I don't know if this would be better in the feedback forum or not, or if you've already decided what you're going to do next year. Or maybe it belongs in the Cash Shop sub-forum.

I like the theme with the monthly challengers this year, but there's been a lot more delays this year, with the Cash Shop challengers overrunning into the next month. I know the artists and battle admins probably have stuff going on that causes delays, but we don't know unless you tell us. Even the free challenger for September got delayed into the following month, and we're still waiting on the CS one, which I hope the item for will still be available to buy for long enough (you did do it with June's after all).

So I was thinking, maybe to take the work load off the artists and battle admins, instead of having a free challenger and a CS challenger every month, you could instead do it every 2 months, or maybe even alternate between the two so there is still one challenger each month. I remember looking at older news posts a while back and I found that CS challengers weren't originally monthly, they seemed to be every 3 months instead. The only problem would be if you were relying too much on the CS challengers for more money, but there are other things you could do about that, people are still hoping for older CS challengers to be brought back every month in the same way as monthly collections.

As I said before, it might be too late to do this next year, but if that's so, maybe it could start the year after.

I edited this a bit because I might not have used the best wording. I'm sorry.

i don't think you being frustrated when things are late is a good enough reason to for them to stop doing two challengers each month

this is the third year they've done two monthly challengers (npcs and fears, blake and legendary tracks, and now this), and while this is the first year we've seen multiple delays, that's not really an indication that they're going to keep having problems and need to stop

I didn't mean to be rude, I was just trying to suggest a way for them to not have so much to work on if too much content is becoming a problem for them. Maybe I did assume that they would keep having problems, but that could just be me being pessimistic. I keep saying that I don't know what's causing all these delays unless they tell us, they often keep us in the dark about that. If it's too personal, then just say it's too personal to go into detail.

This seems like another communication issue. I wouldn't be so frustrated if I knew why this kept happening, and how likely it was to happen in the future.

Less content? Why?

Not enough staff has been a problem for years, but cutting down on content is NOT the solution. That's an ugly precedent and just suggesting it is just...no.

" I keep saying that I don't know what's causing all these delays unless they tell us, they often keep us in the dark about that. If it's too personal, then just say it's too personal to go into detail."

We have been told for years that Subeta is running on a skeleton crew, due to it not being a full-time job, due to it being a passion project. Delays aren't a surprise, because Subeta is short-staffed. That's it. That's literally it.

Never mind, just forget about it, I'm sorry for annoying people again.

I don't think it's a matter of being annoying. It's a matter of not seeing the bigger picture, really.

If the challenger is late, well - they're going to adapt. They're perfectly capable and they've honestly improved on several aspects lately. We got more pet releases, which is a good thing.

A lot of the userbase was upset that we got close to no pets in the earlier months of the year - but it would never have crossed our minds to suggest that if staff didn't have the time to release pets, to just stop doing it. Thankfully, there has been a SIGNIFICANT improvement since the summer, so hopefully we never go through a dry spell such as Early 2021 again.

If we were down to one set of challengers a year, we all know that the free ones would be the ones left on the wayside. We'd probably go back to getting one every three months in the MC, rather than the system we have now. Users with less time to invest in the site, or users with less access to CSC would be the ones losing out.

And you don't really want to penalize casual players - making 80% of the new opponents cash shop only isn't bueno.

The current system is fine. We just have to be patient, and in this case, having faith.

But anyway. Less content is never, never a good idea. It sends the wrong message.

in addition to what sopheroo said about the risks of reducing content and re: "I remember looking at older news posts a while back and I found that CS challengers weren't originally monthly, they seemed to be every 3 months instead":

there's no guarantee that reducing the number of challengers released each year will solve your actual problem, which is that they're not being released according to the schedule you're expecting (you are anticipating a monthly release schedule and getting upset when they are late). it just means the gaps between releases could be more uneven than they are right now.

when i wrote Bring Back Old Cash Shop Challengers Each Month, the only year i didn't see monthly cash shop challengers was 2014 (likely because they had THREE site events with boss battles for people to fight; tempest, a gelatin war, and twisted jaxon skelly), and the challengers/unlock items were released like this -- [box]march 20: glittering feather (winter theme challengers)

april 3: research file cabinet (related to 2013 theme)

june 1: fruit punch summoning feather (spring theme challengers)

august 24: eventide phoenix summoning stone (summer challengers)

november 18: deciduous summoning charm (fall challengers)[/box]

and that is not any better or more consistent than what we have now, which seems to be "this will be as close to monthly as we can get" (note that the 2013 theme "boss" was released FOUR MONTHS into 2014 and start tempering your expectations for when we'll see who's doing the possessions right now)