i'm ambivalent about the price issue but i think it'd be nice if we could at least have natasha/blue building give out quest points so you don't risk losing any of the already limited quest points. i am so tired of losing my quest points to a mis-timed blue building quest, save me from this specific tiny hell pls

(if you're feeling spicy, bonus quest points for the weekend quest bonus would be cool too 👀)

can we PLEASE stop with the trend of countering "this aspect of the site is unreasonable to an extreme degree and many users just don't bother anymore can we please have a QoL change made" (say, 2.5-3 years of quests just to catch up and that's if you're paying the site for being allowed to do more quests a day, as more and more items are being released and just making the hurdle completely Sisyphusian) with "you just want everything to be handed to you for no work"? no, it's absolutely not specific to this thread (think battling, token shop, blue building, literally any change asked about to something that heavily discourages people from even starting to interact with that aspect of the site because it's so brutal, and most who do get quickly demoralized.) but it is an imo infuriatingly dismissive additude very prevalent on the site the last few years.

do you hate Triple A video games for locking any form of reasonable progression or items/characters behind outrageous microtransactions? too bad, you can technically do it for free you just have to work harder! put in 400 hours and you too can get one single free Darth Vader, or just pay someone else to do it for you! no, it's not one to one technically. except the GA you aren't paying the site, unless buying CSC, but other users. but that's what it feels like when concerns are dismissed with a blase additude of 'well you don't NEED it' or 'well just pay someone else to do it instead then!'

(and i absolutely 100% feel those quest shop releases were priced because of this thread so they could go "look, not everything is 60QP!" even if not the timing looks hella sus for a coincidence imo)

I find this ridiculous. I disagree that prices are excessive. And I further disagree that there is a lack of QP available.

I earn more than enough QP from dailies to supply my main pet with books and food, plus copies of nice items for my gallery. At the moment, I have over 2000 QP saved up for the next batch of seasonals or put towards more collections. This is considering I started from nothing 2 years ago and slowly saved up QP for all the items I wanted.

Its all about your goals and priorities. If you're trying to get all the collectables while simultaneously support 10+ pets with food and books, obviously, dailies alone will not give you enough. There is nothing wrong or problematic with that.

Moreover, there's a market for QP and you are freely able to purchase and trade with other players for what you need if that is your goal. ~25-30k per QP is nothing expensive either. If there is really a lack of supply, they should be selling for millions instead.

I'm in agreement with and . Quests give out multiple forms of currency, and all can be traded and shifted around for other types of currency. I've used sP to buy seasonal QP items (or normal ones when I just needed a boost), sold Wiz Tokens to earn sP, etc.

I don't think the comparison of the QP shop to microtransactions in video games is fair specifically because items aren't currency-locked. Video games tend to make those microtransaction items only obtainable if you purchase it with premium currency, but on Subeta I can use whatever combination of currency and items to get any item I want. Like, if I purchase something from the Token Shop, I'm not forced to sell it just for other WTs. Even the special items given out for subscribers can be bought by anyone, regardless of subscription status! Subeta is in NO way abusing microtransactions like other games.

I think this mindset is so weird. Like, where’s the fire? Where’s the panic coming from that people think they need to get every single item all in one year? Longterm goals are a thing. Big agree with everyone who has already said, there are multiple ways to access these items. Contribute to the user sales market and trade sP with someone who’s selling their QP.

Sorry, I don't have anything to add to this specific discussion. I don't do every quest every day, but I also don't spend a lot because I don't want or need most of the items.

However, this:

I 1000 percent agree with. There are not enough "THIS" gifs in the world to emphasize just how much I agree. There are no words that I can safely say on this board to describe how much I loathe that snotty dismissive attitude, of implying that there can't possibly be anything wrong with the game, so it must be the player's fault for being so damned lazy. Yes, that's the only possible explanation. [end heavy sarcasm]

ffs, NO ONE is asking for everything to be free. NO ONE is asking for everything to be made easier. They're pointing at certain aspects of the game, making their case, and saying, "Hey, is it supposed to be like this? Should it be like this? Could anything be done differently, to improve things for a wider range of people?"

Asking for a handout and asking those questions are not the same thing, damn it!! and I wish y'all would stop conflating them. If you disagree with them, that's fine! If you don't see any benefit to their changes and can make your own case, excellent! But stop, stop, STOP insinuating that players wanting changes just want handouts and don't want to put in the work. You don't know that. You don't know them. You don't know what they're having to deal with on the other side of the screen.

Again, I'm sorry, I've been trying to keep out of this discussion because I didn't have much to add to the specific issue, and that is what should continue to be discussed here. But the attitude thing has been bothering me for some time now and I had to get it off my chest. If I need to be warned or banned, whatever, it's fine, I'll take it.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of people missing the point completely. I don't see a direct purchase for sP button in the quest shop. Because we're expected to use QP, not sP. We're talking about what is and isn't possible with what subeta has intended us to use. Which is QP. Our own QP. Amber's post doesn't mention a single thing about using sP and trading with other people, it paints a narrative of solo play and putting in the time and effort is all you gotta do, guys!!! When that simply isn't the case. When there's a set amount of QP you can get a day, and more and more items being added to the shop all the time, it becomes unfeasible. By the time you finally can afford xyz items, 10 more have been added since then. You will never be able to catch up with solo play.

And then I get this vibe of "well if you weren't so greedy and wanting to buy everything in the quest shop..." Can I ask why the items are even there if they're not meant to be bought? Can I ask why it's apparently wrong to want to fully play this game and collect items for the collections that the game has provided me to collect for? This idea of "well it's your fault for wanting to add to the site-supported collections" is not helpful. Oh, I'm sorry, I'll stop playing the game then? Nobody's ever told me I had to pick one collection and stick to it. And all that to say I don't even collect beanbags and plushies. I don't buy them from the quest shop for that. And I've still struggled.

What free stuff? Items that I've grinded QP for? The same grinding that these people have done? The same amount of work is being done. Why is their "free" sP they get from selling the QPs more important than the "free" items I want to get from the quest shop? I'm not responsible for their profits and I'll throw back the same argument you put forward "they've made that decision." I don't know how you've jumped to these conclusions that we're asking for free quest shop items "for 100 pets". We're asking for either more quest points to start going out to accommodate the increased stock of items, or for items to not cost as much because items are being infinitely added and we're not able to catch up. You're the only one ranting about free handouts.

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next day edit: To give a general idea of what I buy, one of every item type is typically included in each new release (but not always), and sometimes the food and the wearable are the same item (multi use) I buy:

• one copy of the wearable
• one copy of the food
• one copy of the sticker
• two copies of the book
• on the rare occasion that an item applies to one of my pet TCs I will buy it for that

This doesn't seem unreasonable or a greedy playstyle to me at all, considering some people have over 100 pets and many people have more than one battle pet. But I'm not supporting 100 pets, or even 10, or even fully two. I buy one extra book. That is it. When I made the decision to buy this extra copy of every book in the quest shop, that is when I went QP bankrupt and could not keep up with releases for over a year because of it. And I did buy QPs from other users to catch up. 😐

The two kinds of players:

"could this be not as grindy or daunting?"

"if you play the game the way I do, you wouldn't have these problems so stop whining, you free loaders".

No one in here asked for free stuff or handouts. No one in here demanded to have the site hand them everything on a golden platter. Pointing out something and going "that kind of sucks" isn't asking for free shit.

Sorry I have a life outside Subeta. Sorry I didn't start playing that way you experts do 10 years ago so I too could hoard currencies!

Regardless of which side of the discussion you support, I think everyone needs to take a pause and not assume negative intent from either side.

1. There is a voice for change driven from the opinion that there is not enough resources (QP) to support their goals and play style. The desire is for reduced prices or increase QP rewards to lessen the cost / time requirement on players.

2. There is a voice that say the availability of resources (QP) is sufficient and the system is working as intended as a daily. Varying goals and play style can be supported through the daily rewards or through the user market.

I am not against changes, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere with careful analysis of pros and cons:

• How much should prices be reduced? It will certainty make items easier to acquire through questing alone in the short term. In the long term, more items will be added and accessibility and time for all items will again be an issue. Meanwhile, this may lower the demand for QP across the site as well.

• Should daily QP rewards be increased? By how much? At what threshold should the reward per day be 'enough'. Different goals and different play styles will require varying amounts of QP. Certainty, a player that wants to buy everything and support 20+ pets with books and food will have much larger requirement for QP than someone who is focus on only a single pet.

From experience, one could buy almost everything in the quest shop from 2 years of daily QP while supporting a single pet. Depending on your goals collecting, you could easily support 2-3 pets. In my opinion, this is sufficient. And as stated before, if a player desire to support more pets and/or accelerate collecting all items, the user market is a highly effective solution. The raw sP earned through quests alone can greatly supplement collecting if desired.

For those who disagree; that this isnt enough, my question is: what should be the threshold that the system should support?

[Edit] You can earn up to 11,315 QP in a year. So around 2.3 years to buy a copy of every single item in the Quest Shop. New items are added regularly, but unless the total price of all the new items in a year exceed 11315, a fresh player will be able to catch up and buy everything!

personally I'm not asking for more QP, or for the existing prices to be reduced.

I'm asking that they stop increasing the prices of newly added items. And maybe rollback, just a touch, the max price of new items going forward.

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As for your edit, there is a huge difference between mathematically possible and practical/achievable. People get sick, take vacations, get tired, have other commitments, most people are not up for the "job" of questing day in and day out for 839.5 days non-stop. LOL most people complain about having to hit a single button every day to keep up with the bathhouse for 30 days straight!

I would personally be in favour of all seasonal items just being the same price, regardless of the age of the items, and leaving all the 'variety' up to the individual shops. Yes, this means increasing the prices of some items while decreasing the prices of others. Don't know how else anyone feels about it though.

Also in favour of the Blue Building issue being fixed because I don't want to think about or count what quest number to get a point I rightfully earned but the site doesn't recognize it as such unless I do it in a specific way. By the time I realized I missed an opportunity to keep track of it (getting a point and then running to BB right away to complete four quests, go back someone else and complete an quest, run back BB), I'm no longer interested in doing BB quests.

Prices doesnt seem to be increasing at all. Looking at back 25 months:

• 2021 added 142 items at 3289 total QP, 23.16 avg per item
• 2021 (excluding anniversary & pride) added 96 items at 2934 QP, 30.56 per item
• 2020 added 112 items at 3355 total QP, 29.96 avg per item

The last 8 seasonals were:

• Winter 2021: 495 QP
• Fall 2021: 525 QP
• Summer 2021: 565 QP
• Spring 2021: 485 QP
• Winter 2020: 540 QP
• Fall 2020: 555 QP
• Summer 2020: 580 QP
• Spring 2020: 545 QP

Also, given those totals, a player only needs to quest 30% of the time to buy everything in the same year.

Additionally, for fresh players, a goal to collect everything is definitely practical and achievable. Yes, it will take some time with daily QP alone - its a long term goal much like training to stats cap, collecting all plushies, etc.

That said, remember that players are not limited to just daily QP earned. Quests also provide sP and item rewards which both can accelerate completing the collection if that's the user's priority. At 2-3m sP per day from quests, thats 80-120 QP more every day (at 25k market price).

So I took a closer look at books specifically in the Quest shop, to try to get a feel for the additions.

Mapped here are the 200-some books, and the prices for each. Top graph is all the normal shops, bottom is seasonal.

Roughly the first 50 or so were all in 2014 and basically populating the shops as they were added. The first winter seasonal was released at the end of 2014. I left the graphs the same X axis, so you can line up the years a bit by just looking at Winter/Spring additions. (larger img)

So I had it backwards. My bad. Seasonals haven't really increased in price (at least for books.) The main shops have though, if ever so slightly.

(larger img)

Average prices have generally increased a bit. In 2014, the shops were being added and populated, and for some reason, the cost per book was averaging around 8.5. But then in 2020, our cost/book was 31. If you eliminate 2014, the charts get a little more linear. (Again, only for books.)

I guess my shout into the void might have been a bit more sourced at the general sense of drowning that we have 7 years of these prices, and it's really really adding up.

I really just keep coming back to this statement:

So you're saying if I dedicate ~45m on quests for the next 2.5 years, I can buy everything? ~45min daily on one of the most repetitive, boring, and mind-numbing tasks on site? Sign me up.

😐 This might be an attainable long term goal, but it is not a fulfilling one. 2.5 years of grinding is incredibly daunting, and not everyone has the time nor the want.

I guess that's when the "you can buy from others for sP" argument comes in... But that is not the point. Sure, I can sell oodles of CSC in my shop and make lots of sP, but that is a level of "play" that's inaccessible to many. Questing daily, all 155 for GA, is a level that is inaccessible to many.

This isn't "greedy users want 20x copies of things", this is "users don't want to be so burnt out".

Just want to add my input here.

As someone who has done the hundreds of days of quests grind: I don't wish it on anyone.

I'm someone who has everything I need from the shops and I still have several thousand QP sitting around, and I repeat: I would not wish the grind it took to get here on anyone.

I am constantly trying to help friends out so they can catch up but it's a never ending cycle of me doing 2x or 3x the work to try to help out (which is 100% on me here, but also I'm lucky to have the time to spare, and a lot of them do not).

And I specifically think this is getting unrealistic / unobtainable BECAUSE it's tied to questing. Questing is: hella boring, hella tedious, and for a lot of people probably their least favorite activity of the site (I know it's my least favorite).

If QP were changed to something slightly different and given additional ways to obtain it (that also require being active on the site), I'd be more excited and encouraging for others to work on it. RN though it's really hard to be like "Yeah just imagine all the grind you can do for literal years and feel like you're getting no where. wacky face"

[edit]

Editing to add... where does the ridiculous amount of grind end? Or is that all Subeta can provide for it's users at this point? Infinite, tedious, and boring grind? IDK if it's just the limitations of this being a browser based game or what ever, but... I'd like to see more interesting things to do. (I was hopeful maybe the Tea House might be one of those fun things but my watch has stopped counting on that one. OTL)

@ Chocolate

Awesome sampling and analysis! I agree with your assessment that the range of prices on non-seasonal items have grown. Though, as you rightly pointed, average price per book has remained relatively flat outside of 2014 when the shop was introduced. And seasonal books have remain unchanged.

I do understand that the volume of the shop is of concern and that the effort to collect everything is daunting. That said, I find this comparable to any collection goals: plushies, beanbags, minions, wearables, etc. And unlike those collections, the QP items are available in one place and fully accessible (nothing is unbuyable / retired). Reducing prices is not a long term solution to this issue as more items will always be added. Should items retire instead, and re-released through other means? I don't think this would be a desirable solution as it eliminates the accessibility aspect of the items.

You do not need to sell CSC for sP. As mentioned, quests are an excellent source of sP themselves (2-3m per day). That means 6-8 months of daily quests for the whole shop.

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@ feral

If the core of the issue is questing itself - being too grindy and tedious (taking 45 mins per day) - the solution is not pricing. Rather, we should be discussing how to make the act of questing more enjoyable / less time consuming.

How about we reduce the number of quests daily to 6 per NPC? QP would be given out every other quest and would overall be unchanged, but the daily time commitment is reduced by ~60% (45 -> 18mins). The main drawbacks to this would be the item and sP rewards from the lower number of quests, and impact to the restocking markets (reducing item usage and circulation)

The overall daily QP reward could also be adjusted, but I feel that the current 30% participation is fair to be able to buy all items for the year.

[Edit] Fixed bad math & typos.. Added negatives to the idea.

I'm fine with the current pricing of the Quest Shop seasonal items. I consider myself a pretty casual player and I'm able to obtain the Quest Shop items I want at what feels like a reasonable pace. I collect beanbags, plushies, stickers, and have one pet I read and feed. I still don't have everything I need from that shop yet but the list of things I want decreases at a faster rate then it increases. Questing is my primary form of income on this game so I do it most days but I don't do all the quest givers, mostly because I just don't want to. I don't stress myself out trying to do all the quests.

Personally, I look at quest points as something that just passively accrues while I go about accomplishing other goals. When I have enough to buy the next item I need, I buy it. I don't use SP to buy QP from other users. If I start to feel stressed or frustrated with how slow something is taking, I usually take that as my cue to take a week or two break from Subeta. I'm just here to have fun, when it stops feeling fun I take a break.

While I personally, would love less quests to do lol... that would cause problems for both people who are trying to specifically get sP and not necessarily QP, and it would also be a problem for people working on the achievements since they'd end up with less quests each day to work towards those goals.

I think the best option would be to change them from QUESTpoints to something else, and award them in other places as well. The situation will only get worse with time because items are added at least once a month, sometimes more often if it coincides with the season change (if I'm remembering correctly).

ADDITIONALLY: Maybe one weekend a month (or something like that) one of the 'Weekend quest' givers offers discounts on their items??? IDK

((Also I don't want less quest shop items because the artist who does them is amazing. lol))

I do think this is a limit of browser-based games— to keep users on the site longer you do need to have some very difficult to achieve accomplishments. And I have to say, it’s the main reason I return to the site! If the items I wanted were easier to attain I would probably not be here anymore.

It's not supposed to be easy to collect every single item from anything. The quest shop represents years of added content, so why should it be something that you can get in a short period of time? This whole thread has done my head in - the data is really cool and interesting, don't get me wrong - but it's just genuinely not meant to be an easy task to complete your collections.

A good concession IMO is to add major drills quests to the QP pool (and battle quests but people would complain it would just help people who have already been here ages and have a good battle pet), which would add ~6 QP a day, assuming you did all 30.

But again, it's not meant to be an easy thing, they're also not retiring items so it is just one of those grindy things. What are you supposed to do once you get everything from the quest shop? Just.... stop playing? It's supposed to be something that keeps you coming back to play.... forever. That's the point of these games.

I wanted to chime in and give my two cents as a more-or-less casual player of one year. I believe that most of the problems are basically symptoms of a flawed system that both suffers from and thrives on the variety of items there is. When I first joined, looking through the Quest Shop was DAUNTING. Those shops usually are the first place for people to make use of the wishlist after all. Surprisingly, I haven't had the chance to even begin with collecting those items because I kept thinking that my QP would be better spent on the seasonals as they will go away eventually. It's just FOMO. Which is not a good thing in any way, yet it keeps places like this running. Dismissing the fact that people are not having a good time with this should be taken into consideration. Swiping it off with the "You should just know where to stop." argument is leading nowhere and to my experience is the death of any online game.

I believe new users are struggling under such high prices a lot since the main mechanic of making money on the site revolves around questing - which is not a fun experience. How should new players be able to prioritise what they want out of this daily grind when they are presented with walls of items, descriptions, achievements, collections? I definitely think that any newly released seasonal item has to be obtainable at minimum within the season. Obviously, some kind of balance has to happen at this point because I feel like I spent this year more time plotting strategies and digging through my wishlist than actually getting creative and having fun with the items I have. We have this incredible amount of really nice items in these shops that give SO much flavour to this game and I don't want it to feel like a checklist.

The main problem lies in the struggle of how items can remain appealing while not oversaturating the market which is a tough one. In general, making older items cheaper to me always sounds like a good idea. There have to be discounts, creative events giving away those items, bonusses for getting a certain amount of the items, I am sure anyone including the team came up with some fun ideas already. What that would require is change and time to implement these things which to me sounds like the main issue. People should be able to get the new items in the first run because the next flood is coming eventually, yet how much longer will this design scale? This goes for the events as well. Whenever I see an event shop open, I feel absolutely overwhelmed and confused by the multitude of items and would appreciate some implementation in the game's design that just says: "It's okay, you don't need all of that!".