Sure, it wasn't "fair" to people with less sP in a sense that they didn't have the same voting potential. But it was never meant to be a popular vote.

We've had item drives in the past, which directly benefit item hoarders - an activity which staff has said they were discouraging in the past. Those aren't fair, but that doesn't get the same backlash that this is getting. I think it's because money inequality reflects a real problem in the world that people are upset about this. Money inequality irl and on subeta are very different though.

I also didn't vote much - just once. I voted for the blob because I like blobs - not even as a joke pet. I have a gallery for blobs. My forum image is a blob. But I didn't really care if it won or not. Sure, I might have been a bit disappointed but only that.

I didn't know until this minute how much I deeply, deeply want this, now.

Seriously, for a sp sink, these are pretty.... boring things to vote on. I can see myself giving a huge amount of sp away for new pet options, but not for a clothing option on an NPC or a color theme for a wedding.

Yes, this event is unfair to people, who for some reason or another, don't want to put a dime in a cash sink like this, nor is it fair to the die-hard, invested pet fans who clicked 50k once or twice. But do you know who it is a liiittle bit fair to, in my opinion? To the users who previously had to dump millions of their hard-earned sp, tokens and even real life money to get these experimental pets in the first place. Not to mention how time consuming it is. Atleast I can know, that the community put effort in these results and that it wasn't just given away for free.

Also, some people are treating the blob like it's the antichrist or something. It had a strong inspiring following, that even convinced me to give some love to it. People really believed in it and even after discussions and ideas, others are still like 'No, you just voted to be a troll, you guys really don't want it, you can't do anyhting with it, it's just a joke ect.."

Also, I agree with other users, that it could have been a more effective sink, When you see how much has been donated during the event, you get competitive. So it could be a better way to get more sp in the long run?

hit the nail on the head, money inequality in real life vs virtual. They are different things, but you can be sure that that resentment can easily follow a person around everywhere they go. Irrational as it may be, that will vex someone if they feel they can't get ahead in the real world or the virtual world.

Yeah it's definitely a problem for a lot of people irl and that exacerbates the feeings here. I think it's important to try to separate the real life problem from the site though. Ultimately, this is just a game and it's good to try to have fun even if something doesn't go your way - maybe next time it will.

Don't want to try to quote from my phone in an edit, that's painful, but agreeing with what you said. People won't donate near as much about trivial temporary things. The only way I'd donate a lot of sP is if it were something I really cared about, and a pet species is something large scale that would make me consider it.

I really don't have any problems at all with the way this was run. It was an ok sP sink, which I do think was the intention behind it all along.

Staff was extremely transparent with what we had to give and what we would get out of this. They then gave us a bonus pet after the results were in and alluded to more experiments gaining pet status in the future. (Hope for the squid!) It was fair in that the experiment with the most unique votes and the most sP sunk won.

I really disliked this form of voting and really hope the staff use a different format in the future. Honestly, a lot of events on this site in the last couple of years haven't been fun at all to me, because there's so many blatant problems the staff seems to overlook or ignore, and anytime someone points this out you have a bunch of rude users mocking them with 'butthurt' or 'salty' comments(which, frankly, I have no idea how these are being allowed under the community guidelines, they only make for a very toxic community that's driven me away from spending any significant time or money on this site).

I had two favorites: peacock and squid. I also thought it'd be nice for more than one pet to win. The peacock won, and more than one choice will be become a species, so I'm all right.
The blob? Well, I like the idea of a blob for a pet, but the design for how the goop is layered on the blob, I'm like...Yech. Eyes are adorable though! :) I want blob designs that are less icky and more cute.

Which events are you referring to?

I'm one of those "rich" users and I wanted the blob or the squid, but figured the peacock would win, so I didn't bother voting at all. Didn't want my sP sinking away out of sight to no purpose.

I did vote quite heavily in the wedding thing - because I knew that my preferred thing would eventually happen, so it didn't feel like quite so much of a waste.

I'm still reading through the news comments. I hope you do a money-sink poll again in the future. This was great.

I agree. When done with teams, that sort of system usually demotivates people in the teams that are falling behind because they don't think they'll win. Sometimes that happens early in the game when they actually still have a chance, so it's very much a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obviously in this case we didn't have teams, which I think would have made it even worse. Since no one was locked into a team, they'd start throwing votes at one of the top two once they pulled far enough ahead, and the gap between 2nd and 3rd place would have been even greater.

Not only that, but it gives some sneaky rich players a chance to hold their votes until the end, and throw the competition in the last minutes. That strategy doesn't work if you can't see the results, which I think is for the best.

Exposing the results while the poll was still open would have made the whole thing way too heated, and pissed off a lot more people. D:

Seriously, for a sp sink, these are pretty.... boring things to vote on. I can see myself giving a huge amount of sp away for new pet options, but not for a clothing option on an NPC or a color theme for a wedding. I should probably have mentioned that votes for goofy temporary stuff wouldn't, in my conception of the idea, cost nearly as much as the experiment pet votes. People probably wouldn't want to spend 50k or 100k on them, no, but I think a lot of people would be willing to throw 1k or 10k down, and people who really care about goat costumes (or whatever the actual idea is because my suggestions weren't meant 100% literally, though now I kind of want the Oatmeal thing to be real so I can take credit for it) could still spam votes.

It probably wouldn't take in as much money, but keeping the polls to minor stuff where staff doesn't have to do a bunch of new art or programming fixes (I realize my original suggestions don't fall in here, but something like voting on what old item comes back to the Token Shop next, maybe?) means they could run them a little more often and make up the difference that way.

Idk, I'd hate to see sP polls get overused to the point where we're voting on what we get in the token shop

Guess it's just a matter of taste. I'd much rather vote regularly on small stuff than throw tons of money at huge changes once in a blue moon.

Maybe it's because I basically never feel the same way other people do and the things I back never win, lol. If I'm going to be disappointed I'd prefer to be disappointed on a small scale.

It can be hard to separate though. I feel pretty ignored and helpless in real life for being poor and when I see staff being somewhat dismissal (even if that's not their intent) about concerns raised about the poll structure just compounds whatever feelings I already have in real life because I feel ignored, yet again, by somebody in charge. I think Rah handled it a bit better when she said this format might not be used for 'next' time but it hurt when Amber responded to possible strong-arming with "you have lots of time to earn sP". It's comments like that remind that of my problems, problems I was thinking about until I saw it.

Heck, I don't think I even voted after I saw that comment now that I think about it.

However, I'm not against the idea of sP-polls completely. Everything was much more relaxed with the charities when only priority was being picked and I certainly voted a lot more in that one. When the thing I voted for didn't win, it was just two seconds of 'awh D:' and then it was gone. I just don't like the ones where "you only get one!".

oh trust me, I feel that way too irl. I don't think was really off base saying that though. We had, what, 13 days to do this? came out the 11th, ended on the 24th? round down to 12 days because idk when things were released and time zones and stuff. So say you do all your quests every day and average 4m a day (I think that's accurate from what I've seen people say lately, I haven't done quests in forever for myself) that's 48m. say you spend half of that on the contest, that's 24m you could donate. that I'm sure is more than the majority of users. This contest wasn't supposed to be skewed by one user though. Maybe a 25m max or something should be looked into in the future to prevent such skewing. I think instead of people automatically giving up because "oh my choice won't win" and then they don't donate at all - that's a self-fulfilling prophecy - people made threads and talked to other users and tried to support each other. Of course one user can't match someone donating 200m (that's the highest I saw someone donate), but 10 people can. I don't really think I saw any networking between users like I have for the snowball contest or other team events. we didn't have strict teams, but the opportunity to make them was there.

I mostly just wanted to point out that one, possible flaw in the idea. Potentially before we were doing the idea in the future, of votes costing more as you cast more votes (which I like) and other people were upset that people were... I don't know, buying more votes than they should "be able to," or whatever. People will find something to be upset about, regardless of what may happen. And, when possible issues get pointed out, we get to think of ways to get around the problems. :D (which I also like.) Not that I've thought of any way to not have people trading around sP in that instance. haha.

Off-base or not, it still hit too close to home and it still felt dismissive. Of course, it's not entirely rational, especially when you throw up numbers, but I'm still pissed. I think overall, Rah was the only who really addressed criticisms and even then, it was a simple "we won't use it every time".

As for the lack of networking, I don't think people felt competitive about it when relative standings were unknown. I'm not sure if people actually gave a lot of thought to it as an 'event' since you don't get trophies, or titles, or the sort (which were prizes for the events with networking), and just thought of it passively until people saw the disparity between the 2nd and 3rd place. It also just left a bad taste in my mouth, so I wasn't even particularly motivated to vote that often even before I saw the comment.

I think another big thing was the method of 'voting' Even if I had the time to earn it, I wouldn't necessarily have the time or drive to donate it all. I've seen some sites let you type in numbers for kickstarter events, and that would have worked beautifully for both events.

Like I said, I took it personally but I super appreciate you coming to try and address it all. Sorry about the misunderstanding.