To be quite honest, I like many others on this thread keep to myself on cs outside of occasionally talking in CSTM and posting on forum games. Not because i actually want to, I want to reach out and make friends on here, but everyone is so hostile and solitary it's hard to do that anywhere but on discord. I honestly can't talk about C$ inflation, I'm sure it's a problem, but I don't really care all that much about C$ so I dont know anything about it.
I think a lot of the issue is the moderation on here feels very flippant, and staff is often intimidating, unapproachable, or inactive. I've seen people link to NSFW twitters and AO3 but that's never dealt with, but if you link to something where you have to dig 4 pages deep to find your age it needs to be removed. Staff enforces rules based on their own feelings, and I get that moderation does sometimes lead to a gray area where a decision must be made and that's fine. But what a lot of people have been upset by is how staff won't answer reports for long amounts of time, a lot of the staff including Tess is inactive, and nobody seems to really be sure what the rules are, players and staff alike. I think it'd be helpful if we got new staff members who are active and have ideas to make moderation better and the game itself more fun, and for staff to openly seek out community suggestions.
Secondly, we have got to talk about how this site feels like an internet relic instead of an actual game. This site is very 2000s, which makes sense because its been around since 2008 and isn't inherently a bad thing. Now I don't think there should be a total overhaul in the game altogether- I think a lot of its charm is how it feels like a part of the internet that's long gone. But there's very little to do here aside from trade (which feels inaccessible), art, and the forums. You can't do hardly anything with your pets, there's no minigames, or anything of the like. Maybe we could take inspiration from similar games for new features, and make the store feel more inclusive? I think it would be great to see textured wigs and celebrating history with poc in mind with new items, since we already do that anyways. There's literally a whole
thread about it, and I encourage people to read it.
Lastly, trading. I've always wanted to be into trading on here, but I just can't because it feels so inaccessible. Despite being on here for a long time, that was rather on and off and a lot of my time I was a COPPA user. Trying to get into trading is an absolute mess, it doesn't make hardly any sense and there's tons of abbreviations that I can't possibly understand. Not to mention how everyone assumes you're trying to scam if you send a bad offer and gets mad at you, and not, yknow, someone who doesn't understand. Just because someone has been here for a long time doesn't automatically mean they know how to trade, perhaps someone wasn't interested in trading for until recently. Does anyone remember the whole list fiasco from a few years back? Yeah. It's fine if you don't want to trade with someone who's inexperienced- That's your prerogative. But most of the community will get mad at you for not knowing things and expect you to remember a long list of terminology, dates, rarities, and demands- the last of which is constantly fluctuating so badly it's hard to keep track. That's half the point of the game, and yet it feels gatekept so hard that nobody new can get in.
