I have been a member of FR for quite a while, and have been on here daily almost every day (sans vacations/school/etc). Since I've become a member I've always had trouble securing enough food for my dragons.
Now that I'm a Flight Rising grandma I think I can express my disappointment in the gathering quantities. I have close to 100 dragons, and I love them all. I also spent A LOT of gold getting the lair space. Now having all of these dragons is amazing, but it's ridiculously difficult to keep up with their energy depletion. I believe this is due to how much food you get when gathering. It was never an issue with 20 or even 30 dragons, but if I miss even 3 or 4 days of the game my dragons will starve for weeks until I slowly stockpile enough food.
I understand there are alternate ways to get food such as the Coliseum, auction house, etc. However, I don't think I should HAVE to resort to grinding for hours or buying it at high auction prices. The amount of food you get with 20 dragons is obviously not enough to also feed a lair of 90 or so, and I think it would be beneficial to change the amount of food gathered relative to how many dragons you have.
This is made an even more apparent problem when you do miss the game for a few days, your energy dips below 80, and you lose 5 gathering turns. This makes everything worse. I agree with enticing people to be active and getting bonuses for keeping energy high, but this kills people with a lot of dragons.
After taking a few days off from fun and internet in general for school 2 WEEKS ago I am still at 0 food, even after spending all of my gathers on food.
Granted, I don't make the site, so I don't know if such a thing is even possible. But food is a real issue, at least for me, especially because there's not way I could part with high rarity items to turn into dragon food!
Perhaps this is a strictly "me" problem, but I have had this issue since I joined. I would just suggest doing something to even out this imbalance.
I have been a member of FR for quite a while, and have been on here daily almost every day (sans vacations/school/etc). Since I've become a member I've always had trouble securing enough food for my dragons.
Now that I'm a Flight Rising grandma I think I can express my disappointment in the gathering quantities. I have close to 100 dragons, and I love them all. I also spent A LOT of gold getting the lair space. Now having all of these dragons is amazing, but it's ridiculously difficult to keep up with their energy depletion. I believe this is due to how much food you get when gathering. It was never an issue with 20 or even 30 dragons, but if I miss even 3 or 4 days of the game my dragons will starve for weeks until I slowly stockpile enough food.
I understand there are alternate ways to get food such as the Coliseum, auction house, etc. However, I don't think I should HAVE to resort to grinding for hours or buying it at high auction prices. The amount of food you get with 20 dragons is obviously not enough to also feed a lair of 90 or so, and I think it would be beneficial to change the amount of food gathered relative to how many dragons you have.
This is made an even more apparent problem when you do miss the game for a few days, your energy dips below 80, and you lose 5 gathering turns. This makes everything worse. I agree with enticing people to be active and getting bonuses for keeping energy high, but this kills people with a lot of dragons.
After taking a few days off from fun and internet in general for school 2 WEEKS ago I am still at 0 food, even after spending all of my gathers on food.
Granted, I don't make the site, so I don't know if such a thing is even possible. But food is a real issue, at least for me, especially because there's not way I could part with high rarity items to turn into dragon food!
Perhaps this is a strictly "me" problem, but I have had this issue since I joined. I would just suggest doing something to even out this imbalance.
Support! I don't even have too many pages of dragons but I always have to spend most of my gathering turns on food, I can't scavenge or dig very much :( I know when I get a lot more pages I'll have the same problem you're having
Support! I don't even have too many pages of dragons but I always have to spend most of my gathering turns on food, I can't scavenge or dig very much :( I know when I get a lot more pages I'll have the same problem you're having
1) Food is not expensive. Try looking in Item Sales. If you can afford that much lair space, you can afford food.
2) You are not required to keep your dragons fed. They don't die, the only things they can't do is breed or battle in coliseum, which you did not bring up as an issue, so I'm assuming you don't use them much in any case.
3) Easily exploitable. I don't care to be punished for choosing to keep a few dragons when That User Over There keeps getting all the cool expensive tradeable items because they filled their lair with exalt fodder and went Hunting for Skinks.
1) Food is not expensive. Try looking in Item Sales. If you can afford that much lair space, you can afford food.
2) You are not required to keep your dragons fed. They don't die, the only things they can't do is breed or battle in coliseum, which you did not bring up as an issue, so I'm assuming you don't use them much in any case.
3) Easily exploitable. I don't care to be punished for choosing to keep a few dragons when That User Over There keeps getting all the cool expensive tradeable items because they filled their lair with exalt fodder and went Hunting for Skinks.
It's expensive if you have to buy food every single day, it adds up quickly. I got enough gold to afford the lair space after like 3 years of saving, the gold didn't just fall in my lap.
Obviously dragons don't HAVE to be fed, but keeping them above 80 gets the extra gathers which I would like to have put to use for scavenging/digging. I constantly feel at a standstill because I have to spend all my time getting food instead of doing other things the site offers, it just feel counterintuitive.
Your last point didn't make much sense to me. You wouldn't be 'punished' for only keeping a few dragons, I'm not asking for less gathers or anything like that for players with less dragons. I'm asking for a more balanced system.
It's expensive if you have to buy food every single day, it adds up quickly. I got enough gold to afford the lair space after like 3 years of saving, the gold didn't just fall in my lap.
Obviously dragons don't HAVE to be fed, but keeping them above 80 gets the extra gathers which I would like to have put to use for scavenging/digging. I constantly feel at a standstill because I have to spend all my time getting food instead of doing other things the site offers, it just feel counterintuitive.
Your last point didn't make much sense to me. You wouldn't be 'punished' for only keeping a few dragons, I'm not asking for less gathers or anything like that for players with less dragons. I'm asking for a more balanced system.
[quote name="Dunmer" date=2016-10-15 15:54:21]
1) Food is not expensive. Try looking in Item Sales. If you can afford that much lair space, you can afford food.
2) You are not required to keep your dragons fed. They don't die, the only things they can't do is breed or battle in coliseum, which you did not bring up as an issue, so I'm assuming you don't use them much in any case.
3) Easily exploitable. I don't care to be punished for choosing to keep a few dragons when That User Over There keeps getting all the cool expensive tradeable items because they filled their lair with exalt fodder and went Hunting for Skinks.
[/quote]
1) Not all players have much money. I don't, and if I had to leave for a few days/weeks because of life, I wouldn't want to resort to the Auction House, because, believe it or not, that can get expensive with an ancient lair full of dragons.
2) Sure, you're not required too, but you get extra gathering turns for it. You also can't breed with starving dragons, and breeding is one of the main purposes of the game. The coliseum is also a huge money source.
3) That's not what the suggestion was for, though. The OP was asking for a more balanced system, not something like that.
Dunmer wrote on 2016-10-15:
1) Food is not expensive. Try looking in Item Sales. If you can afford that much lair space, you can afford food.
2) You are not required to keep your dragons fed. They don't die, the only things they can't do is breed or battle in coliseum, which you did not bring up as an issue, so I'm assuming you don't use them much in any case.
3) Easily exploitable. I don't care to be punished for choosing to keep a few dragons when That User Over There keeps getting all the cool expensive tradeable items because they filled their lair with exalt fodder and went Hunting for Skinks.
1) Not all players have much money. I don't, and if I had to leave for a few days/weeks because of life, I wouldn't want to resort to the Auction House, because, believe it or not, that can get expensive with an ancient lair full of dragons.
2) Sure, you're not required too, but you get extra gathering turns for it. You also can't breed with starving dragons, and breeding is one of the main purposes of the game. The coliseum is also a huge money source.
3) That's not what the suggestion was for, though. The OP was asking for a more balanced system, not something like that.
I agree that if you don't play the coliseum it can get difficult to feed a lair of 100+, (I'm talking day-to-day feeding, mind you. If you go on a hiatus, more power to you. But many flights have in-flight food banks, and one-time AH payments to get your dragons back up to max is a consequence of not playing.) but I don't think that more gathering turns are necessarily the answer.
Things like that thread that suggested 'cooking' to increase food-point yield of gathered items, more brew-able food items, getting free food-points during flight dominance, ect...
I agree that if you don't play the coliseum it can get difficult to feed a lair of 100+, (I'm talking day-to-day feeding, mind you. If you go on a hiatus, more power to you. But many flights have in-flight food banks, and one-time AH payments to get your dragons back up to max is a consequence of not playing.) but I don't think that more gathering turns are necessarily the answer.
Things like that thread that suggested 'cooking' to increase food-point yield of gathered items, more brew-able food items, getting free food-points during flight dominance, ect...
Food is already pretty cheap and fills smaller lairs with food. There should be costs for keeping a large (maxed) lair full of dragons. If the baseline of a low effort income, gathering, is boosted, then active players gain that all the time. Active players can almost all cover their food needs as is with gathering food, and this proposal would put more food into the game.
Any change like this risks trivializing the energy mechanic even further, and it might be easier to propose a total removal of the system. I think someone could put in an hour a week and feed a whole lair of 175 dragons, but that would require daily logins. A few hours dedicated work in one day could also likely cover a week's worth of food.
How little time should one be able to invest in a game like this and reap the rewards? Especially, if we're considering an edge case of someone with 175 dragons.
P.S. One last thing, remember that the game developers do have a vested interest in game mechanics that keep people coming back to the website.
Food is already pretty cheap and fills smaller lairs with food. There should be costs for keeping a large (maxed) lair full of dragons. If the baseline of a low effort income, gathering, is boosted, then active players gain that all the time. Active players can almost all cover their food needs as is with gathering food, and this proposal would put more food into the game.
Any change like this risks trivializing the energy mechanic even further, and it might be easier to propose a total removal of the system. I think someone could put in an hour a week and feed a whole lair of 175 dragons, but that would require daily logins. A few hours dedicated work in one day could also likely cover a week's worth of food.
How little time should one be able to invest in a game like this and reap the rewards? Especially, if we're considering an edge case of someone with 175 dragons.
P.S. One last thing, remember that the game developers do have a vested interest in game mechanics that keep people coming back to the website.
[quote name="Dagomor" date=2016-10-15 18:30:21]
Food is already pretty cheap and fills smaller lairs with food. There should be costs for keeping a large (maxed) lair full of dragons. If the baseline of a low effort income, gathering, is boosted, then active players gain that all the time. Active players can almost all cover their food needs as is with gathering food, and this proposal would put more food into the game.
Any change like this risks trivializing the energy mechanic even further, and it might be easier to propose a total removal of the system. I think someone could put in an hour a week and feed a whole lair of 175 dragons, but that would require daily logins. A few hours dedicated work in one day could also likely cover a week's worth of food.
How little time should one be able to invest in a game like this and reap the rewards? Especially, if we're considering an edge case of someone with 175 dragons.
P.S. One last thing, remember that the game developers do have a vested interest in game mechanics that keep people coming back to the website.
[/quote]
But they didn't ask for more gathering turns? At least that's not how I understood the suggestion. A more balanced gathering system would actually be amazing, because if you have level 30 insect catching your dragons should not come back with a single honeybee and nothing else. Experienced insect catchers are not going to only have the ability to catch one measly 2 point food item per turn.
Dagomor wrote on 2016-10-15:
Food is already pretty cheap and fills smaller lairs with food. There should be costs for keeping a large (maxed) lair full of dragons. If the baseline of a low effort income, gathering, is boosted, then active players gain that all the time. Active players can almost all cover their food needs as is with gathering food, and this proposal would put more food into the game.
Any change like this risks trivializing the energy mechanic even further, and it might be easier to propose a total removal of the system. I think someone could put in an hour a week and feed a whole lair of 175 dragons, but that would require daily logins. A few hours dedicated work in one day could also likely cover a week's worth of food.
How little time should one be able to invest in a game like this and reap the rewards? Especially, if we're considering an edge case of someone with 175 dragons.
P.S. One last thing, remember that the game developers do have a vested interest in game mechanics that keep people coming back to the website.
But they didn't ask for more gathering turns? At least that's not how I understood the suggestion. A more balanced gathering system would actually be amazing, because if you have level 30 insect catching your dragons should not come back with a single honeybee and nothing else. Experienced insect catchers are not going to only have the ability to catch one measly 2 point food item per turn.
I support this.
As it stands, Gathering is rubbish. I can't tell you how sick I am of getting one two-point item per turn. I'm level 32 on some things, 33 on Hunting, I should have something more to show for it than a crappy one-star item. It goes beyond RNG and is just, in my opinion, poorly designed.
The cost of food is a total non-issue. It should be possible to keep a lair reasonably well fed, regardless of size, with Gathering, particularly at the higher levels, providing turns aren't squandered on non-food disciplines.
As it stands, the returns for using every single turn on food gathering are so poor that when you have a bigger lair, unless you want to use the awful, broken coliseum which doesn't even work for all users (totally unresponsive-to-crashes in seconds on my laptop, even with safemode), you don't get the chance to take a week off and get some digging or scavenging done.
I don't support things like more turns for bigger lairs, or whatnot, but Gathering should be more productive and more useful, especially for people who have logged in every day for literal years and diligently used their gathering turns to reach the higher levels.
I support this.
As it stands, Gathering is rubbish. I can't tell you how sick I am of getting one two-point item per turn. I'm level 32 on some things, 33 on Hunting, I should have something more to show for it than a crappy one-star item. It goes beyond RNG and is just, in my opinion, poorly designed.
The cost of food is a total non-issue. It should be possible to keep a lair reasonably well fed, regardless of size, with Gathering, particularly at the higher levels, providing turns aren't squandered on non-food disciplines.
As it stands, the returns for using every single turn on food gathering are so poor that when you have a bigger lair, unless you want to use the awful, broken coliseum which doesn't even work for all users (totally unresponsive-to-crashes in seconds on my laptop, even with safemode), you don't get the chance to take a week off and get some digging or scavenging done.
I don't support things like more turns for bigger lairs, or whatnot, but Gathering should be more productive and more useful, especially for people who have logged in every day for literal years and diligently used their gathering turns to reach the higher levels.
UK time. Sorry for timezone-related delays in responses. They/Them.
The gathering system does need some adjustment as although it does ‘level up,’ the way it currently works can punish a player for leveling up by decreasing the chances of desirable items. In addition, logically it makes no sense that a high leveled clan would bring back a single item. The way gathering currently works is the system rolls which tier (star rating) to pull from, then rolls which item from that pool, then rolls the amount, then rolls to see if there is another pull. So when new items are added to the pool, they compete against items of their rarity. New items to the pool generally have a higher hoard sell value or food point value so in theory adding new more valuable items in the pool should increase the average sell value or point value brought back; but it is not at all useful when a player is searching for a particular item.
Probably one of the easiest ways to improve the gathering system would be as you level up change the minimum number of pulls and minimum number of items in a stack for items that stack and possibly also increase the maximum potential pulls in the higher levels.
The gathering system does need some adjustment as although it does ‘level up,’ the way it currently works can punish a player for leveling up by decreasing the chances of desirable items. In addition, logically it makes no sense that a high leveled clan would bring back a single item. The way gathering currently works is the system rolls which tier (star rating) to pull from, then rolls which item from that pool, then rolls the amount, then rolls to see if there is another pull. So when new items are added to the pool, they compete against items of their rarity. New items to the pool generally have a higher hoard sell value or food point value so in theory adding new more valuable items in the pool should increase the average sell value or point value brought back; but it is not at all useful when a player is searching for a particular item.
Probably one of the easiest ways to improve the gathering system would be as you level up change the minimum number of pulls and minimum number of items in a stack for items that stack and possibly also increase the maximum potential pulls in the higher levels.
