Flight Rising Discussion

i have Many gripes with this system already echoed in this thread, and am similarly greatly disappointed in the lack of QOL updates in favor of… this

my personal biggest issue is the lack of dressing room/scry or outfit testing feature. why are we only able to preview this on dragons in our lair? slapping it onto my existing dragons isn’t doable in most cases due to how severely the colors get changed in most of these. i pick my dragons genes and outfits carefully to get the exact colors/color balance i want, throwing one of these effects on top is just going to mess that up. i’m the type of person who doesn’t even bother buying a new dragon until i have their genes & outfit planned out, and now i’m just… not allowed to plan for these? i can’t plan an outfit or scry involving these? i’m just supposed to hope and pray that it’s not going to totally clash or wash out the colors of a dragon? no thanks. i’m not going to touch this feature until i can actually test it in any meaningful way. it’s useless to me until it’s in the dressing room (which desperately needs QOL work anyway… even more so now)

like idk i’m absolutely on the side of “i want QOL updates and system revamps way more than new content” and here we are getting new content that, on release, already desperately needs its own QOL work. siiiiiiighs

Well I'm not usually the one posting in threads like this, but today's the day.

First of all, this is only my opinion and emotions, not targeted torwards anyone or anything specific, so keep that in mind.

I feel very... uncertain about this update for a number of reasons, most of which were summed up before.
4 hours of curtain-down maintennance... for this. For clippy animations atop the dragon and/or apparel. I honestly was expecting something more... usable? Like dark mode, QoLs like item choosing in CR and PMs and Baldwin (like, why is there still this dropdown menu when you toss something in cauldron if you can melt only 1 thing at once? couldn't it be fixed by now?).
Or like, you know... The ability to see the skins on hatchlings in dressing room the same way you can do this on ancients. Now you need to manually copy and paste the code or the image to try a hatchling skin on a morphology or on a dragon that isn't yours (like when you're looking for a suitable hatchling for the skin on AH).

Okay, I've got the idea of something visual after the post about it on tumblr, but my hopes were for something like... flight banners? Which we didn't have any updates about for 5 years or more now, even though I remember the plans to make a banner for every region of the respective flight, and now this idea seems to be totally forgotten. I could agree maybe to some animations to scenes even (coli animations for Baku when /j), but definitely not what we've got.

And again, I do have mixed feelings about this update, as there are definitely some effects that I can see myself using in the future, but here is another trick to this.
I am a lover of eerie, mysterious or space-inspired stuff, and I was excited to see Dearly Departed, Possessed Possesions, Sunrise Moonrise and The Void Stares Back effects, but... all of them are gem marketplace. And the animation on Dearly Departed is so wonky in some places that kinda makes you giggle rather than feel a dread which I was highly hoped for. And I honestly can't really see why most of the effects are put in gem section. I know the price is not that high comparing to gem marketplace genes, but there is like... a huge difference between the prices on treasure and in gems. And also the gem price seems kinda high for my taste, but that could just be me.

Alright, I still can use some of them (even if they sadly cover the glowing eyes which is kinda sad to me personally as a glowing eyes lover). Now, let's say I want to preview the effect on my dragon before bying it.
Well,
here's the deal.
I have bad eyesight and sometimes have to zoom dragon images to see the detail when I'm drawing for example. I was hoping for the effects to open like for skins and apparel - in a different window. Or at least being visible in dressing room.
Instead I've got a very small (like, what size is it, 150*150? can't tell, but definitely too small) preview in game database... which I can't even see clearly without zooming in the whole page. I don't want to suffer every time I want to preview the effect on a dragon of mine. And what should I do if I ever want to see how it will look on a morphology? There is no way to transfer the preview of an effect to a dressing room to put on a morphology, or at least I didn't see it.

And again... 4 hours of waiting for this is kind of dissapointing.
It could be more amazing feature if it was released on April's Fool, as Marva definitely looks like someone who could bring an extra glitter and shimmer and sparkle in dragon world, but I don't see it as a regular update sadly.

Edit:
As for now, most of effects (Shimmerscale, Flecks o’ Foil, Flutterby, Dearly Departed, Possessed Possesions) completely break the dragon image when viewed from my phone browser. And I can't call my phone "old", I bought it new last August and it has all the updates, and the browser is the same as on my PC, but the dragons with these effects in the announcement post just turn into a small cube with :( emoji and this is exactly how it makes me feel now-

The idea is okay, but I hope for more neutral colored and transparent ones.

Like we already have the whole color wheel system. The gameplay is heavily based on COLORS. Most of the efforts I put on dragons are to make them harmonious in colors. I don't like it when these new items just turn the whole dragon green or turn all the apparels purple, making these efforts meaningless... It would be nice if we have items that keep the hue and change the brightness or opacity.

Definitely hate this update more than any other one I've been around for in the entire 10 years I've been on this site (Yes, including eye vials. I never cared to invest in scattersights because it seemed ridiculous to me to pay the high prices and I was not active when they first came out. I am very grateful that they opened these customization options so they can be freely used like they always should have been. Unfortunately sometimes item values will change in an economic game! anyways side rant over)

I just think they are unbelievably ugly and obtrusive. They break the sites art style heavily. This is fine in user generated skins & accents because that is an inevitable element of player creativity. I want official stuff to keep its look that I've grown used to over a decade of play. I can not imagine I will like any of these speculated festival effects because I think that all of them are tacky, the base concept itself is tacky. I hate the clunky UI and I hate that the clunky UI still shows up even when you have them turned off (though I am at least grateful I wont be having to wait for them to allow you to do that). These dragons seem to still be loading slow or breaking for me with the effects turned off as well.

And I mean really, what has this added that we dont already have a better looking non animated alternative for? We already have tide/foam, we already have butterfly apparel, we already have crystal/facet and plenty of rainbow sparkle UMAs. Its bloat

can't you just...... not use them lol

Been away from the site for awhile, checked in to see this, lol. Not sure I ever could've predicted this. It's very odd and out of left field. Ig points for creativity?

I don't find them offensive, and I'm glad some like them, but I just don't get it. I agree that they feel very 2012 tumblr gif-y. Some of them are ok, like the sheen we were given, but most of them are just really jarring and look like a poorly overlayed gif. It just looks odd to me to see a moving texture on a completely still image.

I heavily agree with the people bringing up how bad they clash with the site's style. I think that may be why they look so horribly jarring to me.

[quote name="Marchwarden" date="2025-02-12 17:46:54" ] The idea is okay, but I hope for more neutral colored and transparent ones. Like we already have the whole color wheel system. The gameplay is heavily based on COLORS. Most of the efforts I put on dragons are to make them harmonious in colors. I don't like it when these new items just turn the whole dragon green or turn all the apparels purple, making these efforts meaningless... It would be nice if we have items that keep the hue and change the brightness or opacity. [/quote] Big agree. I really like them on a couple of my dragons, but only a couple, since my lair aesthetics generally don't fit with what most of the effects have going on. I have an entire tab with three pages for ocean dragons, but Beryl Plunge is less of a "your dragon is underwater" effect and more of a "your dragon is now blue!!" paint job, lol. I wish it was a little more subtle. I wish the Void in particular was transparent rather than with a strong purple hue, cause I would have loved it on my avatar dragon, but it makes him... purple.

I'm chill with the feature - I'll throw some on my dragons very likely, but at the same time never really expected or specifically wished for this kind of update! That being said I do always appreciate having more options and seeing if this could serve as a building block for anything more substantial

tl;dr not really feeling strong opinions in any way

this should have been an optional skin style