Changelog

He was awoken early anyway because of the severe-to-extreme reaction of the community. It could not wait any longer. He was disturbed from his sleep to address the issue, then promptly went right back to bed to try and get some more rest. "Try" being the key word there.

Niet, I think you missed the point. I'll try to explain it: You post in the changelog that "The option to show Shiny, Albino or Melanistic Pokémon icons using the [pkmn] BBCode has been removed." but didn't say it was not something permanent. In the changelog, where most of the things are permanant. And then say that Garthic would explain it later. I do understand that you were upset and having trouble with your thought. But next time, please. Make sure that Garthic have prepare his explaination in advance. That's how you make sure that people wouldn't have "severe-to-extreme reaction", by having already the explaination ready to go. Not by having us wait one or two hours and panicking because we don't understand.

Please tell Garthic that he deserves the rest. He deserves sleep and whatnot. He deserves to not be woken up like this all the time. Sure a previously prepared explanation would be nice for some, but I think that we, as a community of pokemon lovers, should relax and wait for the explanation instead of freaking out. We should just let sleeping Riolus sleep until he decides to wake up. ^^

Of course people need to sleep! And that's why people have been saying to not make change when an explanation isn't ready. Garthic and Niet could have been sleeping for an hour or two and then do it. Or even better. next time a thing that minor have to happen, don't make any update in the changelog! We would have been ok just thinking there was a bug in the pkmn code for a while!

i think there may have been some fault on both sides; more on ours, though. as the old, cliche saying goes, patience is a virtue. niet said there would be more information. he delivered. all we had to do was wait a bit. yes, perhaps there should have been more words included in the original message that could have prevented people from panicking. the mods are still humans just like us. they can make mistakes.

okay, big woop, we give pokefarm money, not that its a competition but i can garuntee that i have invested muuuuch more money into this silly little site than the average player. I noticed a few other players who are big spenders like myself also react calmly towards the news of the minisprites being broken. The least a user that enjoys this site could do is give the staff some respect, there are tons of f2p players here so 'we give them our money lol' is a dumb thing to mention lol. What i cant comprehend is thinking that a team of volunteer artists that were being harrassed is less of a deal than a small site function being removed. yes, people went 'oh jeez thats serious, but stiiiilll couldve told us' when garthic explained what happened, but garthic was asleep when this was brought to niets attention so niet was upset and the art staff were upset, he did what he could considering the circumstances, maybe the situation had him so upset he considered making it a permanent change?? know, like give an inch and take a mile? so Niet just took away the inch. I don't know, id feel that way if entitled users went to my volunteer art staff and made them feel incompetent.... also I think i might be reading in between the lines too much but it really seems like what niet did was simply a band-aid for the issue, no minisprite preview? no artists getting un asked for messages. Garthic can explain later. He literally said ' wait, garthic will explain' yet im just reading tons of aggressive posts that jump the gun, and again with the speculation. Anyways, im done here, peace out, have fun.

Again Terrabit, we have been 2 hours without knowing if it was a permanent change or not. The "Garthic will provide an explanation later. I simply do not have the words to describe the series of events leading to this decision.:" can be interpreted more than one way. Great, you did see it as a "it won't be permenant and Garthic would provide more information" but what more people say was "It won't work from now on and Garthic would explain why we won't using the minisprite s/a/m anymore". Maybe some people where too aggressive, that's not what I'm talking about. Explaination is better when it's giving beside the change not two hours later. People can't know when the explaination is given if there is no explaination. So it let people make assumption, and it's normal.

I don't know how long it took Niet to respond to the art staffs' issue after it happened, so having a prepared message might not have been possible from Garth, but even just mentioning it was a temporary fix would have doused the flames a good amount. The Changelog has only been used for permanent updates, and hasn't been used in a good while because of the switch to Dev Logs, so seeing the Changelog revived for this brought about the "worse case scenario" response. At one point before Garth's response, someone commented on how all the staff were online at that time. Since Garth was asleep at the time, couldn't it have been possible to have any of the other staff members make the comment? That might have allowed for a reason to be given at the time of the update post, or at least much quicker then we got by needing Garth to be woken up to post. Edit: Yes, we could have waited for Garth's response, but the way Niet worded the update, it gave me the same vibes a PM from a mod gives. The "you messed up so badly I'm about to ban you for a million years and I'm not even going to tell you why" vibe. So I think the player responses were just inline with the tone we got from Niet's message.

Except mods don't do that, from my experience.

F2P players do give the site money though... indirectly. Because the overwhelming majority of them still buys ZC, except they get it from other players, but by doing so they increase the demand for ZC. ZC is not generated by in-game means; it always comes from real cash. Without f2p players, most users who are able to pay would have less reasons to buy ZC. The bottom line is this site is a business model. It's monetised. Yes it is not p2w and I'm extremely grateful for that. I believe that the staff managed to achieve the right balance between generating profit from the website and keeping it comfortable and accessible for all users. But since it's business and not just an amateur project, and we are the customers who support it by giving it our money/effort/time (that also counts because involvement of the userbase is essential for making a business model work), we have the right to voice our opinions and to expect that things are run in a professional manner. I agree that it's inexcusable to bash and harass the artists for their work. But I rarely see that. Users who do that should be punished accordingly with bans (or at least forum bans). However, it should be totally acceptable to say that we don't like a certain change, a certain colour palette and so on as long as we remain respectful and use polite language. And please, don't get me wrong. I've been enjoying this site on and off for the last couple of years. I appreciate the frequent updates and the attention that we, the userbase, get from the staff. I also acknoweldge that it takes a lot of work to run something like that. But I often feel like some of the decisions and discourse on here are just immature and childish. It comes off as begging for pity, honestly. All these references to real life sacrifices and so on. We get it. The staff are humans. We are also humans. We all have our problems. The staff should expect respectful attitude from us but we shouldn't be expected to babysit anyone. We are literally online strangers who came here to get some virtual goods in exchange for our time and money (directly or not). Please be professional about it, and if it's too difficult, hire someone who can post updates and proofcheck all decisions to make sure they aren't affected by emotion.