Flight Rising Discussion

[quote name="CosmicWyrm" date="2021-08-07 13:43:16" ] @MulberryScroll Stormlight? do you mean flight rising [/quote] StormLight is the studio that makes FR

[quote name="Aequorin" date="2021-08-06 19:18:59" ] Yes. [/quote] [emoji=special eyes size=1][emoji=special eyes size=1]

There is no more Tidelord water flight switched to using Gain

[quote name="Aequorin" date="2021-08-06 19:18:59" ] Yes. [/quote] Please I need it [s]Also please bring back Ask The Team I really really enjoyed it[/s]

[quote name="@Vertibird" date="2021-08-06 19:27:00" ] Unfortunately, this isn't Neopets, where a plot is introduced, played through over time, and wrapped up. Flight Rising isn't a fan of that. See: every single plot hook the lore has introduced since the site's inception. What's up with the Shade? Who knows! What's going on with Talona? Will the "war" between dragons and the Beastclans ever see some sort of conclusion? It's anyone's guess! What was up with the entirety of the Bounty of the Elements? Something, I'm sure! Introducing new lore brings in new interest and increases revenue. Wrapping up lore storylines does not. Ergo, the questions pile up and nothing really gets answered. [/quote] I’m going to try to be polite here. This is a personal problem that you’ve wrapped up in a “evil capitalism” dressing to give it credence. By and large, people are not paying the site money to read the lore. They’re paying money to have an easier time playing with their dragons. Lore isn’t even locked behind an account restriction – guests can visit the Encyclopedia and read to their heart’s content without even needing to sign up, let alone pay any actual money for it. It’s not as though the staff string plotlines along just to keep people playing for longer, either. They could achieve that exact same hypothetical effect by starting a plotline and very quickly wrapping it up, so you need to keep playing for that whole time to see it to its conclusion, as you’ve suggested they do to emulate Neopets. Lore is given out for free – you can check in, read the newest update, and check back out without needing to do anything else. The idea that adding new lore generates any significant amount of revenue and wrapping up storylines doesn’t is… probably untrue with about five seconds of thought. What you actually have a problem with is that the writing team’s style is to let the story of Sornieth evolve naturally, adding new lore alongside content updates and working on multiple threads at once, not focusing on one thing to finish it up before starting another. We just got an update on the Tidelord and the Shade with Dustcarve Dig, so they clearly aren’t abandoning anything. And it’s fine that you don’t like that! I enjoy it personally, because having multiple things going on at once makes it feel more real – it’s not like the real world functions by focusing on just one thing, after all. If you prefer getting one storyline at a time, that’s fine! But don’t say it’s some kind of play for money by the staff when it’s clearly not. All that does is undermine your actual personal complaint.

[quote name="MulberryScroll" date="2021-08-07 13:32:47" ] So... I don't really blame Stormlight for making the plot move so slow. Less money, less staff (Neopets on its heyday had hundreds to make sure the site wouldn't break over the weekend - something the new, smaller-than-Stormlight staff found out quick) and it's a type of event that's proven to not benefit the site past a certain length. It's better to have lore in small chunks that you can always check back on, and *sometimes* something exclusive and cool. [/quote] I agree with this, actually. A large part of the reason why Stormlight develops the story so slowly is probably also due to monetary constraints. If Stormlight is much smaller than Neopets, then it also stands to reason that they wouldn't have as many people to spend time on making good, cohesive plotlines that start and in within the span of a few months. This is especially evident when you take into account all of the events that they have to prepare for on a monthly basis. Not only do they have to prepare for festivals and seasonal endeavors, but they also spend a lot of time working on developing entire new breeds of dragons and managing the forums. It takes a lot of time and effort to do all of that, and if the team were larger, maybe they would be able to establish storylines that take less time. But even if they did, it doesn't necessarily mean that the site's design would compliment it, in my opinion. The majority of the site is devoted to the players and their dragons rather than the lore itself. As far as the majority of Flight Rising is concerned, the lore is optional to enjoy the game, and I think that's a very neat way to design the website. We already have seasonal events, festivals, new items, new dragon breeds, and snippets of updated storylines that slowly builds into something. Rather than scrambling to make a storyline take place within the span of a few months, Stormlight's instead taking their time to pace everything out. With a small studio like that, frankly, I think it's smart--you get fantastic quality in the story as it develops, it gives them more time to iron out the kinks, we continue to get content that we come to the website daily for, and everything's chill. You don't come to FR [i]expecting[/i] a lore update, after all--it just seems to happen. A surprise. A treat.

It's obvious we would get a conclusion eventually, it's just that we have SO many plot threads open, it's starting to look a lot like Kingdom Hearts in here. Some stories haven't even started to progress, almost all of them are stuck at a juncture, and nothing has actually come to a close or made enough progress to anything significant. There's a lot of information here that probably should have been progressed upon by now in order to keep some semblance of care for the story.

In fact, the general consensus I see is to give up on the lore and do your own thing, which is NOT a great look for the site's state of lore. Users frequently bemoan the quality of the storylines and the fact there's so many stories that it makes your head spin to the point that they have stopped caring until something is done about it. Tidelord is naught but a joke by now, replacing thoughtful speculation with sarcastic remarks that he's a neglectful father who 'went out for milk' and hasn't come home yet. It's genuinely frustrating that everything moves at a glacial pace to a large audience of players.

Of course, I'll always praise FR for putting its staff's lives and well-beings first, it just would be really smart to... ramp up to something that makes sense for a site that's been open for nearly a decade and puts enough importance on lore that there's articles and dragon breed information. I'm hoping that the new map and Dustcarve was the start of something great, but it shouldn't have taken this many years to get to something meatier than an article in the encyclopedia, and it has once again opened ANOTHER plotline to add to the messy pile of tangled threads that already exists.

TL;DR: more significant progress to the lore would be appreciated, because a huge chunk of the playerbase is giving up-- if they haven't already.

I have a question about something mentioned in the Cracks in the Ice short story, what does it mean to be shade-touched? The Shade is an enemy of dragon-kind for sure, but how could we use the shade-touched idea to develop our own dragons?

Several other users drew more questions out, like will we ever get an ancient for each of the flights, and what lore will come about to fix the problems of lost deities and the unusual amounts of elemental energies going through Sornieth detailed in the Aftershocks story?

I just think the lore is getting better and better, It's sometimes cool to go back through and read again. Just can't wait for new stuff!

[quote name="panzerhaus" date="2021-08-14 20:33:28" ] There's this action figure company called Four Horsemen Studios that I buy stuff from fairly often. Like Stormlight, they're relatively small compared to a lot of similar companies. They tend to put up preorders for new stuff every few months and offer very optimistic estimates for when they should arrive, but they almost always experience a TON of delays. Like, the last figure I ordered from them took about 2 years to arrive when it was originally supposed to be just one, if not less. It should be noted that these delays are almost always things outside their control, like factory or shipping issues, and their products always turn out great. But still, I can't help but feel like they really need to lower their expectations for how quickly this stuff is going to get done at times. The reason I bring this up is that I think this is pretty much the exact same issue FR has--new lore is always great when we get it IMO, but the lack of payoff can definitely be frustrating, even if there's not really much that can be done about it beyond getting more money/staff (easier said than done) or just managing everyone's expectations (which I think staff already does a better job of than 4H). [/quote] I like this comparison, but I do notice where the comparisons end. 1. FR staff VERY RARELY ever communicates to us on the goings-on behind the scenes, and even less do they ever give an estimate on when we could expect something. Even something as ambiguous as "end of 2021" could be enough to keep people excited and interested in the site's growth and development, and making sure to say "delays and shifts in priority may happen" would also curb the expectations while covering their own butts. 99% of the time, the only chance we hear from staff is at the exact moment they launch something. We are left in the dark with nothing until they have something to show. 2. Staff keeps pushing off tasks more often than there being something outside of their control that causes them to hit delays. Art fixes on genes are piling up in favour of adding more art to the site (which often results in MORE fixes being needed), and they've commented on needing to fix coli captcha before in 2018 without a single fix in sight. FR doesn't have to deal with outside factors aside from their own lives getting in the way of them being able to work; there's no factories, no shipping a product, etc. to get in the way of actually getting something done. They have near complete control over their product and when it goes out. I think a LOT of things could be alleviated if the staff just took time to say something, or maybe make a page that has progress bars they can adjust maybe once a week for us to see what future projects they're working on. It never has to be much- a progress bar that says "SITE LORE 2021" or "NEXT DRAGON BREED" would go a long way to say 'hey, we're working on the story we want to get out this year, this is how far along we are in accomplishing that' or 'this is how far along we are on introducing the next breed to the site'. They know how much staff they have, they know how much they can be pushed to put out projects, so really it comes down to effectively keeping users aware of what they're prioritizing and that keeping us guessing is not a good thing when updates to things like story are so, so sparse.