I am more aggravated about staff not telling us about this. It is like they were being sneaky because they knew people would be pissed.

I am not a conversationalist so I only post in those gaming and daily type threads. We had a group that had all that together and I was really enjoying the organization of it because it was all together.

I really would not like for the points to go away though. I like the fp shop.

They could give everyone sP for the forum points they have and turn the shop in an sP shop.

Anything that discourages people from using the site forums over something like discord seems like a negative to me. How bad can forum point farming be? And if it is bad won’t making this change just push it to the main forums?

@ poppet Thank you. I'm with you in hoping that staff clarifies the reasoning behind why this was done. I'm curious!

Spamming is against the rules, but except... it's not really against the rules in certain situations? I don't even know and I don't feel like risking my account to find out. :/ I get that a lot of reports are handled on a case-by-case basis, but imo the rules need to be clear and consistently upheld. Otherwise it just feels like playing favorites and it doesn't make for a very pleasant user experience.

It really does feel like they're trying to force more activity on the main forums with this decision and I understand why people are really upset about this. If I did most of my chatting in a private forum group, I'd be upset too.

I'm on the fence about forum points being done away with entirely. I don't like spam, but I also don't want sP for posting. Depending on the amount of sP, that's potentially an even bigger encouragement for spamming because it directly gives you currency. But if you remove all incentives to post, the forums are going to become even more quiet. It's not easy to balance.

Forum groups provide everything the public forums cannot - a safe, closely monitored, small community within a community. You can go vent with your friends in a private group about this girl at work called Bethany who's an absolute douche to everyone because of the things she does and how she behaves toward others. On the public forums, it's likely that there would be several "Bethanys" who would feel called out and either pick a bone with you then and there, or go offsite drama blogs to present you as the douchebag in this situation.

tl;dr - it's only natural that people would prefer conversations in safe spaces where they have some form of control over the situation. Cutting forum points off isn't going to change that.

I didn't mean we should get sP for posting, just a certain amount of sP for the number of forum points we already have. After that we get nothing for posting but we can buy the items in the current forum shop with sP we earn through quests etc.

It would certainly mean that the spammy What Did You Get topics would more or less die which is why Blue Building posts should be scrapped or reduced to something like 10.

If we want to show off our HAs, maybe we could just have a simple Show Off Your HA topic in the HA forum.

Yeah, I agree that not notifying the userbase seems rather sneaky (some might even say it's underhanded). And I'm not one for talking in the forums either.

I also like the wearables and minions in the forum shop, not to mention the prices are reasonable. I haven't amassed that many points in my time on Subeta.....

And is right. I've heard that other users are using Discord or other social methods for conversations (I'm in a forum group that does this!).

Ah, I get it now! Thank you for explaining! That would be fine, though at that point the items can just get moved to another site shop, like the Blue Building, the MC, or quest shops. The forum shop would be kind of obsolete - the only thing tying it to the forums would be the name of the shop.

Though it would prettymuch erase even the shreds of activity that the forums get now. If a new user checks the forums out and sees how slow they are, they'll likely feel even less incentive to post.

And yeah, I fully agree that the Blue Building post requirement needs to be either scrapped, or drastically reduced. I've seen at least three different people in the past two months who were spamming purely for the sake of getting into the BB. Just straight up "posting for the blue building requirement!" over and over. Add a different requirement to the BB instead - feed a certain number of foods to your pet, have a certain number of items in your wardrobe. Do a certain number of quests in total, restock a certain number of items.

I wouldn't mind forum shop gone, but I doubt it'd happen with that desperate and frankly baffling to me need to get people talking.

I hadn't heard about this, so if we don't get forum points from posting how else would you earn them?

You can still get forum points by posting on the regular forums, or rarely from the bathhouse. Staff removed the option to get forum points by posting in private group forums.

And of course no one on staff is gonna come and actually talk to us about this decision that they made. Disconnect between staff and userbase is really getting worse. If it's not about rainbows and butterflies, they don't want to address concerns and criticisms because "it might hurt their feewings".

And here I was really starting to enjoy participating in frenzy group chats. Now there's almost no point to the group.

"they don't want to address concerns and criticisms because "it might hurt their feewings"."

oh i can't roll my eyes any harder over this comment wowzers the thread is barely a day old calm your tits

Anyways, I'm on the fence about this change because I know how easy it was to take advantage of the slacker rules in private forums (i.e. posting as many times in a row as you want) so I don't mind. I like being able to post multiple times in a row and prefer that feature over the FP feature because they can be earned through any parts of the public forums. I guess my only issue is that is wasn't announced somewhere

I also feel like if FP farming was an issue, Staff could investigate, find out who is doing it, and just address them. Delete the group and issue a warning, or something.

But aiight, going on the off chance that the topic's been overlooked due to IRL job & life happening, could one of you please shed some light on the reasons behind this and the plan going forward & make an official announcement about it? People brought up some valid concerns and ideas here. We're feeling left in the dark about it, and it's a sudden, unlisted change that's affecting a lot of users. We'd like to know what's up, and if we should continue to discuss and bounce ideas to find a way to balance it without leaving a significant part of the userbase stranded.

I can only see two reasons to cut Forum Points from private groups.

1. Point farming. If this is a serious problem, there are several ways to stop it. But the simplest is to make group owners and admins ineligible for FPs - you do that and people can't farm. Yes, groups can get together to set up "farming" times/opportunities, but that requires planning and cooperation, so the forums are doing what they're supposed to, encourage participation and site ownership/loyalty.

2. Encourage use of regular forums. It doesn't work that way. We've already told you what would make us happier/more likely to post publicly. This won't get people to post in the regular forums - well, it will get more people posting in the games forums, but those are already the most active part of the forums. People will just further isolate themselves because of fear/anxiety and other issues.

I think, overall it will make people even less likely to post in the regular forums. If people get in the habit of chatting privately, it might make them more comfortable to venture out, more likely to speak up when they see something interesting in the rest of the forums.

I'm not a shy poster - I have 38,000 posts. Yet even I sometimes want to reply to something, but end up not doing so because its too negative, or I'm uncertain of my wording. Even this topic, that is very dear to my heart, has taken me days to post because I didn't want to post just an angry rant.

Talk to us, tell us the problem! Make new rules, clearer rules! More consistent rules!

I think this will end up hurting a lot of people. Make them resentful, less loyal. Posting in the regular forums is really, really hard for a lot of people - even impossible in some cases. Punishing forum groups for finding ways to make people happier and more comfortable, is no solution for any problem.

Thanks for clarifying, I'm not a big talker so will just use the points I already have.

staff are usually so upfront with any changes so i'm confused as to why they wouldn't let us know about this, and it's not like it's a new thing, the changes happened months ago. staff do so much to make this site a fun place, and i'm forever thankful for that, but this feels so incongruous to that standard that it's even more confusing.

like others, i rarely venture into the main forums, so i really appreciated the occasional FPs i used to get from the few daily posts i've continued to do in the frenzy group up until now. if it's the point farming they're worried about, i'm curious to know how a "what did you get from Shinwa today" (for example) type thread would be different between the main forums and a group - they're both for posting the same innane content? so why reward them differently? especially if only a few people feel comfortable enough to post in the main boards, even if it's just a copy and paste, and may possibly have it judged as spam and get you in trouble in more serious ways. seems risky, hence much more safety in a group where it seems those same 'spam' rules don't apply...

i still think we could keep the FPs and shop as is as i appreciate the variety of currencies. but i like the idea for taking the number of members in a group into account. i too have a private group for myself which i mainly use to test out coding and formatting and layout of big posts before posting for realsies, and for saving a backup for my OP for the Subeautique guide/restock thread thing onsite...it had never actually occurred to me that people would use those kinds of groups to get more FPs. so i get why you would restrict those groups from being able to accumulate them (it would feel weird for me to get a point from mine as i consider them more test posts) but to restrict larger more legitimate groups seems astounding, and quite disappointing.

anyway, that's my two cents, i'll go to bed now XD hopefully my tired brain managed to be legible ><

I feel like most things have already been said at this point, but just chiming in with my thoughts anyway I guess.

I agree it's pretty unfair if this was implemented without any sort of warning or official notice and discussion/feedback from users.

I can understand if it was to prevent a single person from just spamming their own private group without actually interacting with anyone. But I like the idea that others have mentioned of maybe making it so that forum points are still given out in private groups that have like at least 10 members or something like that. Then people can still maybe have some actual discussion while forum point farming.

I agree this doesn't really seem to solve all that much in the case of pointless spam. If people still want to just farm for points with no discussion, there's nothing stopping them from posting on all those game forums anyway. A rule like this isn't going to suddenly make people start actually chatting more if they weren't already.

I don't really want to see the forum shop taken away though. And I don't want to see it turned into just another sP shop either, we already have a lot of those.

I'm not sure exactly what the best solution is, but implementing changes like this without telling us (and what, hoping we don't notice or something?) is a bit disappointing.