I'd just like to echo some of the sentiments of - the sense of urgency regarding the new changeover seems misplaced and pretty detrimental to the whole affair. Longterm testing, planning, and implementation of user feedback before rolling out major changes seems like a much safer route for future endeavors. The decision to move to the new shop system before thinking of, and programming a function that allows a convenient switch from old shops to new is a tell-tale sign that while staff may have thought the transition would be smooth, it wasn't planned with the depth it should have been. I appreciate that the programmers are working on a function to allow just this, and probably other issues that have been addressed - but it's too late to assuage the disgruntled masses, and will require anyone without the time to dedicate a manual transfer of items to go without a shop entirely until the new "move all" button appears.

Sorry, nothing really constructive here or anything that hasn't been said before, but I know staff is on the threads/comments listening and working hard to make this work. If user input can be sought for something as simple as adding ears to an ontra (a joke, haha), I hope staff will consider crowdsourcing discussion for major site changes in the future!

@ Athens - ">Keith's post about no limit galleries.

Crowdsourcing! This could be a really good idea! It would be so much better if staff admitted they need more money to help with site improvements then to not acknowledge it and make Subeta "pay to win".

I agree. They made major changes to the wardrobe ages ago (V3) and it still isn't fixed or working correctly. Wish they would get something big like that taken care of and finished before changing something else.

Same here. The first problem is that only GA players can see the new shop search. The second problem is that we have to copy and paste the names of items into the new shop search. People doing quests won't bother to check the new shop search when the quest pages give us convenient links to the original shop search.

I finally found the forum thread. This thread is from last year. Please do not post in it!!!!

So now we have unique item limits in galleries?

From what I'm getting, it was said one way last year and now another just now x_x >_< headdesk

Exactly. When I quested last night I didn't have time to shop search twice for every item. If you could click new shop search and have it automatically search the same item that would be different, but it takes too long to copy/paste the names of 2-3 items in the new search for each quest.

I've spent the day trying to sort out my items. I'm now exhausted and in a lot of discomfort because of my arthritis. The sheer amount of work we're all expected to put in because of these changes is horrendous.

I think we'll all deserve a one week free GA medal when the new shops finally take over.

Wow, between here and the news post it is clear, this has gone badly. I just want to echo those who said that timing was part of the issue here: extended warning and testing aside from years of off-handed comments would definitely have been better. This comes off as "you have 10 days to learn to fucking deal with this" instead of "we have an issue that we want help testing/fixing."

And I just want to casually remind staff that last year, A Coding Fund Drive was highly suggested and many people supported the idea. Subeta, your users were willing to throw money at you to fix this very freaking problem. Now, a year later, the majority of your user base is pissed and some are threatening to leave or not spend another dime here. I think that should really make the staff realize that they need to change how they are going about this significantly in the next ten days. Your own deadline may be more of a countdown to Subetapocalypse based on all the feedback going around. :C

What about trying to reduce database strain in other ways? You guys mention that it is a big resource sink (40%) but it's practically the essence of the site. So of course it will be a resource sink - that's almost the point.

I've always wondered - we hover over an item and it reports the price today and overall price, how often are the cached prices updated? I may be wrong, but I imagine it would be pretty computationally intensive to have this estimate on-demand for every item on the site. Altering or removing a feature like this would only affect convenience, not the economy and many of the main site attractions.

Is it really necessary to have an item search option for galleries? Most people who want to view galleries are probably interested in a particular theme, not a specific item. There are other ways of searching or advertising specific gallery, e.g. through forums.

What I also don't understand is the concept of "starting with a low item cap, and then increasing it, to catch bugs early." How would enforcing such a stringent limitation help you to fix scalability issues?! If anything, having fewer items in the shops would only mask any problems instead of bring them to light. If rolling out a series of small optimizations is impossible because the entire thing needs to be restructured, this massive change should be heavily stress tested before release, with large query volumes, to ensure that it is an actual, sustainable improvement. What if after the changes, when the item limits start to relax, we run into the same problems again? Then it would be a load of trouble for nothing, plus everyone is even angrier.

So my take on this is to NEVER trust anything any member of Staff says about anything, ever, but especially don't trust what Keith says. Gotcha.

Yes, yes, yes. I tried making that point earlier and got a non-answer answer.

I guess I'm confused as to what alternative you guys mean. The shops need to be changed, but the limits, actual functionality, etc. of the change can be tweaked while we're testing (and after, for what it's worth, it would just be nice to get feedback and such sooner!)

What kind of alternatives do you mean exactly?

I didn't really get a satisfying answer tp this:

responded to that post, but it seems like he kind of stopped reading after the first paragraph and missed/ignored the part I quoted above. And if Grace just went on vacation, I guess that explains why we haven't heard much from her. I was hoping to open a dialogue about different possibilities, but instead I keep seeing the same responses about how shops need to be recoded (I've never questioned that), 250 isn't the final limit, etc., etc.

I haven't seen anyone respond to concerns about the economic impact of this change. Someone said that like 90% of the items they buy for quests come from a handful of supershops, and I think that's absolutely true for most of us. These shops are way too big to fit into the new system without some kind of alternative, which is going to have a major impact on the availability and cost of items.

Meanwhile, there's a suggestion thread for more item sinks, which sounds entirely counter-intuitive to me. I want to know how we're going to keep these items in circulation, not remove them.

OK so I've moved 2 of the categories out of my main gallery into a new one and put a handful of items into the new shop (which has no sales because no one is using the new shop search). And it's a royal pain to use the new gallery without the search filters like the old gallery/shop has. So I guess I'm not planning to do anything else until it gets worked out and finalized. Doesn't seem to be any point right now.

This has definitely been one of my concerns, the flow of items and well...everything. How are we going to keep the economy moving when all the shops run out because they can't hold large stocks?

Starting on a new project without finishing the old things is a whole other kettle of fish, but I agree with you. I've been thinking on the suddenness of the change, and am wondering if maybe the increase of errors and database strain during the last event or two, maybe even back to Luminaire, has something to do with staff trying to push this change so quickly. Vesnali is coming up, maybe they're trying to ensure the site will run smoothly during that?

So my take on this is to NEVER trust anything any member of Staff says about anything, ever, but especially don't trust what Keith says. Gotcha.

Keith's response was a half-baked answer that was COMPLETELY dodging the actual question that users have: why are galleries no longer being spun to separate pages? I really hope we get an actual answer and not more of the same vague things we've heard of several times.

So my take on this is to NEVER trust anything any member of Staff says about anything, ever, but especially don't trust what Keith says. Gotcha.

Keith's response was a half-baked answer that was COMPLETELY dodging the actual question that users have: why are galleries no longer being spun to separate pages? I really hope we get an actual answer and not more of the same vague things we've heard of several times.

Agreed - I myself am still waiting for a proper answer. I may not be as upset, but I'm still pretty annoyed about the whole thing.......

I don't really know how much "testing" they expect us to do when the filters and autoprice for the new shops aren't working yet and it takes too long to move stuff from 1 shop/gallery into the new one and recategorize it all over again. So we can't do a lot with the new shops right now until more is working. Hope they get it all figured out before the old shops are deactivated and get the limits raised to reasonable amounts.

So, my gallery is one of the main reasons I use this site, and it's already over this new limit, plus I'm going to have to categorize it all over again...

I don't understand the sudden urgency, either.