That's true! Thanks for pointing that out!

That's definitely something I would seriously consider should the GA and/or subscription perks be a little bit more attractive. For now at least it's a lot more beneficial for me to just buy CSC during bonus weekend and stick to buying 1 week GA tokens from time to time when my shops start to look like they need autopricing. But that option is definitely something that could be both improved and advertised upon!

I remember a website I used to play had a daily support goal and if it was reached, the site had perks the next day for players. Maybe something like that would be good, to encourage people to support or something... Like a discount in the shops, or special floating items, or something. Would also make the bonus weekends more fun... I dunno... Hard to say what would help revenue.

I would also encourage people to leave your referral link on other websites you frequent to expose more people if you can. I talk about SB offsite a fair bit and i've had quite a few people sign up. I hope they continue to play. I really love this website. It's so casual and fun. I'd love to see more people enjoying it

Also more sales, the only sale is during BF, once a year. What if once a month 1 section of the CSC will be on sale? pet slots sale is a crazy opportunity to bring more money - something that the site stopped to do years ago! What is the average sale of a pet slot with a real money CSC per day or per week? not CSC that has been bought from another user or given for free from the pool or morty cards? If you do a pet slots sale for a week, it's more likely that the daily goal bar would be reach every single day during that week! We want to spend money, just give us some perks and good opportunities to do it :)

I really do hope Keith does implements these money helping suggestions soon. I’d rather that than have this topic pop up again sooner..

hnn this so much q v q i promise i'm not trying to start up the unique names debate here but............ i think unique names def keep people away honestly it left me kinda miffed when charahub died and subeta was put forth as a replacement because as far as character storage sites go, not being able to create your actual oc's because they have a common name is a pretty big deal breaker i think ;;

Given how popular OC-storage sites are, I think Subeta should sincerely reconsider its model. Keep the pets, absolutely, but maybe create pages to document character history and such that people can view--similar to what Charahub offered. I dunno how feasible that is, especially if an image/reference gallery like Charahub's was also included.

I think that people are also looking for things to do with their OCs. Like, a lot of people have their own characters, but don't always have the skills to write about them or something. Having additional venues for pets/OCs to interact might draw folks in--for example, revisit cults, but make them be organizations for pets. Or have site events centered on roleplay. Expand the "pet friends" list on profiles so it can be customized more--e.g. making groups.

Either way, unique names need to get nixed. I can see exactly why a new user would be turned off by something like that, when more and more sites are moving away from unique usernames and towards unique ID numbers.

re: more sales I'm a little wary of having big sales too often because CSC prices would likely spike, but I wouldn't mind an occasional 10 or 15% off sale on certain item categories! And definitely occasional sales of non-item things like renames and petslots. I'm maxed on petslots right now, but I know a few friends who'd be interested in a pet slot sale!

I wonder... Would it be possible to have a sale similar to Black Friday somewhere around tax return season?

re:non-unique names If staff can figure out how to soothe the inevitable user uproar over switching to non-unique names, and find a way to confirm which user's character was made first to avoid a rise in ugly drama and character theft, I'm down for non-unique names.

Privacy settings for pet profiles could possibly be nice, but problematic at the same time. And maybe pet nicknames will turn out to be better than what we expected? I'd be interested to see where pet profiles v2.0 are currently before I make any more suggestions about this.

Subeta as a character repository is an interesting idea, but I'd rather they finish current big projects before adding another one to the pile. If pets&OCs are treated as one and the same, I'm not sure how much current petslot prices could compete with premium for places like Toyhouse and WorldAnvil. Unless I misunderstood the suggestion, in which case I'm sorry and I'm down for hearing more about it! I already use Subeta as a character repository for the most part, so I'm curious about this idea.

I think Subeta might need a few new attractives.

It could be between a new fighting game to new features that could bring the public back.

For example! I remember years ago how the site used to have an art gallery - it was small but boy, it was fun, and I met a lot of friends by how they commented on my old art lol.

I like the games they have, and the battle arena is fine - however I think giving a small push on some of the existing features might help.

Why not make a friendly and competitive sidescrolling fighting game? Yes, these on the likes of street fighter, but instead you use the pets. Pixel art, because why not? a good chunk of pets are recolors, and they could release the pets slowly as fighting participants, so that way you don't need to use stats, but its purely based on skill - its no smash bros by any means, but it would be a fun alternative and a lot of gamers LOVE fighting games!! These small flash games are cute, but you need something that keep people more actively coming back for them. An RPG-Esque style of game where you could collect loot to create items and spend currency on werables and what not also seem like a very good idea.

Also let's not forget about other things like housing systems, maybe even a board game that players could play with each ohter, like keyquest (who seemed to be BIG on neopets) or mario party.

I mean, honestly, Subeta already has an amazing asset of items and pets that could be used for a lot of potential stuff, but I'm afraid what needs to be invested here is user interaction to keep the playerbase engaged. Making characters and roleplaying is awesome, I love it! Events some times of the year are sweet too - But it might not be enough anymore, and they should try to reach for all kinds of players and interesting things to do within the site. I think there's a need for more development here- Subeta is still technically a browser game after all, with a playerbase and a good number of years on its belt.

I'm hoping for the best for the site, but I suppose they should take a look on all player suggestions and even if it is one feature at time, there needs to be at least some effort changes here... =/

I think one of the biggest problems in attracting/retaining people is the lack of games that feel worth playing. I understand Flash is dying so I don't know if Subeta has switched over to HTML5 or not on them yet, but the games feel...lackluster. The payouts...not worth it in this economy. For a petsite the focus is...not on the pets. It's disappointing if you came here for the pets. But with so few staff members, what can they do? Maybe they could take on volunteers who know coding with the understanding they wouldn't be paid, but how many people would do that? IDK.

[edit] Now on reading the whole thread, I see that was linked already. Sorry!

(I'm sorry I don't know more staff off the top of my head but this is aimed at so many people, beleive me) Sooooooo excited for these changes, thanks so much for the info and thank you SO MUCH for working so hard on this site! Seriously, I haven't found another site like Subeta and that I've been here over a decade and still love it is just insane, I want to be here another decade if I can! It is so encouraging to hear all of this. New changes on the horizon sound great, a breath of fresh air and some revitalization, updates, spitshine, tinkering, new layouts, all of it. It's just really good to hear you've got things planned and it sounds excellent and I'm looking forward to it eagerly. I really love Subeta and have a special place for it in my heart, so THANK YOU so much, you're all doing so much work and please believe how much it's appreciated! I will keep supporting Subeta as long as I'm able.

Looks like some good changes starting up! I have quite a few thoughts but I have a hand injury and typing is not easy so I'll write more down at a later date when it's healed better.

I just wanted to bring up one thing I don't think I saw mentioned: Please consider bringing back cash shop challengers every month, like monthly collections. I and several other battle-loving folks have asked for this before and have expressed interest in spending CSC on battle opponents! There is no point in not letting us buy these every month. Plus y'all have been making them into some nice wearables too so there is a secondary group of potential customers.

Yaaassss let me give you (Subeta) my money please <3

Having a monthly rotation of challengers that were released during a specific month seems like a good idea, it would be a good way to make the items more available without having the battle part of the Cash Shop being too cluttered, and it would also be good for people who want to buy the items more than once since they often have multiple uses. Most of this year's challenger items are both wearables and food, and people might not be so worried about being unable to afford buying them more than once if they know they can just wait until next year. I'm not really a battler (I just like to speculate about new challengers and stuff) but I would still buy those items for other uses if I was in the mood.

My only complaint about the delayed tea house is the fact that it's delaying the Garden revamp and Lower West Side map because of the voting. I feel like the staff don't want to go back on their promise and do the Gardens and map first anyway even though it seems like a better idea. I guess a good compromise is to release all three at once, or maybe one day after another, like with the Horns and Roses re-releases. So that way when the tea house finally is released, people won't keep saying "Finally, now what about the Gardens and Lower West Side?" if they know they'll be released very shortly after. For all we know the other two could have already been worked on anyway.

I agree with what you said about the voting stuff. At this point it's been over 2 years, and we still don't really have an exact time frame of when the Teahut stuff is going to be released. I've seen other people already asking what about the other things, and mention that they wouldn't mind seeing the other two things get released first even if it technically goes against the voting. And some other people have mentioned that people may have also voted differently if they knew it was going to take this long to see any of these things (especially because the Centropolis one should be just a new map, I don't see how you can really do much else with that).

And it's not like the Teahut even won by that much in the first place. Here are the results of the voting, per this news post:

1. Shengui Guo Teahut with 295,550,000 sP donated
2. Gardens with 293,750,000 sP donated
3. Centropolis Lower West Side with 249,150,000 sP donated

So, the Centropolis map had a sizable amount less donated to it than the other two, but the difference between the Teahut and the Gardens voting was only around 2 million sP, which is pretty small considering the total amounts that were donated.

IDK, this could all be a moot point anyway, because it wouldn't really make sense to update the gardens right now (seems more appropriate to do during spring, or as part of Vesnali), and if the Teahut gets released later this year, the Gardens would be the next step for next spring anyway.

I guess this is all just stuff for staff to consider for the future, maybe not the best idea to have users vote on the order of new projects to be released when we have no idea how long it will actually take to develop and program them and all that. I'd rather just stick to voting on new pet species, new items, and other things like that which can be (relatively) easily implemented.

(I know staff have said they didn't foresee the Teahut being this big of a project originally either, so I'm not mad, and I'm still excited to see what it's all about based on the teasers y'all have released. But yeah, just a bit disappointing that it's delaying two other projects because of voting that took place 2 years ago.)

This is a fascinating thread to see some of the internal things that are put on display here and it honestly seems like you guys are just paralyzed with indecision.

Updating the forum rules? Go to a modern forum and use theirs as a model, it doesn't take recreating the wheel here. There are 10s of industry standards that you can use for models. Pick one, make some tweaks foreward to the relevant department heads for review and comments, and implement it. It should take like 2-3 hours spaced over a week.

Bringing back the BC challengers on a monthly basis, something that could potentially squeek out a little extra revenue each month (probably not a ton) at the cost of manually adding them into the cash shop at the beginning of each month? Publically, you guys have supposedly been talking about this change since July 1, when it should really only require an email to the BAs and maybe to Keith for final approval and then fire away.

I have worked for a couple different small companies and organizations and it seems like you guys have a project management and standard operating procedure problem. Simple changes seem to drag on for months probably because there isn't a formal process for dealing with them.

As for the site as a whole, I think you guys hit the nail on the head at the beginning that pet sites in general are not as popular as they once were. The overall market for them is shrinking drastically. I think the only way you survive another 15 years is to drastically shift your model of customer acquisition. I think you need to heavily integrate with platforms like facebook if you ever want to see growth in users again (and even there the golden age of facebook games is probably gone, but if you look at zyngas stock price after their initial boom/bust they are up 200-300% from their lows.). The core game of subeta (sp/questing/games/collections/battling with possibly the biggest avatar customization database of any other game) would make a great facebook game with some tweaks, but you would need to be playable inside facebook.

hnn this so much q v q i promise i'm not trying to start up the unique names debate here but............ i think unique names def keep people away honestly it left me kinda miffed when charahub died and subeta was put forth as a replacement because as far as character storage sites go, not being able to create your actual oc's because they have a common name is a pretty big deal breaker i think ;;

All of this 100%. I really liked 's suggestion from another board. I don't think staff ever responded to it:

If it's possible to have pets linked like subeta.net/users/Cass/Dorian or something, then a lot of users' unique pet name gripes would be solved. No one would have to worry about the annoyance of linking by pet ID and it would still look really nice. When people have the capacity to hoard 100 great names on a single account, unique names just aren't a sustainable model anymore. :c Like , I think that Subeta has a lot of potential to appeal to people who like character storage if a few thing were updated.