Perhaps users could suggest some things which they think won't be missed from the main shops.

Bits and Bytes - Useless Wires. (It's type Other according to SubetaLodge so you can't do anything with them.)

Home Appliances - Broken Lightbulbs because a shop would never sell these. DIY Breathing Kit, DIY Pet Site Kit and DIY Rock Star Kit (None of these count as home appliances)

Atebus Shop - Cosmic Panties. (Metal underwear????)

i feel like these kinds of decisions have to be based on concrete data (that we as regular users are not privy to) and not just, like, personal preference about which items people like or don't like...

In my less than humble opinion (because I'm tired of the argument), if it doesn't have an immediate use outside pet treasure, fragging or it has been out for +2 years, it should be retired.

The suggestion relates to this topic. Please wait a few seconds' in shop search.

A lot of people have pointed out that there are far too many items from various sources being generated on the site. One suggestion was retiring items from the main shops which used to be done on a regular basis in the past. I just thought that players suggesting items might give staff members ideas about what to get rid of. It would still be staff decisions, though.

I feel like it would be better to just retire items based on age like they used to be rather than via user suggestion, and probably in the fullest shops (either the fullest shops only or the fullest shops first, and see what effects that has). For instance, Book Nook has been brought up as one of the shops with many, many items in it. The oldest book currently stocking (though not currently IN stock) has an item ID of 5. It's R99 and an achievement item though...so I'm not sure if it's especially urgent to retire THAT one based on age, but the second-oldest has an item ID of 61, is pretty consistently sitting around in the shop, and has a shop search price of 3k (up to 15k on the first search page, which isn't outrageous either, unless of course people decide to snap it up and hoard it as soon as it's retired).

I personally feel like some changes to the way things stock in general might be more helpful than outright retirements, but I'm gonna echo and say that's probably a call for staff to make based on backend data. If things weren't sitting around in shops for hours, it would help incentivize people to buy from other user shops for quests and thus get those items actually removed from the system (items coming in from quest rewards notwithstanding as that's a related but separate issue) and I'm not sure that waves of retirements is necessarily the way to go about that unless it's more complicated than I expect to just make less copies of an item or less items in general stock in a shop

I'd go by age or whichever are the cheapest around.

If it was just by age I think most of Icy Goods items would be retired. They've been there for as long as I can remember and nothing new has been added for years.

I think most itens should be retired based on how long they have been around + how many are in circulation. Like I'm recently back from a hiatus (at least 3 years, I think?) and books I bought back then are still being sold at the book nook. Like? Retire those and bring some new itens.

And on top of that, we need some changes on how often and how much the npc shops restock. Restocking in one of the main things I do on the website but on top of learning which itens are worth it, I also have to learn which itens will sell. Otherwise I will end up with a pile of rare itens that are worth 30k on the user shops but are always in stock for only 1,3k. Since the npc shops are always so full and so stocked, the itens do not cirulate.

I love my metal underwear. I make a lot of Transformers related avatars and use the hell out of them.

Here's Silverwing of Vos:

Outfit Not Found

I like your Silverwing avatar. The reason why I suggested people nominate items to be retired was to give staff some idea of things which nobody wants. You've shown that metal underwear can be useful.

Everything is up to staff to decide, though.

If they are going to do this, maybe they should retire items based on how long they sit unbought in a shop after a restock. If something restocks and literally sits there the entire time the shop is full until it resets itself, the market is probably oversaturated with it. As someone else mentioned, just because the item ID is low doesn't make it a great candidate for being removed (i.e achievements).

Maybe Main Shops is what we need to retire at this point.

Would suck for people who enjoy restocking, but there are so many items entering the economy in other ways no. I don't know.

I've been wondering how this could be done without creating a dreadful shortage so quest items don't go through the roof.

1. Revamp the vending machines so they can give out items of any rarity with chances of high rarity being the same as them turning up in the main shops. The machine contents would also need to be revamped. Have a vending limit per day.

2. The Mystery Box. Instead of rotating between main shops it could give out any item. Change the prices to what they are in the main shops. Have a limit to how many times you can use it per day.

3. Quest givers still give out items as prizes.

4. Battle quests still award weapons.

Removing a feature like this could have detrimental effects on the site. It's one thing when it's a feature like the Stock Market or Auctions, either used very little or is redundant compared to other features that can do the same thing but better and easier; but scrapping something just because it seems like the easiest solution to the problem is not a good idea.

I'd rather see changes made to the main shops before something as drastic as removing them completely.

Removing shops is not the easiest solution - retiring items randomly is the easy way out. However, it's not something permanent and the issue would happen again. At this point I'm really wondering if shops don't bring more harm than good to the gameplay.

Even staff seems to ignore the main shops now - most items added are event, or gotten from alternative shops (often ones with infinite stock)

I love every single addition Ciannwn brought up - vending and mystery box could work very well with these changes.

If older items get retired and a new wave generates in it takes time for that next wave to become quest price range because everyone wants all the new things. Right now I think they should still work on the item revamps like they have and filter out a list of items that really serve nothing for anything. And if there's features somewhere we as players are over looking where these items are used then maybe they should make a announcement or news post to remind us of those features. But as far as I'm aware it's mainly quests, TC, frag/recycle, and some combos....

I absolutely do NOT want main shops to be replaced with vending. Vending is just...not fun (in my opinion). You quite literally just sit there and gamble quietly by yourself, click after click after click. At least with restocking it has the potential to be a fun challenge of scanning over items in different shops, watching restock times, and competing with other users to nab things. Let's keep the in-game challenges on Subeta. I vote to keep the main shops and restocking, but simply rework them.

Honestly, removing vending might fix the item problem lmao. The vending machines barely have limits (if they have any?) and just flood user accounts with cheap items. At least the shops can have timers between purchases and limits on # of items stocked if they just get tweaked (stuff that's already coded and just seems like all it would need is alterations?).

I hate vending. I don't do gachas even with fake money.

Thanks!

The original point of metal underwear was 1930s-1950s pulp SF costumes, which not a lot of people currently on site are aware of or into, but pretty much every metal clothing item on the site is used by people who make robot or mecha avatars, whether it's Transformers, Gundam, Saint Seiya, or whatever else people fancy.

The metal panties can also be used as a belt in layering, and the metal breastplates are very useful because they're plain enough that you can layer them with jewellery and harnesses to make unique armour styles.

One of the reasons there is often drama over revamps of wearable items (when items are made wearable, that's always a win-win) is that there are many items on the site that most people don't think anyone is using, but there's always someone who's using an item and when it disappears and becomes a completely different item with a different shape and style, instead of just updating the art, the people who were using the item can't use it anymore.

The metal underwear and breastplates are ridiculously cheap, so if they retired them they would probably remain affordable--for a whlie. But eventually they'd become hard to find, particularly since many cheap items that people receive on quests end up being deleted for Major Drills or fragmentised or recycled.

Wew, things scalated quickly in this thread.

The problem isn't the main shops, it's the horrible offer/demand ratio. Look at this little guy for example. Normally it would sit all day in the shop, with someone buying it once in a while for a quest, and its price in user shops probably ranging from ~2-3k but at the time of this post there were only 6 in total, at 25k and 10m, "just" because the RB asked for it. On the other hand, even a CS item can lose a lot of value because it's little desired. What needs to be done is to figure out a way to make this ratio less broken. Can it be done by replacing main shops with vending? Sure. But it can also be done without doing something so unnecessarily hardcore and with a high change of going horribly wrong.

Tweaks in the main shops to improve things are easy to imagine but completely changing the gameplay not so much. What about the cost? We spend more WT through vending than we make with quests. Without shops, vending will become extremely desired. How to make sure WTs won't become rarer than a shiny legendary Pokémon as consequence? Less vendings a day? But with too little it might not be enough to generate a decent influx of items. Making the machines take sP? What's a good price so it won't be too good nor too unprofitable? Restocking is hard and requires time, patience and some experience, it's not just about the odds of an item showing up in the shop. Vending is literally just pressing a button for a few minutes. This will undoubtedly affect rarer items' value. Again, how do you fix that? But above all, is there any guarantee this will actually solve the main issue, too much junk on the site? What are the restrictions, changes or whatever it needs to become a perfectly flawless feature that will solve all our problems?

What I'm trying to say is, if someone is willing to apply rocket science on a pet site to fix the problem it can be done so on the main shops.

With all this said, I do agree with that retiring some items is just a temporary fix. Afaik the main shops have barely changed since I started playing, 15 years ago, and this is bad, very bad. Staff needs to give some genuine, serious attention to them.

i don't think there's any point in brainstorming about the main shops at the moment. any changes that aren't already a planned part of this "rarity squish" mentioned 2 years ago will probably not be seen as worth the time to implement right now. i think everything will be held up by this "rarity squish" until it's done. from the post Keith said there was a restocking shop overhaul planned, so. yeah.

fwiw i would hate for the main shops to be removed. for right now it would be great to literally just make them stock less and clear more often. i'm sure that would help immensely. there would still be the issue of RB items spiking, but... that's already an issue so whatever. also i hate vending and think its an incredibly boring way to waste my time. click a button for 10mins to get 500 junk items wahoo. i agree some things should be retired but that seems like a really delicate decision. i can definitely forsee people just buying out all the retired items (happens everytime a retired wearable gets a revamp for example) and that would just suck.