Okay I've been seeing this thread pop up again and again and I think I should put in my two cents here.
First off. I'm going to have to criticize the title. Not only is it inaccurate and fear-mongering by nature, it's not based on any actually real evidence. Why is it dying? Why is this urgent? Where are the numbers and the proof?
A personal feeling is not proof that a site is dying off. I've seen arguments flying by on this thread that range from no mini games, to the forum being dead to trading difficulty, to new members not staying long, to discord servers, to the month long wait to get pets grown, and I'm going to address all of them and more with my own observations over these past years.
Keep in mind these are
observations. Things I have personally seen and noticed myself, and they do not include real numbers unless sourced and said so clearly.
The first and most prominent argument is- The forums are dead?
I'm not sure how that argument is true when this thread alone already has somewhere over fifty pages and counting and several new replies every few hours, there is an absolutely hopping art forums that encompasses both personal adoptables and regular art works, forum games that pass by in the hundreds every day, a live feed of thread replies, trade posts are made every day, active discussions on pets that grow on the site, and an entire separate forum for role play as well as forum mods being actively the largest group of staff on the site?
Evidence strongly suggests the forums are not dead nor dying. Certain aspects of the forums aren't popular, such as helping people with trade values, and there's probably a good reason for that that I'll address in my next part.
Which brings me to trading.THIS is a whole separate discussion in and of itself that has separate threads and a HISTORY within the website. I think the long and short of it, though, is something that a lot of people don't really want to accept.
Trade values are not real. There is no catch all that will ensure you get the pet you want. People are allowed to make their own personal values for anything they own, and the only values that you actually see are not in fact made by the site itself, but by users collectively agreeing on what seems fair and what doesn't. I'm not ACTUALLY certain, but I'm fairly sure I've heard that was why the list pet thread was taken down a few years ago, since it was never official to begin with, but I wasn't actually active on the forums back then when it all happened so a lot of that drama just passed me by like a ship in the night.
But when it comes to trading or getting a pet you want? The only things that will help anyone with that are patience, a hefty dose of realism, and the will to wait to get what you want. There are pets on my personal wishlist I have waited upwards of ten years to get. Will I ever get them? Probably not. They're pixel dogs, so I'm not going to invest much in the way of personal effort to do so, and they are incredibly rare and hard to get. No one is required to give me theirs just because I want it, and if I don't have what someone wants in return, then that's that. If people want more than what I think it's worth, I don't trade. Someone might, but not me.
Trade values are, in the end, a personal choice. The fact that it's harder now just means that, like ANY site, things that are older are harder to come by, and the people with multiple are usually the industrious sorts who want to get a return out of something they've actively invested in. That's why these people are in the values threads, that's why people who have actively participated and are passionate about trading are the ones at the forefront of forum discussion. These are values that make sense to THEM, but in the end these values are, like any part of the trading system,
personal opinion.
Taking it as fact or as anything official will cause problems in the long run, and has!
But again, if you want a certain pet and it's rare, you have to remember that you might never actually get it. No one is entitled to a full collection or even to finish their personal projects. Not even me, and I've been playing for over 12 years. And if that is a fact that means someone will leave in frustration, that is also something that cannot be controlled by the website.
New members not staying long?That's actually pretty normal. People join a site, they find it's not for them, and they leave. There's a host of reasons people leave a site, and it's usually something that doesn't jive with them ranging from literally any aspect of the site to just not holding interest. The rate of people who actually stay on a site and are active is... really low.
Like, take Chicken Smoothie.
These numbers are easy to get because they're right on the bottom of the forums:
Total members 596332
Versus the most members online at one time:
Most users ever online was 6116 on Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:05 pm
This site has never had a HUGE number of people active at once, and it tends to hang around 500 at any given moment during the daytime hours. I go to flight rising to check and that site, which has an incredibly higher number of things to do and an *enormous* userbase, tends to range around 3500 people online at once, and even that's usually half and half between actual members and people just checking it out. Like, right at this moment: (There are currently 1780 users and 1664 guests visiting Flight Rising.) Imagine how many members Flight Rising actually HAS? I can't find the numbers of members anywhere, but I know how popular that site is compared to how small activity is.
So yeah. New members not staying is completely normal. Member retention on any site is a FRACTION of who join. It's even normal to stay for a few months and drop off, only to return years later. I do that on flight rising often.
Discord Servers?...I'm going to be frank here, and just... if a discord server is active and hopping around a website, that doesn't mean the website is dying.
That's good for the website. That counts as activity
for the website. People are active and talking
about the website.
...I'm not sure how the presence is a chat server specifically for chicken smoothie would be interpreted as it taking attention away from the website itself since it all circles back.
The forums and trading of chicken smoothie are not all that the website is made of, and not even a fraction of what it is.
Mini Games, Pet Growth, and Things To Hold Interest:This one is an interesting argument to me because I'm actually curious what these mini games should entail. Should they drop chicken dollars, the site's premium currency which is required by the site to help them handle the frankly massive server costs of handling a website this large? Pets? Should they just be there to wile away the hours? What is the reality of these games and how would they actually help interest and the site at large, and what games would even exist? We got Snake for the internet Event and while it was fun, I'd hate to play it for any real rewards because then there would be a whole host of OTHER issues to contend with, such as people going whole hog on it and potentially grinding rewards to sell them at an upcharge to others who can't play it. Not exactly a good prospect for moderation, tbh.
Also taking into account that dozens, if not actually hundreds, of users are currently running their own games on these forums, ranging from site held arpgs, simple forum games, written adventures, and adoptables that are popular enough to even have their OWN discord servers and many of which have various posts every day. I think people are finding things to fill in the time between pet growths fairly well?
And this content is, again, fairly easy to find on the forums themselves.
I think it also stands to say: this website was never really intended to hold people's attention for hours on end. Trying to fit it into the boxes of other websites will always fail, because it simply is NOT those. It's a CASUAL game, meant for literally anyone to be able to participate. No clicks. No input from the player other than the initial adoption and the joy of watching things grow over time,
if you even make it back before the next month rolls around at all. All other aspects are add-ons.
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That's that for those arguments. I'm going to bring up three more aspects that imply otherwise on the statement of Chicken Smoothie's death:
The Pound and Lost and Found- They appear at random every 3-10 hours. When the pound appears, it usually sets 1000-1400 pets for adoption. This number can and will half within 30 seconds. That SECONDS. Not minutes. That means that there are enough active users on at any given time, checking, to know that upwards of 700 pets can be adopted immediately. The Lost and Found is not as popular but does diminish at a fast enough rate that everything can be gone within about 45 minutes of opening. That's *incredible*.
Pets- My last adopted pet is Number 384,487,071. That's not even close to the actual number because it's been a day since then and I adopted pretty fast. There are hoards on the hoard record thread that are upwards of 14000 pets or more for just one type alone. That doesn't even make a DENT in that number. It doesn't even BEGIN to make a dent. Some of them are lost forever, sure, but even with that, that is SO MANY images, so many pets. And the number keeps growing. My last adopted pet from last month? 382,781,908. That's a difference of 1,705,163 pets. that is
NEARLY TWO MILLION pets in a single month being generated. If the site were truly in its death throes, you wouldn't see two million pets a month.
Member Activity- I am a member who is not active on the forums. I have been on chicken smoothie since 2008. I am going on 15 years of monthly activity for the site and I have made all of 500 posts on the forums.
Not all active members are a part of the social community. I know a significant demographic of people that are the same as me. The forums are a lot of effort, and we have other places to be. We're here for the casual game aspect and the ease of use.
C$- It's becoming more popular than ever. How do you get C$? By putting real money into the site. I've seen trade threads advertising that some people have upwards of 3k or more chicken dollars to spend. That's a lot of real money that went into the site! And people are actively putting more, it doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Every dollar put into the site helps the site itself keep running; if C$ wasn't popular, the site would not be able to maintain the cost to run itself.
Okay. That's everything for my observations here. Take it with a grain of salt as of course it IS all me with a few numbers thrown around. What everyone wants out of a site is different, I just personally feel making blanket statements about a site dying off and implying we have to find ways to save it should be made a bit more carefully in the long run. Thank you for your time, for anyone who's read this MASSIVE set of words.
-Concept
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