So my take on this is to NEVER trust anything any member of Staff says about anything, ever, but especially don't trust what Keith says. Gotcha.

Keith's response was a half-baked answer that was COMPLETELY dodging the actual question that users have: why are galleries no longer being spun to separate pages? I really hope we get an actual answer and not more of the same vague things we've heard of several times.

I totally agree that starting low would only make programmers think "Oh it works! It works! We can go higher!" and it crashes XS The testing before having beta testing should've started with all items and then worked downward so that a definite number could be established.

We need 100% clear, concise communication about this and nothing hidden, or having to dig for the information. If this goes live in 10 days' time, I can only imagine the increased chaos that it will cause.

All I know is that something has to be done about galleries and something has to be done fast.

I think it would be an especially good idea to put this project on hold considering Grace is on vacation and won't be able to respond with more detailed input and facts until she comes back. She probably has answers that we're seeking, but to my knowledge, isn't she not coming back until a few days before the update...? I mean, the timing of the announcement itself was poorly planned to begin with, but this only emphasizes that fact.

The original news post says she'll start fixing bugs on the 13th. I think her vacation was timed so that they'd have a few days to collect data and bug reports before she addressed them?

Like I kind of see the logic, but apparently she's the most qualified to answer our questions, so I don't know why they would schedule it this way. And now that people have pointed out that the new shops are hardly getting any traffic since they're blocked off to non-GA users, I don't know what kind of data they expect to collect.

This entire mess is just another example in a long string of examples of how things are just done with absolutely zero forethought or input from regular users.

Only this PARTICULAR instance also involves the decimation of... well, essentially the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE SITE, as well as essentially making it a pay-to-win feature. "Oh, you want to be able to actually make a PROFIT from your shops? Better start buying CSC so you can have a Gold Account because that's the only way to get access to enough shops to do that LOL!"

Of all the thoughtless, careless, downright stupid things that could have been done, THIS was the path that was chosen. To make shops and galleries - things that should NEVER hinge on paying REAL MONEY to get access to - into pay-to-play features. Autopricer and price viewing are one thing. They're EXTRAS; they're not NECESSARY to the functioning of a shop, they just make it EASIER. Which is how it SHOULD be.

But forcing players to pay REAL CASH to simply be able to run enough storefronts in order to turn a profit - which is fucking counter-intuitive anyway; several small shops are going to "weigh" as much as one decently-sized shop... I would ask who thought that splitting one "big" shop into multiple "small" shops would be less stressful on the servers, but it's pretty clear that no one was thinking at any point in this process - is another thing entirely. It's just barefaced greed and nothing more.

Between making Subeta increasingly pay-to-win, poor planning and implementation of new features, half-assing said implementations to the point where things go unfinished for months or years at a time, lacking any sort of transparency, refusing to involve or openly and honestly communicate with users, and apparently squandering the money earned from the site... well, I can easily see this gross misstep being the final nail in the coffin for a great many users. Either they'll simply stop spending money, or they'll stop playing entirely, but the outcome will be the same, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what that will be.

Congratulations...

Forcing people to buy CSC to buy gold account medals to be able to make a little profit with thair shops, is not only unfriendly but also stupid and unprofessional in a real commercial sense. It has absolutely nothing to do with to solve bugs and errors 504 and so on. It is so stupid I will even refuse to be truly sure about this.

This is precisely where I'm scared about, this may probably the meaning of the staff. I still hope this will be all a misunderstanding, but I'm affraid you are right to the point.

bangs head on desk repeatedly

Oh good God can we please have a check all button in our shops and galleries so we can remove the stuff to put in our new ones without making ourselves hurt like hell?

I'd like new bodies for 500, Alex...

Ok so I can't be arsed to read through the entire post, so forgive me if any of this is a repeat (I got to page 9 and gave up!).

So the way Powerpets, another similar pet site that I still play (I long since gave up on Neopets after my account there was frozen after 13 years because someone hacked it, and they couldn't establish to their satisfaction that I was the original owner, despite me using the same username across many, many sites over the years, but whatever.) works:

Shops are increased in size in their equivalent of SP (they call it PB. I'll just say SP for site points). The amount of SP it takes to upgrade increases every time you upgrade it. My shop there, after a very long time, is at just over 5k items slots. If I wanted to upgrade, it'd cost me 5k roughly to add 10 items, or 51.9k for 100, at this level.

They also use purchase points: To restock items from their main shops, they have purchase points. The more expensive an item is in user shops (or the newer an item is; New items start at 12 purchase points). This keeps the new items from completely overwhelming the system on release.

Granted, they don't have the holidays as such (The closest they get is treat bags similar to the Luminare trees here, and monthly events that give themed items to people who win at certain game challenges), so I don't know have a good idea of how that influx of items would work.

Their quests are mostly items that are used for other activities on the site (other quests, items that are tokens for chance games similar to vending. You also get purchase points for each quest completed.

From what I've noticed: They have a slightly smaller population, as far as active and engaged users go, but their economy is far more stable. You can influence item prices, but not to an excessive amount, and their shops have filters to prevent items being ridiculously under or over priced vs their average going rate. The staff there is highly engaged in the daily activity, and I always end up feeling like, if I had more time, I'd engage in it more.

Just a thought here: It is possible to have an economy that works and quests and events. It just requires some kind of additional balancing factor once it scales up. And I think that's really where the problem here is. Combine that with a lack of follow through on past developments, and I think it explains the panic. I'll wait and see what happens after a couple of months (I'm not a big gallery or shop person, I mostly just claim dailies, do site events, and train my pet).

,I don't mean to be disrespectful,but you: me and the man in the moon know that this experiment is not going to work,you been trying things like this for over 9 years,beginning with getting rid if the unique avatars where we made own,remember that,that was going to be the cure all and free up space this that and the other thing,since than there have been tons of things like this,many of us have stuck with you,through the hostile take over by your partners,ect..I could go on,but you know,there are only 2 things that can fix this,spending lots of money for an updated script,or like most of the other private sites,selling off to a big company that can afford to keep the site up while that do the necessary script changes,you grew to big and to fast to keep up,but it's not a good thing to lead people on thinking that all these experiments will fix it,only to find out they won't,this one is worse,because it making people (not All ) but the ones who put much time and money making galleries and are huge,to say the least,the huge shops,I can see taking steps to stop them from buying from other user shops just to jack up the costs to the honest people who just want to quest and do things right,but to punish every of your most loyal patrons,I don't get it.and of course you will no doubt come back with some 50 $ teck stuff to tell me how I am wrong...all I ask is that you be honest with the folks,is that to much to ask ? if it is,so be it

1. An "updated script" is exactly what they're working on here. I don't like how it's being handled, but shops are being rewritten and updated.

2. Selling a site like this only works if there's an interested buyer, and I don't know who you think would be willing to both purchase the site and keep it up and running. Just look at how Viacom jumped ship on Neopets last year, or how Neurogalaxy shut down right after Keith bought it. Selling Subeta isn't going to solve anything.

I didn't suggest there was a buyer,Viacom jumped off the neopets bandwagon because it was loosing money hand over fist,because of all the so called changes and the money pit it was turning into,a lot of people left,and a good amount of them came here as you well know,now they see the same thing happening here,a lot have left here already. I merely meant without changes this will be the new neopets. I know that you have much love for this site and do your best with what you have,I also have a lot vested in this site and I don't want it to go the way of neo,but many of these fixes are being made on a wing and a prayer hoping for the best,but more times than not,it's a bust. I could list 50 examples,but why,and a better way to implement this ha.how about a 200 ways better,people are working harder here now that most do at work : P in closing,I hope for the best,but we''l wait and see the finish product. and I would have answered you sooner,but I had 100 502 errors and couldn't get on : /

Okay so it's taking me a bit to think about this - while I know shops cause lag, are we sure this is the source of the 502s? We survived without the 502s up until somewhat recently. Also I am still getting these errors while there is not heavy traffic on the site. Granted, there might be additional shop activity with people responding to the change, but just seems like we could end up with a lot of pain and agony and potentially not a lot of improvement.

I thought it was odd that this was announced when wasn't around to answer questions right away, leaving other staff to repeatedly not have answers and say they couldn't say much until hearing from . But she's actually on vacation? How is this not the worst timing possible for this announcement, then?

My comments from the news: I'm not thrilled about this. My book shop alone has over 700 items, and I do not consider that a lot. I have a ton of items in my shop because I seldom have a gold account and it's just not easy to price them all by hand. Having to remove all those items, enter them into a new shop, and re-price them is just going to cause more items to sit around on the server. I -really- hope you reconsider the low item limit and include an auto-import feature to put items into the new shops and galleries.

And what about the Billionaire achievement? I have been working on that one for years and am so close! Don't take it away now!

Subeta, you kind of shot yourself in the foot. You "told" us (without using words) that hoarding is good. Achievements all over the site are based on hoarding clothing in the wardrobe, items in shops, money in the til, etc. You do events that reward hoarders (think the Reading Drive). Pets are encourages to have cute treasure collections to win the, again achievement-able, pet spotlight. Holidays and others release thousands of new items into the system monthly. Even the, again achievement-able, questing and vending crank out items like crazy. You trained us all to hoard.

But then you realize that's bad for the servers. People sit on piles of money and items--in part afraid to use them because "What if something like the Reading Drive or Peakaboo come back?" So you, Subeta, had to encourage us to spend. You made Peakaboo to get people off of their piles of money. You made several Free Beer-related achievements to get people to clear them out of their hoards and sell them into oblivion after people stockpiled them because they were easy for the Hoarder achievements. People like achievements; people work hard on them. And, IMO, achievements should ALWAYS been achieve-able. There should be no such thing as an unobtainable achievement. (Trophies are a different story, and IMO, Subeta you need to learn the difference between the two). Every time you retire achievements, there is a wave of panic from people who are working hard on them. That really isn't fair.

Again, Subeta, you brought this on yourself by encouraging us to hoard. Now that is a major part of many of our gamestyles, and we just don't have the ability to feasibly and manually rearrange tens of thousands of items. I use my vault to keep track of food to feed my Gourmet pet. I have a gallery to keep track of pet treasure items while I expand their treasure hoards--that isn't cheap. I collect books. I have a shop. And I dump all my spare items into a gallery to try to get Hoarder achievements. The numbers on these are much less than most people have posted here--but it's still more than a full-time working human being can rearrange.

I have to agree with others. There HAS to be a way to fix things without royally screwing over much of the userbase. As someone commented before, I think I would rather deal with the 502/504 errors than this.

I guess what concerns me most is the reduction of organization in this. I can't have different galleries to keep items apart (gourmet items to feed to pets, pet treasures, holiday collectibles etc). I have a big concern everything is going to end up in my vault and I'll waste a ton of time trying to figure out if Food X is something to keep, something to sell, or something to feed to Pet X. The same with other items. I mean, we can't even search by rarity or select multiple items at once.

Plus this is going to affect the autopricer, how many items are available to questers, and how many items people can restock. None of those were addressed in the FAQ either.

I am tired of the line "you've known for weeks/months/years because we mentioned it in a forum post!" A lot of us avoid the forums. I might go months without even looking at them; heck, even during holidays I just silently dance/kiss/shake hands with/give flowers to random people without posting comments.

Honestly, this whole thing just has this weird sense of urgency with it. And I kind of do not understand why? Does ANY user understand why?

1. The main coder for the new shops is gone on vacation, but we still push this forward.
2. Not all the functions are even made yet (autopricer for example) yet we still push this forward.
3. We do not mention "Hey we are ACTIVELY recoding this to release next month" last month, yet we still push this forward.
4. We only gave our userbase 10 days, yet we still push this forward.
5. We have no idea how our users will move all these items aside from by hand, yet we push this forward.
6. We have no idea what the final limits will be or a timeline for when we will start raising them, yet we push this forward. NO MATTER WHAT, THIS MUST HAPPEN NOW.

The code has been breaking the site for YEARS. Why is there suddenly this sense of urgency that if it isn't fixed in ten days, the whole site explodes. Like, WTF? This feels like the worker who does bare-minimum to get by at work, but has an evaluation in 10 days and needs to show why they are valuable and shouldn't be fired, so they freak out to do as much as they can before the evaluation. What happens in ten days if this fails? Do the servers explode? Does the space-time continuum suddenly break? Does the second coming happen? Not sure, but for some reason, the staff seems to think something will happen SO THIS MUST HAPPEN NOW. NO OTHER OPTIONS. SHRUG SHRUG SHRUG.

Only saying in brief the obvious, why are you NOW trying to fix this (as you've already said it's been talked about for years but you spring it on your clientes saying it's being done within the week!) when there are still so many other site issues ie whenever they run an event that need to be fixed...oh let me guess, Subeta starting an event and running it before making sure all the kinks are out IS NOT THE PROBLEM IT'S OUR SHOPS?!! Please don't tell me that it is the amount we have in shops (let alone galleries... how do they actually fit into this lag by the way seeing as people rarely bother to look at them, they are just a personal space that YOU NOW WANT TO TAKE AWAY FROM US!). I was thinking I needed to cut back on the time I spend on Subeta and you have now given me more than any normal reason to do so, and I wont be renewing my gold account and I really think I'll be setting everything up bar my kids to go and kiss Subeta goodbye. It's really feeling like a dictatorship which is not a place I want to hang out to relax.

Edit: I'm tired. I talked too much in the same words I have aready said on a different way.

@ Lexx Thank you for pointing out what's been rattling in my brain since this was announced! I couldn't put a finger on it. :'D

The rush to push this live is super strange.

Gotta wonder why they're so hell-bent on pushing it so quickly when they're clearly going to rush it to hell and back. And then, true to Subeta's traditions, they'll hastily try to slap band-aids and duct tape on things and call it fixed. :|

With how this was received by the users and how most of the consequences haven't been considered by staff, I wouldn't be surprised if most of us straight up left if the 502s continue a month or so after this gets pushed live.

This is another thing that worries me. Apparently, this was a move years in the making, which yes, something of this caliber should be thought of over the years...but it never really cropped up in conversation with the general public, which it absolutely should have considering how many people are outraged by this (22 pages in a thread on the forums and nearing 800 comments in the news post, the most I have EVER seen). But the fact that it was delivered without seemingly any forethought into the consequences and with poor timing and this sense of urgency that and several others have described in this thread, on top of what I feel is a lack of empathy from decision-makers, as it has already been several days since the announcement and it seems that this update is still going to be pushed through as-is despite the immense public outcry...

...makes me think that possibly, this was anticipated, especially considering the fact that it was directly stated in the news post that it was KNOWN this was going to affect a lot of users, probably negatively, in the name of "user experience". By the looks of it, there will be no user experience to improve because of the sheer amount of pushback and people who will quit over this. I am having a hard time looking at this from the perspective of an admin because it just seems so obvious that there should have been a smaller solution to address the angry userbase by now, because aren't they the ones who are supporting the site with their money and their traffic? As a business, shouldn't Subeta care about the huge loss of public trust and loss of monetary support? Why shoot one's self in the foot in this manner? This is what strikes me as very, very strange.

I appreciate the members of staff that are reaching out to answer some questions, especially considering what is going on in their lives right now. But huge, major valid counterarguments that have been brought up over and over again have yet to have any straightforward answers. What of the economy? What of the now-contradictory plans that were discussed in the past? How exactly will this fix solve our problems and WILL it for certain solve our problems? How can we be reassured that it won't be a half-baked solution that will roll out and end up backfiring if we only have a week to test it? Will this eventually lead to restrictions in the wardrobe, in the armory, or in pet treasures?

These are the questions I seek answers for. Maybe I'm just going to end up talking to myself, but I'm going to put them out here again because they seem to end up buried in the pages and pages of dissatisfied consumers.

I'm not a collector myself so this will not have such a huge impact on my long term gameplay, but I'm assuming the Hoarder achievements will bite the dust because of this? Not that it makes much of a difference at this point since there are so many unobtainable achievements anyway.

But wait, is everything over the limit from the galleries/shops just going to transfer to the vault? That would be pretty terrible, since I for one would forget what I had in the vault originally and then misplace some important stuff for sure.

The hoarder achievements will be retired.

All the stuff from the current shops and galleries will stay where it is. You will be able to take it out and move it to your vault or the new shops. Things in the old shops/galleries won't show up in shop search and you won't be able to add items to the old shops and galleries.