I guess that's one of the more confusing things-- people were trying to offer QoL improvements, concerns about the economy, concerns about how user-unfriendly and mobile-game like some of the professions were to their detriment, etc all during beta (and I assume alpha, but I wasn't there for that) and just never saw anything change. It is wild how little actually changed from beta to launch, despite betas existing for exactly those reasons? Two years live, and we still haven't seen much in the way of QoL updates, despite people clamoring for them almost more than anything else. People have been begging even just for more dens or more slots in existing dens to buy for ages.
I like to think the userbase would be fairly understanding of quite a
lot of reasons for the lack of updates, if only the communication was better. But copy/pasted weekly event posts don't count as actual engagement; indeed, they highlight the absence of it all the more to see just wide unbroken lists of them in the forums. Even the quarterly event posts-- just 4 posts a year, same days every year-- are copy/pastes that have come with errors / no proofreading before they are automatically posted. The userbase is generally
speaking an exceptionally nice one, most especially for an entirely leaderless userbase at this point. But I do think that's strained after two "live" years of the same thing, with the other examples of lack of QA-- background errors during events, inconsistent pricing schemes that continue to crop up after they were "fixed" and that last the entire month of an event with no word, etc, etc.
It gives the impression that nobody in charge even visits the site anymore, which is very unusual for what should still be an up-and-coming game with a lot of very low-hanging fruit in terms of easy little updates. They have barely scratched the surface of markings and apparel, so it's not for a lack of available ideas. Even just drip-fed content consisting of exclusively markings (single color layer masks, no shading) found on real-world animals (so no need for imagining something esoteric or complex) would have sustained a lot of goodwill and been a great distraction for people, encouraging more breeding projects and ways for folks to entertain themselves. Ah well!
I've also seen a looot of 'spite-for and resentment-of the userbase' based theories (not in this thread!-- talking about a private and now defunct chat) for why things have stagnated since then, but the truth is that we just don't know enough to comfortably form any real opinions about it. Unfortunately, though, that's another side effect that comes with no communication; the users tend to come up with reasons for things that seem sound, or logical, or that seem to make sense to them, and without anyone to say otherwise, or talk at all about their own site, well... It's easy to see why people's theories quickly become the less flattering ones. :S
