I've tested the new shop system, and it is mostly functional. While I do agree with this change happening to help with the site's lag and errors, I don't agree with how it's being implemented. One, it's too sudden. While there has been talks about the change happening over the last two years, it's still a shock to suddenly see "we're making this change in 10 days, k thanx bye." With the amount of items people have, it's going to take a lot of time to transfer over things, sell things, etc.

Second, why is the non-GA limit so low? One of the things I love about Subeta is that someone who can't afford a GA or doesn't have a loyalty GA can still enjoy the site and eventually save up for CSC. This love for how the site operated made me want to use some extra money to buy a 2 month GA and a few other CSC items over the last few months. But, this shop/gallery change is a dangerous precedent. GA perks are perfectly fine, like autopricer and extra quests. But, when a GA is NECESSARY to use some of the basic functions of the site, in this case making sp and item collecting, then there's something wrong. The strict shop limit will make it much harder for the non-GA member to earn sp and, in the process, make them less likely to have that drive to keep playing to save up for something. I know this is a major problem on other pet sites, like Neopets.

I understand the need to earn money to keep the site functional. But, enlarging the gap of site functionality between GA and non-GA is not the way to go about this.

I'm really upset about this.

I've had only one shop and one gallery for a reason. I've utilized categories for my gallery for a reason. I'm halfway to the "Billionaire" title, which I did through only one shop. And it took so long because with my schedule, I have limited time online. And because I don't have gold every month, often I'll dump items in my shop, not bother pricing them, then once I get gold again go and autoprice them. And there will be a few hundred in there. Right now I already have almost 500 items in my shop, but I don't know how many of those are duplicates. This specifically makes me not want to spend time restocking and playing in the economy like I normally do during the summer.

My gallery has almost 2k unique items. Not that many compared to some users, but still well over the limit. I'd need to have two galleries with a gold account to have all those items in there. I throw things from events in there! Things I like to collect! Things, for instance, that I have paid sP to the site for, removing sP from the system like is claimed to be wanted. This makes me no longer want to participate in events like Peka-Boo where you pay large total amounts of sP to get items, or events like Morostide where you get a ton of duplicate items. That's where so many of my items came from.

It says we can have "Up to 6" shops/galleries with a gold account, which is still a maximum of 3k items for sale. I can fill an entire shop (with this new limit) in a day if I go playing with the vending machine and actually do my quests. That's NOT going to empty in the same time period! Nevermind the fact that I do not always have a gold account. So if I fill some of my shops while I'm gold, I then have to wait until items sell, bringing me below the limit, to be able to add any.

Now we're going to end up with large amounts of items in our vaults, which is nearly impossible to properly sort through. Especially since if you have any categories used in the item vault, there is no way to see all of your items at once. You have to go category by category.

If server strain is the issue, if the quantities of items in the user shops/galleries is the issue, why don't you just increase the number of individual shops/galleries we can have while bringing down the item cap in each? You want only 1k items in galleries? Well then I had better go make 2 galleries for my 2k unique items. You only want 500 items in shops but I routinely have 5000 items in stock? Guess I need 10 shops.

How is this going to affect the auto pricer? We can only autoprice one shop, once per day. Before this change it was easy enough to have all of our items in the same shop, and only need to autoprice in one shop. Now we have to spread our items around, will we get to autoprice in multiple shops to make up for this? Once per shop?

Doesn't that mean that if we're talking about collection items or very expensive minions, prices for those items are going to rise dramatically because there's less supply? Plus, you're going to get active users taking them out of their shops because they don't sell and the 500/1000 limit is too small.

I think this is going to have a big effect on the economy as users start to pick and choose what to restock.

Well, fuck. At least I just got the Billionaire achievement.

My shop has 2,523 unique items in it right now. I'm not a hoarder, I'm too lazy for that. I just vend and put quest prizes in there. I don't even restock.

I guess it's good that I use my pet TCs as galleries, really.

Doesn't that mean that if we're talking about collection items or very expensive minions, prices for those items are going to rise dramatically because there's less supply? Plus, you're going to get active users taking them out of their shops because they don't sell and the 500/1000 limit is too small.

I think this is going to have a big effect on the economy as users start to pick and choose what to restock. This is a really good point. I've bought high priced items that were the only item on the shop search (for sale, not galleries), and not shown as being in any trade lots, and had no way of knowing how long it's been in that shop. Rarer/more expensive items may end up increasing in price because of lower supply- they were at least available in that shop.

There are some comments in the News Comments that articulate this point better than I ever could. Actually, the feedback from the News Comments has been wholly negative with many, many users voicing their opinions, so I think that is the best indication of how users are feeling right not and not this forum. But anyways...

I'm just going to quote some of them here:

: "Okay so this just occured to me. There are a lot of users who have been inactive for years and are likely to never return to subeta again who also happen to have lots of older items in their shops. After the change we won't be able to buy those items from their shops anymore right? Doesn't that mean that tons of items will just be frozen basically? Nobody will move or buy them, they'll just sit there quietly? Also if everyone has to move their items to new shops to be able to sell them and we can't buy from old shops anymore, won't there be 0 of each item in the user shops when the update goes live? Meaning massive, MASSIVE inflation and impossible questing, for a while at least? I was just thinking of an item that only one person (inactive) had in their shop and I was forever deciding if I should just buy it because it was almost 20mil. There are probably tons more items like that, so do they just disappear? I may not be understanding things completely so this could make zero sense, I'm sorry if that's the case."

: "My GA recently expired. I'm fairly sure I won't be getting another.

Thing is, I'm not sure you realize how this is going to affect the Subeta economy even doing this in the short run. If a large portion of users quest and vend every day (which I did when I was here full-time), as I've read the other posts, it will take two days to fill up a shop. It will also SEVERELY curtail the availability of items. This, of course jacks the price of EVERY item through the roof. If UserX is the only person with a red ball in the shops, UserX will price said red ball at least at 1 million dollars. When UserY gets one, and autoprices, it, too will be at a million dollars. So, when Sarah asks for a red ball...

I have enjoyed playing here, but I don't have the energy to keep up the work for a GA that isn't worth it."

: "If the coding for the new shops is so much better for the servers, why are the limits so low?

I'm concerned about price stability. If we're not able to freely sell all the items we have, there'll be hardly any of each item available in shops. They'll be so easy to buy out completely, and if you're discouraging hoarding the prices of even low rarity items will never recover. Items that are not freely available will become much harder to get hold of.

But making the limits per unique item, and so low, you're encouraging monopoly of items.

There are so many items on this site, and you flood us with hundreds more in every event. There's no way that such a miniscule limit will be able to provide a stable market for every item."

: "I think there's also an additional problem no one's addressed here. This will make questing significantly more difficult in ways not intended. Not only will items gained from questing be unable to be added to shops for selling since they'll be over the limit, this means others won't be able to access those items. The total number of items sold will go down, probably driving up prices and making it difficult to find items for quests since less people will be selling them. This will change price margins and availability during questing a loot, and why bother with something so potentially difficult if you can't sell the items you'll get from it anyway? Just some food for thought of how this will affect the economy in other ways.

(This coming from someone who religiously quests every type every day and makes all their money from quests)"

Ugh. This change is just making me frustrated. The worst part is that I've seen users saying that the change has been announced for years and we should've seen it coming. I've been a member for 3 years + and am subscribed to both Site Update and Tiny Update, yet I've never seen anything about it - and I'm active on the forums.

This seems like a not so smart idea tbh. I think that before this being implemented they should have a) revamped the vault system so it's not so shitty and actually somewhat functional so users have a feasible system for storing their thousands of items that they now cannot place in shops and b) implemented a way for users to transfer these items over without it taking 1239293 years.

And yeah they said they're trying to do a transfer system but that would have eased a lot of people panic and should have been the first step before this is even announced imo.

I took a 3 year break from this site and came back expecting most of the issues to be long gone, but theres still lag, terrible communication and overall bad planning. ;_;

To be honest, once this goes through, I'm contemplating just straight-up leaving, or at least stopping all site activities for a long time.

Questing is already hard enough as is with the Chrome Shop Search glitch but also the 100 item limit in the Inventory (I very rarely have GA because playing this site is overly tedious and time-consuming.......but I need to have a GA to make it less so......but it's not worth the money to get one because I hardly get anything done on the site due to how time-consuming even basic item and shop management is). Adding a shop limit on top of that basically ensures that it is going to take an ETERNITY to get anything done, whether that's item management or actually selling things to boot, which means that it's also going to take longer to save up for items, especially items that are originally sold For Real Money...

For instance, doing a day's worth of quests, even as a normal user who doesn't get the GA extras? At least a full 100 items. Maybe half of those sell by the next day, but often enough I have a lot left in a shop. Rinse, repeat, and now I'm at the shop limit within three days at most. I can't sell anything without opening ANOTHER shop.....that I have to manage manually and take an enormous amount of time doing so...and even then there's a hard limit to that too. Either way I am going to run out of space, and squirreling it away in the Vault isn't an option because I use it to actually STORE THINGS I WANT TO KEEP.

And I've been spending the better part of a decade putting together a food gallery. Well then...there goes one of my major goals for the site, and one of my major motivations for participating in holiday events. On top of that, the limit is bad enough that having a gallery to squirrel away upcoming pet treasure items will rapidly become unfeasible.

OH and let's not forget that now people with GA accounts - aka those with money, whether that is copious amounts of sP or the disposable income to pay Real Money for virtual items - will have even more selling power over people who don't have GAs, on top of the autopricer + showing the lowest prices in the list making things even easier for them...at this point, what is the point exactly of doing anything without paying for a GA?

The economy is going to crash, I'm basically losing a goal that I had been working towards since I was in late middle school (I'm well out of college now mind you), and the gap between the normal users and the GAs widens...lovely.

Honestly I'm of the opinion that if the site is ever going to perform well, EVERYTHING needs to be rewritten, not this "scale down a feature, rewrite it, say we'll scale it back up, and then leave it alone forever because something ELSE is dragging down the site" stuff that has been going on for, what, the last five years? I remember back when new prototype site layouts were being kicked around, and that never happened...the main site layout is still massively sloppy and slow, Sidebar Events are horrifically laggy with deletion, Wardrobe is still not done and is still buggy and laggy, forums have gotten even MORE slow due to the per-post loading, Minion Zoo is still not available for non-GA users IIRC, the colosseum still uses a basic HTML system (in an age where sites like Flight Rising now have entirely HTML5-based battle games), and, as I've previously mentioned, purchasing from user shops in the shop search has been utterly non-functional for Chrome users for YEARS now...but it's taking away a major site feature and also bolting on more GA stuff onto the new version that's being done now. Alright.

And that's the thing too, all these other things got rewritten and are STILL UNFINISHED. I have absolutely no faith that the limits will be increased for the future, because insanity is expecting different results from the same process.

Honestly I dunno what I'm going to do at this point. Was super-stoked about a new bug-based pet species, but there won't be much point in it if everything to do with items is going to be a major headache.

So much I agree with in this topic.

I've been a member for over 11 years. I'm a hoarder. I'll proudly own up to that. I love event items and like to collect multiples when I can. Checking my account, I currently have 138,489 items, of which 20,779 are unique. With the new limits, this means that most of those items will be going into my vault. I suspect that most users will be in a similar position and will have to do the same thing and the problem will then move from shops to vaults.

My vault will not only have to hold the overflow of my gallery items but also items that I need to sell, if I don't have room in my shop.

If I vend and then dump into my vault, it's going to be a big mess in there.

This is one of the things that really worries me because it's not like we haven't been down this road before:

Or, we could end up with duplicates if we attempt anything and the site lags. There's no way I'm going to sit here for days on end deleting thousands of items. Again.

I'm concerned about the effect of the closure of the really big shops on the economy. Some users have hoarded a lot of event items that are used in the Cynthia and Quentin quests, and they have hundreds if not thousands of certain items. I'm sure these stores have over 1000 unique items so I wonder what will happen with certain quests when those shops can't be bought from anymore.

Didn't we have a brainstorming thread about this a year or two ago? I can't find it now, but I swear there was some in-depth discussion about this.

I seem to remember being told that existing shops would be grandfathered in so we could still use them, they'd just be capped and we wouldn't be able to add more items until stuff sold. I was totally fine with that. Now we're being told that's not the case, and we're going to have to manually move all of our items to a new shop, and re-price everything.

Seriously?

Do you realize how many items that's going to take out of user shops? Even if you increase the limit by a few thousand, there will easily be tens of thousands of items that are suddenly stripped from shop search results literally overnight, and prices are going to jump way up.

I don't want to move and re-price the thousands of items that are already priced and selling in my current shop, and I'm terrified of the economic fallout this is going to cause.

Were any of these things discussed by staff before today's announcement? Because these are pretty important issues to consider, and it doesn't sound like they've been given any thought.

Another concern, how is item pricing, or auto pricing, going to work when suddenly there are no prices?

And if you don't change your plans for this, you'd better do some testing and make sure vaults can handle thousands of items, because that's exactly where all my stuff is going to end up if I can't fit it in my shop(s).

- These are excellent points that were made. Of course most people are going to choose to put the more expensive items in their shops. What happens then? Using these comments and others, I've come up with a vicious cycle this economy will take:

Limit of shop items - More inflated items - Less items in supply for cheaper quests - Less sp to complete quests, item hunt, saving up for something you want - Less sp made in shops - And repeat

(Maybe someone else who is better with economics can come up with a better written cycle?)

The News Comments have many insightful remarks so if you're interested, that's a great place to read through right now.

I'm not fantastic at economics myself, but that seems right, no matter how unfortunate it is. :P

It's amazing what a change like this can do for user morale, the economy, and the bigger picture.

- Oh gosh, I've seen the news comments. I commented on there when there were 50 comments and continued to see the feedback roll in. This is by far the most negative response to a site change I've seen, and for good reason.

I really hope the staff listens, as this is not going to end well the way it is now. Some drastic changes to the plan need to be done.

I'm perfectly fine with this change, if the wardrobe also get the same change. After all, the wardrobe is EXTREMELY ressource intensive as well.

Meaning, no more than 250 items in your wardrobe, if you don't have a GA.

Alright, enough sarcasm.

Seriously, this is terrible. We can't even use SP to expand our shops/galleries, we HAVE to have a GA for this? Wow no. This is the most user unfriendly thing possible. This is penalizing active users, and mark my words, this is gonna kill the site.

After all, what reason do I have to quest, or restock, if I have to use the trades to do 90% of my business. I could just go and use the forums all day, since the moneymaking aspect of the site is officially useless.

Worst idea ever. There isn't even a contender for 2nd place.

I've seen my fair share of changes that people didn't necessarily like. I definitely agree with you when you say it's the worst! 400+ comments and a daily goal of around 39%? That's not good.

I think this is definitely the straw that breaks the back for many players who are now just gong to move on. The ones who stay will have a sour taste n their mouthes. I hope this is addressed soon.

I'm just hoping that maybe this time, with the insane amount of backlash, the voice of the users can be heard. If the vast majority of somewhat active players are vehemently opposing this decision, many of which are threatening to lessen activity, threatening to leave, and threatening to refrain spending money to support Subeta, I would think that'd make the message pretty clear. It'll just be a matter of if the say of the userbase is taken into consideration, because if the update rolls out exactly as it was posted in the news, the major consequences from the update (which are much, much more harmful than the occasional 502/504 error pages) could very well kill this site. I know the staff has worked with users to implement changes in the past, so it's not impossible to do.