Huh, maybe tripling supply did help then. If only because the snipers now have more genes than they should, are trying to all sell them at the same time, and are apparently undercutting each other.... Seven pages of daub, wow.
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Artoni: Thanks for your reply. To wit, no, I'm not just talking about users with lower end computers, I mean everyone who doesn't fit the profile of "both able and willing to stalk the site for hours and do the frankly not very fun things that it takes to actually earn enough money in the game to make it fun'. Fun in terms of making enough quickly enough that buying a dragon some apparel or upgrading it with genes, new or old, won't take forever. Fun in terms of being able to enjoy the dragon customisation aspect, because the dragon breeding aspect sure as hell isn't rewarding anymore, because every nest means you have to either exalt your hatchlings or spend increasingly high sums on a lair expansion.
To clarify: One of the reasons it's made such a difference so far if you have a lot of treasure at any one time is the potential, come release day, to snag the new items and resell them for higher, making a very hefty profit. If you have a million and snag three or four genes and resell them for triple, you now have a very impressive sum to leisurely use for anything you want until the next release, and the hatchlings will keep the cash coming in for a while.
The thing is, the users who make money this way tend to have been in this loop for a while - some of them since the very release of the game, when Imperials still cost a fortune. If you're not yet rich enough where you can do that, the only way to become rich enough is to save up and don't spend your treasure on anything, and saving up one million can take months. If a game requires you to dumbly grind for treasure and use none of its features that cost treasure before you're even able to have a proper income, that's a problem. Additionally, as I keep saying, there can be other obstacles to this lifestlye, such as health, internet speed, or having less free time to spend on an online game.
I'm in the latter category. I don't have a "lower end computer", my specs and my connection speed are enough for me on every other website. I play Flash games on other sites with no problem. For whatever reason, in the Coli I typically get connection issues or every animation takes 5-7 seconds to complete and is laggy and stuttery, making the game frustrating and tedious. I do, I admit, have a pretty low threshold for how much tediousness I'm willing to put up with in an online *game*. Should I be rewarded the same as someone who grinds Runecards till they reach the treasure cap? Of course not. Should there be other ways for me to earn treasure and enjoy the game and its features that don't boil down to "spend hours on this repetitive glitchy Flash game" or "earn pennies doing other things and save up for a treat every blue moon"? Yes, there should be.
I think your point regarding the economy, however, is very interesting because it shows just how accepting we are of things we've been conditioned to accept as normal. The sheer... resignation, fatalism, almost, that I keep seeing in this thread in some form of "new genes, nice, but I wont' see them for months... that's life for ya, I guess". An economy is influenced strongly by the specific rules it has. Some economies outright outlaw the stock trade (which is what this is), on the grounds that stock traders produce no goods or services in exchange for the money they earn. Some economies have higher taxes for the rich. Whether you agree with these things or not, it doesn't change the fact that you can't chalk a certain economical situation in a game up to "that's just how economies are", it is not a given.
So yeah, it really isn't about lower-end computers or expecting to get the same perks despite not having a modern one. I'm not even part of the group with that problem. This is more about "FR is made in such a way that you have to be either in the millonaire league or spend hours on repetitive point and click games each day to make enough profit to use the extremely, extremely pricey like genes or expand your lair enough to get more dragons, and through this, they're shutting out a lot of players who don't fit a very specific category."
There have been a lot of ideas on how things might be fundamentally improved and all of them have their supporters and naysayers: higher and tiered exalting rewards, dragons dying, dragons becoming infertile, higher coli and faire payouts, et cetera et cetera. Point is, there are options. What's disappointing is that nothing is being done, and the developers, when they spoke, usually took the stance that there is nothing wrong with the economy and that breeding was never supposed to be the focus of the game anyway (despite the
Site Overview page of FR suggestingjust that). And it's the insistence that everything is fine, if anything, that's frustrating and a little baffling, especially now that several registration windows have come and gone and there are again as few as 1062 users online right now during US nighttime.
Anyway, this has gotten way too long so I'll probably stop replying with this on this announcement thread, especially since I'm not saying anything not said in the economy threads over and over. If anyone wants to continue the discussion in private, they're welcome to message me.
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