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like updating all of the pages on the game and adding new art, as well as fixing up parts of the game that are becoming outdated, keeping up with new features and necessary coding updates, finding ways to continue to grow our community, etc.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!

@MANGO - The HPB are rewarded to the account being upgraded, whether that is by PayPal with their own RL money or through buying an upgrade in an auction. The person who upgrades another person's account will still only receive the HPD from the auction itself. I hope that clears it up!

I have zero idea how to code for the CSS on animal pages so I'll either be paying someone to do it for me or I'll have someone teach me. Or both lol. But I'm loving these changes and that price increase is NOTHING in the grand scheme of things. 

I'm still fairly new here but these changes all seem pretty positive to me! :) 

I'm so happy that everyone is happy about these! :).

chao! you did amazing with the animal pages!

def let me know when you offer them, i'd loooveee to buy them for my horses c,:

I am loving these new updates! I especially love the addition of HPB whenever you buy an upgrade.

Thank you for all your hard work Sam!

♥

Anyone have an example of what an animal page with a stylesheet looks like?

Mango has already done some fantabulous work with stylesheets on her horses - Example: https://horsephenomena.com/horses.php?id=323306 

Awesome thanks so much!