Hey everyone,

I was just reading through some of the pet-related suggestion threads, and one thing I noticed some people saying is that they feel like the site isn't really focused on the pet aspect anymore. I was thinking that it might be possible to increase people's engagement in pets if there were some official contests/pet-related events. My ideas are below, but I'm curious what the rest of you guys think as well!

Pinging # menagerie because I feel like you guys might have some opinions/ideas regarding this.

More Official Writing/Art Contests I know there's been a few official contests before, and I know there's plenty of informal contests, but overall I think having events where the users have to submit their own writing/art would be a great way to increase engagement. Maybe for example, if a new store is created and the staff need an NPC, there could be a "job application" contest for users to design the look and/or personality and background of the new NPC. Or maybe Euclid could created a limited-time, super-rare batch of a "custom" pet, and users would have to compete to get their design accepted as an official "custom" pet. Or maybe an official forum-related roleplay-type event where you'd have to join as one of your pets/characters.

P2P Battling I have no idea if this would be possible, but it would be so much fun if we could battle other players' pets. I think it would create a lot of prestige in having a pet with high stats and could also be a fun little challenge between friends for people who normally don't care for battling.

Secret User Pet-Swap Menagerie did something similar to this a few years back, and I thought it was really cool. Basically the idea is that everyone signs up one of their pets to the pet-swap. They are then assigned the pet of someone else who joined the event, and then they have to create something for that person's pet. At the end of the event, everyone surprised each other with what they created, and they shared it with the rest of the group.

In our case, I think we were just writing snippets/stories for the new pet, but maybe this could be expanded to art as well. I think it'd be really cool for everyone to receive a piece of writing/art done by someone else for their pet, as well as to work with a pet that isn't one of their own!

Virtual Pet-Related "Conventions" There are a lot of people on this site that are extremely talented in pet-related things like art, writing, coding, etc. I think it'd be really cool if we could organize a one-day virtual "convention" for volunteers to share their expertise (if they wanted to). It could be a full-day related thing with certain panels (ie. group lessons/lectures, etc) happening at certain times, kind of like a real convention. People could volunteer as individuals or as groups, and we could make use of channels like discord/video streaming, etc to connect.

I like all these ideas.

I feel however that the pet (art) swap might be a little hard to execute without at least some people coming out dissapointed. It is inevitable some people enter just to get free art/writing making nothing in return, and some might be dissapointed by the quality of art/writing they recieve. At the same time I also believe people shouldn't be excluded because they can't draw a stickfigure/Write a Haiku to save their lives. I really like the idea but I think it works far better as a user contest/secret santa thing among the users in the existing subeta arts community.

hnn i love all these ideas?? q v q

years ago i was active on another pet site called mycena cave and they used to do events where people worked on their pets and depending on how much work you did you got raffle entries? it's been years and i don't remember it all that well but i def liked the idea of a sort of push to inspire people to work on pets!

also yess i love the idea of pet-swap but agree with in that it might be better as a secret santa type thing. like yeah there def will be people who do the bare minimum to get free stuff, but at least for me i always enjoy giving more than receiving when it comes to secret santa haha

I don't really have anything to add but I really like the ideas posted as well, especially the pet convention one.

I'm going to agree with anoniemmus with having the pet swap be a secret santa type deal. I think opening up to knowing who's on the other side might open it up people insulting/slighting the other side of whomever a user gets just for kicks or because of some random personal vendetta. Having it be a secret santa makes it entirely anonymous.

I'm all for more things to do with our pets. So full support here!

I like the idea of pet focused events, but I don't like the idea of users providing the rewards. There's just too much that can go wrong there.

But some sort of event where you have to actually interact with your pet would be good. Like there are event specific items and you get rewards for using them to feed/play with/stat boost/read to your pet

I like all these ideas! The secret-santa style pet swap and writing+art contests especially appeal to me.

However, Anoniemmus does have a point about people being disappointed about getting something low-quality or worse, nothing in return. The former, I don't know how much can be done about that. But the latter, if someone got completely stiffed on pet art or stories, there might be a solution to that. I've seen some art swaps on DeviantArt where there were a couple of volunteer backup artists who would draw something in case any of the participants was a no-show. Maybe something similar could be implemented here.

I like the NPC design contest idea too. Reminds me a little bit of the contests Capcom used to hold for Mega Man games, where kids would submit robot master designs. It's kind of cool to see what professional artists can do with childrens' drawings XD and it just goes to show that inspiration can come from anywhere!

All of these sounds really fun to me. Maybe if you make these contests you can recruit pitch hitters, people who can step in if someone gets a deliberately bad gift or if their trade partner ghosts them.