Suggestions

@Jemadar, @/gemajgall and others were literally just talking about how sucky it would be to have new dragons come out that can't wear the already released apparel or have exclusive genes, and what do we get.

[quote name="McAlli" date="2019-04-15 11:03:37" ] Jemadar, @/gemajgall and others were literally just talking about how sucky it would be to have new dragons come out that can't wear the already released apparel or have exclusive genes, and what do we get. [/quote] In this case, since they are still working on breeds that CAN wear apparel, and these new dragons are going to be completely separate, I can handle it. To me, it is sort of having two breeding games, instead of one. One will be able to wear apparel and the other won't, but since they are pretty much as separate as they can be in terms of genes, etc.. I don't think it will be too bad.

[quote name="Jemadar" date="2019-04-15 11:09:45" ] [quote name="McAlli" date="2019-04-15 11:03:37" ] Jemadar, @/gemajgall and others were literally just talking about how sucky it would be to have new dragons come out that can't wear the already released apparel or have exclusive genes, and what do we get. [/quote] In this case, since they are still working on breeds that CAN wear apparel, and these new dragons are going to be completely separate, I can handle it. To me, it is sort of having two breeding games, instead of one. One will be able to wear apparel and the other won't, but since they are pretty much as separate as they can be in terms of genes, etc.. I don't think it will be too bad. [/quote] Until they release a gene that's perfect for an old perma, or something like that. This slow crawl of more and more exclusivity in features does not make me happy, or hopeful for the future of the game.

here we go again huh
now I'm just afraid how more exclusive things are we going to get. how many groups of dragons are we going to end up with all locked out of some features in one way or another

I would love a scatterat least for primal eyes during festival!

My old G1 need love too! :D

Yeah, I'm starting to worry about how much more "exclusive" features we're going to get in the future, I get what they are trying to do. But this isn't a good long term business strategy

To be honest, I'm not too concerned about the exclusivity of apparel (or genes, I guess) where Ancients are concerned. I don't personally think Ancients are needed, and it's practically impossible that the Ancients aren't putting back production on apparel-wearing dragons. I believe the staff thinks they're telling the truth, though, so I'll overlook how that seems logically impossible to me.

But other sites with similar customization options do the same thing: some of the creatures can wear (certain) apparel, and some can't. I'm not thrilled with the idea, but it does seem like a great compromise. It will be cool to see really out-of-the-box dragon designs for the Ancients--assuming the staff actually delivers on the design aspect. For the first untold number of months, Roundsey's "designed" dragons were so vanilla they made me gag. I swear if we get a proto-Tidelord like has been brought up on about a million threads by now (with one head, two wings, and four legs as depicted), I'll be out of here so fast...

I'm interested to see how the Ancients will play out where things like rarity are concerned. I'm a little confused about how the genes will work in practice, but we'll see. If I don't like them, I won't get them.

And, once again, the eyes literally didn't figure into my thinking about this whole subject. I'm once again disappointed with the lack of customization surrounding the eyes, but the Ancients sort of bring a whole new opportunity with them. The Ancients should be the dragons that lack customization. They'll have genes that are only for one breed. They are built to lack customization, so it would make sense (to me) that there would be none. The Ancients would be the perfect place to put your RNG breeding-only eyes.

Put the Modern Dragons back in the 21st century and let us have our customization back. We won't have it for the Ancient dragons, and that's okay. Put all of the lack of customization on a single set of dragons and put the Modern Dragons back where they came from.

Lore-wise, maybe the appearance of the Ancients brings with it a shift in magical ability as well. Maybe dragons experimenting with changing their appearance or adapting to the new magical energies discover a way to apply the new magics to themselves, or unearthing this Ancient will uncover an ancient magical upheaval that was actually an earlier step in the cycle that continued with BotE.

*shrug* Use your imagination, guys.

I see the Ancients as being more like big familiars that take up a lair slot, basically. They can’t be dressed, they can only nest with their own breed, each Ancient will only be able to use its own exclusive genes, and we have no idea if they’ll even have eye types besides Common.

So to me, I’m not too bothered that they get their own exclusive genes, since they already have such limited customization and interactivity from the get-go. It’s not like a Tundra-exclusive gene or a gene that’s breeding-only and randomly shows up on a nest through RNG. (Which would be awful— imagine spending 3000g on two Crystal scrolls to guarantee Crystal babies, only to hatch a random non-Crystal baby that might look hideous with that random gene.)


But Modern breeds are more interactive. They do have a lot of customization options. Walling off eye types from customization “because we think it’s important” is still a super wishy-washy and unsatisfying answer.

What’s the point? Why should people not be allowed to interact with the Natural eye types? Why introduce something cool if you don’t want anyone to care about it? How would someone putting Unusual eyes on their progen or Primal eyes on their dream dragon hurt the site? It wouldn’t! Having the eyes be both hatchable and vial-able would please breeders who like getting random eye types as well as people who want to get the Natural eyes on their existing dragons or projects.

I don’t know about anyone else, but breeding for 6+ years (longer than FR has been around) for a chance to possibly hatch a Primal Imperial of the right gender doesn’t sound exciting or special to me. It’s a virtually unattainable goal entirely locked behind RNG, and for... no good reason???


I’m... also still not satisfied with the “oh yeah we changed the eyes, oops we forgot to tell you” and “we need to update art for gameplay or aesthetic reasons” answer to the Common update, especially since a lot of the new Common eyes are less expressive and detailed than the old. :( Again, I get that they needed templates to make tints, but why can’t we have both Common and the old eyes together?


So once again, support for Natural eye vials and Legacy vials to give us back our Modern breed customization and let us restore our dragons to how they originally looked, and so that users can enjoy both the Natural and Legacy eye types on new projects.

[quote]I don't personally think Ancients are needed[/quote] This is how I feel. I'd rather wait for a fully functional dragon breed than dragons lite. There's many features players have been asking for and supporting for years: on-site ping lists, an exalt shop, putting eliminate in all venues, making certain offspring invisible, having your level reflected in gathering--and now, individual eye vials and legacy eyes etc etc. I am sure the entire player base would go absolutely NUTS if any combination of those features were released in the anniversary. Maybe the staff sees communication I don't. I don't recall ever seeing a suggestion for dragons lite (dragons that don't have full access to genes and breeding to role out new designs faster) although I do remember seeing some suggestions for non-standard designs, but that's it. It just seems odd to me that that's what the staff decided to pick instead of, say, adventure mode or an entire set of genes or a new venue or something--especially given the coding that might have to follow ancient dragons and breeding and genes and whatnot (I suspect our drop down lists for genes is going to get unruly.) The staff could have made everyone thrilled by giving us individual eye vials and legacy eyes this anniversary. Those would have taken so much less effort to implement. And it would have resulted in a very, very happy playerbase. (I suspect the players aren't going to be happy when "spade tail tert" winds up locked to a single breed and they can't put it on their faes and spirals.) The thing is, as far as I can tell, eyes would be so. easy. to implement that they even could be thrown into the anniversary. Literally all legacy eyes need is to be added to the queue, an item made, and a single thumbnail art. Individual eye vials just need the items made and several thumbnail art. It could be done so much quicker than any ancient dragon. But maybe the staff doesn't want to take away from the sparkle of dragons lite. Maybe they don't want eyes to be thrown in for thematic reasons or whatever. That's fine; they could release individual eye vials at a different date. Or they could bring the scattervials back this anniversary. IIRC, the agol returns every year. So could the scattervials. I don't think re-including those would take away from any of the pizzazz of dragons lite, AND it would make a ton of people happy.

Oof.

While I like the idea of Ancient Breeds significantly more than the Scattersights, I definitely feel that staff is spreading their focus way too thin by introducing yet another new game mechanic so soon when they already have a pileup list of QoL improvements and promised features that are as of yet unfinished. We just got Roundsey and new Hibernal Dens and a new Coli Venue and four new annual holiday events (and... eyes...) within the last year. Is this going to be like Neopets where there's 400 different site events and features running that nobody can really keep track of without making this game their job?

There is no way that developing Ancient Breeds isn't going to result in them being released more regularly than Modern Breeds in the long run, and in the long term I can easily see the market becoming over-saturated with supposedly rare Ancients in the same vein as every other limited/rare dragon breed that has a high rate of being interbred with their own type (Imperials and Coatls for instance), especially with more regular concurrent releases than the Modern Breeds are going to get. Add in the high demand for genes that this will inevitably draw out (and now competition for new gene types between Modern and Ancient breeds; imagine waiting six years for Points to be released so you can finally make your Siamese Cat-themed Pearlcatcher only for it to release on Gaolers only) is likely to cause some contention in the community just as Scattersights did.

And, as said by others above, unless staff has been hiring more people explicitly to fill the Ancient Breed niche (and I definitely understand their concerns regarding overworking and making the company grow at an unsustainable rate by overhiring, I feel these are valid reasons to want to hold back a bit instead of taking on a ton of new artists all at once) then there is no way that production time isn't being taken away from developing other site features such as Modern Breeds (and genes/apparel for such), site update features such as fixed pings, content they promised last year like the updated World Map and stuff they haven't promised but that many users feel should be fixed or updated sooner rather than later, such as the Hoard/Vault system (still in desperate need of search and filter options), and the Scattersight situation.

tl;dr: As much as I want to like this concept, I feel that ancient breeds are adding yet another item staff needs to work on and it's baffling to me that they would cite that they want to avoid crunch by adding yet another upcoming feature to the already expansive list of upcoming features they have yet to finish.

I would much rather patiently wait another five years for a new fully implemented and functional modern breed while steadily releasing necessary bug fixes and QoL improvements than wait ten so staff can give us Breedable Familiars or whatever their next new site feature will be purely to maintain hype.

Edit: Since I forgot to talk about this issue in relation with Scattersights which is... sort of the point of this thread, I feel that I need to echo what others have said here; Scattersights were the starting presedence for this sort of feature. A year ago I doubt that many users on-site would be anywhere near as enthused about the idea of breeding-exclusive, non-appareled dragons that are locked out of virtually all the existing site genes. However, the Scattersight situation was handled so poorly that this feels like a good compromise rather than a sharp drop of site quality in comparison. As stated before, there is a corporate trend involving companies intentionally releasing a bad idea, rescinding or redressing that bad idea up into something that's marginally better, and re-releasing it later to get people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the re-tweaked idea later to make it more appealing by feigning compromise.

I'm not saying that's what staff has done here, as users have definitely been asking for dragons that aren't specific to the current bodytype standards for years, but with the Scattersights still not fixed or fair and this announcement presented early as opposed to it being dropped on us like last year's update... I don't know what to think anymore.