Communication
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First: A reminder that we have community guidelines, and I will enforce them. My email (.net">keith.net) is always open to have conversations about the site, and if you're a programmer we're always looking for contractors. In addition, if you have any recommendations for hires in the programming department, my email is open.
I'm not going to post about the difficulty of running a 20 year old site, or how much investment it takes to turn things around (go look up how much a PHP programmer starts at ;)). I think, honestly, it's time to lower your expectations about what Subeta is going to provide you. We're keeping the site running, building the wardrobe, hopefully launching new features more often. For most people (over 80% of the user base has never made a single CS purchase) Subeta is entirely free. If the current state of affairs means that means you stop purchasing from the cash shop, or getting subscriptions that is fine, especially if you feel like you aren't getting value from your purchases. If you feel like you're sticking around just to see the tea room, I think we can both admit that you're not sticking around for anything positive, and you don't have to! I'm working with on hitting a big reset on how this back and forth works, my goal being to bring us back to an earlier, scrappier kind of flow (more things happening more quickly) but it is hard to change structures in a 20 year old site.
We've been offered buyouts before, and I've said no because every time it was by a giant corporation that would have immediately put 50 ads on the site, increased CS costs and pushed everyone into subscriptions. The plan given to me is always "How to turn around the profitability of Subeta" that when reduced is just about extracting as much value from you as possible. That isn't acceptable to me, and so I've always turned down those offers. There are hundreds of tutorials for learning programming (I built Subeta based on one 20 years ago) and I'd (honestly) love for one of you to make a new pet site that has all of the features you want. I'd find a way to let you transfer wealth or pets, or something. I mean this completely sincerely and honestly, I would love to see new pet sites popping up, but I have a feeling we all know why they aren't successful.
Until then, we've got Subeta. And again, my email for anyone interested in providing programming support (javascript or PHP) is .net">keith.net. Or product support, or if you think you have a skill that would make the site better, my email is open. Even just a few hours here and there fixing up small site bugs can help!
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Thank you! No idea how I missed it lol
[Quote]I think, honestly, it's time to lower your expectations about what Subeta is going to provide you.[/quote]
I'm not even going to formulate a well thought out response to this because my god. All we're expecting is open communication on what's going on, and for things that we are promised to actually be done. I know the site is old, code is messy and all that. I don't care if features are broken. But if we keep hearing "we're working on it" and then nothing gets done for how long? And no updates? It gets frustrating. Just stop promising us things if you can't deliver.
We're just asking for your word to mean something.
We...just want effective communication on basic things. Like the pet spotlight. Like MM. Or that when staff says an item is going out via "this method" it really does come out "this method" not "that method". .-.
If you want to put in on discord fine, but also post it on the forums AND the news page so you hit everybody, not just a select group. This board isn't meant to divide the userbase and the staffbase further. This is to unite them and finally iron out all these issues.
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Truthfully, my nitpicks are not so much about features of the sites, but rather the state of user-staff relations. It seems like a lot of recent decisions regarding items and events have resulted in a lot of negative hubbub. I still struggle to understand what happened with the Melody's Cottage items and why things panned out the way they did because of how it doesn't seem like those items' distributions were done fully in good faith. I hope they were meant with good intentions--it's awesome that users are getting new items and fun additions--but I think some of those decisions did more harm than good. I'm happy to stick around and enjoy the site--like I've said, I've been considering paying for a subscription--but the negativity that goes around the community is definitely a cause for concern. As far as other complaints go, a lot of people have put key complaints down and I don't want to just dogpile in further.
People gripe about missing features because you talk about them, you hype us up, and then nothing happens. I get you are short staffed, I get that people got sick, but you can't keep making promising things or talking about that you want to do or plan on doing and then not doing them.
Maybe we need to lower our expectations, but it's also up to Staff to set up these expectations based on your ability to actually follow through with what you say you will do.
<p>If you want to put in on discord fine, but also post it on the forums AND the news page so you hit everybody, not just a select group.
This board isn&;t meant to divide the userbase and the staffbase further. This is to unite them and finally iron out all these issues.
First: These things aren't going to be ironed out in a "feedback" thread that starts by saying this:
Air out your grievances here regarding staff-user communication. See how long until this thread gets locked I guess. But enough is enough. If no one else will say it, then I will.
There wasn't an intention of any problem solving here.
Second: I think you're all right that we've done a poor job of communication around timelines, deadlines, and getting things out. I think an easy way to reset the board there is to say -- nothing that we've promised up until this point is certain to happen. The tea hut is done conceptually, but has not had an opportunity to be programmed. Pet profiles are around twenty percent done, and have a lot more to finish. Items have been entirely given a new rarity in the 1-5 rarity squish, and some backend code is even using that, but updating the shops got put on hold for the cache server (running multiple versions out of date so that it can communicate with Subeta, so I spend a lot of time writing custom patches) Prioritizing starting that project meant putting other things on hold, which pushed back the battle revamps, etc, etc, etc.
I think it's really, really hard to quantify the amount of work that goes into launching something new on Subeta, or even updating something. I don't mean from a technical perspective, but I mean from a EVERYTHING perspective. Updating mysterious melody meant getting the code (finally) on the new site that handles inventory items, and passes their data back and forth between components. Easy stuff, can do it in my sleep, the difficulty comes in, oh right, we have 20 years of data and unless we do a full transition for item data, everything has to fit into this legacy format, that a teenager wrote.
Okay, what if we do completely move over inventory data, and finally have the item system of my dreams that handles tracking around the site and can lock inventory items without making them useless. Fantastic, start drawing up a migration plan, and seeing all of the places that interact with the inventory on the current site, using custom code in every instance (so not something easily updated) and quickly going back to just working with the legacy format. Well, then, we still have to figure out how to work around the really hacky way that locking is implemented.......
What I want, and what I think all of you want, is a completely new Subeta. One built from scratch, that doesn't need to adhere to twenty years of decisions (both technical, site, product, etc decisions) and inertia. What I'm trying to say is that you aren't going to get that on Subeta. It's going to be slow, painful, and uphill from this point forward, even if we hired 30 programmers tomorrow. I'm trying to be as honest as possible here.
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I'll even go into more technical depth about an actual problem around items, and some of the hacks that we've had to apply over the years to keep the system running in any kind of fashion.
In the start, items could only have a single type. Weapon, food, book, etc. Then we made more and more complex items, and wanted the ability to create items that had multiple uses.
That created the bones of the system that we have today, which is implemented in, imo, a ridiculous way (hindsight is 20/20, of course). We have a property on the items table (a table is like an excel sheet, it's one big group of data, like "items" or "users") called 'item_uses' that looks like this "0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0", where the first 0 being a 1 means it can be used as food, second means toy, etc. So 1-0-1-... is an item that can be used as a food and a book. There are many, many places on the site that take item_uses, "explodes" it (PHP for breaking apart between the --) and checks for a specific spot, so $item_uses[1] for it being a toy.
That means that we can never change what those numbers mean, or change which one means what, we can only add to the end and 🤞 hope that doesn't break something else.
To get around that in newer code, we've built a table (item_uses) that sits between item, reads the values from item_uses, and can do something like $item->isToy(); it still updates back to that row, and mostly acts as an easier way to access the information, and to add new options to.
SO: To make any changes to the way that the inventory works, if we're keeping subeta.net alive and running while we build the new system, is to build on top of those 20 years of decisions and ensure that items continue to work on the current site, and the new site, and just try to put whatever bandaids we can on top of it to keep it working into the future.
Or we can spend 3 months planning a migration and building the item system of our dreams, but then literally nothing else gets done while that happens. It's a tradeoff where both decisions suck.
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Edited because Keith made new posts while I was writing mine.
<p>Maybe we need to lower our expectations, but it&;s also up to Staff to set up these expectations based on your ability to actually follow through with what you say you will do.
The Teahouse comes to mind here. About once a year since we were promised this new feature Amber shows us an artist's sketch for something related to it. People then get excited because they think that the project will soon be completed.
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It would have been better to have told us that instead of showing us artist's sketches .
[tot=Ciannwn]
Because feedback boards in the past have been locked for no explanation. And it is important others air out their grievances because they have different issues than I do. So I disagree with your perspective.
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Hold up. Pet Spotlight's been broken since November?!
I thought it'd just been erratic for awhile, but I started to notice that over the past few days and thought it was just a "past few days" thing. Sheesh. :/ Spotlight is one of my favorite aspects of the site, I love seeing other peoples' work and having a really nice tidy excuse to work on + finish my pets, so that's... very not great.
But anyways, yeah, big agree. I don't like cluttering up my Discord with servers and have zero interest on joining the Subeta server just for news that for whatever weird reason doesn't end up on the site. It can't take long at all to make quick little news posts for updates on here, right??
What are you looking for product support wise?
You've asked for communication, the communication that we can provide is someone helping users in real time, and answering questions with things like "it's still being worked on". We aren't going to make news posts that say that, and if someone asks in the forums we respond, typically saying that it's being worked on.
If you have a question about the status of something, make a board, will respond exactly the same way as in discord, it'll be locked, and you have the same information.
Because feedback boards in the past have been locked for no explanation. And it is important others air out their grievances because they have different issues than I do. So I disagree with your perspective.
Can you give me an example of a topic locked with no explanation? I (and the entire team) welcome the feedback, and are doing our best to address it. What I'm not going to take anymore is threads looking for "grievances here regarding staff-user communication. See how long until this thread gets locked I guess." as a serious matter of feedback.
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'Scuse me, but, seriously, not ALL of us want a "totally new Subeta..." is steadfastly doggedly playing on the "real" Subeta and only leaves when forced to to get in her Wardrobe There's just sort of a charm to it. Just wanted you to know that there are still some of us behind the site in whatever incarnation it happens to take. And, yes, I will most likely switch over... eventually... Since I'm sure whatever you're doing is for the best, since I've been here since you actually were that amazing brilliant teenager.
tbh this thread (and others like it) are giving me big vocal minority vibes. i have no issue with the way things are being handled, i have no issues with the beanbag or w/e being a challenger item instead of a melody item (staff can assign unused items however they best see fit tbh) and i come to this site fully knowing it's a passion project. any money i spend is for my own entertainment, it's not an investment and it's something i do expect to one day lose access to as a result of instability or inability to continue due to financial hardship. i, as a user with an almost 15 year old account, am not entitled to anything on subeta. i am not entitled to the time and attention of the staff. i am not entitled to updates on new features. i am not entitled to promises about unreleased items. i am not entitled to the ability to collect new items. are all of those things nice to get? yes. but they're nice perks and not things that should be counted on as regular occurrences.
I think one source of player irritation is the use of the word, soon.
When we see an announcement saying "Coming soon" or "More news soon" it gives the impression that something will be happening within the next couple of months. When a year or more has gone by without anything happening, players start to think in terms of "Yet another broken promise."
I think we'd all be happier if we saw an announcement like "We are planning X but it will take a very long time to get it on the site so there will be more news when we have something to report."
[tot=Ciannwn]
All I want to say is that I didn't ASK staff to specify how unreleased beanbags will be released here on this thread: https://subeta.net/forums.php/read/923417
I just made a suggestion about not adding unreleased items like beanbags to collections, because yeah, I went through the fun/trouble (it was a nice mix of both and it made me work toward something on subeta, it was genuinely nice) to collect 2,666 beanbags and 100%'ed a collection that I didn't get an achievement for because there were unreleased items in the collection. So I made a cordially worded suggestion thread instead of getting upset because I realise that shit happens.
I didn't ask staff to reply how they would specifically release the unreleased beanbags. It was a suggestion thread. But staff replied specifically then went against that a mere 2 weeks later.
So yeah, there's a thing as lack of communication and then there's miscommunication. I think it was done without tact. And I don't think it makes me entitled. It makes me disappointed and angry. I'm made angrier when people tell me I shouldn't be upset because you know what this place needs? A little more empathy. It would go a long way to handling communication.
Yeah, staff have a right to change their minds, but I still think it was tactless and alienated me personally, especially when "feedback" was mentioned that I don't think was widely accessible enough to merit a change. It's like feedback was provided without considering the context. Which again, lack of communication.
I suppose the beanbag was in a "special shop" after all. User shops haha. So joke's on me. Ha ha ha. I'm now more disappointed than angry.
Looks like I need to "honestly lower my expectations" which again, thanks for your understanding? I have been a vocal defender of subeta for a long time. I have been understanding. This isn't a matter of coding. It's a matter of communication and decisions on item releases, art etc. What we need is someone who understands how to involve the general subeta community. Don't use off-site platforms just because it is a sign of the times and popular. Use your own site, use your own news posts as a platform. Engage the people on the site. But I guess, I have to lower my expectations and can't expect the staff to use common sense with these things.
i had a lengthier post written out, but i'm honestly a little nervous about getting the same dismissive response others in this thread have, so mainly just highlighting and seconding this:
and also adding that i feel at least publicly i've seen a lot of upset or frustrated users be met with reactive annoyance and/or dismissal more often than genuine concern and/or care, which seems to be resulting in at least some portion of users not feeling heard or respected (and getting more upset or frustrated as a result), and i just don't think that's helping or resolving anything. that's my two cents in a nutshell, i suppose.
