- not to discredit the honestly truthful statement that offsite discussion hubs like discord take away from on site activity, but even my offsite cs related discords have been slow lately. anything cs related feels.... stagnant.
there's a lot of reasons for the general downtrend of activity on this site, and a lot of them have been discussed and debated on this thread, other threads like it, and for years since the decline started. Some aspects could have certainly been addressed - some have, minorly - but most haven't. Others aren't fixable, at least not without driving some players away.
Trading and inflationary pet values, for example. Store pets absolutely need to be re-released. 12 nons for one pet is ridiculous. That's not going to get better. They're not going to be any easier to get in two or three years either. For any new player they're completely out of reach unless they have off site trades, art, or other means of trading. Even for older players pets like the skelebun, cerbs, are ridiculously difficult to get. And why? What's the purpose of not re-releasing them at this point? Its not driving site activity by having them so absurdly rare, clearly, and having such inflated hyper-rares has brought other games the same issue. And every year the pets that would have been similar in value, like the moonpups or sunpups, are re-released, only furthering that value divide.
On the note of inflation, c$ is insane. There's no good money sink on site, although the monthly and bi-monthly item packs seem to have been attempt to address that and I can appreciate that. We really need some significant to take some of the c$ out of the on-site economy though, or at least balance it out a little more. Maybe purchasable forum vistas, profile colors, or something similiar that doesnt contribute to the pet and item rarity issues while offering some sort of on-site boon.
Which brings me to point three - site features and general staff activity. The site hasnt gained significant new features in what feels like ages. Oekaki is outdated and feels like its struggling to be relevant. The Oekaki wiki hasn't been updated since like 2014 or something. The forums are a relic from the 2010s, and there hasn't been anything shiny added to them that I can remember. If you look at other pet sites, theres more customization and personalization. CS doesn't really have that. The last update I remember - separating out the forums and reorganizing things like the rp and oekaki forums - felt like decisive ideas that still from time to time I hear people mention. I feel like there have been updates and changes lately that haven't been too popular - like the DNI list update, or some of the rules changes and how staff choose to or choose not to enforce them. All of this just drives away players. Whether its the hostility they see between players over the updates, the updates themselves, or how they perceive staff's handling of the situations.
Also, we need more active, engaged staff. And at least another programmer, if even only for new features. This site is massive, was massive, and there's no healthy way one person can manage it all themselves in terms of coding, updates, back end related stuff, etc. A lot of the lack of activity stems, I feel anyways, from the site's overall stagnation and inability to update and develop further.
