WHY PEOPLE ARE QUITTING CS- A Discussion

[thenullchrysalis]

I feel like if I wasn't an adopt artist, I would have no way to get valuable pets save for events, and even then they're recent rares that are somewhat difficult to trade up to older rares. I would imagine it'd be really difficult to get excited to collect pets when many of them feel quite far out of your reach.

Some things I've noticed personally:

> The pound is emptied in minutes and rares+ there are snatched up instantly, which is kind of intimidating, and also extremely disheartening. What was a system meant to give players a leg up into grabbing more valuable pets and a start into the trading scene is now something nobody wants to use because you stress over uncontrollable details such as desktop vs mobile, your internet speed, and so on in an attempt to try and beat the other hundreds of suddenly online users to a valuable pet. If you're new to the game, already a huge part of it (a majority of it if there's no event going on) is probably now something you won't even try due to these factors driving newbies away from it.

> C$ is the main currency nowadays, or at least it seems to me, but the c$ market is heavily inflated and there's been no solution as to how to fix that. I've seen rare pets from this year being put at 50-100c$ 'with demand'-- rares of the current year used to be like 3-5c$, a few years back. On top of that, with the influx of people quitting, or really soft quitting in this case, they only want c$ for their pets because they're not in the pet trading scene. Your options are either to spend your own money to get c$, but the 20$ option might get you 1-2 MA worth, which is decent but relatively low. Or sell your pets for c$. But if you're new, you don't have hardly any rare, valuable, or in-demand pets, so you don't get any buyers, or very little if you're lucky.

> Staff/Admin communication is disheartening. I'm not sure I 100% agree with the panic over the security system/2fa, but I do think the staff response was kind of iffy. I didn't feel like those who were lobbying for change were really heard, and the changes that were made feel like placations. The site suggestions board also feels like a placation. I don't think I've seen hardly any ideas from that board implemented, if any at all. And I don't think it should have taken site-wide panic for things like reversed trade notifications to be implemented. What does that say about other ideas with major support and their possibility of being implemented?

[Akitaboyo]

Figured I'd put my two cents in, as an artist, I see clearly it is WAY easier to get high list/value pets.

If you make HQ art it is way easier to obtain high list pets through commissions, this is the way I was able to get so many valuable pets suddenly after coming back from YEARS of being inactive. Yes I now stay to collect all the monthly pets but most importantly I use this site to browse the looking for art forums to find either dreamies or USD commissions that provide for me outside of the site.

Trading is incredibly grindy and, although I obtained my first OMGSR from hard grinding trades, pretty much unfeasible for the average player. Not to mention all the younger players who will sometimes have to put up with older people deceiving them about pet values, getting overly angry over pixel trades, etc.

Anyways, the market is heavily benefiting artists with years experience in art whether it be through contests or commissions.

[luxi cloud]

slightly off topic n maybe this has been said before but something that might drive new players away is the sites look in general. it can be extremely overwhelming, especially for ppl who aren’t used to these types of forum websites bc there’s just text everywhere n there’s not rlly any sort of tutorial. i remember when i first started, i only rlly understood how to adopt pets, sort them and trade, it took me several years until i actually started using the forums and more. whenever i tried to get my friends interested it just never worked, i remember specifically one of my friends mentioned how much text was everywhere.

[twilispark]

one small thing is do WAY MORE huge pound openings like they did that one birthday :p a few times a month maybe the pound opens once an hour (?) and the amount of pets for adoption is raised. very simple solution to battle the pet issues just a teeeeny bit but it would go a long way

[Goldstarwolf]

I think a change to the pound would definitely make things a lot better in terms of accessibility to new players. As of right now, the pound has 849,438 pets. That's a lot of pets just sitting around that could go to new users that don't have any! One of the biggest problems (in my opinion) is the barrier between new players and old players, so I think making it easier to get pets from the pound could help, even if it turns out to just be a little bit of a change,

I always thought it was odd that there was so many pets just sitting around in the pet and a lot of them are very rares like idk

[auroraphoenix]

I think a change to the pound would definitely make things a lot better in terms of accessibility to new players. As of right now, the pound has 849,438 pets. That's a lot of pets just sitting around that could go to new users that don't have any! One of the biggest problems (in my opinion) is the barrier between new players and old players, so I think making it easier to get pets from the pound could help, even if it turns out to just be a little bit of a change,

I'm not sure how this could work, but I really like the idea of switching up the Pound so that it isn't as crazy as it currently is !!

[far]

I don’t think inactive accounts should be deleted or the like, either username or pets, but their pets should be discounted from rarity listings. The calculator should pull from accounts that have been active within the last year so that we can get an actual idea as to how rare certain pets ACTUALLY are (there could be twenty in circulation for some of these istg). Pets with ridiculously low circulation should be weighted higher in mystery boxes so that more are added to the pool.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is how rarity is calculated? User's pets who are inactive don't affect the rarity tag and aren't taken into account. Correct me if I'm wrong!

[LiaTsu]

I think a change to the pound would definitely make things a lot better in terms of accessibility to new players. As of right now, the pound has 849,438 pets. That's a lot of pets just sitting around that could go to new users that don't have any! One of the biggest problems (in my opinion) is the barrier between new players and old players, so I think making it easier to get pets from the pound could help, even if it turns out to just be a little bit of a change,

I think the pound should just open more often, without taking away lost and found spots either. Just, open more often and removing the 3 hour limit. Because the number of pets stuck in pound is just getting bigger and bigger and theres no reason for it to be that way.

[ShrimpDan]

I'm not a super social person, so the social aspects of the game aren't all that important to me personally-- but I do still think it's a big issue when you consider how friend-oriented this site's economy is. With how old it is, a lot of higher-value pets are super inaccessible, and so you're basically entirely relying on the kindness of strangers for bulk commons, uncommons, and occasionally rares. Now, the community is great about this! I love how generous and friendly the majority of people are. But I don't think new players should HAVE to rely on giveaways just to have even a solid chance of getting a UC from 5 years ago.

I know economy isn't /everything/ and that you really shouldn't be playing pet sites to "win" them, but... the only real goals you can shoot for on CS ARE collection-related. For example, I'm intent on collecting every single Butterfly Wolf. The unfortunate part is the fact that a lot of BWs are extremely rare (one of them is an outright list pet), and people... don't really want to trade down anymore. I get why, don't get me wrong, but it's just another thing that creates an accessibility issue for players who haven't been around and active since 2008-2009. And when it comes to a site like this especially, a lack of social incentive on top of a lack of goal incentive (or at least one that you won't die before you can achieve) will lead to people getting discouraged and leaving pretty quickly. Granted, it's not like staff hasn't tried to mitigate this. The yearly rereleases as well as the pound are both good ways of keeping rares circulating without tanking their value. It's just that these issues are inevitable with how old the site is, and I can see how that would discourage a lot of users for sticking around long-term just for some PNGs. All this on top of the fact that the site hasn't been meaningfully updated in years outside of pet releases and events.

[bark]

I think a change to the pound would definitely make things a lot better in terms of accessibility to new players. As of right now, the pound has 849,438 pets. That's a lot of pets just sitting around that could go to new users that don't have any! One of the biggest problems (in my opinion) is the barrier between new players and old players, so I think making it easier to get pets from the pound could help, even if it turns out to just be a little bit of a change,

CS should hold another pound event again! (More is described here) It seems like the pound has enough pets to be adopted out.