Address the pound lag + C$ sales transparency

[Darkcloud!]

-snip-
then there’s not much morally to say that you should know how your money is then being spent. If anyone wants to tell me their reasons, I’d absolutely love to hear <3
-snip-

Because the majority of the staff in CS are unpaid volunteers, because the site has been running so poorly lately, because the staff members who are getting money from this are largely silent.

There's a whole thread about the prices of the store pets going up, and it was disclosed in there that the artists do get a portion of funds, but not exact percentages or anything.

It is always a consumer's right to know how a business is spending the funds they are given through purchases. Are they acting ethically? Are they paying their staff fairly? Are the artists being given a percentage that is at least supplemental income if not a fair going rate for commissioned work?
It's the same reasons people boycott buying from corperations- the money isn't being split to fair compensation or needed improvement of the product/conditions, it is overwhelmingly going to a small group of people or one person (a CEO) who did very little work at this stage to actually produce the product or make the sale.

If CS isn't using business funds for business, why?

If CS isn't putting any of the hundreds to thousands of dollars they receive towards paying the large staff they have.... or towards upkeeping the site's backend (does nick or any staff he might have get paid?)... or paying the non-store pet artists... and only paying the store artists an unspecific portion.... well. There's only really one place left for it go, and that's a personal pocket.

[Darni]

Bumping this again because the lag I just got was super bad.

I loaded into pound with everything claimed on the page, but one pet I managed to snag. I really hope they start being transparent because spending money on CS is not making sense to me if I don't know where the money is going WHILE KNOWING how much CS needs improvements on multiple things. This lag has been ongoing and it's still quite bad so it's really frustrating that we had to go through a whole event dealing with that T_T

[Sofia]

-snip-
then there’s not much morally to say that you should know how your money is then being spent. If anyone wants to tell me their reasons, I’d absolutely love to hear <3
-snip-

Because the majority of the staff in CS are unpaid volunteers, because the site has been running so poorly lately, because the staff members who are getting money from this are largely silent.

There's a whole thread about the prices of the store pets going up, and it was disclosed in there that the artists do get a portion of funds, but not exact percentages or anything.

It is always a consumer's right to know how a business is spending the funds they are given through purchases. Are they acting ethically? Are they paying their staff fairly? Are the artists being given a percentage that is at least supplemental income if not a fair going rate for commissioned work?
It's the same reasons people boycott buying from corperations- the money isn't being split to fair compensation or needed improvement of the product/conditions, it is overwhelmingly going to a small group of people or one person (a CEO) who did very little work at this stage to actually produce the product or make the sale.

If CS isn't using business funds for business, why?

If CS isn't putting any of the hundreds to thousands of dollars they receive towards paying the large staff they have.... or towards upkeeping the site's backend (does nick or any staff he might have get paid?)... or paying the non-store pet artists... and only paying the store artists an unspecific portion.... well. There's only really one place left for it go, and that's a personal pocket.

This is exactly what it is. I never care how I spend my money on lots of other game sites because I know they run splendidly and they regularly release updates and improvements to their sites/games. I know it's being used to support the games I enjoy and the people making them.

Here, however, it's all incredibly grey and people would just like to know if the money they spend actually supports the site itself or helps pay the people who create the things we like or if it's all going into the pockets of the owners. All the artists don't get paid, and from what I heard, and I hope I'm wrong, even store pets don't generate monetary income for the artist. I heard they get paid in C$ currency which again I hope I'm wrong. Regardless, in the many years the site has run since 2008, with C$ currency being available for over a decade now, why haven't they been able to afford any improvements to the servers? They have ads on CS as well, meaning even without purchases they should be able to make some sort of revenue. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask imo, hence why I support it <3

[schlottis]

A relevant note in regards to lag. I will copy in some information I also left on the post about increasing/decreasing pounds that Nick put out a few days ago.

Some people in this thread also mentioned the use of botting, both scripting to grab pets, and the discord reminder bot.
During the pound's opening today - recorded at 23:32 UK time, a few minutes in, there were 1155 users online.
When the pound closed - recorded at 23:34 UK time, the number dropped to 861 users online.
At the time of writing - recorded at 23.40 UK time, the number has dropped to 734 users online.
(Numbers recorded from the 'Who is Online' section at the bottom of the forum page).

So how many people are logging on explicity to grab something from the pound, then going offline again? No wonder the lag spikes so aggressively on the initial load in to the opening.
I would love to see if anyone else has data on the topic.

People in this thread have talked about how quickly the pets go, how there's such a lag spike in the opening etc, and this has to be at least a contributing factor. We all kind of know it. But I wondered if anyone here has also noticed the same sort of thing, or has any other gathered data on player activity in and around the pound opening. The server just cannot compensate for a large influx of players in one big batch.

[Darni]

Bumping this thread because of the fact the new thread is up for pound discussion. I still think we should get some transparency on the c$ sales so maybe this thread should be changed from addressing pound lag + c$ sales transparency to just being about the c$ transparency.

[sm06sm]

Pound lag really needs to be addressed. I didn't load into this last pound until 5+ seconds into the opening, at which point half my first page of pets were gone.