WHY PEOPLE ARE QUITTING CS- A Discussion

[Lex.]

maybe this doesn't belong in this thread bc it's not really about quitting per se but i think a big problem cs has, in conjunction with the pet / trading economy and inflation, is that it's almost impossible for new users to get anywhere with their collections. in the past few years i've gotten quite a few friends to start playing cs, but even the ones who showed the most interest and stayed around long enough to experience events / dec 18 / etc have since backed away. it's very difficult for new players to get trades without having anything of worth and and a lot of older players r rude to new players and unwilling to understand that they don't know everything about the rarity and demand of every pet. plus in general the site is very dated as a forum site. without easy access to trading, making friends, and so on there's not much keeping new players coming in and more importantly staying. i'm not even sure what any type of solution to this would be, it's just something i've noticed as someone who has had multiple friends start and subsequently stop playing in recent years.

This is true, new players are probably much harder to get to stay playing the site because there's almost nothing to do when there isn't an event. Yeah, there is oekaki, but not everyone is an artist or is interested. There is trading, but not everyone is a collector, or cares about pets. Ok, there are forum games, but not everyone wants to play them.

I do think there should be a "Christmas is July" type of mini-event where we get 1 or more days that are similar to Dec 18th. Either 1 day in July with 3 boxes, or 3 days and 1 box per day. Or up to 4 boxes, raising the count to 4 for each event.
I feel like that is a great way to help try and curb the crazy demand/inflation, there are just too many people and not enough pets, or at least too many people hoarding the rare pets. But by all means, as long as you paid a fair price for every pet, hoarding is fine. It SEVERELY hurts the economy when people hoard these ultra rare pets WITHOUT paying the fair price.
Which I'm sure plenty people do. :(

@Infinitive
True!
If these people do happen to come back, then just recreate the pets. If they're store pets, take them from the pound. All the other pets are basically expendable, since they can be obtained through Dec 18th, or are uncommons & below. Staff have recreated store pets before so I mean. I don't see what the issue is with the whole making new pets thing .

[vixentail]

I want to add that sometimes, having incredibly nit-picky staff and admins policing a "child's site" IS harmful for the players.
Even if they don't always respond to complaints by users, I'd rather the site only reprimand when things are actually harmful on boards than all the time and have the staff care too much about random site drama.

For example, I was an active member of another pet site for years, I spent lots of real money on this site, I chatted in the message boards etc. This site had a huge list of very specific rules to "protect" a child fanbase, and as it was another site that had been around for a very long time, not many children visited the site anymore, and the staff failed to see that. I was inevitably banned from this site for something very, very silly.

I dont want staff that doesn't care about protecting children on a site that children are allowed to visit and join, but I don't want a site where you're scared of saying anything because you don't want to be banned. I fear if staff are tons more involved like some people want, and every possibly outdated rule is enforced, the site will be even less popular.

I'm really sorry this happened to you. I feel the same exact way and it's so nice to hear it being talked about openly here! It's so refreshing!

I said something about how racism was wrong on this site and was told it wasn't child friendly, despite the fact that children NEED to learn to criticize racism; if children are young enough to experience racism they are old enough to learn racism is wrong. I've never gotten over it and wouldn't be surprised if I am reprimanded for repeating it now - maybe I'll be banned tomorrow.

Exactly. That was on this site? I thought CS was one of the better sites for progressive, important conversations. The site I was speaking of earlier only recently unblocked "Gay" and "Lesbian" as words you could even use on the boards. It's ridiculous, I don't want to support a site that would act like anything gender or race related is not appropriate for children.

[lana del rey ♡]

As someone who's been on only since 2020, I've found it very hard to make trades for pets. I'm genuinely scared to trade for slightly older pets because I'm afraid of making someone upset for "a low offer".

Yes I still very much enjoy trading monthly and event pets because most of the time it's just trading species for species. But I'm so terrified to make mistakes when trading for older pets and I just avoid getting "dreamies" all together.

I love CS, I've made so many friends here but I wish the trade economy would get more balanced.

This is exactly what I wanted to say, just didn't know how to word it. 100% agree

[glitter]

I joined in 2008 and have been active/unactive on and off through the years.

I think the saddest thing is all the old players that will never log on again. On my friends list I have so many people who have these huge collections of pets (rares+) and the collection is just sitting there. It hasn't been active in years, like 10+ years.

I think if those pets were introduced into the pound system that a lot of players would have a lucky break with an old rare. I know it may seem unfair, but honestly these players will never log on again.

Idk, just my thoughts as I wish the people I used to play with were still here. But they're not

this!!!! the amount of accounts i come across that are so wealthy but just dead is crazy. I think there should be a reasonable time limit (10 years or so) and if there is no activity the pets should be put in the pound. I dont think the dec 18 system takes into account the pets that are sitting in ppls accounts never to be used again. so things are just getting even rarer as years pass by when ppl quit.

[blues clues]

another point i'd like to bring up, i've found tons of old cs accounts that haven't been logged into since like 2012 usually full of these old rares, and they just sit collecting dust. * edit u guys above me literally just brought this up lolol

i'm not sure who or what exactly that falls under but maybe with more passionate mods/admins they'd be able to clean up those old accounts that are no longer being used. there's already a place for old pets to go , ex: the pound , but for how busy the site used to be and how few people are on it now i'm sure there's so many old pets collecting dust that should be funneled back into the system to try and deflate the current numbers some of those 08'-11' pets

[benvyy]

Honestly I'm scared to trade any of my older pets, not because I'm scared I won't have enough for MA or Non trades but because I'm scared once they're gone I'm not getting them back, or at least not without a lot more work. The fairness I got them before was already difficult not being a much older players and having a few breaks but now it feels impossible to achieve again.

yea i agree, most of the rarer pets (at least from way back) i've gotten from being lucky w/ the pound or people quitting a while ago. even back then i didn't understand trading, let alone now, so i know that if i traded any of them away i would never get them back

[freepan1]

I personally think Horror's list was a mistake and part of the reason why trading has gotten so difficult. Those new made up values make it so hard to trade for anything old.

I've felt that sting with items like the shadow creatures and the original laptop, at the time they already felt out of reach but now it feels like a fever dream to think about trying to get them. It took me a few years just to get one shadow creature. I won't dare try for the other ones.

[FriedApplePie]

Honestly I'm scared to trade any of my older pets, not because I'm scared I won't have enough for MA or Non trades but because I'm scared once they're gone I'm not getting them back, or at least not without a lot more work. The fairness I got them before was already difficult not being a much older players and having a few breaks but now it feels impossible to achieve again.

Granted, I take long breaks on this website, some lasting years, but when I first got back online in 2020/2021 after being inactive for years, I had a lot of people take advantage of my lack of knowledge in my older pets. Apparently a bunch of them were friends and helped eachother out, I later found out in discord, and were not honest with me. Lost a good handful of older pets that way. I wish CS would have more rereleases to help with that. So many returning players get taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate.

[Rindepie]

old time player here from 2014,i sometimes like going on the forums, its fun.. but mainly all i do is log in once or twice a month, stay if there's an event, then when the event's over i log out and wait till next month.
it only had came to my attention that there was a security issue in any way when it was announced on July 27th. I had appreciated the little updates to security before then, but i actually didn't know what they were about, leading me to delay even changing my password.
why can't other mods make an announcement? why aren't they granted permission? this has always bothered me. staff hardly even listen to us and its outright frustrating, almost like we're all children or something (i know some of us are minors, but why do you treat us like we don't know what we're talking about all the time?). i feel as if no matter what we do, they won't listen to us or outright dismiss it.
ive been seeing more and more familiar faces, and im not sure if thats a good or bad thing. i like the familiarity, it makes me comfortable.. but that also means no new players. its hard to make friends, its hard to trade without feeling like you're gonna get chewed out for it, its just hard interacting with people in general unless its in forum games. trading is harder as well, and i know that i won't be able to get most of my dreamies or pets i've been looking for. i still don't really understand the whole trading stuff either anyway, ma.. non.. all that sort. besides, lots of people get scammed on dec 18 and the staff just don't really care.

i wish that cs had better security, 2fa would be nice, different display names, maybe some sort of unique captcha? (ive been on sites/games where they would have some sort of unique captcha, like matching a name to a pokemon or something). i wish there was more trading improvements and such (no trading on dec 18, giving older players a chance at older pets, etc). i also just wish that.. things get better, i love this site. i love the art, the pets, the community, but i just wish things would get better and much more safer.

[felo]

this is almost exactly how i feel. as a member since 2013, I feel like a "newbie" because i came back to the site after a long hiatus. i remember trading based on how much we liked the pets in the trade, and all this MA and nons stuff doesn't make sense to me at all. i can totally see how trading would make no sense to a beginner on the site.

hey though, I really want to speak to the fact that the way trading worked "before" the non and MA system also made no sense. genuinely the way pet value was calculated and added up was impossible to understand unless you had a deep understanding of every single pet's demand within the larger trading economy. I would argue the non/MA system makes *more* sense than the old "list," since "non" is a defined term the way a dollar is, and "MA" is a smaller fraction of that defined term, the way a dime is. adding up numbers is a lot less confusing than saying "well, an evil pps + a balloon dog = a toxic, but a balloon dog + a lolita = a coontail"

I know those values are likely inaccurate anyways (I struggled deeply with trying to learn the old system) do you see how that kind of "trading" information would be completely indecipherable to a new player? and how you can't ever figure out what those kinds of things mean until you have an internal perspective & memory for every single pet's value?

conversely, saying a non = 100 rares and an MA is worth 1/10th of that - sure, it can still be confusing if you don't know where those terms came from, but "non" and "MA" can still be defined in a concrete, countable way.

sure it logically "makes sense" that nons and MAs work like dollars and cents, but now nobody will trade if your math isnt perfect :/ I think trading being more fluid and based on a demand that you cant exactly know at any given time is like...more normal? like, that's trading. having assigned values is just buying things and if you don't have enough MAs you'll never be able to get a non