I agree with everything you said. Quests are definitely mind numbingly boring but they're something that everyone can do even if they have poor reflexes or a disability. They're also the reason why Subeta has any kind of economy. After all, I'm guessing the bulk of user shop sales are quest items.

Yeah, nerfing quests is not something I'd like to see. Staff have adjusted them before, and will probably do so again if necessary, but they need to remain worth doing to keep items selling, and to act as an item sink. There are several items that would barely sell at all if not for quests.

The feedback is that the games aren't worth doing. I'm suggesting a possible starting point to address that. We have 2 activities to do on site, games and quests. One currently gives 100x the rewards than the other. I wouldn't suggest pumping even more sP into the economy as a reasonable solution.

Agreed.

I don't think we need another currency (Not to mention another shop for staff to manage). I'd suggest we enhance what we already have. Example, why doesn't Decanter of Indestructibility move to the carnival, cost wiz tokens to play and give out tickets? Put some high priced items in the carnival shop and move tons of games over.

CSC was under 7m/500 when I started. It's now 60/500. Games payout hasn't changed. That's the problem.

No, quests give out way to much sP compared to the statically priced items on site. They've been needing to be nerf'ed for a year now - since the change to add direct buy links to the quest/SS page. If less sP total enters the economy, items in theory will be cheaper.

Quests are negligibly less difficult than most of our games.

What? We're not playing counter strike here, most of our games can be played on a 10 year old machine or a phone.

Right, you reduce their payout and massively increase games payout so that games are a more comparable option when deciding what to do.

I actually find the games here to be mind numbing boring. I don't think even upping the sp from them or giving them their own currency will get me to regularly play them. I'd rather go off to a site dedicated to hosting a wider variety of games than play on here.

Then again, apparently I'm one of the weird ones who finds quests to be fun.

@ QwertyJoker That's kind of the point I was trying to make? Quests are less difficult, which makes it easier for people who can't play games for whatever reason to earn sP. You don't need good hand-eye coordination to profit from a quest. You don't need a bucket nearby in case you get ill. You don't need quick reaction times to avoid losing a quest - you have 30 minutes and afaik, only the Wizard's token reward is affected if you take too long. If you cut back on the quest payouts and have the payout be... idk, 60:40 for quests and games respectably, you're going to have people doing both, and you're going to have people who can only do one because of reasons beyond their control, and I don't think Subeta wants to start alienating it's already thin userbase.

Items, in theory, will be cheaper because there will be less demand for them. There's going to be less of an interest in restocking if item prices keep dropping, and less of an item sink because less people will be interested in questing.

As for the Counter Strike quip... Yeah, I'm just going to point out that not everyone can afford good, or even standard-level tech. I have played Subeta's games on a machine that would be considered antique (from roughly early 2000s), and the phone I have is considered disposable scrap by current smartphone standards (Samsung Galaxy Ace 4 Neo). Surprise: on the old machine, the games lagged badly even when the browser with one game tab is the only thing running. I had no lag while questing and I could even listen to music on the side. What a luxury! Those users might be a minority, but they're still around.

About the CSC prices - it was 50k for 500CSC back when I joined. There was also a lot less Cash Shop swag to buy back then, so demand was fairly low. The only thing people were prevalently interested in was the GA. Now, you have a lot more official CS items, a lot less users selling CSC, and the CW market constantly pumping out new stylish pixelclothes. I really doubt cutting the quest payouts is going to do anything for CSC prices.

Was this an idea before? I like it, I'm all about that unique currency train.

Oh, I finally found it here: Making games worth playing?

There are probably other threads which I don't remember exactly where they are, but this has been a old and continuous subject.

Nobody said that dude. Our entire point was that the quests pump out too much sP PERIOD. A lot of the flash games make me sick too, so I don't play them. That doesn't negate the fact that the quests give out too much sP, which causes inflation. I used to be able to buy 500csc for 12mil. Yes, after CWs were implemented.

Nerf the quests, it needs to be done regardless of the games. Take a closer look at the games to update the sP payout. Add some other incentives, like stats. Subeta relies too much on quests for the sP payout, and doesn't have nearly enough sP sinks to make up for it.

@ Aztec That's what it'll feel like though. I remember previous quest tweaks ending with the userbase being very displeased with them too.

I'd rather have things simplified for ease of use and add other incentives to play (like occasional stat points) instead of nerfing anything too much. Because if you nerf quests, a couple years down the line someone is going to complain that games give out too much sP and that their payouts need to be nerfed. It never ends and I still kinda doubt the demand for CSC will be affected. :x Black Friday also plays into it. People also stockpile CSC because its value is guaranteed to keep going up.

Besides, if someone can earn 90k game points by playing Burrero Bonanza, they should get the payout for it. And if Major Drills asks you to play Spectrail for the 11th time that day, you won't get screwed out of a quest with the tweak I suggested earlier. You could hit the payout cap just by playing the games you /can/ play without getting sick. Like... idk, Tubular Tiles or something that's less nauseating to look at for 20-60 minutes.

the only support i have is for more achievements from games and the possibility or earning stats from games. mind games should give intel points to the active pet, arcade speed, chance games maybe level or defense... and the other 2 types [collection and Miscellaneous] none.

i don't support the idea of yet another currency nor the idea of having a bigger payout. Caliph's Tomb already gives 20k sp if we manage to clear the cards. that's already 200k more sp per day. and i can easily get at least 25k sp from Matlal's Jewels per game. Tubular Tiles also gives 10k per finished game. 100k per day. this means nearly 600k sp more each day if i play each of these 10 times.

if i manage to do all the quests daily, with a GA, i easily reach 7-8 mil. add to that the sales from the shop, say 10 mil a day.. how much more sp can i ask for? of course, without a GA, i make maybe 4 or 5 mil from quests/day, but it's still enough..

i think currently the balance is good.

That's because people don't understand inflation. They just want to make more more more sP to compete with rising prices, without understand that more sP just makes those prices go up. It would take time to settle and even out, but eventually the inflation rate would drop with less sP going in to the system.

And I'm saying this as someone whose main income IS quests. I should not be able to make 25k+ sP AND get tokens off every wizard quest. Not when the items he's asking for cost a grand total of maybe 2K

And yet the suggestion for nerfing quests but increasing game payouts is basically "we take some rewards from this site activity and put them into this other site activity!". Which... is kind of not doing anything to reduce the amount of sP going out, it's just relocating it elsewhere.

Can you explain what you mean by updating the sP payout from games? I'm like Frost, here, because I'm wondering what the point of reducing quest payouts will be if the payouts from games is increased. Do you actually mean that we should get more sP from playing games?

As someone stated earlier, some of the payouts for certain games is paltry compared to the effort you put in to it, like spectrail. I'm not encouraging lifting the payout massively, but updating it so you get more than a couple hundred sP from some of the games.

If the wizard gives out 25K as a reward, and a game gives out 500 sP, dropping the wizard to 15K a reward and boosting the game to 2k a reward still takes 8.5k out of the system

So what about people who can't play a lot of the games? I can manage to do all the Wizard quests, for example, but there's no way I could get 2K from Spectrail. I'm an old woman with arthritis in the neck so my reflexes aren't good enough to play Spectrail and games where I have to look up at the screen for any length of time are also out of the question.

In an earlier post you said a lot of the flash games make you feel sick. so you don't play them. Why do you want to get less sP from quests if you can't play a lot of the games? All it means is that you'll make considerably less sP than people who have good reflexes and don't end up feeling ill.

PS; How about making the maximum payout for all games 10K sP. This means less for some games like Matlal's Jewels but more for the games people say aren't worth playing because the payout is so bad.

"Do games/quests," they said. "It'll pay out," they said. Hi, this is BS calling.

I support that there is need for the admin to look into possibly actually making the games worth while if they're being touted as a viable source of game currency. Otherwise, it's basically a flat out lie to tell someone to quest or to play the games to earn sP, imho.

To start off, I am supersorry if I come of as overly aggressive about anything on this topic. That is not my intent, I am not mad with you or with anyone else who's into the idea of nerfing quests, and I don't know how to go about fixing the tone of my posts without slapping buckets of emoticons in. :'|

That aside... Spectrail is bugged and nobody bothered to fix it since release. Sorry, staff, but going "the game will be not on a grid because we don't want it to be :D" isn't good game design. It's trying too hard to reinvent the wheel. Especially when the pickups spawn on the deathblocks, or even outside the game's playing field. [sub]I genuinely like and enjoy snake-type games and I am very bitter about Spectrail, can you tell?[/sub] Also, all of the games that cause motion sickness or severe eyestrain have been mentioned to staff several times during the years - nothing was done about them.

You'd still be taking a comparatively small amount of sP out of the system, even if you redistribute part of the rewards into games. Games that most people don't want to touch with a 10-foot pole to begin with, for previously listed reasons as well as genuine disinterest in games. :/ That'd just result with pissing the userbase off yet again.

Same thing happened when Keith toyed with removing item rewards from quests. Most of the userbase doesn't restock, so quests are their main (and often only) source of items. Quests also add new items into the system. If I didn't get items from quests, I wouldn't need to buy a GA every month or two to price my shop. So item rewards were added back for some quests. [sub]On topic of item deflation, I'd rather see some vending machines with overlapping item pools axed instead, but that'sjustme.[/sub]

I'd genuinely like to know the % amount of users that play games, be it for sP, achievements, or even just Major Drills. Out of pure curiosity.

This sums up my feelings pretty well.

Personally, if quests were nerfed a bit and game payouts didn't even change, then it feel more comparable to me. As it is, with the 10k limit you can earn from any one flash (I feel like I used to be able to earn 200k a day from Caliph's Tomb but maybe that changed) game and I played all ten of that game, then questers can easily earn double of what I did if they only did Wizard's quests. Additionally, they probably did that in a lot less time.

It really does feel like that Questing and selling is the only way to earn money sometimes, especially when we have bonus weekends for quests and GA accounts can do more quests. It's not like you send 15 scores instead of 10 with a GA. Quests are pushed but the games are just... there.

Probably because animated games were most likely added to pacify the part of the vocal Neo-crossover userbase that demanded animated games? And later, they were introduced as part of site plots, then kept around because it'd be a waste of investments if the games were only used once and never again. D:

Games were never huge moneymakers on Subeta.

Even in the babby days of the site, you were much better off restocking for profit. You still are! The oldoldold games (pre-revamp Rock Paper Scissors, Random, Item Scramble) were there for the sake of giving you a bit of extra spending money to get you started for restocking. Nowadays, they get you started for quests. Just like Flight Rising games get you started in the business of buying your first dragons. Nobody could really get rich just from playing games. Even on Neopets, they were incredibly boring, often difficult and paid out very poorly. The only difference is that you had half a million of them to pick from on Neo.

I wouldn't mind increasing the payout, or simplifying the general framework of playing games for sP with better payouts and a total cap that you could hit by playing any game you like. I wouldn't mind more achievements for games. I wouldn't mind a boosted payout weekend. I definitely wouldn't mind updating the games to be much more user-friendly, less nausea-inducing and less eye-straining. But none of those will really make the games any more interesting because the games themselves just... aren't very interesting to begin with.

Caliph's Tomb could pay out 50k per completed around and I'd still be meh on playing it because it's simply not very interesting. I'd rather spend my time doing something else.

And that's fine. If a balance between games and questing can be struck, then it's not a bad thing if there's something on the site you don't particularly care for. It would make me happy because I would rather play games (because unlike you, I do like them and I like them on Neopets too) than do quests, and if you are the opposite, then that's cool too. :D I've been playing a lot of the games lately because I'm just too burned out on questing and I'm entertained. It's just not particularly helpful for getting the things I want.