General Discussion

is neopets still running?

okay most of the pet sims games I’ve tried have already been discussed here, but there’s another one I had a loooong time ago: Wajas.

For those who don’t know, it’s basically a pet sim game with wolf-like creatures. The standard breed looks like a dog, the 11(?) maybe other breeds look like some variation of that. I remember it had really pretty markings/dress up items, a pretty nice community /sans the mostly under-13 roleplayers/ and had a lot of events.

Unlike Flight Rising (maybe that’s not the best descriptor, because FR is the only site I have seen that doesn’t do it) you could make customs! There was different token level things, varying in price from one that was worth 20 IRL dollars, to one that was worth maybe 40-50 dollars. (I don’t remember the exact price.) Basically, each one offered you progressively more markings or body-altering mutations, with about 1 mutation/marking slot per 10$. (Kind of a rip-off IMO, but I’ve only played a few pet sims so whatever)

Then you could spend basically the same currency you used to buy the tokens (keep in mind 1 of this money = 1 IRL dollar) on “dyes,” which are like FR genes in the sense you could give your wajas new markings/mutations, but the thing was, (at least for the popular markings) they cost upwards of $8 per dye. Not very much a better deal than that of the tokens.

What made the game so frustrating was how absolutely hard it was to get the special token currency without 1) selling a service, like art, 2) painstakingly breeding gen 1’s you’d get from tokens that you’d have dropped sometimes up to 100$ on to sell their offspring for 1-5$ each, 3) selling rare items you’d probably sat in for years, 4) entering various community contests, and of course buying it with actual dollars.

There was virtually no way to obtain it within the game except using methods the community had created. I often didn’t have the energy to spend hours socializing on the forums, so I eventually gave up. (They had pretty markings, though. I might come back.)

Flight rising is basically the only decent one out there (trust me, I've been looking), and 90% of that is just because it's the only one that's ever prioritized the paper doll customization aspect over the rng breeding trait lottery aspect in it's design (also dragons). Basically there's no way i'll ever play any petsite game that (isn't about dragons) doesn't have some direct equivalent to gene scrolls, for every available gene/trait, that are available relatively constantly and for ingame currency. I HATE rng-centric (and dragonless) games. It's why the eye update and everything it represents angers me so much. We don't need another rng lottery sim when every single other game already is one too.

I'll probably be on Mythaura if it ever comes out (it hasn't been heard from since early august and before that the updates that were supposed to be monthly just sort of slowed until they vanished wordlessly, so i doubt it will, It seems to be either caught in kickstarter development hell or just dropped entirely at the moment) but since the creator stated directly that they want most if not all traits to be breeding-exclusive, i don't think i'll like it very much. I'll probably just browse it casually every once in awhile when i'm bored and have nothing to do on FR. Without a gene scroll equivalent the only thing it has going for me is art quality and apparel(+ dragons).

There's also BeastEon, but the creator of that seems more interested in desperately avoiding any possible fridge logic association with pet mills or slavery than in making a game that's actually any fun. They really seem like they'd rather make one of those talking character phone apps than an online pet sim. (The irony is that a lot of the mechanics they use in attempt to discourage these potential implications, such as a finite number of breedings per pet, on a purely mechanical playstyle level actually ENCOURAGE treating your pets as disposable breeders. I know this because their previous site, beastkeeper, has it implemented. I played that game, it was an awful rng slog with no point and no pet customization options whatsoever, just a few dozen pre-made sprites per species, where the game would guilt you constantly for using half of it's features. Their exalt feature is "the pound" and it's picture is what appears to be a crying baby gryphon peeking over a sign, for Stormcatcher's sake.) Because, you know, you certainly couldn't just..... Remove the part of your lore where you the player exist as a human character and own these creatures? That minor, pretty unnecessary part of the lore that nearly all of those potential fridge logic problems stem from? You couldn't just rewrite it a little so that humanity shares the world with these allied sentient races and the ones in your account just represent your friends, or something? You know that as long as you have it so you CANONICALLY OWN these sentient creatures no amount of game mechanic design is going to be able to save you from unfortunate implications, right? That and it also focuses on rng genetics rather than customization (and too many mammals, not enough dragons). It might turn out good, who knows, but right now i don't think it sounds that way. Even if it does turn out good it's not going to turn out as a good pet-shaped paper doll collector sim, it's going to turn out as a good tamagotchi.

I don't like it when tamagotchi-types present themselves as fr-like pet collect sims, because if i'm signing up for a pet sim i'm assuming i'm signing up for the digital equivalent of a toy chest full of action figures, not electronically re-living the bit in high school where they make you carry a robot baby doll for a week because something something learning responsibility.

I played draconis theory for all of two months a year or so ago. I filled up lair space fast, i couldn't figure out how to get more, and what little of the guide i understood seemed to imply that the only way to get more was to buy it directly with real money anyway. They give you 20(i think) spaces to start with. I might be remembering wrong, but that's not even enough to get one full breeding pair of every species. I think the dragons were programmed to die after a real-time year. I dimly recall some suspicious corporate stuff and odd "you're not allowed to complain about us at all ever even if we do something illegal" sounding things in the terms of service that made me uncomfortable. The site's banner was kind of pretty, and that was about it.

I tried leviathan myth for about two hours, and just.... Ugh. No. No no no no no. No to the design, no to the mechanics, no to the activities, MAJOR no to the art style. No. I still have nightmares about the "art" of some of the shopkeepers in that game.

I don't know much about evosaur beyond the demo, it might be fun but it looks like the customization system is just going to be way too frustratingly overcomplicated to use. Some of the other comments on this thread suggest it's stuck in development hell too, so there's that.

Don't even get me started on the dragoncave types either. Any game where core mechanics rely on begging strangers to click on something an arbitrary number of times within an arbitrary time limit just to keep them from dying or whatever it was i haven't read up on it in awhile, is just automatically bad, not to mention an incredibly transparent and manipulative marketing scheme. My (limited) understanding is that just collecting identical sprites and getting strangers to click on them is the ONLY thing there is to do in that game.

If i sound overly salty it's because this sort of thing's been frustrating me for years with how little sense any of it makes. I can't for the life of me understand why every single petsite feels like it absolutely needs to be rng-centric. I've never taken a coding or game design class in my life, how is it that i can seemingly tell what works and what doesn't better than nearly every petsite developer in history? Am i just weird and insane and actually don't get it at all? The only thing about it that makes sense to me is that most of them are probably just playing follow the leader with eachother because it's easier than refining the formula.
No one seems to realize that pet collector games, at least in their ideal form, cater best to people with sort of OCD-ish(???i dunno if there's a better word??) tendencies and stamp-collection-having tendencies(???again don't know if there's a better word??), people who don't take kindly to not being able to perfect their plans, don't take kindly to being arbitrarily blocked from their goals, don't take kindly to being forced to give up on their heavily personalized collections because of unnecessary restrictions, and don't take kindly to having their hard work kicked over at random by the hands of an uncaring rng-deity. I imagine years ago the argument for this design philosophy would have been something along the lines of "it would make everything too easy, something about pride and accomplishment" but FR's long since proved that wrong.

Overall, pet sims are just too underdeveloped and tragically overlooked a genre to have much of a positive presence. The stigma of "not a real game" and "for casuals/kids" surrounding them is so deep that it's directly harming any possibility of the genre evolving for the better, and most if not all companies seeing them as nothing more than another variety of throwaway glorified mobile game to load up with microtransactions and manipulative gambling elements doesn't do anything to dispel that perception. Pet collector sims could be great, if they were considered a genre worth giving the care and attention of a "real" game, but they won't.

..... There was also one called "the dragon empire reborn" that was floating around like two years ago but there was next to no information on it and the first time i saw it was also the last time anyone heard from it at all.

[quote name="Ragnarok42" date="2018-10-21 19:57:13" ] Don't even get me started on the dragoncave types either. Any game where core mechanics rely on begging strangers to click on something an arbitrary number of times within an arbitrary time limit just to keep them from dying or whatever it was i haven't read up on it in awhile, is just automatically bad, not to mention an incredibly transparent and manipulative marketing scheme. [/quote] I've hated this concept for a long time. If my pets run the risk of dying, I want it to be something [i]I[/i] did, not because I didn't generate a site enough traffic because I'm not on a lot of things. (Not picking on anyone who plays these; I dislike the concept, not the people) I kind of thought most pet sites were like that until I got older and started looking up lists of sites in search of something I could enjoy. And on a separate, but related note, why don't more sites have a free trial? I mean, if you're going to ask for my personal information, I'd like to be able to have like, a five minute demo, or a trial page, so I can tell if I like the art style, or if I like the play style, or something more than 'You'll like this. Trust us.'

i've been on & off FR for quite some time but yeah, this game is just one of those that has a certain charm to it. another one of these could be neopets, but that game went downhill long ago. i played it ever since my childhood (2007/08 up until '15), then it fell into shambles which was pretty sad to see go down.
subeta was another one i kept leaving & going back to. if you havent heard of it its a great game (much like neopets; almost as old as neopets even) with a good community. not quite sure why I left.

i played CS for a bit but ended up feeling bored with not much else to do on there. the game has already passed its golden years and it just felt outdated.
dappervolk was fun to try out, but the game-play and limits as to what you could do on there got me pretty bored. the one main thing i loved about it was the art. if there was a game with that type of art but better gameplay, who knows how long I would stay.

Are there any invite codes for Dappervolk? I want to give it try. I've heard about some of the sites mention here and Dappervolk seems more my style. I'll never leave FR though.

@SmokeyPinecone They already had the last open beta, but I think there might be a way to join with a recommendation or something. Here's a link to the development blog: http://dappervolk.tumblr.com/