What is going on with Episode?

Community Episode Fan Community
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Ink doesn’t get any more updates. There still is people that love it, but a lot of people prefer to write and read in Limelight cause it has more assets and is updated weekly!

These are connected imo. Ranking is affected not only by how many reads you have, but also by how many gems your readers spend on the story. For this reason they added things like the skip-the-wait feature (read about it here) and this also affected how you can access payments (here)

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Other than the ranking of your story getting affected by both reads and gems spent on it, I can think of some other things-
You can get in-depth with your story stats once you publish (the thread)
You can add early access or skip-the-wait when you release a new episode
There’s a new bodytype (Plus Female) and animals (dogs and horses)
There are some new clothes called “complex colored”

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Thank you very much for your comment, but I am still a bit confused…
Back then, in order to get into a higher rank, you just had to have the most reads atm. now you gotta have the most of them all? so reads doesn’t matter?

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Reads matter but gems are important too. On days I would get more reads, my ranking would go up only a bit. But whenever I am donated to with gems, my ranking shoots up.

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Melani3 explains it here
Reads do matter, but gems kind of help the story to rank higher

I’m sorry I’m bad at explaining

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  1. In my experience, it appears that newer readers (like myself, I guess lol) despise INK. However, I do still see a lot of people reading and recommending INK stories. I still see some trending in the individual genre shelves as well. But if I had to guess I’d say like 90% of new stories are LL.

  2. Very! I mean, the forums are still bumping. I still see stories all the time with 10M+ reads and it seems like a ton of new stories are coming out every day. I wasn’t around 2 years ago so I’m not sure what things are like in comparison, but I’d say the community is still pretty active.

  3. Ugh. Yeah, basically. It depends which genre your story is in (for example, romance is a lot harder to trend in than thriller) but gems matter a lot. I personally only use support and point top-up gem choices, and when someone selects one my rank temporarily goes way up. I’ve had a story of mine double in reads overnight and yet my rank didn’t improve as much as it did when I got a bunch of gems in the same time period.

  4. I think these are the biggest ones:

  • Early access: you can now release new chapters with this feature which gives readers the choice of waiting a few days to read, or spending gems to read immediately.
  • Skip-the-wait: you can add this to ongoing or completed stories, and what it does is break up your story into 2/3/6 chapter increments, where readers have to spend gems to continue reading, or wait a specified number of hours to unlock the next batch of episodes.
  • Story metrics: this is a new feature in the portal which allows you to see what your readers spend gems on, and where they stop reading your story. You can also see how your rank/reads/gems change over a 30 day period.
  • Guidelines: I’d definitely take a look at the guidelines if you’re starting to write again. I think an important update is in regards to hidden assets, which we are not allowed to use in stories.
  1. @/Sydney_H is the forum moderator!
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Wow, is that so? I don’t like this :pensive: … but I mean, if people spend gems over your story - it can determine that your story is good enough to be spent gems on, so maybe that’s fair.

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You’re not bad at explaning and thank you for taking your time to actually answer me, that makes you a good person and we need more of people like you :smiley:

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Yeah, the thing that sucks the most (in my opinion) is that a lot of authors, especially smaller ones, really don’t want to implement early access and skip-the-wait. Therefore we don’t get any gems from those features, and instead rely on things like support buttons.

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First of all thank you for this well-detailed comment :slight_smile:

So I got into Episode back in high school and Ink is literally all I knew, I never really liked LL until I needed to make money so I did LL. INK will always be my favorite artstyle :stuck_out_tongue: Good to know they are still relevant.

2, I am so happy to read this too, I was afraid the app is dying and it’s the last thing I wanted lol

  1. That’s terrible, I don’t like gems but I mean they gotta earn money somehow… we can’t get everything we want unfortunately :\

  2. Thank you so much for explaining these to me, I was confused :slight_smile:

5, Oooo I actually remember her so that’s awesome she’s still here

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That’s what I did back then when gems weren’t a major thing. people actually supported me and I’m still so glad for having my readers lol

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No problem! There are probably a few other things I missed but hopefully they’ll pop up as you go.

And me too! It makes me really happy to see that some readers will donate gems :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Good luck with your writing!

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You too! I hope things are going well for you :slight_smile:

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Moved to Episode Fan Community since this is Episode-related. Make sure to check out our Forum Tutorial for more info about creating topics, and feel free to PM me if you’ve got questions. :smiley:

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we have dogs

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still dunno how to use those tho :frowning:

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just choose them in the character menu

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  1. I wouldn’t say it’s dead as there are still people who prefer ink, but more people use limelight because theres alot more diverse options for customization and character creation etc.
  2. I think the community is becoming less active because Episode keeps implementing more things that require gems. So I think ppl are leaving alot.
  3. Sadly anymore, yes. But you don’t need to have them choices, you can give the readers an option to support you by spending am x amount of gems at the end of a chapter.
  4. There’s alot of updates with LL and the gems stuff
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No, he quit.

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