I stopped playing 6 years ago but I still used to drop in every few months and check my astronaut-space suit, rare item from september 2009, my favorite one and the reason I started playing this game.
Seeing this game closed made me a bit sad, I had some nice memories there.
I switched from yoville and SW was years ahead considering graphic and features but it didn't improve much till its end as I see. If only they could make it for android and ios, I'm sure it would be very popular game. But it couldn't be done easily as Vince explained
here Anyway, back in september 2009. I was feeling it was kinda late start. Old items and monthly rares were crazy expensive. I had no surveys in my country so I was just lurking around, playing mini games. This game was not very noob friendly at all back then. I guess it was better after they introduced crafting tools and some more.
Then I met a guy from my country who had a big shop and was doing great. I liked all that shop thing so I put some money into the game, got like 30k gold and started my own shop. I was doing shop thing, looking for cheap items, selling for a bit higher for like a year, it was interesting and funny. I made like 5 millions gold, had all monthly rares, fox, my final goal.
While having a shop, I also got an idea to look around old places, checking guest books and visiting places of that inactive people. Some of them were 1 year or more inactive. Doing that, I found like 15-20 old snow globes, 10-15 old pumpkins, few rare monthly items that were put for sale for cheap. And few old places by inactive owners who had placed monthly rares from snow fox to leo the lion but not for sale heh
Then after a year, around beginning of 2011, doing shop business and making profit became harder. We, shop owners, had a feeling SW staff started rigging prices somehow, probably by injecting more old rares into the game. They didn't want old rares go sky high, of course.
Also around that time, they started selling gold packages with rare items for cash only, like 20$ per one. It kinda got out of control with cash only items flood. Maybe it was the best solution to keep the game alive but it definitely killed my wish to play this game. As a shop owner, it was hard to make profit and keep up with all that items and prices.
Most of all, I liked monthly suits but first 10 were the best looking. After that I think they changed art designer and suits became more kiddish. Probably to attract younger population.
I think social games like this are not very popular anymore like it was 10 years ago but owners could consider making it again for virtual reality devices like Oculus Rift, Vive, even gear vr one day when it gets more mainstream and devices get better, with better resolution.
