Pixel Progression #5

Voting, Omega, Farming, Ads, and Keys, oh my!

melmsie

Mel

5 min read

February 1, 2024

Welcome to the fifth edition of Pixel Progression!

This week has been a weird one for me personally, but always interesting. Lets get to business.

Also just announced: There's a 25% off your first month of (monthly) premium coupon available on our website until Valentines day. Use code LOVE at checkout! This is the hottest premium sale in a long time, and it'll be a long time till another!

Voting and Beyond

We have had over a month of daily interruptions with voting, unfortunately.

A few things to note, past the obvious of us not owning those sites:

  • Top.gg is a decent sized company that should have their shit together, and hopefully is making improvements to prevent this.
  • Discordbotlist is owned and operated by one person, and this person does great 1 on 1 communication with us and revenue shares the ad rev.

Downtime sucks for everyone, including the vote sites. They're losing out on ad revenue, we're losing out on visibility, you're losing out on rewards.

Going forward, a MAJOR source of income being subject to a third party with stability issues is not what we want. We aren't going to remove the voting sites for the time being, but we are working on a replacement on our own website slated for sometime between now and fishing season 3.

The goal is to have a place to go interact (with ads, to support us) and you get a reward. Just like voting! We also have some fun ideas on top of that to have things for people to do on the page past just a button, but that may not be at launch.

Vote rewards will slowly start to move to OUR solution, and we'll use the vote sites for other things for those who want extra rewards.

More info on this in the very near future, it's pretty high on our priority list right now.

Omega

This is the last shoutout to omega and the update that should be coming INCREDIBLY soon, but I just wanted to share one more art piece.

Below is the farm skin for omega, and DAMN it's a beauty. This is just another of multiple new rewards you can only get from the omega shop at various levels of omega. And because it's been asked, we will not be increasing costs for omega at all, despite all this new content upcoming. We also don't plan on reducing any existing perks at this time.

We see you, Omega grinders!

Omega farm

Speaking of farming...

I'm personally considering giving farming the fishing 2.0 treatment.

This isn't set in stone, and it won't be AS crazy, but I've seen a lot of ideas I like and I agree that farm is underwhelming in both UX and fun.

Top of my head, ideas I've liked are: more farms, bigger farms, animals, cooking, more plants, farm events, and worrying less about sellable plants and more functional plants.

I have no clue how many of these, if any, will turn into a reality, but credit where credit is due for these cool ideas. I'm thinking about it all.

Key Event

At this point, the key event is a meme.

We've reached a point where the hype has reached a peak and started dropping back down because of the delay, and to be truthful, this is part of the reason it's not happened yet.

The expectations I accidentally set for the level of amazement for this event has us worried that we'll under-deliver.

So we have something planned, and it IS fun, but I wanna set expectations and a timeline now.

Event details:

  • Key holders will be able to consume their keys for high value rewards
  • Keys will no longer be tradable after the event starts (but won't be deleted, like pinks)
  • There will be riddles to solve, with exclusive prizes (for everyone)
  • Key holders will get extra riddles compared to non-key holders
  • There will be new items exclusive to the event, but not as rare as keys and will be tradeable
  • There will be a race to be first to complete riddles and complete a puzzle

At this point, I'd like to complete this event development before the end of May. It's not that far out because it will take that long, but because we feel the bot will benefit better from other things first (pls, gambling, fishing s3, and lots of other updates)

I'd like to apologize for the wait, and emphasize that this event will be a lot of fun and IS still happening.

Ads

Those around before the rewrite might remember we used to run ads on our website to help with revenue. We removed it due to some quality issues and we never got around to fixing them to add it back.

For full transparency, you might start seeing ads on the site again in some places (like the above mentioned "vote" replacement).

I ask, if you'd like to support us, to not run an ad blocker. If ad revenue proves to be something that makes money for us, we will be able to scale back on making gem exclusive things. While we know a lot of you can't pay for things, this is still a business that has to function with a profit to exist. I'd love to move towards less "pay to play" and more "free with ads" as a model because it feels more fair for those without expendable income, especially in the current state of the economy in multiple regions.

One example of this is the HIGH cost of making adventures and unique items for adventures. At the moment, we can't make free adventures purely because of the cost of developing them. I'd love to do stuff like this again going forward, but it needs paid for somehow.

I will throw no shade at those using ad blockers, I run one myself on many sites. I just ask you consider turning it off on ours to support our small team's development efforts, and help us be able to make the F2P experience a rich and long term fun game to play.

Thank you for understanding.

Community Shoutouts

Something I'd like to do each time we post one of these, is take a moment to call out cool things happening in the community.

3 years and counting

u/BaguetteSenor Has been streaking for 3 years. God bless daily streakers.

LINK: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemer/comments/19exnev/day_1100_havent_missed_a_day_yet/

Server Team

I'd like to dedicate an entry to the staff teams of DMC and DMS this week.

They do a lot to help YOU readers have a fun time whenever you're around the two servers, and we appreciate them. For this one, the community deserves to give them a shoutout.

Happy staff's day off, mods and giveaway crew and community managers AND admins!

Rolling the dice...

User naimur hit the THICK d20 3 days in a row. Insane luck. 4 next? (Posted in DMC)

d20 results

Wrapup

Don't forget to stop and drink some water while you think about February and all it has to offer. You deserve it <3