The soft cap was discussed back in the days and voted for by almost everybody, still the powers that be decided against it. We actually had a poll, which then was neglected. Nobody knew or knows to that day, why. The decision - like so many other BC changes prior, which we swallowed over and over, screwed the people at the top, punishing them for their earlier efforts.

Also, nobody ever condoned the fact, that all challengers kept being made harder to accomodate the fact, that pets grew, which was of course highly frustrating for the ones trying to catch up to those specific challengers, not new harder ones, which was kind of ridiculous, to say the least.

Simple answer for me, no cap raise and i quit. As battling and raising my pets stats was the only thing keeping me here in the first place.

i really dont get why we cannot just keep what we was doing i put money and time in to the battle and really love it its my big fav but this cap is lame never liked it i loved this place when i first joined for been able to do so much and have fun..we all start from 0 and i would like to think that every one can go far.this cap sucks. end off ..thats how i feel and my mind will not change .and yes not every one has the money to do so or time..and every one is diff but for me it is the one thing i really enjoy...and there has been others that quit when this happened.:(

I don't really have too much to say about the cap since most of it is already mentioned, but I feel like the Subeta team in general don't really care about what most users want these days. It seems like Subeta is trying to attract a whole new type of users. Things are getting more and more simplified, making Subeta more like a Facebook game. Which is really sad, because Subeta as I know (/knew?) it is awesome.

When it comes to battle and the cap, the Subeta team should really listen to the people who actually spends most time and csc/money on battling.

I sorta disagree. On the one hand, yeah, absolutely. The opinions of current battlers should be taken into account because a) they've spent a lot of time and money on Subeta and their support is important b) they actually know what changes have worked and what haven't c) they're spending money on Subeta right now, might leave if things suck, and there's no guarantee new users would fill that gap.

But on the other hand, how many users don't battle right now because the system is too complicated/too expensive/too broken? I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't battle who might start if battling had more mass appeal somehow, which might earn a lot of income for the site. If Subeta had an awesome battle system it could attract new users from the Pokemon/MoGa/Monster Rancher fan demographic.

I sorta disagree. On the one hand, yeah, absolutely. The opinions of current battlers should be taken into account because a) they've spent a lot of time and money on Subeta and their support is important b) they actually know what changes have worked and what haven't c) they're spending money on Subeta right now, might leave if things suck, and there's no guarantee new users would fill that gap.

But on the other hand, how many users don't battle right now because the system is too complicated/too expensive/too broken? I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't battle who might start if battling had more mass appeal somehow, which might earn a lot of income for the site. If Subeta had an awesome battle system it could attract new users from the Pokemon/MoGa/Monster Rancher fan demographic.

See: Neopets. That system is significantly less complicated (lower real cap on stats besides HP, simplified damage) and even then it still has very few battlers in comparison to total users. The real barrier to entry is the time it takes to train a pet because it can't be done in a week. On top of that, weapons are expensive. People would rather do quests and complain when expensive loot is dropped by top tier opponents than put their pet in training every day, follow the very well laid out guides put together by some of the BC, and play. It's a lack of attention span and dedication, not just how difficult it is. There's not a whole lot of complexity until the higher tiers anyways, most of the lower tiers are designed to be click and bash, with weapons guides to give you the optimal weapon to use. Then, you learn as you play.

I'd really like to know what scared staff away from a phantom cap because from where I'm standing it's a win/win: no need to bend over backwards to make challengers 'hard enough' for capped pets because challengers will only be designed to a certain level of difficulty, and no risk of alienating long-time players because you haven't put a crappy limit on the thing they enjoy most: training. a soft cap isn't even about the battling, really. it's about being able to train as much as we want, for personal satisfaction, without hurting the balance of the bc. don't give me the, 'u guys will get bored n start complaining that your super buff pet has no challenges' - no, we won't. Almost every person I've seen post about a soft cap has said the same thing: we don't care about having the challenge as much as we care about being able to train.

Personally, I don't like having a challenge. I overtrain my pets, then go back and fight the challengers I probably could have two months ago if I put in some extra effort, because I don't want to. I'd much rather be able to, down the road, continue training my pets to the point where I don't have to struggle through 10 wins against the toughest opponents and I can still get the loot I want.

I'm not good at battling. Not just here, but anywhere. I still play Runescape. I don't do PvP. I don't do PvM except against the very weakest bosses. Because I'm not good with learning strategies and I don't have (or want) the best gear. Even in Pokemon, my strategy extends as far as trying to use a type that's strong against what I'm fighting. I don't watch EVs or natures or any of that, because that's not the kind of thing I like doing, or trying to learn. I'd much rather just overtrain and win through brute strength than actually trying to figure out a strategy because I'm not good at that.

So yes, soft cap please.

this is all very funny because oh so many people in this thread who were in favor of the cap are now against because they capped (y)

the hipocrisy is strong with this one

I'm through with this - condemned to use intelligence boosters into oblivion to stay in front of pets boosting level and because wtf am I supposed to spend sP on anyway ? At this point if it doesn't get lifted altogether I don't care for it, most people would just use whatever exp and bootsers they have hoarded and hit it again in a few hours. Whoever can't beat Baenwurath still wouldn't be able to beat baenwurath with the small increase everyone was asking for the other day anyway

I personally like the challenge. The challenge is important to me and the lack of end-game is pretty apparent. The most exciting times for me, as a battler, have been beating that one challenger who was always slightly out of grasp - whether it's beating General Error for the first time or toppling Baenwurath. There still needs to be an element of challenge if the cap raise is going to be successful for me, imo.

Introducing a challenge is where the problem comes in thanks to the very simple system we have in place. There's so few avenues to do this successfully; predominantly, now, it's about having specific weapons. Which is fine - if they're obtainable in some way. That can form part of an endgame. The lack of variety of weapons is a big problem at the top end - if we had viable alternatives to full blocks maybe it'd open other creative avenues to defeat challengers and create a more immersive system. The other way is to have more challenging and engaging opponents; thanks to the very limited coding it's really hard to flesh out the AI to create something captivating. Some of the more successful attempts here are Sophie, General Error and Careaper imo. Most tend to fall into heavy hitters or defensive behemoths.

None of this is to say I'm against a cap raise. I guess I'm for one. I'm going to cap in the next ~3 months and don't know what I'm going to do after that - BQs currently keep me coming back daily and I have minimal interest in raising additional pets. Still, the cap is a piece in a larger jigsaw that needs to be considered before we can have a more satisfying battle experience imo.

I'll make this as plain as I can,the cap is stupid.... : / If anyone can explain to me the benefits of it .I'd be glad to hear them.beside the fact that the admins might have to make harder challengers

The fact that speed is included in the cap at all is still a joke. If you are trying to max 10 wins on Baenwurath, you need 8K Speed, or you are wasting any stats that you have put into speed. It was so incredibly easy to see that skewed stat builds would be by FAR the most effective for of training, but noone believed us a few years ago when it was implemented.

They have tried to fix reflecting>full blockers>defense so many times without ever understanding what they were doing with it, and that it was never the problem. It has always been the healing that was the problem with the BC.

They based the cap off games like WOW if I remember Keiths comments from back then, but then it takes multiple years of training pets to get caught up to any of the worthwhile content, compared to a few months in a game like WOW.

IF they were going to fix it, they would probably need to massively reduce the training time on the training center. Subeta is the only game that it gets easier to train your pet the stronger it gets (As you get stronger you get more exp per day). Then again a lot of the older battlers would (probably rightfully) hate that because it cheapens the effort they put into the game, and fundementally changes the nature of the game they have been playing for years.

All they needed to do to encourage end game content was to encourage people to continue to win past only 10 wins like the neopets 1p tournaments were able to encourage thousands of wins on single opponents. Then the content scales up....

This. I'm lazy and I have a lot of other things to do, so I generally don't go beyond 10 wins. Now there's only a chance of getting tokens. I definitely don't want to fight angry arnold or willowisp just to have a chance at more easy tokens. But if they would give exp, or if there would be achievements involved with cool prizes... But I guess that's completely different from the cap issue =)

I have to disagree a bit with that statement. As a community we have collectively bent over backwards to make as many helpful threads and guides to help new players/battlers. We assume they're working, however, because not every battler participates on the forums. There's probably lots gone unaccounted for.

As for the expense aspect, it's been made abundantly clear that battling is just as expensive as any other hobby here on Subeta. It's merely part of the challenge.

Broken isn't a word I'd use...underpowered, hasn't reached its fullest potential, but definitely not broken. You want broken? Try Neopets; their staff released a half-baked revamp of their system, and haven't touched it in years.

As far as I'm concerned, Subeta's got one of the best battle systems online, excluding major franchises (can't effectively compare something as small as Subeta to something as large as WoW/Pokemon).

People don't battle because it is boring.

Training for a long enough period of time overcomes all content that people care about (10 wins on opponent XYZ).

Each individual battle comes down to very rudimentary decisions that repeat move X until you are low on health then you heal.

The only thing that made subeta unique was the ways you could go about training and acquiring items, which was systematically destroyed by BQs, tiers, and the stat cap.

As for comparing subeta to other games: Of course you can, you only have a finite amount of time that you can spend gaming. They tried to emulate those systems and then they failed, and now the economy game that made them unique has stagnated.

[edit] When I say that battling is boring, there are going to be some people that come back at me and say well I enjoy battling and think its fun. But thats not what i'm saying here. Look at how many new battlers there are now compared to how many battlers there were post aaron revamp. The BC is not attracting new players.

I'm not in favour of a soft or phantom cap, but am very much in favour of a stat cap raise. I defined phantom cap as staff stops making challengers harder than something catered to a certain total stat build. I.e. the stat cap is removed right now, but staff never makes a challenger that a smart 22k statted pet can't beat 5-10x. and soft cap being that you can continue to train any stat indefinitely, but it is only effective to a certain point. Such as the stat cap being raised now, but str,def and speed only ever contributing the effectiveness they would have at 5k and HP only ever counting as 7.5k. My reasons against a soft/phantom cap are as follows:

1. Having a phantom cap would undoubtedly discourage some players from the battling scene. A never ending game of catch-up is not encouraging. Obviously some wouldn't care and the number who might could even be very small, but it's still a big -1 in my opinion.
2. It discourages any sort of build strategy. If any of your stats can be trained infinitely, then it's smartest to just train them all infinitely. If all/any of them have a capped effectiveness, it's smartest to train them all to that point. But if you only have a grand total cap there becomes many viable builds (though certainly not as many as there should be, but hopefully that's something that's being continually approved). Adding that sort of strategy definitely adds to the fun for me.
3. It works against the idea of 2-p (pvp). If everyone can train infinitely, only people near exact the same point in training will be worthwhile to fight in pvp, else it will be rather one sided. Sure people can make different pets at certain exact stat totals, But I'd rather see people have several end-game stat builds than purposely not training a pet to keep it in a certain tier so they can compete in pvp.
4. It's terrible for global boss battles more so for the phantom cap than a soft cap. With a phantom cap whoever has the highest stats gets first place and whoever has second highest gets second place. This will almost certainly be true unless the top player puts a GREAT deal less effort. This is not the way to encourage competition, which to me, is the whole idea behind a global boss. Even with a soft capped pet it becomes solely about time and weapon set and far less with strategy. With a regular stat cap like we have now, someone with an up and coming build that is well planned out and not just evenly trained can do far more damage than someone who is just wailing away with an evenly trained capped pet. Strategy and competition is good!
5. With the current system of opponent loot, where most all opponents drop loot for a lower tier than is recommended against them, people with multiple high tier pets win multiple prizes and sell them to up and coming battlers. This is great for the growth of the battle community. Encouraging people to put their all in to only one pet (even if still daily training center with all the others, which is extremely ineffective by itself) means that there will be less loot and at a higher cost to up and coming battlers. This is also very discouraging and will not be as effective in helping the community grow.

The reason why I'm in favour of a cap raise is simple. People with a great set, a capped pet, a good scroll set, etc, but still no old godlies can't beat some opponents 10x. This is a problem and can easily be fixxed in two different ways. By introducing new weapons that cater specifically to these opponents, or just simply raise the stat cap a bit. And secondly, I really think it's the only way we're going to see pvp, and it's the way it'd be most enjoyable to me.

If the stat cap was removed all together, I would be upset, but it would not be the end of the world, just very very disappointing. Either way, there needs to be some sort of update to the BC, it's overdue, and the stat cap issue is the foremost change that needs to happen imo.

For complicated: There's so many guides right now that I have no idea which guide covers what, or which guide is even up-to-date. There's multiple guides in the forums, there's guides at the BC, there's guides on pet profiles, people have made guides on tumblr.... And yet, most of them don't even cover shit like 'this is what that little puddle of water icon below your pet/challenger means'. And where most games would have a hold-your-hand guide to baby's first battle, Subeta doesn't.

This is fine for me. I'm a click and bash kind of guy, and I've played enough games like this to figure out the basics, and I know how to find the info I need when I need it. But there are a lot of people who aren't familiar with systems like this.

It's not that the core mechanics themselves are difficult. The problem is the presentation is overly complicated. To train your pet you go to the training center. Or you buy boosters and use them (meaning a player will need to learn what these are and how to find them). Or you earn exp and spend it on stats, and you can either do that through the BC directly, or by doing BQs. And you also have to read books, or play games. And the Oracle gives stat increases. And, and, and. That's half a dozen ways just to raise stats, which is the simplest part of the system. Variety is essential for old players, but daunting for new players.

For expense: I was thinking mostly of the time aspect and the cost of weapons. Most casual players probably aren't spending more than an hour or two a day on Subeta, maybe if they're really dedicated they'll put in a few minutes in the morning as well. That means at most they're getting one or two training sessions a day if they don't autotrain. Being reeeaaaally generous, let's say they manage to get 1k points a year. That's nothing. And autotraining is a godsend, but only if you can afford it. Weapons aren't necessarily expensive, but getting a lot of the better ones relies on you being online and participating in events.

Compare that to casually participating in other site activites. You can post in the forums, do your quests, price a small shop, add prizes to your wardrobe and collections, and play a few games all in that hour or two, while earning sP. You can be a casual HA maker, or a casual collector, or vendor, or whatever. You can't really be a casual battler.

For broken: Not in the way much of Subeta is broken, no. The BC isn't a mess of broken ping groups and half-baked changes. But a lot of people in this thread have pointed out flaws in the system. That Subeta has one of the best pet site battling systems isn't saying much, since there isn't a big pool to compare it to.

But all of this is kind of beating around the bush. really hit the nail on the head. It's boring. It's a strategy game that requires no strategy to beat, just a lot of time. And time is the one resource that players never want to invest, because they can't earn it back if it's wasted.

I initially wrote a huge wall o' text to respond to ya, but I found a much simpler answer:

Everything requires time and investment. No matter if it's battling, collecting wearables, plushies, pets, etc.; if you can't bother to spend more than 20 minutes on any of that stuff per day, then don't complain about not being able to get the best rewards.

Tiers did not destroy the system. The old system was not fair. Sure it was fun, an untrained pet plowing through Prodigy because the user was able to buy the best weapons and equip them.

Short-term rewards make you lose interest faster than the long-term rewards.

It is very simple to me on cap..

1, Phantom cap [Baenwurath being the set goal right now] 2, 50,000 cap as the trainer can currently train that high anyways [done never touch again]

This is the easiest way and it would be done with period. You have an end game and you have so called catchup crap.

That never happened happened post aaron revamp lol.

God weapons sucked with small pets, I own 5 gods and rarely used them with my pets. Using god weapons on a small pet was purely for bling purposes, and maybe a 1 click speed advantage in BQs. FoRRC/P combo was the best weapon to use until you hit something like 800-900 stats all around.

The most "abusive" thing we did with god weapons was to get a 1K/1K/1K/1K stat pet to beat GE using Oracle SS and Oracles Staff of Enlightnendment once in 2 hours of trying to RNG multiple 1K HP heal blessings together. At the time it took about 1500-1700 stats to pull that off with MCAB and a trident. So if you consider a 1.7bil investment and 2 hours of messing around with RNG, for no financial gain abusive instead of waiting a couple months of training to get that first win overpowered, then I guess it was lol.

What that was though was a lot of FUN, and under the tier system that is impossible.

There were a couple individually abusive strategies that involved stealing opponents weapons, like the one where you used STS + RV to steal and blast specific combos of Saggis weapons to steal and use against him to beat Saggi with a tiny pet, but that was quickly reported and patched and had nothing to do with god weapons.

There was a blaster strategy to use against Wurmgear for a few weeks that required access to a Wrath of K or a Kwand, but those were so obscenely difficult to get ahold of that it wasn't even really done by people often, and again, there was not a whole lot of financial gain associated with it.

There is also a screenshot of a pet with 10HP beating a few high level challengers, but what the screenshots don't show is that the pet also has something like 2K STR ect. I have a feeling thats where a lot of the myths about god weapons helping under trained pets come from.

Short term vs long term rewards have nothing to do with losing interest, and both are essential in good game design.

The Cap and tier systems traded all short term goals for long term goals that go from a couple months to the first time you beat saggi/GE to a couple years later when you cap out and are able to do the challenging endgame content.

Having a small pet pick up god weapons and beat a 1K/1K/1K/1K challenger isn't even a problem. It's only a problem if that challenger drops something valuable that is abusable (like a lucent from the saggi steal glitch.)