID?

But yeah. I am giving the site money, and I don't have a GA, so I deal with the ads. I don't mind buying from the cash shop if something tickles my fancy but man, give me stuff I can be interested in.

This is why I'm sad, a lot more than because of the lag and the glitches. I'm annoyed at lag and glitches, but they're usual.

2015 did very great for pet slots! I got 12 new pet slots, 5 with SP, 5 with CSC, 1 for free and one for my loyalty box but...I would have loved to get a new specie or something cool (LIKE A SQUID. OR A PIG.) to fill these slots. This is the one thing I'm happy about 2015, man, we got so many pet slots. This is a part of the site that was not neglected. Just wish I had fancy stuff to put in there.

(what do you mean, the fancier color i actually own is silver?)

Yup, labeling and flagging the old, outdated scripts to let any programmer who comes across them know that they're out of date would likely help prevent situations like that in the future. I'd like to hope that the programmers already took measures to make sure a similar situation doesn't happen again. It just makes a lot more work for them. Annoying for both the users and the programmers to deal with and I really do have to give Grelca mad props for putting this much effort into resolving the mess.

As for them not expecting anything to go wrong - Subeta's dealt with DDoS attacks every so often since the 4chan Longcat incident years and years ago. We've already had at least one DDoS attack that I can remember in 2015. I'm not saying the staff should be in full-out paranoia mode, but being overly casual about things is not a good mindset either. Having everything rely on one person who is known to travel frequently isn't good. I'm glad they realized that, but sadly shit had to hit the fan first. :/

If memory serves, something similar happened during Peka-Boo - Keith wasn't around to start it off, or something? I don't remember it well since I wasn't doing so well health-wise, but it's definitely not the first time he was on the road while something was going on and was the only one with the skills/abilities to kick things off on the programming end.

For those getting upset how no thread like this can go by without complaining, consider this: staff can and needs to do better if they want Subeta to stay on the map, especially because the market for petsites is getting steadily smaller. Staff have also been known to start off great, but drop the ball halfway, then forget the ball was even there to begin with.

The complaining isn't done out of malice. It's feedback. If you only provide positive feedback and avoid the negative, the folks in charge assume everything is okay and things will stagnate. It's safe to say that none of us want Subeta to stagnate and go along the Neopets route. I've been here 11 years, hoping for at least another 11. Subeta wouldn't have gotten so far if it wasn't for both the user feedback and the work from staff.

Not going to touch on the other things that went on during the year like the monthly themes, battle opponents, etc., this isn't really the topic for it.

No need to be snarky about it. The site being a business is a perfectly valid reason to criticize, which is why so many people keep saying that. I do agree though with putting revenue into the site; it's a healthy way to help get things fixed. As I said before, if I didn't want the site to get fixed, I wouldn't spend money here. I may not spend as much as everyone else due to my financial situation, but I do spend. Every little bit helps.

I'm all for giving constructive feedback. But when everything that's been said has been repeated to the point of a broken record, it's enough. The message has been made plenty loud and clear by enough people, it's now time to move on. Forgive, and move on, even if you're still sour about all that's happened. Ain't any good reason to hold a grudge. =)

NO YOU NEED TO ALSO BE ABLE TO HOP ON ONE FOOT AND SING A SONG IN ACAPELLA. At the same time. >=p

Anyways, those who spend large amounts in two or three months time only helps so much, if the majority of active users only buys small amounts sporadically ($5-10 for example, especially on CSC bonus weekend), or none at all. If every active player bought at least $5 or $10 worth once a month over the span of an entire year, with or without the bonus CSC weekends or sales being a regular thing; plus additional profit coming in from those who regularly purchase CSC throughout the month in either large or frequent quantities, more things could be improved a bit faster.

site dropped out once or twice during the bosses, but that's all I remember. it was temporary, maybe 5 minutes max.

staff obviously knows that things went wrong. they don't need complaining to tell them that. things will be different in the future regarding DDoS attacks.

I don't think most of us here can really complain about the handling of the DDoS attack since Keith probably has the most experience of anyone here on how to handle them. Do we really know that could have been handled better? I don't know if there's any site performance cost to protect it from DDoS attacks at all times, or if that's going to accomplish anything really.

There's only so much complaining that is constructive before it becomes beating a dead horse. I'd like to hear if they will label archaic scripts differently in the future, if that would even help, and if that is even a possibility. Other than that, I think everything went as good as we can expect. EVERYTHING about the trees is going to be fixed now. It would be one thing if the accidents happened and then it wasn't fixed to the best of their abilities, but that's not what happened, so I don't see what complaining will really do at this point.

Compared to other freemium sites, subeta staff have a much better ethic to get things fixed and explain things to users!

I'm super sad all of this happened, and whilst it was annoying at times, there was a good line of communication and we had a full explanation of what happened!

well since everyone else is taking up the complaining route on a thank you thread, and while yeah sure I'm just as salty over trees being late, the lag, downtime, glitches and the rest as everyone else, I'm here to thank the staff. I'm thankful they admit fault, im thankful that even after so much amount of time we got a full explanation, im glad that even after the while it took, it still happened. thank you staff, for figuring everything out and fixing it, even if it did take longer than we wanted or thought,(a single bug leads to several more, after all.) thank you for finding out how to get everyone's names back on presents, even if its taken so much longer than what we expected, or how some of us wanted, and yeah, sure, to some people this sounds like thanking them for just doing their job, and something stupid to do seeing its their job, but hey, I'm still thankful they are. Working for Subeta, with all the faults and problems that arise, shouldn't be a thankless job 24/7. I'm so thankful for how hard they've been working over the holidays. i still appreciate everything they've done, and continue to do. i hope everyone can take a few days to take a breather after this whole fiasco blows over, and that 2016 leads into a less stressful year for everyone.

Yeah, I'd like to know the same thing about those old, relic-scripts from the past. If they can be flagged as old/do-not-run, or archived somehow without affecting the rest of the coding, it would definitely save a lot of headaches in the future, if Subeta decides to hire more programmers. Maybe Grelca will clear this question up this weekend, once the tree issues are fixed and sorted?

Oh, there's absolutely no denying that Subeta did a lot of things really well in 2015 (so much uptime and the near-painless server change!), but this sadly made it clear that there's no resting on the laurels.

On the topic of Keith being the only one experienced with DDoS attacks... That's kind of odd, isn't it? We have 3 programmers I believe (Keith included) and before all this, only Keith knew (and had the tools to deal with) a DDoS attack. To me, that's a bit strange considering how frequent of a threat DDoS attacks are to websites in general and how often he's on the road.

It's been remedied now and I'm really glad about that, but it's the thought that it took how many years for someone else to get these tools and the proper briefing on how to handle it that somehow doesn't sit well with me. Keith's fellow programmers have been on staff for a while, so the fact that they haven't been trained and given the tools to handle that situation until 2016 is strange, at least to me.

I know DDoS attacks aren't a constant occurrence to the site, but it never hurts to be prepared. Having more people knowing how to deal with the issue if it pops up won't hurt Subeta in the long run.

Well I don't really find that odd. He is the owner after all. I don't think it's particularly useful to question why they did things that way if it has been remedied for the future though. and in the past year, we've had two DDoS attacks directly targeting Subeta? in the past two years I don't know if the number is any higher. It's not exactly fair to hold them responsible for something that doesn't happen with any regularity and something that isn't all that frequent. These criticisms are 20/20 hindsight observations. I think they handled it very well though. Sure, things happened that may not have happened if they did things differently, but they reacted to the best of their abilities. This is what I am thankful for and it's what I'd like people to see too.

This isn't really a thread to express our frustrations, it was meant to be a thank you thread. So thank you for working on the site and fixing these problems that popped up.

Oh no, I'm not frustrated or complaining. I'm enjoying discussing this with you.

To be fair, people in all kinds of businesses and workplaces are trained to deal with work-related emergencies, I don't see why Subeta should be any different? They have stepped their game up after this, but I'm a little disappointed that it always takes something big going wrong for things that should be common sense to be pushed forward. , I suppose.

All in all, the DDoS attack was handled well considering the circumstances, like you've said. Grelca's gone above and beyond to fix the issues with the Script that stole Christmas and has kept us posted on everything but the kitchen sink. Subeta is an old site with experienced staff and, human error aside, this is the kind of mistake that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Hopefully they will start flagging/archiving outdated scripts from now on. Something they should have been doing already, but judging from previous situations, Subeta likes learning things the hard way.

And, as I've said a few times in my previous posts - I do really appreciate the work put into resolving this. I'm a salty old fart, I'll be the first to admit it, but seeing that Grelca's really gone above and beyond to retrieve the gifting log says a lot about her dedication.

lmao, and then the forums start going wonky. Ah, Subeta... If it's not one thing, it's another.