Hey everyone,

Firstly, I wanted to say I’m sorry for my long, unannounced absence. It’s been an insane year and I feel like I owe you all an apology for not talking about what’s been going on. I know many of you have been “waiting in the wings” so to speak, and wondering what was going on. 

The moderators haven’t been sharing because it’s been some deeply personal things and I think they didn’t want to cross any personal boundaries for me, which I’m very grateful for, but I think I’m ready to open up to you all. 

At the end of this, I’d love your input, your advice, and if anyone would like to help, I’d love that too. 

This year has been an absolute mess for me.

Yes, it’s been for everyone. The current world state is insane. Every time something has happened, I’ve thought “we need to bring the ‘community’ back into Keepers of Eniv,” because I feel like that’s something we’ve lost over time and something we could all use, but I’ll get more into that later. The issue has been that every time I’ve thought that, some new giant personal problem has sprung up.

First, it started with a surgery earlier this year. 

As many of you know, I’m trans. I’d been waiting about a year for top surgery to finish off my transitional surgical stuff, but I still had a few months to go on the wait list. While I was waiting, we discovered I had a cyst in my chest that needed to be removed. Rather than remove the cyst, then have me go back in for a second surgery in a few months, they bumped up my surgery and did both in one to decrease any risks of something going wrong. The good news was that I no longer had the pain I had from the cyst, the bad news was the recovery greatly hindered my ability to work on KoE. 

I also still felt incredibly sick. I was losing weight at an alarming rate, I couldn’t eat, felt tired all the time - a whole mess of other symptoms, and my doctor wasn’t doing anything to help. She wouldn’t run blood tests or send me to any specialists to look into things. I swapped doctors and just as he started to investigate, things spiraled. I woke up one day in an immense amount of pain and had to be rushed to the hospital. I found out my insides had literally become twisted, cut off bloodflow, and rotted. They performed live-sustaining surgery, removed the parts that weren’t salvageable, and repaired the parts that were, but it was a hard recovery afterward. 

Between those two surgeries and a slew of other issues, the year honestly flew by.

I think something most people don’t know is that I’ve been the primary person working on Keepers of Eniv. Almost all of the artwork, the adoptables, events, planning - everything but coding new features has been done by me. Redesigning the site, planning, designing, and setting up new features, making new markings, bases, pets - it’s all one person, and it’s exhausting.

Don’t get me wrong, the moderation team helps A LOT with keeping things in check, and the coders I’ve hired as freelancers to make the new features or help me load them onto the site are AMAZING and I’d HIGHLY recommend them to anyone who ever asked, but doing everything else is rough work.

On top of this, I’m just going to say something many people have said in private but are afraid to say in public. The ARPG and SIM game communities are not friendly. There are a handful of sites and site owners who, I believe, are genuinely good people. Who are there to create communities that make things better and want people to have fun, build characters, and help other creators (after consideration I’ve decided not to link them, but you know who you are), but there’s a lot of people who work against one another in the community too.

Since becoming part of the owners side of the community I’ve found things to be very cut-throat. That’s the best word I can think of for it. I’ve been personally targeted for not sharing KoE’s custom coded features that I’ve paid for, I’ve had rumors spread about me, I’ve had people try to rip our assets, I’ve had people steal KoE artwork I’ve made, had my work fed into AI generators as a “haha!” and sent to me, I’ve had people try to bait me into public arguments when they twisted my words (and then sent me threats when I didn’t respond at all to the tag), I’ve been scammed by “coders” four times. I’ve been harassed and made fun of in public chats for saying I plan and don’t release KoE assets until they’re fully finished and refined, and that I put hours of work into the site, and have been told I should “half-ass” things because people “don’t care about the artwork”. Our site has been targeted for DDOS attacks on multiple occasions (and yes, I know who it is, but no, there’s not much we can do).

It’s not just KoE.

I’ve watched this same group of “site owners” rip content exactly from other sites, then spread vile and malicious rumors about other site owners. Things that I wouldn’t say about anyone, ever, without proof. I’ve seen them fabricate proof with faked screenshots, or out of context private conversations. I’ve watched them steal designs exactly from artists outside the ARPG and SIM game community, then fight with the artist about it when they were asked to remove the exact duplicate. I’ve watched them publicly beg for assets and then go on the offensive when politely told no. I’ve watched them actively try to take down other sites and their staff members because they don’t like them or disagree with them. I’ve watched them post thinly veiled NSFW images to minors and get away with it. I’ve seen them openly admit to “targeting people with autism and ADHD because they impulse buy, and we can take advantage of that”. 

I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to be anywhere near that. That’s not who I am. 

Which brings me back to Keepers of Eniv and the community.

When I first made Keepers of Eniv (World of Eniv back then), it was meant to be a community where friends and friends of friends could come, join in, and have fun together. We could character build, do art trades, and have a good time with one another.

The fall of DeviantArt forced us to make our own site. Admittedly, I’d wanted to do something like that so we could have games and other features, but the exodus of DA made it clear that if KoE was going to exist, we didn’t have any choice but to have our own site. 

I love that we can have games, events, and general fun on our own site, but I feel like we’ve lost the community aspect and replaced it with quick mini-games. 

The real view of this is that KoE makes no money. It costs me a few hundred a year to run if I add no new features and make no technical updates. This doesn’t include the time to make assets or make and run events. I’ve been paid for none of my work here, which is fine, I’m the founder - I make sure our coders get paid when I hire them, but I can’t justify paying for new features people don’t use, or a site that people don’t participate in. 

I also can’t dedicate 40 hours a week to the site. There was a point where people were asking for new events, new features, new assets on the regular, but I have bills to pay and need food on the table. I can’t have Keepers of Eniv as a full-time job.

I am in the game development industry, and I’ve started making a narrative-focused cozy game in the last few months. This is something intended to make money rather than just be for free. 

Keepers of Eniv’s funds were used for Keepers of Eniv. They don’t keep my family afloat. This new console game is meant to do that, and I have to dedicate the majority of my time to it.

The last year has been a real downer for me. Every time I wanted to make an update or work on KoE, I was reminded of all the stress, drama, and hardship the site was putting on me when minimal people seemed to enjoy it or participate in it. I’d work for three months on an event and only a few people would participate in it.

It was a hard pill to swallow.

Again, this isn’t something that just affects KoE. It’s something that a lot of ARPGs are seeing right now.

I still love KoE and this is where I want your opinions and feedback.

If Keepers of Eniv is going to continue, it would need to;

• Be more community focused. 
  I’m not sure if that means having more Discord events or becoming entirely Discord-server based where people can just make and share Enivi and we keep the site for things like the character builder, but just keeping a pet site isn’t what I’d intended for KoE at its start.
• Be maintainable.
  The few hundred a year might not sound like a lot, but it is in this economy when you have a kid who is about to go to college and groceries are what they are, I can’t afford to make more coded updates, or put three months into an event. I’d love to make more assets and put them up, but it can’t be every month, and I can’t do monthly or quarterly big events that change every year. 
• Know the community wants it.
  This is a big one. I need to know if people actually want KoE to be here. It’s not bad to say “this had a good run, I have good memories of this, but it’s time to move on”. There’s no shame in letting go of something that brought us all joy once and doesn’t anymore. I’m happy to keep KoE running, but I need to know if it’s still something people enjoy.

There’s also the issue of keeping out AI and bots.
The site has been scraped many times. That’s just a reality now. No “anti-AI” code works. We could use Nightshade on our assets, but it would make them distorted and I’d rather let you have your quality than lessen it for fear of AI. The site, however, keeps getting attacked by these bots and advertisement/scammer bots. Captcha doesn’t keep them out, unfortunately. 

I’ve considered a “friends and friends of friends only” approach, where people need an invite code to join, or a system where you must be part of the Discord server to join. I just don’t have the energy to delete hundreds of accounts per day or week in order to maintain the site. I would feel better approving people to join rather than deleting spammers.

I’m not afraid of keeping the community small if it’s active and people are enjoying it. I don’t care if it grows to 100,000 members. That’s not my goal. If we’re keeping it, it needs to be something the people in it love.

That all being said, let me know your thoughts and how you think we should go forward. Like I said, I need the community’s input before I make any moves. If we decide to move forward with the site, we can talk about the how’s and what’s, but we’re a community and I’d like to start acting like one. 

KoE wasn’t meant to be a business, it was meant to be more of a club. A fun activity for everyone involved. If we’re keeping it, it needs to go back to that. We just need to figure out how to get there. 

Thank you, everyone. No matter what decision we end up coming to, and despite the drama, our community has made this worth the while for me.