Thank you to the devs that took time to answer our questions intricately and with meaning. This part feels like the old PIMD that I knew. And big thanks to Ripley for answering my question thoroughly! This is based of my experience and I haven't been as active as some players had for the previous years, but to me volleying has helped me a lot in terms of getting quick cash outside of promos and big events. Efficient in time. Though there are some cons to it, like the game being glitchy (specifically if the tutor value that we hire is 50% or higher to how many coh we have, it tends to not get put in immediately into our bank). The other being that it takes a lot of button click spamming lol. If only there was a way to just send certain amounts of cash to other players but treat it like an actual bank where there will be taxes/interest/fees if we were to transfer funds. I'm sure dvp is now more popular than ever so it would be nice if we could have a newer, more pratical and different approach to this. I've heard of the transfering ecs option some time ago between rs partners. Maybe an option like this could work? At the end of the day, this is just a rough idea from a random player to y'all. I might sound cray cray for wanting an easier option to get cash 😂 but lemme know what you think P.S. kudos to the programming dev team. Ripley speaks facts! Codes are the backbone to all this being a reality imo.
And issue I see with this is that the EC transfer feature was removed due to abuse; I'm quite sure the cash transfer one would be abused as well, although maybe not necessarily to the same extent. I could think of some potential safety features to these kinds of currency transfers to prevent alt abuse. But the biggest one I can think of (needing to be RSed for a certain amount of time, like 6+ months to a year) may be unpopular, especially come Valentine's hunt where people like to hop around for the bonuses from perfect matches
I took the time to read all the questions and answers. Thanks for clearing up the tougher ones I asked too 🫰🏻🩷✨
Just a heads up, this had to all be typed up and formatted in my notes. Apologies for any errors that may occur. Starting off with this, I greatly feel like the first part of the question was ignored. I know the second question this user asked was regarding questionnaires but we as a community come to you in many ways, specifically here on fourms where your event posts frequently say you want to hear what the community has to say. I want to use the xc events to highlight this. 🎃Trick or Treat This Halloween!🎃 Spring in Bloom 💐 Age of Dinosaurs: A Mini Event 🦖💚 Halloween was bad. We don't need to rehash all the details but people we're up in arms about it. Then, the spring event was great! It was fun, well executed, and I had to comment on it because I cant only be commenting when things are bad. Truly, this event made me feel like you listened to your players. But then the Dino event got released and.. it was like Halloween 2.0. To this day I cant figure out how that happened after people specifically came to say how and what they liked that was different between the first two for the third to end up like that. Surely there was enough time between the spring event to end before the dino one got fully planned to absorb all the feedback? I want to point to shard boxes and male monthly avatars on this as well. We as the community have been for years now I think calling for shard boxes to not have 4 sets in them or for the drop rate to be upped & male avis to have an equivilant amount as the female avis for the monthlys. It feels like we're yelling into the void. Things like the search bar in gifts the community has been asking for years, and was very exciting when it finally got implemented! We understand that things like that are on the wishlist checklist of eventually, but we dont understand how requested-by-you feedback on regular semi-consistent content can be disregarded. Please, tell us how you as a team take in this feedback and how you decide what feedback to implement the next time around and how you decide which you won't? Genuinely, as someone who provides hours worth of typing feedback, I want to know. No further questions on this. I just want to comment how this sounds like when my place of work that is a small company tries to do things like the "big companies". We play PIMD because of what it is. I'm all for improvements and trying new things for the sake of fun, but reducing players accessibility to expected content isn't fun. Again no further questions. We get new hunts every ~2 weeks, new monthly content every month, shard avis/lucky boxes/story pass at regular intervals that used to align with the invites for a lot of excitement all at once, VIP/Lucky box updates approximately every ~120 days on alternating intervals. New VIP tokens. New Molly's multiple times a hunt. New XC events (that need some attention for balancing) and now XC mini events. Theres lots of content, lots of ways to engage, lots of updates, almost overwhelmingly so. Having these things on the schedule they have/had helps us as players get ready to engage with it all and plan how to spend for it, and a lot of it is already for money/EC. Theres plenty of variety. Increasing the "limited time and you have to spend to get it" content isnt what makes the community happy to be here. You talk about being a small team with your respective roles working to meet deadlines to keep everything on track, but there doesnt need to be this much to get us to engage. We know you're a business and paid for content makes you money, but there's plenty the community would be happy to pay for that doesnt feel like pushed out content at an increasing rate. I'd really like to flip this. When you release something that has been made with player feedback in mind, can you specify what feedback was taken into consideration? I'd love to see fourm quotes or something similar from players that helped shape the structure of new content. Maybe even the quote will help highlight the kind of feedback that is valuable and more people will be more selective and detailed with what they have to say in the future. We want engagement from you, and promising for the future is hard but examples that shaped the current format would be very appreciated over generalized statements. Im gonna split this into 2 parts. Firstly, I have been a victim of your alt account sweeps. I am neither a bot nor a scripter and previously, by who devs/mods I dont remember, it was suggested for alt accounts to be used to sell items. This was back in the days before we had a starred section to our showcase to easily highlight from. The TOS even says that alts are okay as long as they aren't being abused for an unfair advantage. Working off of that, I had one get banned I was selling my excess painter items from. It was active daily, nearly as much as my main was, I was very transparent with everyone that it was my alt, and it go swept up. And I dont know how or why. And it feels horrible when the alt farms are still a raging problem. I know there has been much progress on the banning of unfair alts but somehow it feels like its gotten worse. Or maybe just more obvious? The black market bento sellers are brazenly advertising dollar values in campus daily. I regularly see clubs with 100 variations of nonsense IGNS all hitting parties for their free lite and timer boxes. I think removing these freebies would ultimately have a negative impact on the community at large but this is still a growing issue. I highly suspect the reason ATA boxes have been made untradable this year (and please correct me if my assumption is wrong) is to somehow mitigate the impact these alt farms have on the in game market. And I hate to say it, but they're actually the reason the ATA day furni items have become obtainable to players. The day the free lite box showed up in Molly's the Starlit Sky 999 dropped more than 70% in bento value from the first day release. I stand by what I've said previously that you ATA are the biggest supporters of the black market bento trade. I know as a company you dont want this, they're taking revenue from your pocket for the content you have designed and released to your playerbase. Theyre fucking up the in game market on items, assigning their own dollar value to bentos (so much so that you felt the need to sell bentos during black friday and add them to the online store rewards) and suck the fun and generosity out of trading in game. But with the ATA box account locked and massive bento price drop I think its obvious that the issue is accessibility. Everything being locked behind EC and real world money that is tradable makes those items worth more bentos. Its supply and demand. When accessibility goes up, demand goes down, and so does the demand for players to consider TOS breaking ways of obtaining their in game currency. We see the same thing when decore boxes become a free to win item through playing the game. All that content becomes feasible and accessible. The cost of content on this game needs to be addressed if you want to have a lasting impact on the demand for black market trades. That last paragraph is basically the second thing I wanted to address here. When I think of the community I think of the people playing this game as a free to play player. It has to feel good for them. It has to be accessible to them. Many of them would be willing to justify micro transactions on this game to feel like they're getting a boost. We dont want what feels like constant DLCs. I have to be honest, I don't feel like the same effort has been put into the style of these hunts as the other ones you know will hit a home run with the community. The avis have always seemed.. less rendered. Or the event was for a weekend and not an entire hunt. Off the top of my head I cant point to any furni except an ollllllllld Holi box from back before my days on PIMD. Same goes for the hanukkah furni. I think a lot of us want more multicultural events, but the content and the effort needs to do right by them. Having an informational tidbit in the fourm post would be great for people who dont know much about it! Making an in game feature of something related to the culture would boost engagement, like how its tradition to ask someone to be your valentine for Valentines Day. Personally, I'm not a fan of the dye shop. It never really struck a chord for me. I do like how they offer different color palettes though and would love to see color palettes themselves be suggested on the surveys alongside the more content themed boards! I think before speaker amounts get addressed the channels need to get addressed. Pub is meant to be the 18+ bar scene, campus I would think should be for socializing with people outside of clubs but right now its everything else. I'd love to see a market channel for all the buy/sell/trade needs. I do like how theres a specific channel for events like the current necromancer one but I feel like that could be moved to campus if all the trading had its own channel. Im content with clubs having a 100 person limit. I think a lot of things need to be addressed to boost player engagement before opening the doors for more would be worth it. More people also means more work for all the admins running these clubs. EC clubs already have to limit their members to be below that number due to party difficulty/speed/payout/member stats&damage. ------------------------------------ This has been a lot. This has taken me hours to write and review. Theres a lot of the Q&A that I didnt quote respond to either because I didnt feel it was a priority to comment on or because I just enjoyed the responses you Devs gave to them. I feel like anytime theres an AMA yall talk about how things work behind the scenes and I really enjoy this. I know from previous fourm posts that hunts are scheduled months in advance and its really interesting to hear how the different teams get together to make that happen. The interest in attention and reworking to parties and PvP sounds very interesting as well. It sounds like big changes that makes me hesitant but it also sounds like theres a lot of things up in the air about it. Players have made lots of fourm posts regarding these things, but I think when yall a ready to start revamping these having an ATA made forum post to discuss it before wheels get set in motion will do great to hear what the community wants - instead of just trying things and seeing what sticks. We'll even tell you what content we would be happy to pay for and what we feel is best for the free to play people. Of course theres going to be trial and error, but everyone posting in forums, discord, sending tickets and participating in things like this AMA want to be heard. We play this game because we enjoy it and its mechanics and the art and the people we meet along the way. And we want a two way relationship with the people creating all of this. I appreciate you sharing how disheartening the negative and visceral reactions can be from your end. I know its not easy being on either end of when things go wrong. At our best and our worst we are showing up and trying to talk and ultimately I think we need you - the Devs - to talk with us more.
One quick thing I forgot to link, @GoddessHailey has already started a discussion and poll regarding Invites and their frequency, specifically during these summer-into-autumn months. You can find it here to see what the community has shared so far regarding that.
I was so shocked today when I saw the ATA Day 499ecs which I had sold for 42 bentos on the 1st day was now struggling to be sold at 5-7 bentos in Campus today.
Oh I didn't know and thought this through Sounds like something that would happen for sure. What you suggested can be a good solution! Putting a certain criteria before making cash transfers possible is definitely a smart move. One of many ideas could be that or maybe put a paywall? Though I know that's an ATA move and I know a lot of us wouldn't be fond of it 😂 and they'd probably abuse that option too knowing how some would pay for anything... So another idea is a list of things that a player has to go through to get acces to the feature: like maybe limit the cash transfer per day, per account, per IP address (if it's possible) or something like that? Will abid to an agreement or rule otherwise risk being banned both alt and main. For the giver (the one transferring) has to have played PIMD for a certain amount of time, maybe 3 months or so, similar to your idea. After thinking further, this has a lot of aspects to be considered. Definitely willing to discuss further if given the chance!