MAY 25: UPDATE + AMA

HELLO, ALL. Life has been a butt to both of us. If you are wondering what we've been doing, the answer is: our best.

amber has been doing things behind the scenes with items, which is not helpful to you right now. ariel and amber are working on finalizing pricing for two rose and thorn items, so they'll be comin at u soon

bug (hi) has been trying to do little QoL updates as well as staying on top of bug reports and bug fixes and working on a bunch of TOP SECRET things behind-the-scenes! here's some examples of the teeny tiny qol stuff...

• You can no longer make forum groups with invalid characters in the tag. (Things like hashtags, hyphens, etc that make the group un-pingable.)
• Invalid species and colors have been removed from the Adopt-R-Us search page. (These are like bumbus, hydrus and bhakoru, which cannot be abandoned without changing into a different species or color.)
• The text informing you how much time is remaining in a training session has been tweaked to avoid referring to your pet as an "it"

All right! So for this week's update, we wanted to do something a little bit different.

First off, what are some quality-of-life updates you'd love to see this summer? What are your favorite site features and how can we make them better? What do you do every day on the site that could be improved? Note: We won't have time to do every suggestion, of course, but we'd like to get a general idea of what y'all want to see. If a suggestion pops up that we know we won't be doing, we'll make sure to reply and let you know!

Second, Ask Us Anything! While we're here, we also want to invite you to ask us any questions you may have, about Subeta or about us! We'll do our best to answer anything about Subeta, even silly questions like why are there so many ladybug items ([user=amber has a great story about that). can answer more technical questions and anything code-related. And uh, will answer anything about yarn. No need to ping us with questions, we'll be lurking like the lurks we are!

REGARDING TEAHUT: there will be a topic specifically for this in the future from the creative department. We won't be answering anything about it here, sorry! We promise it is happening, but the topic from CD will have actual information about it and not just us trolling you guys here with ??? WHO KNOWOoOWWOS, which is known to do.

Quite note: We'll be answering these in multiple posts, and we won't be answering the questions in order, because some of them we have to discuss amongst ourselves first and so on. But we promise we are not ignoring anyone so please don't feel bad if you were skipped - You weren't actually skipped, your question probably is just going to take a bit longer to answer

I'll be passing these wardrobe suggestions on to who is working on a new and improved version of the wardrobe! These both sound like reasonable suggestions to me, so we'll definitely discuss it!

There's been a huge ongoing project at Subeta HQ to make a new site layout, and we have discussed incorporating a night mode into this new layout! Since our efforts have been focused on this new layout, we unfortunately won't be adding a night mode to the current one.

However, a fellow user and cool bug made a beautiful and free Night Mode CSS. You can find it here: -Night Mode- Shengui Guo Custom CSS [v2.0] I highly recommend it!

Gardens will be revamped! We just have to get the teahouse project out first :x

We currently have no plans to add more quests per a day. You can currently do so many if you do all the different quest givers. I'll brainstorm with about some new quest related achievements, though. :)

What do you mean by subcategories? Like do you mean something different from the current 3 subforums you can have?

I actually plan on bringing redeemed wigs to the top of the page, newest first! <3 I'm just working on sorting out my dev atm so I can test it.

Unfortunately, this isn't feasible in the current system, and has a potential to overload our alerts system as well :(

I'll see if it would be possible to increase the number of categories for now! Sadly I don't think subforums for these forums is feasible at the moment.

To both of you - I know I just turned down these suggestions due to limitations on our current forums system. However I wanted to mention that and I have been talking about moving our forums to a more modern, flexible and scalable solution. Even though I had to turn these down now, I'm still glad you suggested them and they'll be taken into account as we decide how to proceed with forum revamps in the future. <3

and are going to look at rebalancing the amount of sP from games <3

We're actually planning major updates (and even rewrites) to several of our games as soon as we've got some resources freed up. (Especially the ones that broke because of browsers killing Flash.) We're excited for these rewrites because it's an opportunity to really pay attention to accessibility and making the games work on mobile.

Okay haha that seems easy enough to tweak. Added to my list!

Hmm...... ;) ;) ;)

It will come back in a couple weeks :)

I'm going to be answering a lot of these questions tomorrow, but just wanted to quickly on phone:

• the question regarding artist applications, that's for to address not us!
• more achievements will come yes
• is SO ready to make wig its own layer, it's just something we're waiting on from Keith so she can go to town. her plan is to reorganize a lot of layers but MOSTLY WIG
• questions regarding wardrobe we're going to get keith to come answer, or i'll text him to answer them and i'll copy and paste here WHATEVER WE GOTTA DO

Thanks for your patience, everyone, as we organize and try to answer these! We have literally been using a spreadsheet to keep track of the questions here lol. As mentioned, a lot of these questions don't have a simple response we can just give right away, and some require more discussion amongst multiple staff members. But we promise we haven't abandoned this topic!

This is something that would warrant more user discussion to see if enough people would want it, to make it worth implementing for everyone. I'm also not sure how much it would even help, because while it would make completing the sessions better, it would still be tedious to have to put the pets back into training one by one.

I would suggest weighing in on this topic: Make training easier for people with lots of pets

I can't find the staff post right now, but it's been confirmed that we will be adding this information to the Subetapedia. There's no immediate plans but this is on our list!

We've been discussing how to incorporate this as, potentially, a part of the Bathhouse Cleansing Pools - since we sort of established that as a part of the site for removing things, and we do have some more "rooms" for that planned already. (Side note, if anyone has suggestions on a cool way to make it fit into the lore, we'll hear them :D )

We understand the concerns over this and we're well aware of the important role widgets play, in the current layout, in allowing you to customize your site experience. We understand how important that is to Subeta users and we have kept this in mind as we design the new layout.

I spoke with about this, and we are unable to discuss our hiring process! (Sorry, I know you're all curious, but there are some Legitimate Reasons we can't share many details about this)

I... I don't like most fungus :x

I guess mushrooms count though? So it would probably be that, but... honestly I'm not the biggest fan of mushrooms either lol. I can eat them but it's not my favorite food in the world.

How about if you could click Fantine to reload the page? Or if there was a link to reload the page (or both..?)

Can do.. will work on this :)

I am exploring a way to do this! Around the time of the Item Directory revamp, we made some major updates to how items work behind-the-scenes, to make this more efficient. I am still not sure if it will be possible, but we are gonna try :)

Sorry I haven’t replied, it’s been a very long crazy weekend. and I have a spreadsheet going where we’re recording all the questions so things WILL get answered, don’t worry!

and I have plans to work on updating the game payout for a lot of games. :)

Oh, my lovely bonita. I can’t spoil things too much, but I am actively team lETS DO GELLYs if that helps

I know I sound like a broken record, but and I do have a lot of plans for the subetapedia. My goal this summer is to start fleshing out our plans for like recapping old events, fixing up old NPCs, etc. I’d like to work with Rah on updating the holiday articles, and adding ones missing etc.

Yes! I actually plan on going through all achievements this weekend and retire ones that need to be, make note of achievements we can theoretically bring back (battle!!), what needs to be updated, etc. :) This will be a big part of my sprint for the weekend, ha.

Yes! I know a lot of people pointed out Vesnali items didn’t go out during the holiday, and that was actually planned. :) I’m almost done tagging old holiday restockables, so yeah I have something up my sleeves for all that.

okay first, I love that you asked/suggested so many things.

Second, we have no plans to change Major Drills at the moment. We firmly believe that some things should be a little harder to do!

This is a thing I’ve been toying with doing. There’s a great user run thread that tells people how to get all the titles etc that’s updated frequently. The reason we haven’t done one officially yet is because like some of those titles are ones we want you to figure out on your own. Sure, some are easy like feed your pets x, but an example of like the rift achievements you had to work it out yourself. Doing a list with all of them just seems like handing you how to do it without much effort on your part, I guess? idk. SOMETHING I’M STILL DEBATING MYSELF ON.

hello, yes I will give you more pokemon go gifts.

Also, we do those easy achievements because it’s something anyone on staff can add without having to go into the code of the site. is very pro add achievements to new features (hi rift) so look for more things like that coming up! I’m going to work with the BAs to get some more battle related achievements, too.

I’ve said this a lot, but we’re not going to add an alarm for the bathhouse. This is something that’s your responsibility, you’re the one being rewarded with CSC, referral points, etc. If you forget, it’s on you.

MORE ANSWERS TO COME!!!

Okay so... I've gone ahead and added this to my giant to-do list lol <3

and I agree this is an interesting idea! We're willing to explore if doing this is possible. It would be a neat new feature!

We appreciate this feedback and will take it into consideration - especially as we design future layout updates :)

Gahhh I wish this were simple and easy to do. All I'll say now is, we basically do agree, it would be nice for them to match up. It's just going to take some work due to how it's currently set up, it's a bit... complicated.

I'm afraid it's a hard no on this. It would just require way too many resources - We have so many pets, in so many different poses, we wouldn't be able to make clothing for all of them.

However, you can make custom overlays for your pets if you want them to have clothing or backgrounds :)

Unfortunately, this has been turned down already and we don't foresee our position on this changing.

This seems to come up a lot, so I'm looking into making this a User Preference, where you can opt out of this (completely optionally) That way users who like it this way can still use it, but you can also opt out if you don't like it.

Hm, yeah I would consider that a glitch, since the form says one thing but doesn't do it correctly. Would you mind posting about this in the bug report forums please and I'll get to it as soon as I can <3

You know... now that I think about it, I think this can be done. I could make it so if you highlight a part and click quote, it'll only quote the part you highlighted. But only caveat is, this might not work on every browser, and probably won't work on mobile since highlighting is weird there

That's a good insight - thank you! While our decision is set in stone, we do take the concerns very seriously and we will make sure they're taken into account.

I think it has to be clarified that we're not deleting widgets from the current site layout. If we just deleted widgets without changing anything else, that would of course be terrible for usability.

The new layout is our chance to address the current layout's shortcomings and see if we can remove the need for a clunky and outdated widget system altogether - while providing other benefits like a more accessible and intuitive navigation, a site that works and displays well on mobile phones and tablets and touchscreens, loads faster (less resources per page) etc.

I can't answer any more on this topic, but if there are more thoughts posted about this, we'll be sure to read and take note of them as we move forward. <3

Great idea - I'll bring that up with ! We typically do have a phase with big things like this where we do beta testing and feedback with users, or at least a Q&A or brainstorming type of thing if we can't test it yet. I think the new layout just isn't quite ready for this at the moment.

This is a really good idea, so I will see what I can do! However, I'm afraid that if this is implemented, it won't be possible to make it retroactive, and the logs would need to be automatically cleared after a certain time (like 3 months maybe?)

This is also a great idea so I'll add this to my list! Like the pet spotlight denial log, a trade log would also not be retroactive. It would also be necessarily limited (older trade logs will automatically get cleared after a certain time) However I think it would still be pretty useful for the reasons you've stated.

That's fair! I'll see about adding a character count to that page. I'm also working on adding it to the text boxes for posting a forum reply and new topic <3

The character limit is a physical limit - it's how much physical space (like in bytes) that it's allowed to take up. This is a property of the database thing we store it in. You can't store more data because it can only hold so much data.

Increasing this storage space does come with associated costs, I guess the most obvious of which is that we'd require more database storage space which we gotta pay for. So I guess what I'm saying is, we can change it, it's just not something we can change arbitrarily since it does have costs that factor into it.

But!! we hear you about it being too small right now. So I'll speak with on whether or not we can edit this to allow for bigger signatures! I think there's a good chance we can.

Whoops, that shouldn't happen. Working on a fix!

This was an unintended side effect of a new user preference that will be announced this weekend :)