With the introduction of the our new subscriptions (thank you to everyone who has subscribed already!!) and custom wearable vouchers we're looking to shake up the custom wearable market. BUT we want to share the decision making for the market that so many of you have poured so much creative energy, time and money into.

The concept and rules for custom wearables come from a long time ago, when we were worried about them overrunning the site completely with hundreds of items. 😆 Well, we're now at tens of thousand items on the site and I believe we've crossed that bridge. Thousands of times. So, the new focus and guiding light for the CW market is to make it as easy and efficient as possible to submit an item and get it on the site, and just as easy to find the perfect CW to complete your outfit, for as few CSC as possible to continue to support the site.

We're starting to find where our creative focus is best spent (plots! events! features!) and it's not on pumping out new wearables (y'all have that COVERED), so, we're putting together a small group of users to work with us on three specific, near term goals:

1. Rules and Acceptance Criteria: The rules for custom wearables were made a long time ago, when we were worried about them overrunning the site completely. Well, we're now at tens of thousand items on the site and I believe we've crossed that bridge. So, my new focus for the CW market is to make it as easy and efficient as possible to submit an item and get it on the site, and just as easy to find the perfect CW to complete your outfit, for cheap.
2. Approval / Denial Process: If we relax the rules and lower the price (!) we expect significantly more items to come into the queue. We're interested in a solution where users can give each other feedback, and be part of the process for approving the items onto the site.
3. Pricing: If we make it easier to submit new items, we also want to lower the prices. Find a way to remove the slotting process overall and move all CW purchases to the shops (giving the submitter multiple copies, and reducing the price to shop are options) to streamline finding CWs to wear and buy.

These goals push us to make the market sustainable so that we have the resources to continue to build and improve the wardrobe and the other areas of the site and focus our staff creative energy building those long term goals. We're starting to reach out to users that we would like to be involved in this council this week, but if you would like to put your name in the ring please send me a smail with what you think you'll be able to bring to the above discussions. We're looking for people passionate about the CW market, from someone who just has an interest in custom wearables to someone who has submitted hundreds of items to the site.

This post is going to be the theme of posts to come. I've got some great ideas for ways to change the game to inject a little bit of excitement into it, and I want to make them together.

Some of them are going to feel like breaking the game, but hopefully we make it more fresh and different. I've got a list of things that when asked why they work the way they do it's "well, Neopets did it that way". We've now gone through a generation of sites who said that the features worked that way because Subeta did it. Time to change!

Coming in the next week is our plan to address unique pet names, with a timeline for rapid implementation.

To help develop new rules, recommend new policies for the queue, and pricing.

They will not be involved in accepting or denying items from the queue.

Whew, thank you for that post!

I want to be clear that we are not going to stop making wearables or other items on the site. The point I was making is that there are a few options for a creative team as small as ours, working on a project as big as Subeta. If we can get the CW market to a place where if you're looking for a special wig it's the first place you go, our creative department has one less wig to draw and can instead focus on long term improvements to the site. A recent example is the icons on the user profiles, they're small and you'll stop noticing them in a month, but they are HUGE IMPROVEMENTS over the buttons that were there previously, and give a lot more personality to the page. These are the kind of things we want our creative team working on, not a new pair of pants (not that there is anything wrong with a new pair of pants!)

I know that we talk about things that we've missed the mark on a lot, and one of those things is the tea hut. It's a great example, because the programming for it was wrapped up (at least for the first phase) a long time ago, but it's the creative work of building the characters, the story and the art for all of the items that we wanted involved that have continuously put it on the back burner because it's significantly more time consuming. If we had focused 100% of our creative energy on it ("No new items are going out this month, we're instead working on x") I think we could have pushed it over the finish line! Instead our small creative department worked on it, upcoming holidays, and regular releases.

I don't say this to complain, we made choices and built the site in a way and are now reflecting on how we could build it with more community involvement. We want Subeta to be somewhere that we're building together.

I also want to address the "unpaid labor" portion! I'm going to be frank, and I hope that these posts in the last few weeks have made it clear that I'm invested in Subeta and want this site to succeed. I have not been paid for my work on Subeta in more than three years, because generally we haven't made enough money to pay me (not that I cost a ton, just we get to the end of the bank account after having paid everyone else and the servers) and I'd rather the money go to our incredible creative team, pay for servers, etc. This isn't a sad story for me - I've been fortunate to be employed doing the thing I love (building community, programming) and that means I can pour purely passion into Subeta.

My focus for the next few months is to find ways to empower the community on the site to be more involved in decision making, in building the game and in moving us forward. In some cases that will be things that you could get paid for in the real world, but hopefully adding to the game will be a worthwhile trade off.

Another somewhat unrelated thing: As we refocus our creative department and start picking the "big bets" we want to make for the rest of the year, there are going to be opportunities for us to hire freelance artists to help us create some of the beautiful visions we're coming up with. Our CW artists will be an excellent pool of creative people to tap into (and pay!) for that kind of work.

Thanks for the questions. I understand the anxiety of change, especially when you've invested so much time and energy and money into something! I'll be honest, I found your questions really pointed, so I'm trying to respond to the question itself and not the tone.

1. We will be focusing our creative efforts on plots, events, and new features, and that is where items will come from and will use those avenues to make the game more exciting and fun, and not spend resources creating more main shop sets of items. We're at tens of thousands of wearables on the site, and believe that avatar creators could sustain themselves purely on what is in the wardrobe now for years without us needing to release more standard sets of items in regular avenues. Special wearables from events and new features will fill in missing gaps, and CW creators (with reduced prices of getting items on the site and easier tools for selling) can fill in gaps they believe are missing.

2. Honestly, because this isn't rule by committee. We're at a really important point in Subeta history where we just have to start moving quickly. We believe that there are things that need to change about the system, and have assumptions. We've watched feedback from the whole community, and built those assumptions around that feedback. Now we move to a phase where we need to check those proposals and assumptions and start moving on implementation. The number of stakeholders and size of feedback groups needs to shrink considerably to not be moving on this for the next ten years. At the end of the day, we decide the rules that create the CW market, and if people in the community are unhappy with those rules they can take their considerable talents elsewhere. We're making proposals for the health of the entire site, and are putting together a diverse group of people who can help us make it happen.

3. What we're asking this group to do is engage in conversation with us over the three goals, the proposals that we've come up with so far, and what next steps should be. At the end of the day I'll still be the one deciding on the rule changes (with input from the council) and anything else that comes out of the group.

In the message I'm sending when asking if someone would like to participate it is clear that this is not a paying position and participation is entirely at will, however there are perks involved including on site currency. It'll be unfortunate to lose some voices to the conversation if they can't participate, but I totally understand the priority!

TLDR: I'm really excited to make Subeta better. I want to drive users to come online every day because there is something to check out or do, and getting the creative department focused entirely on that is part of it. Also, we just have a ton of things that have "been that way" for 500 years, and now is the time to shake things up. The energy is really positive, and I'm bringing that energy into this council, to speak for improvements the CW market has been asking for for a long time and advocate for change. This is a small step in a big direction!

No apologies needed, I'm trying to figure out my own tone on these style of posts. I want to be all ✨ emojis :sparkling-heart: all the time, because that's generally how I operate in life, but I also have to radiate the energy of the person who owns & operates the site and makes decisions at the end of the day that effect the people I employ and their families, the thousands of users who play the site today, and the hundreds of thousands who've played before and have memories 😰. So, I'm sorry if my tone comes off mechanical by also chaotic, it's not on purpose!

The duties of the council will be in having conversations, giving feedback, and helping come to decisions on the goals outlined in the first post. The amount of involvement is entirely up to the individuals, and there aren't any recurring tasks ("go through 10 items in the queue, rewrite 5 rules") but more threads of conversation on particular changes, and coming together on what that change will be. Advise vs implement, I guess is a way to look at it.