Going to be completely honest: I didn't even know quest-a-thon was going on right now this year, until I saw the announcement that the quest quota was already met. :( News events are also extremely easy to miss, especially if you're already logged on on the website.

This is something that, if I knew it was going on, I would have came onto the site to participate... I looked onto my email, and the last time I got a newsletter from subeta was... September 2019. I understand that doing newsletters for every month could be tedious, but wouldn't it be useful for user activity to announce events like Quest-a-thon in newsletters? Or even a push event? Otherwise things get bogged down easily on the news page; I'm really disappointed I wasn't able to participate this year.

Agreed, a newsletter would have been a great way to encourage participation for people who don’t use the site regularly. Full support for more newsletters!

However, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to check the news page if you are actually using the site - the quest-a-thon has been advertised in the ‘upcoming’ section for weeks if not months (although a definite date was only given recently) and the quest tracker has been at the top of the news page since it began. There were also 6 news posts about it. Admittedly, the quests themselves don’t say anything about it.

Did you do any quests over the last few days? If you did, you technically participated and should get the prizes.

Edit: I bookmarked the news page so that I don't miss any news. Just a heads up for the future.

Newsletters? Yes, absolutely!

But people miss that news banner? Along with all the other news about it that Skoletta mentioned. If you could miss the news banner and 6 news posts, you could miss a newsletter in your email as well.

Newsletters (especially for site-wide events) should definitely become a standard, imo. At least once a year, if not once every 6 months.

I've already posted about this in another topic, but it's still mindboggling to me that Subeta never sent out a newsletter when pet names were made non-unique, when the hair salon came back to the wardrobe and when the CW system got a bit of an upgrade.

A lot of returning users still don't know that non-unique names are a thing now. Even a nod toward these features in a new upcoming newsletter would be great. The pet names were a huge change and something that a lot of people were expecting to motivate the pet community more, but it fell super flat in terms of drawing attention to it.

[edit]I remembered that no newsletter was sent out when the subscription system went live either.

One potential explanation for the lack of newsletters could be that sending out newsletters is actually really expensive per month if you have a certain number of subscribers to email. And if your newsletters are not getting enough "opens"/interactions AND you're not seeing a return on investment in such a thing it may not be worth it.

If this is/was the case for subeta, they may have decided to put newsletters on pause for now and put that money towards other things for the site.

But I do see how helpful newsletters are for major site updates, events, and what not! 👍

A newsletter about all of these might have actually helped with getting more support for the website. I think Subeta's Twitter account has been posting about the Quest-a-thon and a few other things, but not everyone would think to follow that.

I think a new newsletter makes sense, especially with all the updates that have happened.

However.. I think perhaps staff just forgot it's a thing...

Newsletter would actually be great. It would have helped some of my friends to know about it, and I honestly did not know the unique name was a thing until reading it right now? I feel a lot of things need to be shared so that people who might have lost interest in the site (like myself) might be encouraged back. It might spark new interest and then some.

I don't think they forgot I think it was more of a issue of sending out stuff

The newsletters used to be incentivized with special items iirc, so I could imagine that they stopped because they just didn't want to create more items specifically for it. However, I would also be happy to get a newsletter from Subeta every month (or 2 or 3 times per month) summarizing what's going on so I could be aware even if I was too busy to play. Also maybe if I did have time and it didn't cross my mind it would remind me to log in. (I've been playing Subeta a lot less as an adult since working, marriage, etc.) maybe insert an ad to them as well and it could be a passive way for the site to earn a little bit of extra money?

I totally agree this may be a contributing factor. We are on site and see the users who interact on the forums around the time of a newsletter but there are thousands more who don't post, open emails .etc. Plus I am sure many go to spam. Going from the Main Statistics page:

There are 179,903 users of Subeta with 17,129 that are suspended so still that is a lot of emails.

And although those numbers seem scary because that is almost a 10%, some of those suspended users are active players once their account ban was over as in they waited the full year and made another account. I know of a handful of players over the years.

Also himself mentioned the potential for hiring two more part-time staff members.

So perhaps the Community Manager will have a role in newsletters as that would hopefully increase user retention and engagement.

Too many emails is exactly why most people unsubscribe to newsletters. I would rather quarter or seasonal. Less content requirements as in it could have links to the forums of major changes or news posts instead of putting all the information in an email. You want a newsletter to grab attention so more graphics which is art team labor intensive. Although to be honest, I would love another user contest for graphics or art to showcase in the newsletter.

Sending out email blasts costs money. They don't dictate how you should play. Some people are on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, blue moons, yearly .etc.

Ads in a newsletter? No thank you. Especially when so much of the vocal fanbase has been concerned with Subeta's finances. The wrong vocal person will see that and use it as "evidence" that subeta is closing. Which again has been disproven time and time again but is draining for staff to have to see. Staff love this site and have been here for years and years through the up and downs.

I agree that a newsletter is long overdue. There are quite a few changes that would be beneficial to showcase to others who are unaware and that may entice them back. However, Subeta is also going through changes again. Perhaps it is best to wait to when everything is ported over to the new.subeta.net which will be a radical change.

What if, instead of/in addition to the newsletter, Subeta used a new graphic every time it has an event going on? Flight Rising puts a banner up on its site header for every planned holiday and its off-calendar events. Having a big banner that says "Quest-A-Thon!" for the duration of the Q-A-T would pull users into joining and give a visual indicator that something new and fresh was happening. It could just be a new graphic that goes over the header on the top left of the site, and links to the event-relevant news post.

This is a great idea!! <3 I hope they implement something like this with the new site update, because it'd be so helpful for both current and potential users!

I miss the once a month newsletter!

The ruling idea in marketing at the moment is that if people are subscribed to an emailing list, they want whatever it is you're sending out. If people unsubscribe because they're getting too many emails, they probably never wanted the emails in the first place. Either that or the content changed, like you used to send out coupons but now it's just ads with no discount. Or in Subeta's case they used to give out free items and now there's no benefit to opening the email.

I see the game and the newsletter as two separate things, to me the newsletter does not need to be an extension of the game. It's an email. The point is to spread a message or a campaign, and frankly I would be more offput by graphics in an email than plain text with some modest graphic design, plus most email servers filter images out anyways.

I'm afraid if it was less than once or twice a month, it wouldn't be possible to summarize everything important in a timely manner without leaving things out or spoiling surprise spontaneous events. Ideally, from a player's perspective, I would subscribe to a Subeta newsletter that sent me essentially a highlight reel of the most important news posts - i.e. ones having to do with site events with some subtext highlighting game changes that wouldn't constitute their own email.

You have a valid point about costs, I don't know how many people are on the email list but surely it could cost over $100 to a few hundred or more dollars per month, so if that's the major issue here then that contradicts the concern about people unsubscribing. It would be better to have fewer subscribers who are actually interested and engaging with the newsletters you send out periodically, than to have a list of subscribers who don't care about your newsletter, that you never send them out to because A) it's expensive and B) you don't know what to send them that wouldn't make them unsubscribe. Rambled a little bit towards the end, hope that made sense.

So to address this, I am pretty sure everyone is auto enrolled at account creation. I do not see anywhere to unenroll from Subeta's end. Which means yeah probably a lot of people would not have chosen to be enrolled. The whole free items with a newsletter is also just an expectation that has come with the original batching. I don't feel like it should have to be an exclusive item. But a small SP and a select pool of items either related to the theme is fine.

In agreeance. So in terms of graphics I meant like logo in the theme or the time they did like who's that Pokémon but with a new future pet release which if memory serves right was the Zasaba. However, to increase user engagement I think just having like a here is the Subeta logo make a graphic related to the theme of "XXX" and the winner gets put in the newsletter. If email servers block it then they do, but at least less requirements on art staff, and bring attention to impending email.

I still disagree that monthly is the way to go. It's more work on the staff and detracts user engagement then on site. Which doing on site is more valuable than engagement with an email.

I just go by the site stats which is over 170k. It may be expensive, I don't know which provider they use, or the actual % of those still subscribed .etc. I was agreeing with that cost could be a factor and right now there are other ways to use that money for better return. Also just in case, they do seem to host the newsletter on site as well: Newsletter Definitely not pretty though. Which I am the type of consumer who does have newsletter subscriptions and I like the ones that are well organized with some graphics here and there to make it not look like a wall of text. Just a preference thing, and for most newsletters I just add the sender as a secure contact or whatever the phrasing is so I can see the nicely formatted message.

Again I am not against a newsletter, I think we should have one. I just don't think it should be monthly. User engagement tactics should be focused on site rather than email. Having a monthly expectation is work, a hard deadline that we know some users will really have a hard time with if it gets missed.

I've actually had some people ask me about my pet names in case I was to ever adopt out - which I was always fine with, as long as they were nice when asking - and I've had to let some people know actually about the non-unique pet names as a feature... and they were pretty surprised to find out about it. If you weren't active and saw the news post go up in the first... what, week or two? It is super easy-to-miss news.

I don't log into the site every time I visit, as I'm often logged in already, so it's very easy for me to not... often see the news page, honestly, even though I visit and send out smails/comments/whatever else. I might have seen the news page once or twice? I really miss getting the banners about new news more often. But the banner for quest-a-thon is very easy to overlook, IMO, on the news page. I've also been having a hard time actually loading forum threads too :( It seems to only load every few days, even though I have good internet.

Even a push notification - instead of a newsletter - would have caught my attention. ^^; Most of what I do on the website is related to building TCs for my pets so I'm not always questing, I've been bad about questing as of late since I started replaying neopets since I wanted to accomplish some childhood goals I never got around to doing + I've been helping my parents move and working my job... so I've been a bit scatterbrained. Totally willing to admit that! So many that was a big contributing factor for me, personally... but I also noticed recently that the password reset request link was actually broken again (wouldn't actually send an email to reset the password, it was working fine a little bit ago) so I am worried that might have also potentially impacted user activity too. :( I'm fine missing an event, since I've been busy anyways irl, but I really want user engagement to get better on the website. There is a few site holidays between now and then, but I think the next "big" event is isn't until Morostide. It's a shame because questers would get an extra pet slot, which I think would have complimented the non-unique pet name feature well.

Perhaps to compliment a newsletter it would be interesting if news was set up by a tab for "recent" and "big" news posts? Otherwise it's a pain to actually go back and read previous weeks, it feels clunky and awkward.

Mm, it can be hard to keep up with things if your focus is elsewhere. A 'big' news post section might be nice, actually! It might be hard to work out exactly what should go in it, but I like the idea.

Regarding the forums - have you logged in on https://new.subeta.net/? That fixed the eternal loading problems for me, although I've heard that some people are having trouble with it. I had to do it individually on all my devices.

Totally in favor a news highlights page. Honestly one of my hopes is that staff can tag news posts into categories. Some categories off the top of my head: New Release Revamp Site Event Retirement Battle Pet Spotlight Freebie Site Update Special Restock (token, crystal,free shop, cw pawn shop) And then they could act as filters so people could easily just pick the news section they want to read which would remove the others essentially a highlight reel. But for this to work the tagging system has to allow staff to edit the news post and add it in after the fact since it is so easy to forget to tag something.