Just a heads up, this had to all be typed up and formatted in my notes. Apologies for any errors that may occur.
As a long time player on PIMD, I would like to know when you guys will actually start listening to what your players want? When will you stop putting out questionnaires just to ignore the answers?
-Anonymous
[ATA]Ripley - I'm really sorry that has been your experience. It is definitely not what we're aiming for. We're a small team with finite time and resources. Fixing bugs, improving balance, building features, and shipping content all take a lot of work. Diagnosing problems is considerably easier than solving them, so we triage and tackle the most urgent work first.
We repeat survey questions to track change over time. We want to see if things are getting better or worse, where and why, so we can focus where we can make the biggest impact. Players will often disagree not just on details but overall goals of updates, so surveys, in addition to Discord/forums/tickets, help us understand that. This gives us the best chance to please as many players as possible since we cannot have regular one-on-one conversations with everyone.
[...]
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.
I am actually curious about this one- Why didn’t you have the Battle Pass available with ECs and real money and players choose?
-Anonymous
[ATA]Jean - For sure, I can give a little context there. For this first run of the Battle Pass, we chose to offer it through real-money purchase to keep things simple and aligned with how this kind of feature is usually offered in other games.
[...]
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.
Why did the frequency of shard avis, lucky boxes, invite hunts increase? There is literally no breathing room for players in between money spending events, nothing feels special or rare anymore
-sinistercrystal
[ATA]Jean - [...]
We’ve been running more of the familiar content lately - things like shard avatars, lucky boxes, and invite hunts - which can make the pace feel heavier. Our intent is to make sure there's always something exciting going on, but also to keep the game feeling lively and offer players different ways to engage. [...] The goal is to bring more variety so it doesn’t feel like the same thing every time, while still making sure players who love collecting avatars, furniture, or boxes have plenty to look forward to. It’s a balance we’re always working on.
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.
Recent releases (e.g. BattlePass, Beauty and the Beast StoryPass) were not received well at all, to put it gently, based on feedbacks in the forums. Players don't feel heard, and we don't really hear back from devs about changes that will be made in similar hunts/passes in the future. Is it possible to ask for devs (or if it's someone else in charge, those staff as well) to respond to forum posts or post an update about changes they will be applying for future hunts/passes based on current feedbacks?
-Tatoru
[ATA]Will - [...]
The challenge we often face is that its quick for us to pull feedback from folks, but takes a lot of time to review, validate, plan and put those plans into action. When a new experiment or tweak launches, we often need time to see the results before we can make commitments to whats next. [...]
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.
Why are you guys only focusing on monetary aspects and not community stuff
-Anonymous
[ATA]Ripley - [...]
We've spent a lot of our community resources lately dealing with bot accounts and scripters to level the playing field [...]
What kind of community stuff would you like to see more of specifically, and is there any community stuff you'd want to see less of?
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.
Why don't y'all make avatar for other religious holidays like Eid or Holi? I've been playing for almost 3 years and I haven't gotten a single hijabi avatar. Yet, y'all have put in countless effort for Christmas, St Patrick's day, etc. It's not fair, when a good chunk of your player base is Muslim or hindu.
-Breadie
[ATA]Azure - It's tough, because our team loves working on these events! We have run both Eid and Holi events in previous years, but we haven't seen very much player engagement when we do. WIth such a small team, we need to place our resources very carefully, and sometimes that means we aren't able to meet everyone's wishes.
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.
When will there be another update to the Furniture Dye Shop?
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Anonymous
[ATA]Jean - Oh nooo… so we’re actually planning to retire the Furniture Dye Shop soon (we’ll give a heads-up before it goes!). It never really took off the way we hoped, so rather than letting it sit there gathering dust, we figured it’s time to tidy it up and make some room in the shop.
Can you tell us more about what you'd want to see with this, what you liked and disliked about it etc?
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!
Why is there a 25 speaker limit, 75/100 would be better.
-BarbwireSilk
[ATA]Ripley - [...] I personally think that maybe your speaker allowance goes up over time or due to good / positive behavior, and is reduced due to negative behavior. Something earned that can be rescinded if not used properly. What do you folks think? What's the right way to handle speaker count?
This is also true for club sizes too, some people think it should be more than 100, some less than 100. Some say if we change it at all, we're cooked. Thoughts?
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.
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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.
but lemme know what you think
) that view this community as a big family and this game as their baby. Big ups from me to you guys and id love to help if you ever needed feedback
they may be near impossible and/or not happen any time soon but if there’s even the slightest possibility, i would love to see these developed one day 