Suggestions

I think the post above is very interesting mathematically if one breeding pair is faced off against unhatched eggs. As said above, the best any one breeding pair can do is 5 eggs every 15 days.

With unhatched eggs, it's as many as the player can afford to buy (which, with G+G...would be two eggs a week? plus whatever money is earned from the Coli, reselling, hoard selling, exalting etc.) as well as how many eggs the player happens to find (gathering and Coli). This could easily be an egg a day--maybe more, depending on player activity.

So an optimum of 5 eggs in 15 days versus 15 eggs in 15 days. By rough, estimated math, unhatched eggs are more reliable than one single breeding pair.

And that's assuming players enjoy breeding. Not all players want breeding to be the sole way to get these eyes.

I was just in another thread but I thought it belonged here as well. The comment section for innocent eyes shows another big concerning issue. The eye system is confusing. More so to new users and casual users but it looks quite concerning to read all the comments from confused users from the innocent eye release. There are posts with users asking many questions such as if innocent were inheritable, natural, could you hatch them, are they purchasable only and this kind of confusion doesn’t seem like a good thing. It appears eyes are so different and odd compared to the other systems on the site that they cause lots of confusion. This is a bad thing in several ways. If your userbase gets this confused over the current system should it not have a encyclopedia page to explain the odds of getting certain eyes and how all the eye types work as to avoid this confusion? Or as I’ve said before should the whole system be uprooted to match that of the gene systems? This really needs addressed with any “fix” we get. Such a big difference in systems from breeding, genes, and eyes being the odd one out needs a tutorial or something. Some examples; [quote] Are these new eye types hereditary? Is it a glowing eye deal, or is it a more goat eye deal? :0[/quote] this one on page 57 [quote] Huh didn't they say that new eyes would appear in Galore's gifts? Well I can live with this because I can purchase it anyways ^^[/quote] page 49 [quote] Wait, can the innocent eyes ONLY be bought? A bit disappointed if that's the case. But hey, you can't have everything.[/quote] page 67 I don’t know but I don’t think users should be confused like this about a feature.

I agree. Users shouldn't be confused, and consistency is important.

I wonder what people would think if all eyes were breedable AND vialable, for consistency's sake. As in, all natural eyes get a vial somehow. And all unnatural eyes get a chance at popping up through breeding.

I am sitting here in my room at 4:49 AM, having an extensive rant with myself about the ethics (or lack thereof) and mechanics of lootboxes and gambling in games, and I have just realised some things about the Eye system and why so many people are against it. Not just that, but I think that the Staff made an excellent move by forever retiring the Vials of Scattersight because that would moreso encourage gambling than anything else, particularly if it was implemented for special currency.

If you're interested, watch The Addictive Cost of Predatory Videogame Monetization by Jim Sterling on Youtube. They made some fantastic points and I need to admit that I have a ton of respect for the Flight Rising Staff for not encouraging or even implementing a gambling mechanic into Flight Rising. Sure, they've made some mistakes with the Eye system, but putting a stop to the scattersights and NOT making them a Gem-exclusive gambling mechanic is so important. Yes, eyes are RNG based and the scattersights were the closest thing to gambling, and I really hope that that exact fact was the reason why the Staff discontinued them.
The thing is, we can purchase a Boon of Fertility to hatch our eggs sooner, but that doesn't affect any value when it comes to hatched dragons, we are not gambling for exclusive items. Another thing is, we can't speed up the breeding cooldown, we can only rearrange it and that is once again so important. The Staff managed to design this website so that the core mechanics aren't "exploitable" by real money. Sure, a person can spend money on Gems but that doesn't change the fact that Gems are pretty easy to earn without spending any money AND, besides purchasing some items, it won't make any difference when it comes to core mechanics. I guess eggs are the closest things that come to lootboxes but you're not giving money to the site itself, you're giving money to other people on the site by purchasing eggs and I think that's important. As long as Flight Rising stays as far away from lootboxes and unethical exploits of the gaming industry, it is going to stay good.

Edit: in bed I later remembered that Scatterscrolls are actually the only RNG element that you can purchase for Gem currency directly from the site. The Vials of Scattersight are now retired and cannot be purchased from the website which is good. The eggs aren't necessarily lootboxes as they don't contain loot, they contain a dragon that can roll any colour with the exact same percentage, but then there are the eyes... and that's the problem we're talking about. I apologise if there's any incoherence, it was almost 5 AM when I wrote all of that.

No need to apologize, it does make sense as to explaining a con side of putting a new scattervial in the gem marketplace. A pro would be more money for the site. Another con would be the fact that first we had Veilspuns and then a gem marketplace cycle that included Wildclaw scrolls and desirable apparel. Right now, the g:t ratio is out of flux, so I don't think we need anything that would skew that even higher atm.

@du11ahan my 5 am rambling point was the fact that besides the Tri-Color Scatterscroll, we really REALLY do not need or want another gambling element and that I'm glad that the Vial of Scattersight is retired. That's all there is, I wish I could have expressed myself better but I was on a different plane of existence at that point.

It is still very obvious that due to how the site is designed, gambling isn't something the Staff wants to pursue. There are some RNG elements and there's one RNG element (the Scatterscroll) that you directly purchase from the website and that's it. Theoretically speaking, Staff could have put eggs as a purchasable option in the Marketplace, as well as kept the Vial of Scattersight, they could have given us some "boosters" that ease the grind, they could have given us USD-bound lootboxes that have a chance of dropping valuable items or purchasable festival currency. Basically, they could have put a lot of things behind the paywall and they refuse to do so and I am genuinely proud of them for that.

I am not claiming that the exact reason why the Vial of Scattersight was forever retired and never available as a Gem purchase was because the Staff wanted to stay true to their game design and marketing decisions OR just because the community voiced their opinions about their dislike for gambling and unbalanced RNG elements, but either way, it was a good decision. I just understand much better why so many people dislike the gambling part of this. That's basically my entire point, I wish I could have expressed that in the previous post but I was dead.

Regardless of all of this, I really hope we'll never see any sort of pay-to-win, exclusive, booster or lootbox content on Flight Rising and that maybe somewhere down the line we'll see some sort of alternative for obtaining eyes besides relying on gambling.

I would love there to be a way to unlock different eye types on existing dragons, with the caveat that it's through some serious challenge. Why do my progens have to miss out? I like all the ideas OP listed for these challenges.

To be honest, I think the reason scattervials are retired and why staff think they were a mistake has nothing to do with gambling and everything to do with they wanted the natural eyes to be breeding only.

However, that is only my opinion and unless the staff explicitly answers we won't know.

I think you may be overthinking things a little @Natron. When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. You just watched a show about lootboxes, so any kind of RNG now looks like it has lootbox elements.

The thing about lootboxes is by rarity those items are valuable to the interested public. But dragon eye preferences are incredibly idiosyncratic to the individual. Say I got lucky with a scatter "lootbox" and gave a dragon of mine Primal. There's nothing at all to say that that dragon has any value to anyone other than me (you can look at the hatched primal market for that).

There's no profit to be made at all in that system, whereas true lootboxes like CSGO gun skins or EA's mess, other players want what is inside of them. So some item that has a 0.0001% chance drop of a Vial of Primal *that* would be a lootbox. Because people want that Vial, not the lootbox itself.

The scattervials aren't lootboxes, so even if they were gem exclusive, they wouldn't be lootboxes. They can't be by their design. It's smashing the emerald to prove it was an emerald. To find out if the scattervial held a primal, you have to destroy the vial and you aren't given a primal vial that would be the desired item. The eye just appears, but it's stuck where it is, on a dragon that may hold no value to anyone but you. (again, see the bred dragons with primal market to know how low-value that is). So that player got lucky, or not (if what they really wanted was Rare instead), the vial is destroyed and the Primal eye is functionally worthless.

So your analogy is interesting, but not quite what happened in this system. The devs straight up said they wanted the eye mechanic to be breeding only. So that's the focus, not some pie in the sky idea that they wanted to not create a lootbox mechanic. (I was about to say "Because then we could just buy eggs for chances at scorring XXX g1s and making bank" because we can't, but then I remembered Bog eggs which the players can make so technically function as a dragon lootbox if you keep sinking time to brew them -thus watching adds and giving the devs revenue that way indirectly. But again... once you start looking for lootboxes, any RNG thing starts looking like a lootbox.)