Flight Rising Discussion

I think the fact that it's trivial to get interesting looking pets is a big plus. In my experience on comparable sites, you'd have to shell out a lot of money and/or time to get a specially colored pet. Here, you just hop on the auction house and find something great looking that costs almost nothing. There's something that can appeal to any aesthetic under 15,000 treasure*.

*if you're not fussy about generation 1s, offspring lists, id numbers, or similar fluff

Some other pet sites have a battle feature, but they are made in such a way that new or casual players can never catch up. In this game, level 25 is the cap and there's no sign of it changing. The gap between "haves" and "have nots" is much, much smaller.

I'd definitely have to agree on the premium currency thing. A big part of why I never liked pet games in general(FR being the exception) is how a lot of the "premium" items/pets/et cetera cost exorbitant amounts of premium currency to obtain.

Older players on FR have, of course, more access to rare items like sprites or G1s, but there's still no pressure placed on new players to pay for gems. After all, you're not going to be locked out of anything if you don't have every gem familiar.

This, along with the simplicity/flexibility(and the fact that you don't have to scramble to spend hours on the game to keep up. That part doesn't hurt either) make it really accessible! It helped create a very lovely and generous community :)

It helps that getting both types of currency isn't to hard to gather. Also there is so much more than just breeding and selling, I can't even begin to count the amount of time I've spent in the coli just collecting stuff for various reasons lol.

I get bored with Ovipets rather quickly anymore and struggle to keep up with feeding and such. Here I just push one button and don't have to worry about reviving dragons like I do pets.

There just seem to be way more to do then any dull ''pet'' site i've tried. Dappervolk looks childish, same with Neopets (I loved old Neopets). Also no human avatar you can dress (blah) and need to represent you as. And this stupid house building stuff.

So i actually think the mechanics make FR stand out tbh. Keep on shining king of pet sites.

i've only ever played neopets long-term (so you'll see a bunch of references to that) and i've dabbled in a couple others for a minute, but FR is y far my favorite online game.. a few of my favorite aspects are:

1. customization. with colors, genes, accents, and apparel, it's extremely difficult for any 2 complete dragons to unintentionally look identical. that's what i didn't particularity care for regarding dappervolk - you can customize your avatar, but the pets seem to be the same except for their version of UMAs, and i find that a little boring - i don't want 90% of my pets to be the same as everyone else's until i can get some rarer ones. same with neopets - your pets looked the same as anyone else unless you 1. bought clothes (which i'm fairly certain most cost neocash which you could only obtain by buying with real money) or 2. spent an eternity saving up for a paintbrush. even paintbrushes only gave your neopet one specific look. if flight rising was like... "you can have a fae, mirror, guardian, or tundra. it can be red, green, yellow, or blue. you can buy genes, but only some genes, to get rare genes and breed changes you need Flight Rising Premium" i would have noped out of here real fast lol

2. accessibility. there's no membership or paywall, nothing is "pay to win". as others have said, the free exchange of gems between players is very unique. the fact that you can access every single thing without spending a dime on gems is very attractive to players and keeps them coming back (and they still support the site via ads). like i mentioned before, all the cool stuff in neopets was only accessible using neocash, and little 11 year old me had approximately $0 to spend on clothes for my pets. club penguin (not a petsite but still a very popular virtual game) had membership, and you missed out on half the fun if you didn't have membership.

3. the simplicity. flight rising is super straight forward and basic, but still in an interesting way. i feel like i wouldn't have liked it much if i was younger, but being older i feel like i can appreciate and find entertainment out of other things like making outfit and gene plans, writing bios, etc. the site is very easy to navigate, you can grasp the mechanics pretty quickly. a lot of other games overwhelmed me because there was so much to do. neopets had a bunch of different lands all with different sub-sections and different things to do in those lands, a hundred different shops and dailies and games,

4. the art is really good! other than the occasional hiccup it's consistently high quality. i know a lot of other popular petsites sometimes have some.. very outdated looking art. maybe that's because FR had the advantage of coming out in 2013 and not 2005, but still appreciate them keeping the art style consistent and modern.

5. many options for how you want to play! you can be a xxy male wc gen 1 lair, or you can buy any and every pretty dragon you see. you can have four dragons or a hundred, you can have any aesthetic you want, you can breed or coli as much as you want. you can earn treasure and gems in a ton of ways - play fairgrounds, exalt, sell dragons, sell baldwin mats, flip, make art and accents, and more. there's also no consequence for taking a hiatus. your dragons' energy run out but that only affects your bonus, the game is very clear that a dragon won't die or suffer if it has low energy. one of my least favorite parts of neopets was coming back to my pets crying and having their status be "dying" because i haven't fed them. i'm very sensitive to that and it really broke my heart.. it made me not want to log back in when i took a hiatus.

I think it’s a number of things!

1. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention Registration Windows/Welcome Weeks yet. I honestly thing that’s a big part of why the community here is so wonderful - for the first two? Three? I don’t quite remember when we opened reg... years of the site’s life there was a real consequence to breaking TOS/community standards because if you left, there was no way back. I think that helped create the high standard of the community here today. Plus! The excitements around a new reg window and rush to make welcome packs for the newbies was HUGE and set the standard for welcoming new players that I still see around the site today.

TLDR: The FR community is a great place, which started from very early on. So great of a place that generally there’s an enormous social pressure to NOT be toxic, as opposed to many sites where you see some pretty toxic attitudes towards new players/players that don’t fall in with the sites group think

2. Holy moly this site is FLEXIBLE. As someone with chronic illness/runs a business, it’s incredible that I can either pop on for 5 mins and do dailies (bare minimum gathering and feed) or sit and coli for hours on end. There’s no huge pressure to ‘grab this before it’s gone’ and the site doesn’t make me play on its timeline (a huge pet peeve of mine with games - I’m a completionist and hated Pokémon go because if I missed an event I was screwed and couldn’t get whatever they were releasing).

I love that I can pop in and out and still, as an inconsistent player, earn my way towards anything. I haven’t spent a cent on gems and still own almost a complete retired familiar collection (I’m so close!) and have a bunch of really spiffy dragons. My goals are still accomplishable if I miss a couple weeks, a couple months, or even an entire year.

3. You don’t HAVE to be social to play. I hate sites with social achievements, I’d rather interact with communities on my own terms.

I guess that’s really the crux of it, isn’t it? Aside from the super lovely community, the site doesn’t MAKE you play in any specific way. You don’t HAVE to participate in festivals (and even if you do, you have an entire week/two weeks for NOTN). You don’t HAVE to buy gems. You don’t HAVE to collect familiars. You don’t have to coli, you don’t even have to gene dragons if you don’t wanna and it’s all okay and valid!

I've tried out a lot of pet sites but most I got bored soon after the tutorial finished or during the tutorial because everything was so complicated and most were pay to win as all the really nice things were soooo expensive.

But with FR it was quite simple at the beginning, you breed starter dragons and get babies, you sell the babies and can buy more cheap babies but they have shiny genes and you breed them and sell those to get more.

But best of all, they don't die if you neglect them for a few days/weeks so it always felt good to come back cause I wasn't being punished for leaving

[list]i don't know what it is to be totally honest.. i just wanna run my mouth! i also play chicken smoothie actively (since 2016). i was inactive on flight until probably two years ago? so like.. 2018? my account just kinda sat for about a year after joining because of a close friend i'm no longer friends with introduced me and the rest of my friends at the time (we were a big rp group!!) to it. some of them already played but most didn't. at first i found it hard to get into, just preferring chicken, but now that i've picked it up and expanded my lair i quite enjoy it. i do think the economy is a little screwed up though with overwhelming prices for 80% of apparel. that is something i do not enjoy. i will agree though it is one of the easiest sites to navigate, probably besides chicken (the only other game at this point in time i really play). i tried lioden after my other close friend introduced me to it back in may but recently made the decision to step away from it and probably quit because it's just not my thing. i like the older player base, but it's SO hard to navigate and it just didn't really capture my interest. the only thing i really was working towards was apparel for my lions. another thing with flight rising is because everything is so expensive (most of it, anyway. if it's old, it's typically expensive) you have to really work towards things and if the community enjoys that, well, it's the perfect place.

was just talking about this on discord, i think the flight aspect is probably the biggest one. on other games, it's kind of everyone for themselves, and so it's hard to make friends, because why would i message a random stranger for no reason? whereas because there are flights, not only do you have flight solidarity so the bridge is already being built, there's also incentive to talk to other flights, bc of flight eye colors. if you want matchy eyes, you gotta message someone and b like "hey can i borrow a nest for a sec" and so you also build connections that way.

i think it's also notable that by dividing the userbase into 11 groups and then giving the groups private forums/discords to chat in, you reduce the number of people you can expect to interract with in those spaces and so you're more likely to run into the same people multiple times and form a rappor

i mean imagine if flight rising had no flights and there was just one discord for everyone. it'd be chaos.

edit: also, dragons are sick

To add on my $0.02, I use it because I enjoy microeconomies. I can have a bit of fun saving up and making investments to make more money. Thanks to a few years of VERY minimal effort, I am making ~150kt/week for 2min/day of effort and can bank more if I put in an extra 10min here and there or hoardsell.

Using this currency, I can buy art. So much art. Its a problem. But I can get good quality OC art for money that isnt real and therefore doesn't damage my real life wallet. I can buy a nice piece about 1/month. It satisfies a real life urge and product desire without hurting me real life.