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TurkeyRaptor
Well, as someone who has gone on multiple year hiatuses before..
I got back into the game because having fun things to do every day, just working it into my routine, was nice. I'm really motivated by stuff that encourages you to check in daily or relatively often, so I enjoy just keeping the tab open and clicking over every once in a while to check my digs and baldwin.
I'd like to get much more active in the forums honestly, but when I do interact with other folks on this site, they tend to be friendly. The few times i've had hostile exchanges were either years ago or a recent event that I found to be pretty funny. My blocklist is practically nonexistent beyond one spammer and a user I had one too many disagreements with way back when I was fourteen lol. The community is just insanely creative, generous, and charming. It's something that keeps me coming back.
Aside from the community..
I am inexplicably attached to the collection of odd little customizable pngs i have accrued on this website. I legitimately cried when I believed that I had lost the first dragon I ever purchased. I've had her for six whole years. That's a lot. That's longer than my younger brother has been able to speak. Longer than my nephews have been alive.
In my head, all these little dragons have personalities and stories and lives of their own. They will all eventually be written down when I'm not busy with a trillion other things. The creative freedom to just say "This is Teeth he's an heir to an ancient bloodline. He collects teeth" and have no one correct me is what makes the site great. It's a core feature. It's the best feature. Almost everyone has someone like Teeth.
Holidays. They're just a fun little surprise to me, but they're a chance to snap up fun new accessories for the pngs that I have become inexplicably emotionally attached to. The apparel and skins and familiars are reasonably limited, but you always have a chance at the newer stuff from joxar. If you think the stuff is ugly, you don't have to buy or participate. If you love it, you can grind to buy a whole bunch of it to save up, either for your own little pixels or for someone else's. If you miss a holiday, you can buy the things you missed, albeit at a premium.
Which brings me to my final point. Dragon capitalism. I have been on this site for six years and i am not a rich man. That's because I have no idea how to save and I frequently make fun lil impulse purchases. But I do know how to Make money if I need it. I've had thousands of gems in my vault at a time before huge sprees. My brain just likes watching numbers go up. I like spending those numbers on pretty things for my pretty pixels. I like owning "exclusive" and "rare" stuff, because that's just what the human brain is like. I like showing off my dragons to other people and seeing other people's dragons.
Sorry for the wall of text, I just love this site. I've grown up with it, played it since I was thirteen. Even if some things get repetitive, the dev team always manages to bring in new features. My dragons have remained a source of joy, and I still find it mindboggling that you can make friends with a person over just a couple of interactions. That's always been a constant. Overall, it's where you find the fun that shapes your experience of the site. Community, art, trade, you name it.
