Horrible forum lag

I made this bug report months ago about the forum lag, and it's still an ongoing issue. It's been nearly four months since I made that thread, and the lag was a problem for weeks before that.

I understand that these things take time to fix, but the forums are a central part of the Subeta experience, and it seems to me they should be a priority for the programmers.

Keith pops into the thread every few weeks to say he's pushed some fixes and then disappears again, but the "fixes" never do anything to improve load times.

From a player's perspective, nothing seems to be getting done, and it's beyond frustrating.

To make things worse, this was posted about a month ago:

Weren't the forums recoded from the ground up last year? Why wasn't this addressed during the recode? If having them in a MySQL database is the primary issue here, that would have been the time to change things. So why didn't that happen? Now we're right back where we started, and all that work seems to have been for naught.

Speaking of recodes, what's up with the wardrobe? It's been in beta for over a year, and it's still buggy and clunky. The banner says "Welcome to the beta wardrobe! We're making some pretty significant changes over the next few weeks in this space," but development seems to have stopped.

Again, the programmers may be working on these behind the scenes, but from a player's perspective there's not much happening, and it's hard to understand why.

And then there's the status page, which was meant to keep players informed of technical failures, but never actually provides any useful information.

Even the minion battle system was seemingly abandoned immediately after testing started. I'm personally not a fan of that feature, but I'd rather see something completed than a bunch of sloppy, half-complete beta releases that go nowhere.

And this isn't the first time we've had this conversation. There was a feedback thread on this same topic just a few months ago. And while we had a short burst of obvious productivity in response to user complaints, that's gradually dropped off again.

Everything is broken, lets revamp something else!

So the big question is: what's going on? I understand that Subeta has limited resources, and that programming takes time, but why do we have so many features that get partially recoded or have a "soft release" and then -- to all outside observers -- abandoned and left to rot?

And I also want to take this opportunity to go off on a slightly tangential rant that's been bothering me for some time:

We had a minor plot this past Morostide that involved several minigames as plot steps. These games no doubt took time to code, but they were literally designed to take under a minute to complete, and to only be played once. There was actually an achievement for finishing one game in under 30 seconds.

What's the point of that? We see how long it takes for other features to be coded, released, recoded, fixed, and so on. We constantly hear about how limited Subeta's resources are. So why put in that much effort to design 30 seconds worth of content?

Those games could have been reused with a higher difficulty for other plot steps, or released as standalone games later on. But no, they were completely disposable. I see this as a complete waste of resources, and another example of how skewed Subeta's priorities are.

🙌🙌🙌 Great post.

Sadly, if history has shown us anything, it won't do much other than possible get staff to come post about how much they do behind the scenes, how they have skeleton crew, how expensive it would be to recode everything, and/or how features were so close to being done and then the dev server crashed.

But maybe I am just a pessimist after watching the same crap happen year after year after year. Maybe I am wrong and this is what needed to be posted to light a fire under 's ass. And I hope so.

But I doubt it.

You need to be put on staff and then you need to be given a raise tbh.

I don't really have anything to add other than that I agree wholeheartedly. New features are great, but not when they're abandoned a few weeks or months later in order to work on something newer.

Amens all around. The forums are whacky, the wardrobe is a damn struggle, and the only ones who ever tell us ANYTHING useful are the mods. (Thank the stars for Amber and Ariel, honestly.) The status site was a great idea but bombed. The minion thing was a horrible idea that ALSO bombed. Everything seems so half baked over here in terms of recoding and revamps and all this jazz and all we're gunna get is Kieth coming in here with a 'tude. which yeah I know is fair but still.

Though tbh I loved the games I wish we had them in the games room now they were grand and I'm glad we had them!

I agree with everything and I'm getting sick of everything laying around half finished and half broken. There was so much more than could have been happening than a half-baked minion battling system.

I mean really, you have people ready to throw money at you, but it doesn't mean a thing if it's going to be squandered away.

Subeta Coding Funds Drive

Meanwhile is vacationing in Paris. Again. 👌

Edited to add: I am pointing this out not because of the financial side of things, but because is more than just the company owner. He is one of only 3 programmers (4 if you count who isn't a fulltime coder for the site).

Even seemingly incredibly simple fixes don't happen around here. How long have we been without map hovers? And average/overall pricing? And restocking royalty no longer showing a count? It took over a week to get the text updated to reflect the update in autopricing to 5m.

Also, account worth? This is supposedly fixed somehow?

If the forum is heavy, why not removing the locked threads from certain place? (Like old selling board- duplicates - etc).

The new wardrobe is a desolation. All those new perks and only half of it loading properly. A great pain in the ass for pets owner with their babies, struggling with an heavy page. Why not making the pets smaller? SOMETHING? The lags happening during every events, and the downtime "Subeta is down!" during hours. The "Don't post twice in a row!" but man, there is someone else after me - stfu.

I mean, I could go on all day. It's like a store satisfaction policy*.

*If not satisfied, we will listen to your problem and work on it. . . . In a year.

There is a reason why I'm not spending my money here.

I haven't been on Subeta as long as a lot of people, so my frustrations don't go back years like some of y'all. Even so, it's pretty annoying. There's been how many feedback threads in just the past few months about serious problems on Subeta's end? Just on the front Feedback page there's two threads calling out on-going problems with wearable quality control, and more items with the exact problems those posts are calling out have been released since those threads were made! Granted, art quality isn't as big a problem as the broken wardrobe, unfinished forums, battle problems, fucked up achievement revamp, on-going SBQ saga, and numerous other issues plaguing the site, but it's a symptom of the larger problem.

Subeta implemented that 'daily support goal' thing a while back. It's cute, but completely meaningless to us users. Between crapton of CW releases, constant Cash Shop items and features, GAs, Autotraining, ad revenue, CSC pet features, and the easiest way to make sP being selling CSC? From a user's perspective it seems like Subeta should be rolling in the dough. If all of that isn't enough then wtf is going on behind the scenes? CWs are a relatively recent thing, and so are CSC chance machines, so how was Subeta managing to keep going before they were introduced?

If the art department is so overworked, WHY are they? Slowing down art releases shouldn't be that difficult. If Subeta doesn't have adequate programmers, why the fuck not? This has apparently been an ongoing problem for years. Staff members have come and gone in that time, when Subeta could afford to hire on new people, why didn't the spots go to programmers?

But really I think the key is there's a lot of money Subeta's NOT making because they can't get their shit together. I spend a lot of money on games and overpriced gaming merch. I don't regret spending that money because I fucking love video games and I like supporting companies that make games I like. I don't spend much money on Subeta. I would probably buy a lot of CSC if Subeta didn't seem so poorly managed, if I didn't feel like I was being rooked every time I went to the cash shop. How many other users feel the same? How many people have thought about buying some CSC but didn't because they aren't happy with the site?

Adds disgruntled voice to the pile that's already formed here. I've been fed up with the way things have been for a really long time, and generally voice my annoyances. I want to say that I'm past the point of caring, but i'm not because if I was, I wouldn't still be here giving feedback. Like the only reason we're so annoyed and fed-up is because we give a shit about the site and want it to do well and all be happy farting unicorns.

I'm SO BOTHERED that the minion battling system was a NEW FEATURE that seems to have now been abandoned. Not because I wanted it particularly, but it's yet another thing in the pile of SPARKLY NEW FEATURE WOO NEW THINGS ON SITE that will never be finished or is at the most being worked on at a snails pace. What bothers me the most about the minion battling is that we have so many other things that need work, (not to mention all the shit that needs to be sorted with the PET battling system), and yet we get a new feature shoved in our face to what, distract us? All it does it highlight how broken and how lacking in priorities the whole site seems to be.

I was just going over some achievements earlier and I didn't even know how BROKEN the achievements page is! You have to refresh the page constantly, go back to the achievement you bought items for, open the list, wait for the achievement to activate, sometimes even needing to go take a look at your books read page or food eaten page, (which is a huge hassle because of various reasons. 1. having more than like, 15 pets means the pet page takes FOREVER TO LOAD and 2. loading up the tremendous list of books and foods.) It's ridiculous because putting pages on these things didn't even help.

Now after reading the OP apparently the forums, that we were told had been re-coded from the ground up so we wouldn't have to deal with bs anymore, STILL HAVE BS ASSOCIATED WITH THEM? What was the point in moving the forums if everything wasn't re-coded? What. Was. The. Point. Because you've got me at a loss. I had threads that I wanted to bring over onto the new forum system, but was told that it couldn't be done so I made do and now this shit has MySQL issues like... you're killing me here Subeta and you're killing yourself.

I don't even want to touch on how long the BETA wardrobe has been the fucking BETA wardrobe. Does it really still NEED to be in BETA? What else is there to be done with it? Like how broken is this feature that was meant to only be in BETA for "a few weeks" ?

I'm honestly just waiting until the site keels over and dies from the overbearing weight of these Neopets refugees that we're receiving. I feel so bad that they think they've found a nice alternative to Neopets and then they have to deal with all of Subeta's fuckin' broken features + terrible servers and god knows what else.

This post is very long and negative and angry so here's a picture of cute birds

Lets not forget this topic: Friendly Site! 11 pages of suggestions for user friendlyness: 1 was used. Or this sP Sinks! 17 pages of suggestions for sp sinks, we got 1. And here The giant list of usability and random improvement 74 issues still standing which vary between minor and less minor flaws in the website that need fixing.

When are things finally going to get fixed? If you add the two usability topics together that is 20 pages of posts with things that need attention. And don't get me started on the problems & bugs forum. The luminieve site layout has been broke since it has been released, dozens of topics have been made about it, someone said they would fix it... like 3 years ago? So many times staff say they'll look into something or they get brainstorms going and nothing is actually done with it.

It still seems to be a constant that someone gets an idea: oh lets look into this, and they never finish it. Seems like a serious ADHD: starting things, getting distracted after 10 minutes and then doing something else and entirely forgetting about the first thing you were working on. Then someone gets really angry (a topic like this usually) and then the person is like: oh yeah, right i was working on that! They work on it again for 10 minutes, and we are back to where we were.

ehhhh, I don't want to complain about that because it's not my business how he spends his personal earnings. I'm not going to call him out for embezzling funds or anything crazy.

I do worry about the timing though. He went on vacation during Peka-Boo last year, and we saw how that turned out. With Masquerade about to start, I really hope the site doesn't fall apart while he's away. :x

I edited my earlier post to clarify, my comment about vacationing in Paris is less about how he is spending his paycheck and more about the fact that he IS one of the site's programmers, and there are a lot of areas on the site needing programmer attention... so it would be nice for the playerbase if he was actually coding features for the site, and not galavanting across Europe. :)

In before I am told that IS working while on vacation.

I was just saying to my friend the other day how bad it looks for new players to try out the wardrobe and it literally says

"Wardrobe! :( " with a frowny face. That just doesn't look good.

TBH Subeta, and Keith in particular, often remind me of this. Just replace Mojang with Agoge.

I wish i had the time and energy at this moment to contribute a long post like you all have done so far. But i completely agree.

I have been on the site for more then 8 years and still things seem to be broken at a constant pace.

Surprisingly none of you mentioned the achievement system yet. I LOVE achievements, but this page is driving me completely insane (and not the user, lol). Or a smaller thing: battle quests and the quest bar not filling. A little irritating. The autopricer that prices up to 5 mil now but the numbers underneath still say 0sp to it.

Just little things. But worth mentioning.

[edit]

So reading is not my best asset. These things have been mentioned before. Sorry.

In that case this post is just an support to all that has been said above. I agree completely that these issues need fixing before starting something new.

- I see now. We're totally on the same page. :P

Do you know if and are full-time programmers on Subeta? I hardly ever see them around, and when they do post it's usually on the weekend. Somehow over the years I've gotten the impression that they're only part-time. D:

That would make Keith's absence a lot worse. :x

Ugh, yes. Honestly some things have been broken for so long that I sometimes forget they're even broken.

😂😂😂

I'm glad you think we are on the same page because every time you post I am sitting here going YES YES GET OUT OF MY BRAIN YES.

As far as I know they are both fulltime programmers. Neither post very often though, and sometimes it really seems like only has them work on side projects (ie, was the one that coded the minion battling feature, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that was a poor use of her time and energy)