Slashmaster
Donator

This blog post is mostly for me to get my thoughts out regarding how Aywas came to be. The history is still in my head and it's currently distracting me from my NaNoWriMo project, so I thought I'd babble here in a blog post. If it entertains you, cool!

I was a long time player of virtual pet sites. I spent most of my time on Neopets before going down a pretty rocky path there and getting involved with a group, wherein I made lots of friends, some of which I have to this very day.

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Lately I feel like I've been seeing a lot of posts made by ex-staff members taking about how poorly the inside of sites are run. Their reasons are probably valid, and I understand their concern. It can be difficult to watch a site you enjoy start to struggle when you feel like a couple of obvious changes would fix that problem, but the people in charge don't listen.

Believe me, I understand your frustration. I've been petsite staff before Aywas and Explorer Games were created, and

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When you open a pet site, it can be tempting to release all of the cool items and pets into the Cash Shop, which requires your players to pay real money to access. After all, every site needs some money to cover start up costs, and then there are reoccuring costs like server, programmers, artists, staff, etc.

One mistake that I've seen a lot of sites do is put too much in their Cash Shop, which creates a massive unbalance in the game economy between cash shop currency and game currency.

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This post is only authorized to be used on Virtual pet list. Please do not repost!

Pet sites frequently suffer from a lack of finances. They're expensive, and there's no doubting that. They require a decent amount of income to keep up. Consider all the costs associated with running one - server costs come first, then programming costs, artwork costs, and of course costs associated with keeping you, the owner, on board. Obviously you don't want to live in a homeless shelter while running

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