Alright, as it stands, I have not cared for Beastkeeper in a very long time- as you can see by my complete lack of pets and other things. However, I remain here under the hopes that it ends up becoming a site that I (and many others) might eventually truly be able to like a great deal. But unless some things are fixed and/or changed, it will not be able to be a site that caters to a vast majority of people. The main issues that still remain even after a few years are as follows:

1. The payment methods for Gold Coins. Now, we all know that this site is not and never was a scam, but it has always bothered me and prevented me from purchasing anything with real cash to note many of the payment methods. It is and always was strange and unusual that this site accepts fast food, sports goods and gas station gift cards, in addition to the standard paypal/ewallet/cell phone methods of payment. Credit cards are fine, but these random cards have always made the site seem very weird and a little shifty to me, even though I know better than that. If the random gift card payments are removed, the site will seem to be much more legitimate.

2. Have someone who speaks fluent and precise English as a staff member. Everyone realizes that Angel does her best, but since English is not her first language, she oftentimes comes across as being rude or condescending, even when that is not intended. Therefore, it would be best if someone who is a primary English speaker were put in charge of handling relations between the userbase and staff. (The moderators are great, but sometimes, people need to hear from one of the higher-ups about things and it would be great if there was someone to take care of Public Relations who was a very fluent English speaker- someone who was hired on, so they didn't just end up vanishing at one point or another.)

3. The art issues. While there is no denying that Angel is a good artist, there are (even now) issues with certain pieces of art that are far too similar to what other people have done (not the old issues that have been resolved, we're talking the Etelia art being far too similar/possibly copied from the original source.) While this is probably not Angel's intentions, the site still lacks its own pet style, which caused issues in the past and may spell issues again in the future. 

4. Not letting users under the age of thirteen join. It has been a while since I signed up, but I never noticed anything about coppa on this site- and it is important on any pet site to make sure that children either only have access to a few things (without any information, including their e-mail addresses, collected) or to post somewhere that states that minor children may play, with parential consent. This just covers a few bases that still need to be touched on to avoid anything at all happening down the road.

5. Completely restructuring the forums. They are not arranged in a coherent manner (things are scattered all over the place) and there are far too many dead threads, everywhere. This makes the forums appear to be simultaneously dead and horribly cluttered and difficult to navigate at the same time. All of which will turn people away from wanting to post anywhere, because people are conditioned to searching forums to see if certain topics were posted before they post the same thing, or something similar.

6. The whole "inappropriate words" thing that comes up every now and again. Rather than banning or disallowing people from using certain words, they need to be required to put a certain tag, such as an (M), at the beginning of a thread when there is profanity found. This tag would make it clear that there are "foul words" being used in that thread and that sensitive users proceed with caution.

7. The site completely lacks a sense of community. I personally avoid the forums most of the time because there really isn't much going for them. Mainly because the forums are set up in such a way that they hinder casual conversation, due to being difficult to navigate.

8. The way that many things are worded is extremely unprofessional. While it is easy to see that the people/person who runs the site does not speak English as their first language, this does not work for a site that is "commerical" in the sense that people can pay to play, should they choose to do so. It would make the site seem much more professional if a writer was hired to re-word almost everything.

9. The layout. Yes, it is the one that the site has used since the very beginning, but it's time for a change. The colors are now old and not welcoming, the way everything is arranged is dated and the color choices just make the site as a whole seem old and tired before its time. 

10. Decide if you want this site to cater to "older" (15+ year old) people or "younger" children (7-13 year olds) and stick with that alone. Trying to cater to all crowds at once only makes the site look like it is trying far too hard and is becoming stretched too thin for anyone's good.

11. Eliminate needing to post the random character code when creating a thread. This is an outdated security measure and it has become both unnecessary and extremely annoying.

1) You can also find gold in other ways, so I don't find this annoying at all.

2) It's not really the others' faults that they leave, and I'm sure Angel is doing her best, because I honestly didn't know she spoke another language. I guess I learned something today. Besides, imagine if you had to learn another language and someone else came and told you they wanted someone else who spoke it better. I would feel bad...

3) As far as I know, Angel and Foxcomics(that was what it was called, right?) worked together so Angel could introduce it to BK.

4) I'm 99.9% sure that there is nothing on this site that would be harmful to younger users, so I personally don't mind it. Besides, how boring would your life be if you couldn't play anything until you were 13?

5) I do, actually, agree with this one. Sorta

6) Um...this one I'm thinking about...I don't know if I agree or disagree...

7) The Offtopic subforums are great for casual conversation. I get really annoyed by people who say the forums aren't lively enough, because whoever said that doesn't even try to liven it up themselves! If you want casual conversation, start your own thread.

8) Maybe, but you know how long it would take to reword everything?

9) I personally love the colors. I don't have any problem with them looking old. If anything, I would call it "ancient", which fits the site. I like the layout too. It's nice and simple, nothing too complicated or fancy.

10) I don't mind, I love this site the way it is.

11) It really only takes about three seconds. I can take three seconds of it. Although getting rid of it would also be nice, I wouldn't see much of a difference,

my problem with the site right now is the spawn rates for the portals and etalias they are insanely hard and my one bet who can get to the etalias is nowhere near stone enough to beat them. it is kind of un balanced. a

I agree completely with SuperHappy's analysis of these suggestions, with the exception of #2.  

Angel never seems condescending, snide, or nasty in any way to me, and the few errors that do exist in her English are clearly indicative of her not being a native speaker, so it's easy to cut her some slack even when she says something blunt.

1. Xsolla is the only legal way to accept micro transactions in our country. This is not an exaggeration. We spent a year to find a payment provider and set up the contract taking into account unstable economy situation in Ukraine and our ever-changing laws. Either we have this or close the site for good due to inability to accept any kind of payments. Besides this, Xsolla is one of the major international payment providers, and they are super credible. They work hard to make payments available for everyone everywhere in the world. Even such large gaming companies like Steam are working with them. It would be very hard to find someone like them even if we weren't limited to Ukraine.

2. We were strongly considering hiring someone to do the text work. I understand that I'm not the best English speaker, and I would gladly dive into development and art instead. Unfortunately, the practice showed that this hugely increases the time of all of the communication and updates. Right now I can just write and post directly. With a third person between me and the site, we would have first to explain them exactly what needs to be written, wait them to write and translate it, then fix everything to match the text with the mechanics and lore, return for rewriting (this part is always unavoidable when a writer doesn't participate in the actual coding and development and doesn't know the lore), and only then post the resulting text to the site. Besides this, we would need this person to be available on weekends and holidays, and during the nights. We have 7 hours difference with the biggest part of our playerbase, and a lot of the players play on the weekeneds, and we need to match this. We would prefer to spend such tremendous amounts of time and funds on coding and art instead.

3. Etelias were a collaboration with Foxcomics. They were made as similar as possible to the original intentionally. I already replied you about this in the news thread.

4. We're not in the US. We don't have COPPA here. All users are responsible themselves for the information that they post, and all users agree with this when registering. Besides legal part, I also believe that age has nothing to do with the understanding how to behave in web in order not to compromise your personal data. We have a lot of adults who do this all the time (how many of them are registered in Facebook and other social networks using their real personal data?). The young generation grows up in the 21st century and learn the rules of the web earlier than they learn the multiplication table. Age is not a criteria.

5. We're always open to the suggestions about forum structure! Though forums are not a major part of the game, and we could go without them at all, we would love to have them useful and convenient for users. If you have any specific ideas, please post them as a separate thread. With the support of other players, we would be happy to implement them.

6. Sorry, but we don't share your attitude to the inappropriate words. We would prefer not to have them here at all. It's possible to say literally anything as well as express any emotion without them. If someone prefers not to choose the words precisely when writing, then BeastKeeper isn't the best place for posting.

7. We're focusing on building a game. Building a community driven social platform with the game as a background is a different task. There are a lot of successful projects that work this way, but we have a bit different focus. All gameplay interactions are designed that way to allow anyone to play without interacting other players directly at all. Forums and community interactions are completely voluntary, and don't affect the gameplay. If players don't want to involve themselves in the community activities, we won't force them and won't introduce anything that will make such interactions obligatory for success. Concerning the forum structure, please see 5.

8. A lot of things have been reworded by our players already, and we're very thankful to the players who helped improving the wordings all over the site. Some of the things can't be reworded because of the technical limits (like quest texts). Some things were written by a professional writer from the beginning (Beast Codex entries). Could you please be more specific about "everything"?

We're not utilizing Pay-to-play model, or even Pay-to-win. We don't have anything that can't be achieved without premium currency. No premium-only species, colors, genes, abilities, areas, events etc.

9. You're completely right here. And not only the layout, but the whole code, project structure and concept are horribly outdated. The world web has changed a lot since we started writing BeastKeeper six years ago. That's why we're focusing on the development of a completely rethought and reworked game while supporting this one in background.

10. I'm not sure what you mean here. It's the gameplay and personal preferences that make the game interesting for a certain player, not the age. We have a game for players who like fantasy pets, casual rpg and genetics breeding at the same time. It's a pretty narrow niche, and we don't target anyone else.

11. No one likes captcha including us. It's a forced measure. And no, it's not outdated. As a player from our first wave, you probably remember that there was no captcha earlier. But we got the forums flooded by spam threads. Captcha solved this problem like magic.

well, since this is a thread about fixing the site, I have a question.

why when we click in some thread : subscribe to new threads,

or in auction :notify when a new bid is placed,

we don't get any notifications or msg about new threads or new bids??

Thank you

1) Make sure that Auction notifications are turned on in your account settings

2) Please check your spam folder

If the option is turned on and you don't see the messages in spam, then they may be blocked by your mailing provider.

ok, thanks, I'll check.

I thought we get a msg here, that would be more practic..