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I should amend what I say.

I actually don't mind the rules myself since I love rping, and I'm not actually sure why it's really so hard for others. But I did just want to give suggestions for those who may want more of an incentive. I'm fine with it for right now, except for maybe the solo amount and 10 posts per.

I do apologize if my words have sounded like I'm complaining too much. As of right now, I do not mind the rules. If you guys go ahead and decide to change them you can, but for me personally, I agree with them. I just did want to offer suggestions since others have said they can't rp that much.

Thanks for your patience everyone while I wrapped up my day at work.

Dear Koi,

There are a few things I want to address that I feel are major misconceptions about how things function in the shop, and when certain changes came in to existence, but also a couple other things that have been commented on here that I feel are blanket statements that require more context to be fully accurate.

Customs are never open, only bribes.

Actually, customs are always open. At least one artist has them open at any given time. The custom threads you see in the Customs Subforum are each individual artist’s custom and bribe sections. If you don’t want to bribe an artist – don’t. It’s not required to get a pet. Just fill out the regular custom form instead of a bribe form. RP Point Redemptions have not been and will never be the primary way to purchase characters in the shop. It is intended as a bonus.

There are not enough active customers in the shop to sustain Roleplay.

Is this being based off guild activity? If so, I can see where people may think that. Many of our customers prefer roleplaying over Discord. It allows them the freedom to roleplay their characters however they want, and privately. This can let them fulfill their head cannons, play outside of a PG-13 setting, or whatever else they may want to get up to. We don’t encourage this (cuz ToS on Gaia in regards to RP), but that is a very real fact. The plot channel is fairly active and has people consistently looking for plots with their characters. The ultimate follow through on roleplaying those plots is up to the individual. I do not think it is fair to make such a broad statement when there are other factors involved.

Staff don’t need to meet growth requirements due to SC.

This is also not entirely true. Up until recently (like, the last 6 months or so ) we were only allowed 1 growth a month. Anything else we wanted to get we had to go through the regular growth system. I did. I did it almost every single month for a good stretch of time there. So I also know that the system is do-able. And I know how long it takes if you take the time to sit down and actually do it. Obviously numbers will vary a little on timing from person to person, but it only took me 2 hours to do all the requirements. For customers, you are allowed to grow 2 kids per colorist a month, and you can enter 2 kids of each stage in to classes each month. This means you could grow all 6 kids by the end of the month if you really wanted to and picked 3 different colorists' kids to grow. Staff are only allowed to grow 4 characters in a month. That's two kids less then what customers can do work towards in classes, and a lot of our staff haven't been applying for growths even with that system in place.

For most staff members, it is 1 SC point for every 5 characters they make for the shop. Which means even by doing 1 character the vast majority of us have spent more time then required to grow a character. We’re still 4/5ths away from obtaining the points required to even be able to afford a growth or a character in the shop. Staff have to do 4x as much work in order to get the same thing as customers do (time wise), and I feel like this is where issues are popping up and misunderstandings are happening. Most staffers spend all their NMA time keeping the shop going for the customers. As an example, Duck has made around/over 100 Nightmares in the past year that she has been on staff but has only claimed/made herself about 7 things since she joined (I am probably heavily lowballing the nightmare count and only slightly lowballing the claimed count). Personally for me – and I have the quickest time out of artists for making characters – it takes me 10 hours of work to earn the funds to grow a character. All the other artists take more time then I do – and to put it in to perspective – even working off the higher average numbers that Green presented, it takes some of our artists 30 hours to earn one growth. And an important thing to remember is that we all started off as customers. We’ve been on the other side of things. We get it, as we’ve had to use the same system.

’RP Heavy’ is an excuse for making poor decisions.

I’m not even sure how to respond to that. It’s really not an excuse. It’s a legitimate reason. We are. If you personally disagree with a choice made by the shop, that’s totally fine. Not everyone is going to agree, but I wouldn’t say that reminding people that the shop is intended to have a heavy roleplay focus is an excuse. When ‘light’ was used in the past, it was in regards to content, not the amount of writing. If you want to be less involved with the writing aspect of the shop then you are 100% allowed to be, but please keep in mind that the shop will always be roleplay focused. If you want to earn roleplay rewards, then you will have to roleplay and hit the minimum requirements.

It seems like staff are just trying to purposefully chase customers away.

Again, not sure how to respond to that. Anybody saying that is really just promoting hearsay. Myself and our staff put in so much blood, sweat and tears in to the shop to keep it running. I bite through carpal tunnel to make sure stuff gets done on time and spend hours icing my wrist to get it back up to health so I can keep going. Because if we don’t, who will fulfill the expectations placed on staff?

When individual people say there are not enough pets being released, we push ourselves to go beyond our limits to produce more for people. Then we are told it’s too easy to get pets in the shop. So we scale it back. We were told bribes were too much of a focus for the shop, so we shut bribes down. Then people were upset that we took bribes away, so we brought them back. These are just a few examples of how there is no way to please everyone. Some people will like changes, some people won't. It's up to us - as staff - to figure out what the majority want.

We try to listen so we can accommodate and adjust to what customers ultimately desire most, but also in a way that will work for staff. This is where the duality of being previous customers and staff has its strength. The shop still needs to function and run, and sometimes hard choices have to be made that can only be made by living both sides of the argument. That knowledge is necessary for the betterment of the shop. But sometimes, every now and again, we have to put our foot down when things get overwhelming for staff to ensure there’s staff around to keep making things for the customer base.

Adjusting the roleplay redemption in this way – while it might suck during the adjustment period for some people – helps preserve the longevity of our staff. Previously there were no hard limits, and it would result in many roleplay redemption requests coming down the pipeline simultaneously that we had nobody available to fulfill. Not only is that not fair to staff, but it isn’t fair to you guys to be kept waiting until somebody comes off hiatus or has a clear workload to take on the work. One too many times we had someone waiting 3+ months wondering where their custom or semi was from their points they redeemed. What they didn't see was that it often bounced around between multiple artists because too many people were on hiatus or already had a back log of work they had to do that became overdue, or something more pressing outside of the shop came up.

Of course this wouldn't necessarily be apparent, but most folks who have redeemed customs that way have probably wondered why the have to wait so long to get their RP customs and semis. And this was a big factor. Ultimately this resulted in unhappy customers having to wait way longer then they ever should, but also stressed out staff for feeling like they couldn't meet the demand placed on them.

We had to weigh the pros and cons. We did consider the customer perspective. We had to come at it from every angle, and this was discussed long and hard. This was the option we felt worked best that was a good compromise for everyone.

Frankly, many of our staff – and myself included – consistently feel underappreciated and taken for granted in the grand scheme of things, and hearing unnecessary comments such as staff trying to chase customers away just drives the point home for many of us. We are not inconsiderate towards our customers and we do not make changes like this without heavy consideration. Whether that is lore shifts among lore masters, or changing an old system that's broken and not working in some way among all our staff.

More to the point, though ...

Ultimately, no. We do not want to drive customers away, and suggesting staff are actively doing so or saying such is pretty slanderous and incredibly misinformed.

With that, I am closing this topic to further conversation. Voices have been heard, adjustments have been made, rules tweaked, and suggestions presented here are further being discussed on staff in regards to how to implement them and if they will work in a way that benefits the shop.

Thank you again for all your feedback and taking the time to let us know how you feel,
Ember