Hey HP!

We've got some big news to share this evening!

Over the last 10 years, a lot of things have changed on HP. As the demands of the game grow, and the cost of living goes up, the cost of running and maintaining HP has gone up considerably from when we opened in 2009.

In addition, the list of things that need to be done in order to make sure that HP can stay up-to-date and relevant for the NEXT 10 years continues to grow (and grow and grow). This includes things that I talked about in the 2019 HP State of the Union like updating all of the pages on the game and adding new art, as well as fixing up parts of the game that are becoming outdated, keeping up with new features and necessary coding updates, finding ways to continue to grow our community, etc.

Basically, what I'm saying is that HP's financial and practical demands have begun to exceed our resources. Therefore, I have come to the decision to increase HP's upgrade prices to help offset this. (Although, not without adding new upgrade perks! Which I will talk about a little later on.)

The new prices are $6 for 1 month, $17.50 for 6 months, and $35 for 1 year.

I am hoping that this will be a relatively small change for all of you, but it will help me and the game as a whole immensely. In addition, an upgrade on HP is still a great deal - even with the price increase it's still cheaper than most other SIM games, and you can get an entire year's worth of upgrade time for less than one console game or a night at the movies!

I understand that this will come as a surprise to many of you, and might be unpopular for awhile, but I hope that everyone understands the reasoning behind this change and can see the future benefits that it will have for the game. I do my best to be honest about what's happening behind the scenes and tell you all the why's behind my decisions, so that's what I am trying to do here.

First and foremost, it will allow me to have a significantly higher budget to hire help and pay the wonderful game admins to do more of my everyday tasks so that I am able to focus on the aforementioned ever-growing list of things that need to be addressed. I am only one person and I am realizing that I cannot do everything that needs to be done by myself. Currently I am struggling to fully keep up with the basics (like responding to messages, managing staff and the community, and running our regular events), let alone any of the other stuff that needs to be done. And as many of you know, I've been working on my own programming skills recently (and it's paid off - which you will see for yourselves in the next section of this update!), but I can't both do my entire job and continue to improve my skills and eventually do the job of a programmer at the same time, it's just not possible.

Secondly, it will mean a bigger programming budget in the meantime, so that we can continue to bring new features in and pay for updates where they're needed. Since HP opened, the going rate for programming has quadrupled, which as I'm sure you can imagine has been cutting into our ability to bring frequent updates. We've already done some updates this year, and we have more coming soon (like moderator function updates and a new player tutorial, as well as other smaller updates around the site).

Finally, it will allow me to continue to have a stable income as the cost of living goes up, so that HP can continue to be my full-time job and I can continue to meet the needs of all of you.

But, of course this isn't coming without immediate perks for all of you! To offset the cost, we have added (or increased) some upgrade perks!

SUPER pumped for the animal page CSS...

-plots matching layouts and animal themes for each account-

Super excited about these changes! Especially the extra public shows and animal page CSS! (:

no idea how to code for the animals pages.. but yay updates

Public shows completely reset for the week, fyi. I had already made my publics previously, and it still let me make two more of each - was this intentional?

Jaya, the public shows resetting was a biproduct of testing :)

So if I run through and make the 2 extra shows I won't get in trouble? lol

no =P but it wont last long hahahah

i am IN LOVE with all these extra perks! HELLOOOO TICKETS!

Issues I have with this:

NONE.

Very Excited!

WOOP WOOP

Y'all better read this carefully!

God I'm so excited for the animal page CSS! I was playing with it to beta test it a little and it's really easy! This weekend I should be able to start offering it as a coding option for sale.

It's high time the USD price of things changes, and the increase is still basically negligible on our end. 

Link Tree

I can also do double shows on my basic accounts, isn't that supposed to be upgrades-only?

It is supposed to be upgrades only, but me running the cron over and over may have given basics extra shows for this week. I will double check the code later today though!

Sooo many great things!!!

Jaya, could you point me to the account where it let you make 2 shows as a basic?

Just noting that a couple of bugs have been fixed that cropped up because of the changes (not letting people retire animals or admins do mass deletion, and not giving upgrades 2 shows unless they used all of their previous shows). So everything should work as planned now, but if you find anything else, let me know :).

Can I just take a minute to comment how much I appreciate the HP community for being so supportive of the price increase. 9 years in retail I have seen people devolve into screaming and obscenities for a 50 cent price difference.

Thank you for being more mature and reasonable than the general public. Sincerely.

Link Tree

thanks chao!!

The price increase is understandable ^^ And we're getting a lot of cool stuff in return, so it seems fair to me :3

Question about the HPB for upgrades though - does the HPB go to the account being upgraded or to the account that purchases the upgrade? Because upgrade auctions :P Who gets the HPB there?