Moving this to site feedback. While there are some suggestions weaved in this is more about a discussion.

I love Subeta. Everyone on the staff loves Subeta. There is no reason any of us would still be here if that weren't the case. I facetime'd yesterday (who has twins!) and talked about missing Subeta and wanting to be back desperately. None of us are here because we're getting rich, hahaha.

These types of games just don't make that much money anymore, and that's really fine! We can figure out where to tweak and change things to keep the game moving forward, and keep people interested. A lot of us have multiple jobs because we love Subeta, and want to make sure that the money can go toward keeping the servers running, paying for vendors and paying the moderators & artists and ensure we can pay them as well as we possibly can for the work that they do. I've even paid for things out of pocket a few times because I truly love this website.

I think I've tried to level set the expectations over the last few years, but clearly still aren't doing a great job of keeping things moving forward. and I talk every single day. I was going to post a screenshot here from our staff slack, but couldn't embed 💀 But, we were talking yesterday about optimizing avatar generation, and have been making tweaks and improvements to the API server. A lot of the work that we do is invisible and just keeps the site moving.

To give you an idea of where my priorities are: I have another full time job (and have had another full time job since 2016) where I am programming all day (literally, my job is to build a way for everyone else to program online) and so coming back to the computer to build Subeta is hard. We've got notion documents full of plans and changes to the site, but when it comes to implementing them... 💀

We've tried to hire freelance engineers to work on the primary codebase (subeta.net) and it's literally a waste of money. It takes months to onboard to code this old and even if we're having them entirely rewrite code on new.subeta.net, you have to be able to dig through the old code.

The good news: I will be back full time on Subeta in mid-July, for at least a few months. I've got a list of priorities, but the folks at this bottom of this post will be able to help craft those into an actual plan.

The CW system is a great example of how we've seen our income numbers dwindle and want to ensure the site can stay up and running, and so handing off some of the "content creation" to the users takes that off our hands. You're right that we haven't released a delish set in awhile, and that's 100% because we can focus that energy on other things because of the CW system.

There are a ton of good ideas on this board. I'd love to harness some of this energy! So, I'm going to open up two new part time positions (paid!) to address what I see as two major complaints.

1. Community Manager: Someone to communicate on threads like this, take community feedback and work with both staff & the community to organize these small tweaks that would make everyone on the site a little happier. Every place I've worked has had someone specifically hired to work with the community, we should too :)
2. Another content manager: has multiple jobs and has moved into more of a management role instead of a day to day role. I think hiring someone to take over her responsibilities (renaming items, moving things around the site to keep things fresh, coming up with new ways to interact with holidays, organizing items to revamp / rework for the artists)

Then, those two hires can work with me to come up with a plan to find places where users can create content or volunteer in a non-exploitative way. I don't want to rely on volunteer labor for major things.

Finally, , from your tone on this thread and all the others you post on, I think I'd recommend you cancel your sub and move on if that is what you want to do. Threatening to do it has lost the punch, and the negativity moved on from 'feedback' a long time ago.

Making baseless assumptions about our intentions or what we're "perfectly content to watch" goes against every post we've made in the last year. We do want to keep going and have said that.

(PS: Sorry that this post is all over the place, I wrote it while in a meeting)

It's either too late, or it's a nice idea, come on. You aren't being harsh with your words, you're just showing up to every thread to tell anyone who is even slightly positive about the site that they're wrong.

If it has to! The hope (and how I've seen it done well in other places) is that it would be someone who engages with the community, pulls out the really good ideas and is about to focus the staff on them and give updates to the community (which energizes us to do more!). I think in the sense that I'm the messenger on threads like this would probably continue, since I've always felt it's unfair to put the burden of any decisions made on the site on anyone but me.

Thank you for leaving feedback, I really do appreciate it! I'm not sure that the "point of the site" can really be defined, anymore. The home page has this blurb:

However! I do think there is a lot of low hanging fruit that could be addressed with pet stuff, and also there is a ton of functionality that we can build out in the new system. I'd love to explore things that don't require a ton of art assets in the short term!

Yes, so just the most high staff time required stuff possible 😂 And yes, everyone has the ability to post their opinion on here, I also have the ability to respond. The community guidelines exist and are pretty clear on the golden rule.

brushes off my 1 year old revamp of the smail and forum system 😭 I'm so close SO CLOSE to finishing the forum revamp, including some special fun new features. One of the things we're doing is getting rid of the "do x to the person above" or "post what you got from the bath house" type of threads and instead going to focus on building actual community (hence, a community manager!) and I think having user run contests (maybe we can even provide some prizes!) would be 💯

Yup -- the Pet Profiles V2 is the project that is actively working on now 💪🏼 We're both super excited about it, and there has been some solid progress on it lately. It's one of those things that as you pull the strings it gets more and more complicated (I don't know how the current user profiles still work?? honestly) but there is progress!

I agree on the newsletter, and that's exactly the kind of thing I'd want a community manager to take over and put on a schedule, haha.

The difficulty with this idea is the same difficulty with every other idea, we want to build this, it's a great idea. We're building everything on new.subeta.net with modern coding (that new people could pick up!) and so building a shopping cart for the currency shops means building currency shops on the new.subeta.net. Which means adding the ability to add/remove items (which we can do since the introduction of the wardrobe management page ;)) which means probably porting the inventory which means taking care of the 1,000+ items with custom code that can no longer run on new versions of PHP because they removed the custom code evaluation functionality 😭

So you can see how something like "cart for currency shops" spirals out into 5,000 separate individual projects.

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