Sell Chicken Smoothie (Poll Has Been Reset!)

[nickjr]

(I think the "base issue" Celozon was referring to was the "generational" thing that was initially brought up by Ratsuyan)

(Unicreatures's death was a little more complicated than the owner not being part of the community, although that's part of it) (edit: I didn't see the 90% line the first time oops)

(I think people have generally been saying that the "generational" issue is just another factor and that less than 100% but still over 0% of the blame goes to staff/admins, although some posts do read like it should be 0% of the blame; on my part I agree with you completely and I think what just happened was that we got a little adrenaline rush from finally seeing a nagging feeling we had at the backs of our minds finally put into words, because up until now, the one issue that we can't fix--namely, getting the new "generation" as a whole to be interested in CS--wasn't discussed while everything else has been lol)

[Shian]

Yeah, it's hard to articulate exactly what makes this game special and have a second party understand.... much less try to convince someone younger than you

For example Wajas is complex, has breeding and all kinds of snazzy features to keep you busy for days!

But nothing can prepare you for that feeling of losing a 6 month daily streak thanks to daylight savings or being sick or whatever.

Nothing else in the world can get you to appreciate a simple site like CS.
Where you can collect thousands of pets, not.. what are we up to now? 200 something lair slots out of a possible 145 billion possible combos? Lol. As much as I find FR fun, CS hits those strings I enjoy just a little more.

[RevSpicy]

I come and go as I see fit, but I always come back. I've played on FooPets, Neopets, Marapets, Webkinz, FlightRising and dozens of other websites who have all seen ups and downs in their playerbase

Which of those sites have you been on where the owner ghosts the community and hasn't participated sine 2013?

I'm getting a bit of hostility from the way you're putting together your responses.
FlightRising and maybe Lioden are the only sites I've been on where the owner hasn't "ghosted" their community. FooPets completely abandoned theirs with a whole scam fiasco and their userbase is still around, albeit small. I don't think the owner of any site needs to actively play with and entertain their players-sometimes time is better spent doing other things like maintenance and physical work. I imagine there are also responsibilities behind the curtain and with personal life as well, which is not such a terrible thing. Just because someone stops interacting with you directly doesn't make them irresponsible or dead.

There was a thread here on CS a while ago about advertisement. Would you recommend CS to someone else?
It's hard to say yes when the default pattern is the above. "Well, the owner isn't around and there are very few game updates but I'm sure that's just fine since we still have holidays and events".

Considering the above, in anyone else's mind, the next step is, "the site just goes away".

If we had updates? If something like the customizable wishlist or one of the dozens of QOL things dropped tomorrow? If there was some new and exciting feature to tell them about? That would be a great way to recruit more players and get them interested. CS could grow.

That's why I'm constantly unintentionally getting people into FR. There's just so many fun updates all the time that I can't help telling people about what's new.
I'm not saying CS needs some lastest and greatest but it would be nice to brag about this site and get other people interested in playing every once in a while beyond Dec 18th. Because that's what I used to do. I used to really appreciate how well things got fixed when they were broken. When systems were updated when the current system stopped working. I'd constantly brag to others about how much better this site was than the newer sites because it's OUTLIVED everything else because it's been updated, changing to meet issues but still having the same quiet, relaxed website where you don't have to feed or click things.

I feel like this is a little bit of an exaggeration. If all you look at is the negative, all you will see is negative. If you want to invite people and get them interested-something I've never personally had an issue doing-talk about what you enjoy about it like you would any other thing?
It's a relaxed website where there's no obligation or threats made if you can't log in every day on the hour to tend to your pets. You can collect thousands upon thousands of dogs, cats, dragons, chickens and more, dress them up with any amount of incredibly diverse items, and display them however you like. There's a semi-realistic but also relaxed economy system where players can trade pets they don't want with other players for pets they do want, and interact in a generally stress-free forums environment if that type of thing suits your fancy. Every so often we have events on the site to bring in new and old players together and to generate some fun-and if you miss out on a few outcomes of pets you can just add them to a public wishlist.
You're not selling a product, things are fine with the playerbase as they are now, but if you want to invite friends-people you're genuinely interested in playing with-then it's not really that hard.

In 2013, we gained the ability to trade C$. Do you know how much of a pain that was to do before that happened? Where you'd buy items with C$ and the person who requested them changed their mind, leaving you with items and no C$. You don't find that at all useful?

Before 2010, there was no way to filter out wishlist pets when trading. You just had to click through each page and find the starred pets yourself. An update let us filter out pets that weren't on our partner's wishlist.

Now we're swimming in thousands and thousands of pets whenever you wanted to trade someone and you had to pick which pet out of 20,000 your trading partner might want. You don't want that updated so it's easier to trade?
You adamantly don't want a single QOL update at all?

Yes I do know how much of a pain that was considering I've been around since 2009-not that long after your 2008.
Once again, I think you're exaggerating a bit.
Nobody is saying that updates to the site wouldn't be useful. There are a lot of small changes that have happened over the years that have improved the quality of life on the website-we just don't need a complete overhaul? Quiet =/= Dead.
Personally, I think it would be great to have some additions into how we're able to sort our pets-considering how much use I've been able to get out of the All At Once naming system once it was implemented. For a situation where I have 20,000 pets on my trading partner's wishlist my reaction is to go along the line and pick out some good ones-or god forbid read their rules to figure out what they specifically might like. To have everything automated and sorted would also take out some of that human interaction of actually thinking about how we want to go about doing things. There are pros and cons with everything.

But none of this is reason enough to say that the owners have "abandoned" their website as though we were children who needed to be watched. The staff team is promising more updates and communication, things take time and it's being worked on. Suggestions are getting looked at, and moderator applications are being accepted. Be the change you want to see and make something out of your concerns, but do so politely and with consideration.

Yeah, it's hard to articulate exactly what makes this game special and have a second party understand.... much less try to convince someone younger than you

For example Wajas is complex, has breeding and all kinds of snazzy features to keep you busy for days!

But nothing can prepare you for that feeling of losing a 6 month daily streak thanks to daylight savings or being sick or whatever.

Nothing else in the world can get you to appreciate a simple site like CS.
Where you can collect thousands of pets, not.. what are we up to now? 200 something lair slots out of a possible 145 billion possible combos? Lol. As much as I find FR fun, CS hits those strings I enjoy just a little more.

Pardon for the edit but I wanted to bold this last bit for emphasis. This is a lovely description that compares the more "old style" websites like chickensmoothie to the newer generation of online games that are captivating the younger audience right now. This statement is usually more than enough for me to catch someone's attention and say "here, why don't you try it for yourself?"
Much like those idle games we find so many of in the app stores now as well, chickensmoothie is something you can make a home in and come back to as you think of it. Mark off your calendars for the 18th of December and check in the first couple of days in October for the Halloween event. If it's something you look forward to as much as I do, I never forget. And when I do, it gives me something fun to add to my wishlist and get out there into the forums to trade with others for. Because I have so many more pets than the newer players, it makes it all that much more fun to absolutely bombard them with my 20,000 wishlist pets for their 3 or 4 event pets that I missed.
A game is as much fun as you allow it to be too c:

EDIT: Due to past experiences with speaking exclusively through text!! I would like to point out that I mean all of this in the most lighthearted of tones. I mean no sense of aggression or calling-out of the sort and am 100% just trying to explain my own point of view with a c: !! There are a lot of reasonable points that I agree with in this thread, but I am highlighting the ones that I don't entirely agree with specifically here.

[Celozon]

ah supposed to be off to bed but brain doesn't want to sleep so here I am. Sorry if this comes out a bit jumbled.

I feel I should note that I haven't been keeping up with everything posted on this thread, I read through the summaries and the last few pages, and have been occasionally reading snippets, so I don't know exactly what has/hasn't been addressed before and was mostly addressing the conversation from the last several pages.

What issue are you referring to?

But now it seems anyone just joining us has latched onto this idea and thinks "sell the site" means "We want a ChickenSmoothiev2 with new everything, twice the events, a sleeker site etc." and that's not the case at all.

As NickJr said, I was referring to the generational thing, specifically the fact that forums are becoming less popular with the newer generation and that CS is using an older (and somewhat outdated) forum format that a lot of the newer sites. Sorry if that wasn't super clear ^^

I personally never mentioned more events or anything, and as stated I was referring to the generational idea and the problem posed by the idea that the site visually may not be as appealing anymore. I'm not saying 'sell the site' = 'make a whole new site' in any way. I'm trying to say that generational issues are contributing to the site decline and what would be involved in addressing those issues.

Which of those sites have you been on where the owner ghosts the community and hasn't participated sine 2013?

Just personally as someone who chats very little in the forums (just posting here is out of norm for me), not posting doesn't mean a whole lot. Tess an Nick are involved in plenty of behind the scenes things, especially the site events. I totally get the frustration in site creators who don't post on the forums or talk a lot with users, but it doesn't mean they've abandoned the site, and really dismisses everything else involved in running CS.

I've been on dozens. Hundreds. So many I don't even remember the names of half of them. Tygras. The Dragon Empire, Aramii, This Is Halloween, CelestialVale, DragAdopts, squidby, Unicreatures, Dragonopia, It's always the same for 90% of them.

> I mean this response doesn't really have anything to do with what I was trying to say, I was referring to declines on forum-based site due to the generational shift. The fact that other sites die due to the owner leaving is a completely different issue. I get why you jumped to this, but its just not what I was saying.

Yes absolutely small sites come and go and they follow the same pattern much of the time. Yes if the site owners did completely abandon CS there is nothing we could do about it. But I'm also pretty certain that Tess cares enough about CS that if she really didn't want to run it anymore it would be passed on. And again, just cause shes not visible doesn't mean shes not still doing things to run the site.

I think its also fair to point out that we've gone from our original 2 admins to 4 over the years. Even with no knowledge of what admins do on the back end it can be pretty reasonably assumed that this means that Sorren and Simon are now helping with things that previously Tess and Nick had to do. Naturally this means Tess and Nick may be doing less things on CS, seeing a decline in their activity. And you can see where I'm going with that, etc.

I'm sure we could go back and forth on this forever, but my point is there is an awful lot of jumping to conclusions and assumptions here while ignoring a lot of other possible reasons for things. This isn't pointed at anyone specific so please don't take it personal, just in general on this thread I have been seeing it.

TeaLeafe covered the rest of my thoughts on your posts so I'll leave it at that.

To make a couple things clear as I understand how my posts may be coming off as arguing that CS is totally fine how it is;

• I 100% want to see more updates, especially QOL updates on CS. I think a lot of the things in the suggestions forums would be very useful and great to have, and personally I do my best to push them forward when I can.
• There are many valid points made on this topic and there are a number of them that I agree with. I'm not trying to say this topic is pointless or the issues presented are not actually a problem.
• What I am trying to say is that I have seen a lot of arguments/opinions looking at this from a very narrow perspective, seeing exactly what they want or expect to see. Most of the point of my posts is that there is a lot more going on and a lot of other realistic and probable causes of these same problems with very different reasons behind them. If the point of this thread is to help fix the issue of CS' decline, then we need to be able to look at this from all the angles in order to clearly see the cause and subsequent fix for it. If the cause truly is 'Tess is abandoning the site' then 100% yes lets fix that. But if thats all it was we also wouldn't be 76 pages into this topic.
• I would go through and cover exactly what I do/don't agree with on the whole front page but most of its pretty much the same as what you all have heard from other staff members, and there isn't much point in repeating it. Its pretty safe to assume I generally agree with them on those aspects.

[Aurora Storm]

In 2013, we gained the ability to trade C$. Do you know how much of a pain that was to do before that happened? Where you'd buy items with C$ and the person who requested them changed their mind, leaving you with items and no C$. You don't find that at all useful?

Before 2010, there was no way to filter out wishlist pets when trading. You just had to click through each page and find the starred pets yourself. An update let us filter out pets that weren't on our partner's wishlist.

Now we're swimming in thousands and thousands of pets whenever you wanted to trade someone and you had to pick which pet out of 20,000 your trading partner might want. You don't want that updated so it's easier to trade?
You adamantly don't want a single QOL update at all?

Forgive me if I come off more defensive than I intend here, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth.

Having originally joined CS in 2008, yes, I do remember all of those things and how much those updates improved the site. I also remember how the pound was once a FCFS system that disproportionately benefited some members over others, and also how tedious it was to dress up pets before the item rearrange feature was introduced. Not once in my post did I say (or even imply) I "adamantly don't want a single QOL update at all", I still frequent the suggestions board to show support for the many great ideas users have. What my post was actually about was how the simplicity of the way CS is structured and run at it's core has always been one of my favourite things about it. That doesn't mean there aren't issues and featured that could be implemented or greatly improved, but some of the harsh criticism on this thread (please note the some) is unfair in my opinion and the blame can't simply be passed off as "oh Tess doesn't care cause she barely posts anymore so the site is dying". The forum isn't the only part of this website, there are SO many players who don't post yet are still active members of the community, and as Celozon has explained, Tess is still involved behind the scenes. You don't have to post every day to contribute to CS.

I don't disagree with the sentiment behind this thread, but the extent to which some people are taking their complaints is unnecessary and uninformed in my opinion. I've seen multiple posts of users complaining about a lack of features... that already exist (and they've promptly been directed to the relevant place to find said features). This point brought up in the recent posts was a new look on the issue that I agreed with but does not at all conflict with the idea of improvements being made to the site. I don't know why anyone would ever have a problem with that. And finally, without going around in circles I'll just say I also stand behind everything TeaLeafe said.

[Bean_Cake]

Sorry, No Support

I've been on CS since early 2011, I've seen a lot of changes on the site since then and I honestly feel that the site and staff are doing a great job. So much has evolved on the site since the early days, but I dont feel like the site is dying.

It might feel like things have slowed down a bit since I got older and became an adult but I still love CS; the art and the community. I feel that Tess and the staff are always trying to improve or update the site and listen to their community.

I dont think we need updates more often then once a month, I dont think there needs to be any more events or mini events and I love the site owners we have.

[avaloafe]

one update that i would love to see regards the pound.

people who have faster and better wifi/data get the best pets. i feel like the rarer pets and such should be spread out throughout the pound's opening. the rare pets are usually always in the beginning, and if you come out even a few seconds late to the pound you won't have a chance at those rare's, ex lists, and store pets. i would love to see the pets be spread out a lot so that you have a chance to get any kind of rare and up pet at any given point the pound is open. that is an update that i would LOVE to see in the near future!

[Zurtada]

one update that i would love to see regards the pound.

people who have faster and better wifi/data get the best pets. i feel like the rarer pets and such should be spread out throughout the pound's opening. the rare pets are usually always in the beginning, and if you come out even a few seconds late to the pound you won't have a chance at those rare's, ex lists, and store pets. i would love to see the pets be spread out a lot so that you have a chance to get any kind of rare and up pet at any given point the pound is open. that is an update that i would LOVE to see in the near future!

Ooo! I approve of this!!!

[nickjr]

one update that i would love to see regards the pound.

people who have faster and better wifi/data get the best pets. i feel like the rarer pets and such should be spread out throughout the pound's opening. the rare pets are usually always in the beginning, and if you come out even a few seconds late to the pound you won't have a chance at those rare's, ex lists, and store pets. i would love to see the pets be spread out a lot so that you have a chance to get any kind of rare and up pet at any given point the pound is open. that is an update that i would LOVE to see in the near future!

I don't have a quote on me, but I'm pretty sure that the pets that are shown to each user are randomized (for each user, show 20 random pets from the Adoptions group, no other factors considered). So it's actually possible for none of the users who get there early to find the rare pets.

It just feels like all the rares get snatched up fast because people tend to recognize the rare pets and they also are often near the top of the list since pets are shown in order of pet ID.

[Wormgod]

Actually, I agree with that pound idea. Maybe weigh the first couple minutes or longer to have less rares? Unless you’re waiting for the second the pound opens, the rares are a bit hard to get.