Holiday Name Changes

[FaithHeart]

But our opinions do not really matter. Things will change as the powers that be see fit and the PR spin is just that, "spin". The kool-aide has been drank. Tell them they don't understand it, tell them to wait for the recode... no wait there isn't one of those anymore, uh tell them to wait for the uh.. well just tell them to wait. It will all become clear.

All we are missing is a big pink meepit telling us we are not prepared.

The economy is a mess, all the users fault it seems, and frankly I am bored with Subeta. I will stay cause I am a die hard and need distractions from real life but it isn't any fun anymore. Other places are getting my money now. Places I actually think might give a crap about what I want and not just try to placate me while they hope I buy something.

[Luxe]

That's your choice, and one that I am sorry you feel the need to make. As both a user and a staff member, I have always felt that Subeta listens to its users far more often than any other site I've visited but I can understand that not everyone will feel the same way I do. I certainly don't mean to give you the impression that it's a PR spin when I say that I don't understand the specific emotion you're expressing to us nor the reasoning behind it. I am simply trying to get clarification to see if there is some compromise I could discuss with my peers. Why would I go out of my way to come to this site to read opinions, offer explanations and then go through the effort of saying that certain reactions confused me if I didn't care at all? Why not just ignore it altogether?

[shaelyn76]

Luxe...I never said you mentioned Kumos Day. Don't put words in my mouth please. In case you missed it, I clarified at the beginning of my post that I was referring to all of the Subeta staff when saying the word "you". I used Kumos Day as an example of what I can see coming in the future if this goes down how I fear it will, not as something any staff member directly said.

Now I will address you(Luxe) directly with this next bit here.You wrote: "You're not thinking broadly enough. I did mention Subeta's countries and races and patriotism. By that I mean that we are actually going to reevaluate Subeta's cartography and instead of having a carnival the size of Alaska plastered on a world map at random, we'd like to have a country or nation instead with a certain type of people and culture and a carnival within. In this respect, there will very much be a multicultural feel to Subeta, even if they aren't all cultures that we're used to in the real world. Remember The Senate? Where are the members from? What parts of Subeta do they govern? What are their ethnicities, cultures, holidays?"

You are purposely twisting what I said to make it convenient for you. You are a smart woman and that leads me to believe that you knew damn well that when I referred to nationalities and countries and ethnicity I was talking about Earth and not Subeta. I don't care if you guys change every part of the Subeta map to show multiple countries and give each one of those its own story and history. It will still not be the same as the cultural melting pot that has made Subeta fun in the past. The real world blend of culture/tradition/holidays is what I was referring to in my prev post which I thought I had made clear. And as for the Senate...unless you are talking about the US Senate then, no, I have no clue what the hell you are talking about and I'm willing to bet the majority of Subeta players wouldn't either. Also, I had to laugh when I saw that you had used the word patriotism in relation to Subeta. Seriously? It's a virtual petsite/social networking site and the concept of patriotism is now being applied to it?

I will now stop addressing Luxe directly and from this point on any "you" used in this post will either be clarified as to whom I speak or will refer to Subeta staff as a whole.

FaithHeart, you crack me up and I agree with you completely on this. Cashification made me LOL! I have also had this mental image of the staff all walking in goosestep wearing Morostide shirts. The ones I imagined said "Morostide, love it or GTFO" though.

Ty, I agree with the whole fake races that are obviously not thing as well. I love Robert Jordan but I totally agree with what you are getting at. It is almost insulting.

And on that note, I have to get back to living my real life which sadly is more logical, sane and fun lately than my online life.

[Huggles]

I don't think you can compare holidays on WoW to holidays on Subeta. It's simply because if you take the real world holidays away from WoW, you are left with frigging World of Warcraft. Take them away from Subeta and you're left with, well even less than the little to actually do on Subeta. That's the biggest problem with Subeta, more than the lack of backstories or holidays, or whatever. We get pets, we buy items, and do what with them exactly? You're basically left with not much in the way of a game, but a community. So when you take away or change something that affects the community more than the game, the items and activities are still there, it's going to have a bigger effect on Subeta than elsewhere.

I am also confused as to why anyone thought they could appease everyone and celebrate every single holiday in the first place. As mentioned, then every day would be a holiday and the celebrations would probably be on the same level of those celebrating Tuesday or Monday, or hey Friday! Woo! You can't make everyone happy all the time, and of course I am going to care about you making ME happy more than everyone else. You(Subeta) can accept that you aren't going to please a lot of people with this change, but you couldn't accept not pleasing every single person who brought some obscure holiday for celebration when you asked them to? If the goal is to make as many people as possible happy, then you've got to do something for the holidays that the most people celebrate. Then if you can add some less popular ones in, great. And if you can create some new original Subetian holidays in that everyone enjoys, even better.

And then off course you'll piss off all the people who don't believe in celebrating any holidays. Alas.

Mod Edit: I changed the title. Halloween Fun might lead people to expect Halloween and/or fun.

[Jessi]

Huggles brings up a very, very good point. On Ragnarok Online, they celebrate a small amount of major holidays... Halloween is a big one, as well as Christmas, Valentine's Day and White Day. They'll have events on holiday weekends that aren't ABOUT the holiday, but just an event that cleverly happens at that time.

Now.. RO has a pretty established world, and history, and all of that jazz. But they still call the holidays by the usual names - they've managed to make them unique in their own way through the stories they use in the game (for example, there's always a huge quest/plot at Halloween involving some of the monsters, so you don't just associate Halloween on the game with the usual traditions of Halloween). And at Christmas, all the maps have snow, and the music changes to holiday music, and you can hunt down special monsters to win gift boxes with various presents inside.

The point is, if RO took away celebrating holidays, you can still play the game. There's still other quests, and things to kill, and guild wars and what not. When you start to take away all the little celebrations like this on Subeta, there's not a lot left.

I like the idea of any place, including Subeta, strengthening the mythology of their land. But RO is a good example of a place that has managed to do this, WITHOUT changing the names of holidays. I hardly associate Halloween on RO with Halloween, except that it happens at the same time of the year. I imagine a large percentage of Subeta's populace felt the same with Halloween on Subeta.

I love Huggles suggestion of celebrating major holidays that most people celebrate (without changing the names), and SOME of the smaller holidays to please people. And making up your own holidays in between that (ie.. Malaria Day, i don't know) would be a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, it not only seems like it's way too late for that, but even if the majority of the populace expressed interest in this, it wouldn't change anyway.

[Luxe]

I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, shaelyn76. I only meant to offer my opinion on the idea of pet themed holidays. I agree that it would be a horrible idea to move towards a holiday model like that and as long as I have a say, I would like to prevent that from happening.

Neither was I attempting to twist your words. You said that it was contradictory to say that Subeta will be multicultural when we remove real world cultures from it. I was simply explaining how such a claim could be made. I did know to what you were referring, but I also know to what Sayle was referring and I was simply tying the two of them together for you.

Apologies on the members of The Senate, as well. I had thought they were used in a plot that I'd missed before, but to explain: When King Keith stepped down from ruling Subeta, he elected Sebastian Phoenix to rule instead. The Senate is a smaller branch of Subeta's government with eight members, each supposedly representing a different region of Subeta. My reference was to these eight members and where exactly they were from.

I mentioned patriotism because I do feel like it applies. When we're discussing a fantasy world where there are going to be nations and cultures, and we've already had tensions between prominent figures and even wars? Sure, I think patriotism is appropriate, and I think it will be a nice way to still incorporate some sort of independence day, post-war victory celebration, or for lack of a better word "patriotic" holiday into our lore.

Is it less of a blow, Huggles, if when we take away, we also attempt to fill those voids? I, personally, know Subeta is lacking in a lot of activities. It's just quests, items, more quests, mix stuff to make these other items, use the items you got from your quests to buy these items, don't forget to feed your pets, put those items in your collections...I get it. But if this is one of many steps to make Subeta more interesting and well rounded and give you more to do than collect items, is that such a bad thing? If we took holidays out of Subeta and still had plenty of Subeta left to busy yourself with, would that redeem this? Because that's not far from what we're attempting to achieve, I don't think.

I don't think we ever truly believed that we could appease everyone and manage to celebrate every single holiday. However, as users started complaining that we celebrated this independence day or that national holiday but not theirs, we realized the only solution was probably all or nothing. When it's your holiday being ignored despite everyone else getting to celebrate theirs, there's really no excuse or reason in the world that is good enough to excuse that. You feel left out and likely rightly so.

We can't please everyone, you're right. It's my belief though that if the only solution was all or nothing, and we obviously couldn't do it all, it needed to be nothing. After staff decided to discuss this, I realized (much to my surprise) that a lot of us felt this way, including Keith (even more to my surprise).

[covet]

Okay, now I'm slightly confused.

1) The 'real world' holidays are being changed because there were too many of them, and because people wanted you to celebrate them all, and it was too much work.

But: it's going to take a 'huge amount' of work to restructure all the holidays, give them subetan names and traditions.

2) The real world holidays are being changed because people would be upset if their obscure holiday was missed out.

But: You're still celebrating lots of 'multi(earth)cultural' festivals by different names, so people can still be upset that their important celebration doesn't have a subetan counterpart. Furthermore, you're risking offending the huge majority of the site who celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Easter and Halloween either for festive or religious reasons, for the sake of not offending the small minority who want to celebrate, say, Faunalia?

You're not doing all or nothing. You're doing the same as before but giving the holidays wacky names.

3) The real world holidays are being changed so you can integrate amazing new details about the NPCs into them.

BUT: none of this has been planned particularly far in advance, so what you're actually doing is trying to come up with NPC backstories to cram into the new holidays. I don't care much about subeta NPCs, honestly. I've never wondered about their histories. I'm sure a lot of people do - but I'm also sure those people would rather celebrate holidays unique to the NPCs rather than have them superimposed over the reasons we celebrate real holidays.

For example, what you do with the cave fairies on Atebus is great. For a couple of days a month they have a special tradition where you can go and dig up gems and create special pets. It's wonderful, it's original, and it works well. Creating a special holiday or tradition for NPCs is a good idea - and harking back to neo again, look at the Faerie festival and gadgadsbogen, for example. It's entirely possible to develop original ideas within a world where you still respect at least the major real world traditions.

4) The real world holidays are being changed to sound less earth related.

And yet Oktoberfest is replaced by the german word for beer garden. That actually sounds more, not less related to the real world, to me.

Doing something like this demands a lot more thought put into it before it's begun. Having acutally mentioned halloween in news posts before deciding to change it to Morostide just shows how late and hurried the decision has been. Impulse, spur of the moment changes aren't a great idea.

[Joey]

To clarify, I'm using the general you here.

I see the problem here being saying is one thing and doing is quite another. You can say that you're doing this to improve subeta and that you'll be filling the voids left behind by changing the holidays with actual content until your blue in the face and it doesn't mean anything. Meanwhile, all of us on this end only see you renaming our favorite holiday in an attempt to make it more subeta like. That's it. None of this cool stuff you keep promising and saying you're taking steps on. I think instead of hollow promises you should actually have something to back it up that we can see or else I don't see how you can blame us for getting annoyed.

[Wingsrising]

Speaking as someone who actually isn't that interested in Halloween... (I like the sales on candy, and the excuse to torture my poor cat by dressing her up and taking her picture. That's about it.)

Why can't you just keep calling Halloween "Halloween" and then invent (more) neat Halloween Subeta traditions?

No matter what name you give it, a festival that involves spooky things, pumpkins, and candy near the end of October is going to be Halloween. And, if you change the spooky-pumpkin-candy thing, you're going to piss people off even more than you already have.

I also don't see how this solves the problem of people being upset that you didn't celebrate their favorite holiday. This just means that instead of being mad that you didn't celebrate Bastille Day, they'll be mad that you didn't celebrate Merena's Prison Storming Festival.

[Luxe]

1) The 'real world' holidays are being changed because there were too many of them, and because people wanted you to celebrate them all, and it was too much work.

But: it's going to take a 'huge amount' of work to restructure all the holidays, give them subetan names and traditions.

Do you really imagine it to be a walk in the park to transform the holidays we have celebrated and their resulting items to correspond to similar Subeta equivalents? If that is an easy task, please share your ideas on how to do it. It's possible I'm trying to do things the hard way.

2) The real world holidays are being changed because people would be upset if their obscure holiday was missed out.

But: You're still celebrating lots of 'multi(earth)cultural' festivals by different names, so people can still be upset that their important celebration doesn't have a subetan counterpart. Furthermore, you're risking offending the huge majority of the site who celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Easter and Halloween either for festive or religious reasons, for the sake of not offending the small minority who want to celebrate, say, Faunalia?

You're not doing all or nothing. You're doing the same as before but giving the holidays wacky names.

I disagree, perhaps because of intention to add other traditions to Subeta's new holidays so that they're not just rebranded Earth versions.

We're also not obligated to give every "obscure" holiday a Subetan counterpart. However, we do need to give existing items on site a corresponding tie into our lore with a Subeta twist. We could just stop celebrating real holidays entirely and then make up brand new Subeta ones from scratch, but what are we going to do with the mountain of items on site that are left? Just retire it all and pretend it doesn't exist?

3) The real world holidays are being changed so you can integrate amazing new details about the NPCs into them.

BUT: none of this has been planned particularly far in advance, so what you're actually doing is trying to come up with NPC backstories to cram into the new holidays.

While the decision is a recent one, the development of Subeta's lore and NPCs has been going on for at least a year behind the scenes.

4) The real world holidays are being changed to sound less earth related.

And yet Oktoberfest is replaced by the german word for beer garden. That actually sounds more, not less related to the real world, to me.

Doing something like this demands a lot more thought put into it before it's begun. Having acutally mentioned halloween in news posts before deciding to change it to Morostide just shows how late and hurried the decision has been. Impulse, spur of the moment changes aren't a great idea.

Again, having taken a page from games and stories that have done this before, we didn't have a problem with the names for Alegarten, Morostide or Keelholiday. Deviate too far (like some people believe we have done with Morostide) and there are other complaints.

The mention of Halloween in the news isn't a result of it being a snap decision. It's a result of some people not getting the memo. I hate to say so, and I am as much to blame for not being more strict, but if a proper chain of command had been followed before making said news post, it wouldn't have happened. I can only say that I changed it as soon as I saw it.

Joey, personally, I'm not blaming anyone for being annoyed (even though you were speaking of staff in general). I just don't see any other alternative. We could have planned out a year in full and rolled it all out at once, sure. Meanwhile, in the year it took us to plan it all, we'd have continued to celebrate holidays and release items that we'd have to replace later, which I believe would have confused users. January 1 comes around and we unroll our new name and celebration of New Years Day, and users are like, "What do you mean no more real world holidays? You just celebrated Christmas last week!" We felt the best way to do this was release it in stages to avoid as much backpedaling as possible. I understand that we need to put up or shut up, and so I do hope that we can impress you in time, but I also hope it makes sense why we chose to do this now instead of waiting until it was all finished.

Wingsrising, it's hard to tell people we're not celebrating real world holidays when we have Halloween and Christmas and Easter by name on Subeta. If on July 4 we tried saying with a straight face that we weren't celebrating American Independence Day because we've done away with real world holidays, I guarantee you the first thing people are going to point to is the recent Easter holiday. And, if we give in and celebrate July 4 as an American holiday since it is a big deal where most of us come from, well, then we're back in the same boat. People will lament Cinco de Mayo and Bastille Day and the Australia Day we chose not to celebrate in January.

If we have a set schedule, we won't have people angry that we didn't celebrate Merana's Prison Storming Festival, because we made the holiday. We know when it is because it is ours and we're not relying on some sticky thread that users may or may post on to tell us OHSNAP. YOU FORGOT GRECIAN PUDDLE STOMPING DAY. (Much like Subeta never forgot American holidays because staff is largely American, we're not going to forget Subetan holidays. It will be that important.)

[Wingsrising]

Wingsrising, it's hard to tell people we're not celebrating real world holidays when we have Halloween and Christmas and Easter by name on Subeta. If on July 4 we tried saying with a straight face that we weren't celebrating American Independence Day because we've done away with real world holidays, I guarantee you the first thing people are going to point to is the recent Easter holiday. And, if we give in and celebrate July 4 as an American holiday since it is a big deal where most of us come from, well, then we're back in the same boat. People will lament Cinco de Mayo and Bastille Day and the Australia Day we chose not to celebrate in January.

If we have a set schedule, we won't have people angry that we didn't celebrate Merana's Prison Storming Festival, because we made the holiday. We know when it is because it is ours and we're not relying on some sticky thread that users may or may post on to tell us OHSNAP. YOU FORGOT GRECIAN PUDDLE STOMPING DAY. (Much like Subeta never forgot American holidays because staff is largely American, we're not going to forget Subetan holidays. It will be that important.)

My point is that Merana's Prison Storming Festival is Bastille Day, just like Midsummer Fireworks Festival is Fourth of July and Spring Bunny Festival is Easter, and Morostide is Halloween. This change doesn't mean you're not celebrating real world holidays. It means you're celebrating real world holidays with stupid names.

So I don't see that this is going to stop people from complaining that you're not celebrating their favorite holiday. It's just that now instead of saying, "You didn't do anything for Chinese New Year," they'll say, "You didn't do anything for Chinese New Year! Why didn't you have Chinese New Year and call it the Paralix Dancing Festival?"

The only time I think not calling a spade a spade accomplishes anything is when you're celebrating End-Of-Year Gift-Giving Holiday. The reason that works is that there are so many end-of-year gift-giving holidays happening at about this same time. People can't complain that you're not celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, whatever because by celebrating End-Of-Year Gift-Giving Holiday you're celebrating all of them at once.

[AngharadTy]

That's a bit unfair, Ty, when I've also said several times that I do understand other emotions that have been mentioned here. If I genuinely don't understand a certain opinion, I hardly think it's belittling to say so and offer the chance for it to be clarified instead of just smiling and nodding and not figuring out how to address it.

First, I was generalizing. The nebulous "staff," you know.

Second, what I mean is that the words that come through are not words that make me feel good. Let me write two examples.

User: I do not like X!
Staff member: I genuinely don't understand how someone could not like X!
User: BUT I JUST SAID I DID NOT LIKE IT. I WASN'T LYING, YOU KNOW. RAR SMASH!

User: I do not like X!
Staff member: Would you explain what it is you don't like about X?
User: Hrmmm, sure. This and this and this.

The staff member feels the same way in both instances. But the words of the second are much more polite and open. I haven't been keeping track, so I don't know exactly which staff members have been saying, "I just don't get you guys!" But it's more than one. It's more than two. (I mean on Subeta, as well; I occasionally brave the forums to read about an issue I care about.)

1) The 'real world' holidays are being changed because there were too many of them, and because people wanted you to celebrate them all, and it was too much work.

But: it's going to take a 'huge amount' of work to restructure all the holidays, give them subetan names and traditions.

Do you really imagine it to be a walk in the park to transform the holidays we have celebrated and their resulting items to correspond to similar Subeta equivalents? If that is an easy task, please share your ideas on how to do it. It's possible I'm trying to do things the hard way.

As far as I can tell, the original point was that you're replacing "too much work" with just another flavor of "too much work."

I disagree, perhaps because of intention to add other traditions to Subeta's new holidays so that they're not just rebranded Earth versions.

This is another way that the multicultural aspect of the site will be lost. I'm referring to what most of us consider the already-present multiculturalism--the reference to multiple holidays that are seldom mentioned anywhere else, like Chanukah and Loy Krathong. Earth holidays. You can't replace "Earth cultures" with "Subeta cultures" and then say that you're keeping the multiculturalism.

We could just stop celebrating real holidays entirely and then make up brand new Subeta ones from scratch, but what are we going to do with the mountain of items on site that are left? Just retire it all and pretend it doesn't exist?

To me, this is a good, logical reason for why y'all shouldn't be changing the holiday names.

Again, having taken a page from games and stories that have done this before, we didn't have a problem with the names for Alegarten, Morostide or Keelholiday. Deviate too far (like some people believe we have done with Morostide) and there are other complaints.

First: If you're going to compare yourselves to other games, take a look at Neopets. I know everyone hates comparing Subeta to Neopets. But one thing TNT has done is create new holidays with a Neo culture and keep standard, popular, Earth holidays. On another planet, too.

Second: There will always be complaints. I'm sure everyone knows this. Can't please everyone all the time. Is this action really pleasing most of the people most of the time? It's really hard to gauge a real response on Subeta itself because of the herd of people who stomp on anyone dissenting with, "If you don't like it then leave!" I certainly haven't expressed my opinions on Subeta because I don't want brownnoser drama.

Third: I have a problem with names for Alegarten, etc. Alegarten especially! If you colonize another planet and want to adapt your existing traditions to fit in with traditions you find among the natives--as has been suggested--you're not going to keep using other Earth words for it. Some of the words are going to come from the other culture. And no one is going to rename something Alegarten because if they remember enough German to come up with that, they remember enough German to recall Oktober. And no one would forget about October, because the months on Subeta are the same. I'm nitpicking here, but a theory was presented to us to explain the change logically, and it doesn't actually explain the change logically.

edit to add:

It's my belief though that if the only solution was all or nothing, and we obviously couldn't do it all, it needed to be nothing.

The solution was not "all or nothing," and basing all the changes on that means that there's no logic.

[FaithHeart]

That's your choice, and one that I am sorry you feel the need to make. As both a user and a staff member, I have always felt that Subeta listens to its users far more often than any other site I've visited but I can understand that not everyone will feel the same way I do. I certainly don't mean to give you the impression that it's a PR spin when I say that I don't understand the specific emotion you're expressing to us nor the reasoning behind it. I am simply trying to get clarification to see if there is some compromise I could discuss with my peers. Why would I go out of my way to come to this site to read opinions, offer explanations and then go through the effort of saying that certain reactions confused me if I didn't care at all? Why not just ignore it altogether?

I don't feel that you are sorry, and that is ok just don't bullshit me. There is a big difference between doing your job to quiet the users who you don't understand (that also I call bullshit on btw) and actually "caring" that most anyone who isn't an ass kisser will really dislike having the Holidays they hold dear taken from them. There has been a public push on from the inner circle about this for awhile. Posts about how Halloween was too long, and other things that now I can see were people who knew what was going to happen trying to sway public opinion before the big reveal. You are going to ignore it all together. You just don't want to look like you are.

They (Subeta) can't call a spade a spade unless they know it is going to be a spade and not say a rake, or a pink flamingo. The fact you(Subeta) are just making this up as you go along is very clear. But hey go on with your bad self, and good luck, it is your site after all.

[Luxe]

I'm not bullshitting anyone. You want to generalize that Subeta staff doesn't care when clearly I am here and caring.

Can you clarify what you mean about an inner circle pushing these changes? I can promise you we didn't grab prominent members of Subeta to vocalize complaints that would better facilitate this change.

[covet]

Ty's right, my point was you're saying it's too much hard work to celebrate real holidays, and also saying it's epic hard work to change them all. I'm sure neither path is easy, it's just that this one is rather pointless, the way you've described it.

And there I'm done.... this is just, incredibly self contradictory, and I'm really tired. Suffice to say it's losing an aspect of the site that I, and clearly many other people, really enjoyed... apparently for the sake of a few people who wanted to celebrate obscure holidays. It's a shame. It's a shame, and in the case of altering religious holidays and the names of items related to them, it can also be genuinely offensive.

But I'm sure we'll all live.