FlightRising Solutions Brainstorming

[Bulletdance]

With the economy in game crashing, the familiar's on strike, and the lack of new players a lot of us are going to the rant threat more and more with good reason. We all really like FlightRising though and since Petopia is full of smart and creative people I figure we need a thread where we can have fun and come together to think up ways we would fix all this if we were in charge. Who knows if we can come up with some really good ideas we could post them over on the FR page or tumbler together.

I'll kick things off with what I've come up with:
With the game being so popular they could start another kickstarter for FlightRising2.0 or something. This would fund the retiring of all current starter breeds and remove their breed change scrolls for a time from the marketplace just like a disney movie going back in to the vault. Four new starter breeds could be introduced and new player registration opened. With new players wanting older starters their prices would increase and current players would want theirs so they could sell babies. The storage capacity should be increased and the price of layer expansions dropped by 50%. If they added the adventure mode in the fairgrounds it might help justify the new kickstarter and give players a new way to get gold. Well it's probably not an entirely realistic solution, but what do you think? What are your ideas on ways things could be fixed in game?

[Silivren]

With the economy in game crashing, the familiar's on strike, and the lack of new players a lot of us are going to the rant threat more and more with good reason. We all really like FlightRising though and since Petopia is full of smart and creative people I figure we need a thread where we can have fun and come together to think up ways we would fix all this if we were in charge. Who knows if we can come up with some really good ideas we could post them over on the FR page or tumbler together.

I'll kick things off with what I've come up with:
With the game being so popular they could start another kickstarter for FlightRising2.0 or something. This would fund the retiring of all current starter breeds and remove their breed change scrolls for a time from the marketplace just like a disney movie going back in to the vault. Four new starter breeds could be introduced and new player registration opened. With new players wanting older starters their prices would increase and current players would want theirs so they could sell babies. The storage capacity should be increased and the price of layer expansions dropped by 50%. If they added the adventure mode in the fairgrounds it might help justify the new kickstarter and give players a new way to get gold. Well it's probably not an entirely realistic solution, but what do you think? What are your ideas on ways things could be fixed in game?

That's actually.. Well that's actually very cool. I never would have thought of it like that. /scratch chin. When you say retire do you mean the current plentiful breeds too? the Fae, Tundra, Guardian and Mirror?

[Bulletdance]

Yup, there's just too many of them so they don't hold their value. If they were no longer available as breed changes or starters eventually it would make them rare I think and would make people see them as more valuable.

[Silivren]

Yup, there's just too many of them so they don't hold their value. If they were no longer available as breed changes or starters eventually it would make them rare I think and would make people see them as more valuable.

That could actually probably work and if the new breeds they introduced were pretty enough then current players would want them and breeding and selling all could actually make a profit. Of course given time the site would have to be revamped and a Flight Rising 3.0 would be needed but that would seem like a decent system I think.

[Ana]

As long as i get to keep my dragons i alrdy have i dont mind

I think that Díes suggestion on the forums with exhalt price being 20 % of scroll values is a good idea too ontop of that suggestion Bullet

more interesing games which i dont get headaches from.. e.g. tetris be good

[Bulletdance]

I would love a tetris like game! The blocks could be the symbols of the flights.

[TygerDarkstorm]

Exalting needs to become a more attractive option for all breeds of dragon and not just the starters, which is why I've thrown support to Die's thread on FR and I know Fayd has a pretty popular overhaul for the exalt system. The way things are right now, too many people aren't willing to exalt dragons that really probably shouldn't be selling (I'm not saying dictate what is and isn't pretty, but something like my magenta/forest snapper I just hatched is really questionable color wise) so instead everybody's breeding for the sake of breeding (myself included because this is, ultimately, a breeding game, and it's fun) and then throwing them on the AH and flooding the market.

As I said in the poll thread, I would love if the admins would acknowledge that this is a breeding/trading/selling game and really sit and work on that aspect. It currently is not worth it to buy gene and breed scrolls because buying dragons with those existing genes. The fairegrounds currently have a cap and are a rather tedious means of earning treasure and they keep nerfing coli so that it's not as profitable to grind it.

There was mentioned a farming type mini-game thing on the FR forums that I thought was kind of a neat side way to earn food for your clan.

The idea of retiring the current starters and bringing in new ones while opening registration is an interesting idea, I'd be curious to see how that would work out.

[Makoes]

I feel that the game has a few aspects:

Dominance-I feel that a bigger push needs to be given towards flights to fight for dominance. Either by higher rewards for exaltions, and higher rewards depending upon rarity of dragons exalted. And that better rewards need to be given to the dominant flight. At least 5 gather turns, 500t/day, and +10 to stats in wild encounters, +2 to stats in PvP.

Breeding- I feel that the current breeding and CD's are fine.

fairgrounds-Remove the daily Cap. Let people decide for themselves how much time they are willing to play. Add more games, and particularly more games that are not to hard on the server. Tetris, a couple more card games, "whack-a-mole" type game, etc.

Auction house-Put a deposit fee on the AH for treasure/gem sales over a certain amount. This would help denture people putting dragons on at a price they know wont sell, or just throwing things on the AH "just because". aka make to more like WoW AH.

[Chimera]

Regarding the addition of new plentiful's and retiring the old ones, I think the new plentiful's would need a cap before they're retired as well to avoid repeating the very problem we're trying to remedy regarding dragon sales. It would also most likely have to wait till registration was open to everyone to give new players an adequate window, but one not too, too long for us who are already established, time to gather up a fill of these dragons.

It would also be nice if they didn't actually retire completely either. Make them only obtainable through breeding existing ones or from unhatched eggs people find, that way the unhatched eggs will also raise in price cause they're the only source for tradeable retired breeds.

But thinking over how the scrolled breeds have been dropping at alarming rates, Wildclaws beginning to join the rock bottom market already right now, Skydancers falling fast behind, and even Imperials starting to dabble in those unfortunate depths, there's a lot of concern I feel for this idea as a whole. Undel would have to draw up the breeds, then apply all the various gene effects to them, then make a basic and gene'd version of every color on that wheel, and then take every apparel item and redraw it to fit on their bodies which means drawing the design by hand all over again. I just... I don't think anyone could be able to do that on a regular basis without burning themselves out. :X

It took most probably a month or so at least to make Skydancers-- I don't know when the person who bought that kickstarter package pitched the idea, but it took them a long time to produce just one new breed, and not all the apparel works right on them. It could probably be fixed with some coding and editing to the artwork but Skydancers when they wear hoods, nothing underneath pokes out of the hood properly, its quite literally overlapping whatever you have beneath the hood. It makes Birdskull Headdresses look horrendous because the feathers are behind the hood, not poking out of the fabric. They need to look into the apparel overlapping and try to correct some of the combinations if its at all possible to do-- which it should be if they can find out how to code it right. Editing the art I don't think would be a problem at all since its more or less just removing things here and there, redrawing a little more, some touch up shadows, etc.

[Makoes]

For each gender of new dragon, is about 300+ new pieces of artwork that needs to be done for them. If I am remembering correctly, from when the SD's were announced. So 600+ for both male and female forms.

[Azunara]

Exalting needs to be fixed, yeah. I still think it would be beneficial to mess with breeding and create a limited breeding period, where, eventually, they can't breed anymore. Increase demand, and it will kill the supply. (Though breeding CDs would need to be slashed). And yes I know people will be upset about their dragons--breed selectively. Make little clones. Or better yet, there will be an item (more goldsinks for the gold gods!) that will allow you to reset a dragon or a breeding pair or something.

I agree with Shalyth--making entirely new starters and retiring the old ones would take way too much time and too much effort--the game wouldn't survive it, not with all the coding bugs right now anyways.

[cowmuflage]

For each gender of new dragon, is about 300+ new pieces of artwork that needs to be done for them. If I am remembering correctly, from when the SD's were announced. So 600+ for both male and female forms.

Well coming from an art point of view that can be done very quickly if given to a professional artist. I know animators do around that many drawings in less then a week. Well a good one would!

Looking at the size and the amount of detail put into them that amount of art could be done quickly and to a very high standard and seeing as all they'd be doing is drawing items that are already designed it would be faster then drawing things from scratch.

[Syleye]

I can't get behind the breeding only lasts so long, that in my opinion would do more to anger people than benefit the economy

[Chimera]

For each gender of new dragon, is about 300+ new pieces of artwork that needs to be done for them. If I am remembering correctly, from when the SD's were announced. So 600+ for both male and female forms.

Well coming from an art point of view that can be done very quickly if given to a professional artist. I know animators do around that many drawings in less then a week. Well a good one would!

Looking at the size and the amount of detail put into them that amount of art could be done quickly and to a very high standard and seeing as all they'd be doing is drawing items that are already designed it would be faster then drawing things from scratch.

I don't think these guys pay their bills solely on FR though, I think its lore of a project they started in their past time which means that they don't really have a lot of time between work and family to squeeze out a regular flow of things. If they were to actually dedicate serious time on em though, we could probably see two new breeds fully done in a month. It could come down to length of span they think they should wait before releasing something so big as a new breed, and how much they're willing to invest in a certain time frame.

But yeah, coding is still proving to be a nasty little bugger as we've all probably seen fairly recently with site outage, runestone's not working around the time the croakers came out, they're still looking into a new way to design the familiar bonding process to stop giving error messages.. no idea what else they're doing beyond that atm code-wise.

I have to agree with Syleye about being unable to back up a limited breeding 'charge'. I would probably quit FR if they did that. It's already right now is to the point where I'm pretty much only doing my daily gathering and bonding. All my dragons have been bred now as of yesterday and once the babies I'm trying to get rid of are gone I probably won't breed anymore till the economy is fixed. I can't justify paying 400k for my absolute perfect dream Imp only to sell babies for, by the time he can breed, like 50k ea.

[cowmuflage]

Oh I know. I just was saying it could be done pretty fast. I know it would never happen they can't even fix the things they break!

But in saying that I don't think they WILL change things. I can't seem them changing the way things work to save the economy or anything.

[Chimera]

Yeah, I'll probably like, eventually wean off it completely ._. I'll like, save pics of my dragons, maybe my favorite familiars, and just fawn at their files rather than their profiles. Though I guess it doesn't really matter in the end, I have adblock and flashblock on cause I'm tired of being battered with ad's everywhere I go. I've never turned off either for FR when it went live and I won't anytime in the future. They have enough people who believe the economy is perfectly fine to support them, and then all the money they got from the kickstarters...

Anyways, I don't really want to leave the game though so.... we've addressed exaltation, possibility of retiring and bringing in new starters-- perhaps rotation? But then again the stress of all that drawing and I'm sure inspiration would run dry eventually. We would also need to figure out what to do with the scroll breeds. we need scrollbreeds, so if they were to retire, we'd need more dragons to replace them.

Maybe also give the scrolled breeds a chance to come out of Unhatched Eggs so people can still acquire parentless ones. I know its important to some people, I know someone who only collects eye burning first gens, they won't touch a bred baby no matter how horrifying it is. Then we come to Imperials. I have no idea on how to fix them since they were a limited breed. I fear that no matter how many times we rotate dragons, they'll all go the way of the Imperial only worse because there's a lot more of every other dragon than there is of Imperials.

I don't know what the players looking at the exaltation system have brewing in their minds that everyone seems to be supporting, could someone link the threads if they're able to please? Exalting and Dominance could get some tweaking or an entire overhaul.

Poking more at the Fairgrounds and removing the cap (though I'm a bit tense in the latter) would definitely I'm sure bring more attraction. Games everyone knows about-- chess, checkers, tetris, chinese checkers (there could becomputer players or a multiplayer system for multiplayer games), any other games that are fairly famous and popular... and definitely opening up the chance to adventure through the FR world like you were doing a page-by-page quest would be really neat.

[Moonlost]

Exalting needs to be fixed, yeah. I still think it would be beneficial to mess with breeding and create a limited breeding period, where, eventually, they can't breed anymore. Increase demand, and it will kill the supply. (Though breeding CDs would need to be slashed). And yes I know people will be upset about their dragons--breed selectively. Make little clones. Or better yet, there will be an item (more goldsinks for the gold gods!) that will allow you to reset a dragon or a breeding pair or something.

I agree with this. It means people will be encouraged to be picky about when to breed/who to breed with and limit the flow of new dragons somewhat. And the item to replenish their breeding cooldown is another really solid idea, although I'd imagine that it'd be something bought for gems/found as treasure in some way to keep them relatively limited and desirable.

But I also heavily support the idea of reworking the exultation system. It needs to make people feel rewarded for exalting, make it a viable alternative to throwing a dragon on the AH, rather than being a last alternative for a dragon who won't sell or just throwing them at the dragon gods for dominance battles. Fayd's suggestion is probably my favourite of fixes so-far presented, but I'd not be opposed to just seeing the exalting prices raised.

Adding onto this, I'd like to see another item which allows you to "un-retire" an exalted dragon. You could only use it on dragons that have been exalted for over a week (to prevent people from messing with current flight dominance battles) and you'd need to pay a nominal treasure fee. (Say, double the exalt price? Gives another reason to raise the exalt prices for different rarities too.). Gives people who accidentally exalted a baby a way to get them back, and gives people looking for a specific set of colours another option of getting them. Such an item naturally have to be pretty rare to begin with, I'd say gems and random chance from Coli/chests.

More fairground games is always a good idea, more variety of fun games for us to pick and choose. Snake was a good one, I'd also not mind seeing more varieties of puzzle game myself. For that matter, increase fairground payouts. It is not fun to spend hours grinding at them in order to get a decent amount of treasure each day.

[Ana]

With the economy in game crashing, the familiar's on strike, and the lack of new players a lot of us are going to the rant threat more and more with good reason. We all really like FlightRising though and since Petopia is full of smart and creative people I figure we need a thread where we can have fun and come together to think up ways we would fix all this if we were in charge. Who knows if we can come up with some really good ideas we could post them over on the FR page or tumbler together.

I'll kick things off with what I've come up with:
With the game being so popular they could start another kickstarter for FlightRising2.0 or something. This would fund the retiring of all current starter breeds and remove their breed change scrolls for a time from the marketplace just like a disney movie going back in to the vault. Four new starter breeds could be introduced and new player registration opened. With new players wanting older starters their prices would increase and current players would want theirs so they could sell babies. The storage capacity should be increased and the price of layer expansions dropped by 50%. If they added the adventure mode in the fairgrounds it might help justify the new kickstarter and give players a new way to get gold. Well it's probably not an entirely realistic solution, but what do you think? What are your ideas on ways things could be fixed in game?

That's actually.. Well that's actually very cool. I never would have thought of it like that. /scratch chin. When you say retire do you mean the current plentiful breeds too? the Fae, Tundra, Guardian and Mirror?

and i hope by retire you dont mean that we cannot breed them anymore.. cause that would make me too sad.. i dont mind if they could not be purchased anymore as long as i still can breed theragons i have

[Dewclaw]

Perhaps retirement could be temporary, like, for example, tundras would only breed in winter. Some dragons could only breed based on season. it's not altogether nutty either, many species in nature have breeding seasons.

[Bulletdance]

I think they should still be able to breed, but new people should have different breeds to promote trade, though without a ton more staff it doesn't seem realistic. The exalt changes would be great too and instead of saving image of exalted dragons perhaps it could just go to a generic piece of art picturing that god in a super cool scene surrounded by dragons of his flight. It would save storage on the servers.