Suggestions

[quote name="Snek" date="2020-02-23 15:13:35" ] It sort of takes the punch out of the drive and rewards for the Feats if you manage to bond the reward before you ever actually lay a hand on it. Congratulations, you won something you can't do anything new with despite that being the point of getting it? It's like finding a golden ticket after you've already been on a tour of the chocolate factory. It's weird. [/quote] By that logic, though, why would anyone want to bond with [b]any[/b] familiars they haven't yet obtained through Fiona? Say a player finally awakens their Stone Borer through her and the next day gets one as a drop. If pre-awakening would make that less special, I would think that player wouldn't have been using Fiona in the first place. (I'm not saying that's a wrong way to feel - there are plenty of areas of this site where I choose not to go the cheapest and most efficient route because it's more satisfying to do the thing 'right'. But if someone feels like this about awakening familiars, I don't know why that would only apply to Feat-exclusive ones.)

A possible solution here may be to restrict feat fams from appearing until you've completed their feat?

[quote name="wittykitsune" date="2020-02-24 05:09:32" ] If you don't want to bond with a particular familiar before you obtain it just don't flatter that one? Flattery is optional. [/quote] ... This is completely missing the point. I think they want to use flattery to bond. Of course they would. But they want it to be something they would consider more useful. It's not a matter of "it doesn't affect you" because it does: Fiona's unique familiars take up a slot that non-Fiona familiars would otherwise occupy.

Hmm I would think maybe just giving them a lower priority would be helpful? I see wanting to have some priority towards familiars that will help with feats but I don’t think those familiars should be removed entirely, I don’t mind bonding with them through flattery.

I think it definitely wouldn’t make sense to remove them entirely when awakened familiars aren’t removed, because awakened familiars are even less “helpful”

[quote name="Lara8" date="2020-02-23 20:53:28" ] By that logic, though, why would anyone want to bond with [b]any[/b] familiars they haven't yet obtained through Fiona? Say a player finally awakens their Stone Borer through her and the next day gets one as a drop. If pre-awakening would make that less special, I would think that player wouldn't have been using Fiona in the first place. (I'm not saying that's a wrong way to feel - there are plenty of areas of this site where I choose not to go the cheapest and most efficient route because it's more satisfying to do the thing 'right'. But if someone feels like this about awakening familiars, I don't know why that would only apply to Feat-exclusive ones.) [/quote] This right here. I don't understand this at all.

[quote name="Lara8" date="2020-02-23 20:53:28" ] [quote name="Snek" date="2020-02-23 15:13:35" ] It sort of takes the punch out of the drive and rewards for the Feats if you manage to bond the reward before you ever actually lay a hand on it. Congratulations, you won something you can't do anything new with despite that being the point of getting it? It's like finding a golden ticket after you've already been on a tour of the chocolate factory. It's weird. [/quote] By that logic, though, why would anyone want to bond with [b]any[/b] familiars they haven't yet obtained through Fiona? Say a player finally awakens their Stone Borer through her and the next day gets one as a drop. If pre-awakening would make that less special, I would think that player wouldn't have been using Fiona in the first place. [/quote] There's a major difference here. You can only get Fiona exclusives from... well, Fiona. And it's not like those accidentally drop on you. You have to actually bother with another (at least) two other familiars) for something like 80 days before you get the exclusive ones. You can happen upon a coli drop. But you'd have to be really lucky or playing for literal years to get a Fiona exclusive on the same level of accidental.

This really boils down to individual preferences, and asking FR to remove some because you haven't gotten something yet, or awakened something yet is a bit silly. I mean, how long do you really think it'll take you to go down the list and get everybody going? I personally like seeing everything in the pool. I don't see this as a negative, just further incentive to get my hands on those familiars and work toward the achievements. It's obvious that FR can't possibly please everybody, but I feel like having more than we need is always better than not having enough. It's really not hurting you or your game play. it's an added extra to enjoy if you want to.

[quote name="Almedha" date="2020-02-24 14:15:45" ]You can only get Fiona exclusives from... well, Fiona. And it's not like those accidentally drop on you. You have to actually bother with another (at least) two other familiars) for something like 80 days before you get the exclusive ones.[/quote] This is exactly it for me. There are loads of other reasons to go into the Coli, and loads of other things I might get out of it than a familiar. I can even get more than one of those familiars (albeit it might take a while in the case of Borers and Delvers), and I can do more than one useful thing with them--I can put them on a dragon, bond them, sell them, melt them, make a collection of them, give them out to lots of people who are missing them, donate them to games or raffles or flight incentives. Most of these I can do as often as I can pick that familiar up. But I can only get one Fiona recolor, and I can only get it one way, and once it's fully bonded, that's it. Pretty much all I can do with it at that point is stick it on a dragon, which... whoop-de-doo. Practically nobody is going to see it there but me, and once I finish a bio for whatever dragon it's on, I am very, very rarely gonna have reason to scroll down to where I can see it. I can't melt it, or get anything else worthwhile out of it by bonding, or get more of them by repeating the Feat, or make a collection out of them without paying out the nose and then some. If I want to sell it or donate it or gift it, I have to pick one, because I can only do so the once and it locks out the other two options. If it's fully bonded before I ever pick it up, the concept of it being a reward is majorly reduced, and so is my drive to work for it. So yeah, for me, fully bonding with the Cracked Crystal before I finished the familiars leading up to it would be incredibly disappointing in a way that fully bonding with a Stone Borer before one drops in the GW isn't. (And before anyone brings up Bone Fiends or Booleans, or to a lesser extent, Light Sprites... They're locked out of repeat Coli/Gathering/Swipp/Baldwin access as well, but they differ from Fiona recolors in their being old and super limited in number as no new ones can be created, with the extremely rare exception of Light Sprites through Roundsey. They're known to be either vanity items or personal attachment goals and nobody reasonably expects to be able to get them without losing an arm and a leg in the process. A Fiona recolor simply cannot live up to their importance or cost. Fully bonding with those before owning one is different because the vast majority of the playerbase [i]will not ever be able to[/i] actually own one. That is not an actual possible endgame for them. Because of those familiars' majorly out-of-reach nature, [i]simply having them be awakened[/i] is the reward.)

@Snek

Thank you for clarifying! Sounds like our opinions on familiar collecting are very different and it's always great to have as many perspectives as possible on a thread like this.

(Although if a coli fam like a Borer isn't an appropriate analogy, what about a Swipp fam like the Epiptites? It's difficult to obtain even the components for them by accident, usually takes focused gathering and/or purchasing, and then you still have to consciously trade them for the familiar.)

My priorities are: dragon-matching first - most of my dragons have a standard familiar I usually end up putting back on them when I don't have a lot to awaken, but there are some that are so perfect that they keep them always. When a new batch of fams comes out and one of them is that kind of match for a dragon I've been trying to fit for a while, it makes my day.

Completionism next - there are a lot of familiars in the bestiary I had to work hard or spend a lot to obtain, then do a bunch of clicking to awaken...and once awakened, I never thought about them again. But I don't regret obtaining and keeping them.

So the only way I would balk at pre-bonding a familiar through Fiona would be if I had the perfect dragon lined up to give that familiar to once I obtained it - three months of being obliged to visit said dragon's page every day wouldn't be so bad if I could spend that time reveling in an awesome match. Then again, there are familiars I've awakened before I got their dragon, and it was still satisfying to equip them, even if they'd 'bond' only rarely in the future.

Your point about Fiona familiars being one-offs is a good one, however, and it's a slight shame that they've really got no reason to participate in the economy - no player needs more than one and no player has the opportunity to obtain more than one, so they're a bit of an insular achievement.