Wild stats should be kept separate from prestige Right now, that is the only way to get super stat pets, and that is much desired in hard places such as caves.
Legendaries/mythicals, are extremely special, and well, I already get confused with super stat breeding, I would very much like prestige to be a complete separate thing as far as stats are concerned.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=13#130 Author: Squeak Time Posted: 10/22/2019 at 9:14 AM I think the main issue, regardless of what is decided, is that all of these changes are made with significant warning beforehand. Last minute changes or accusations of abusing a mechanic that you never specified how it was supposed to be used in the first place are only going to alienate your playerbase, Krin. 1. & 2. & 6. Expired Tokens Personally, it doesn't significantly affect me whether expired tokens give gold or not. I usually have 2-10k leftover tokens every fest because there is nothing worthwhile to spend them on. I don't care at all about avatar items because the fest zone floods my inventory already with stuff I'll never use, the token shop feels extremely overpriced for anything else, and honestly, spending tokens on anything usually feels like a waste because what you get for the amount of tokens always feels like a rip-off. I occasionally go through and waste them all gambling for catalysts, but with stuff not auto-growing anymore, actually planting pets will probably be a waste of time as well. 3. & 5. Pets will no longer auto grow after a Festival completely ends. What is the point of even planting pets, then, if there's a chance you'll never get them? And like Xav said in a previous post, the extra time at the end of a fest is absolutely useless because no one has any agents to actually grow the pets anyway by that point. Especially if agents no longer drop from the fest zone, meaning anyone who doesn't grind for days acquiring thousands and thousands of tokens to spend on agents is pretty much screwed. Not everyone is going to be sitting on millions of gold to buy from other players. So casual players won't be able to grow pets at all. 4. Festival growing items will mostly cease dropping from the Festival Zone. Last fest growing agents were way too rare, and that coupled with the last-minute changes you enacted stressed a lot of people out unnecessarily. If there hadn't been multiple players with millions of gold and literal days to grind for agents going through and saving pets, a lot of people would have lost all the effort they'd have put in. Why even bother with a fest if the catalysts you were trying to get all fest only drop in the last few days? Sylestia, in general, was way too many gambling mechanics, and not enough guaranteed worthwhile return to justify a lot of the fest features. Taking away one of the guaranteed ways to at least get something feels like it's making growing pets a waste of time entirely. For most of last fest, I didn't know that pets only grew when given agents - that was left out of the overview entirely, which meant a lot of scrambling and stress. The feature wasn't fun. Wasn't challenging. Wasn't even worthwhile, for the amount of effort put in. You need to be a lot more forthcoming about how exactly these features work, and how you expect the mechanics to work, because far too many times I've seen things 'nerfed' without any prior explanation to how they were expected to work - you can't blame players for using a feature a certain way when barely any information on how it should work was ever given in the first place. Presumably some fests have pets grow over time without agents. Is that being nerfed too? Are agents the only way to grow pets now? This information absolutely needs to be in the fest overview for every single festival. Leaving out important information and then blaming players for playing the game in a way that makes sense to them, is really not okay. :/ 7. Prestige Points These would be nice on an individual pet, but don't make prestige passed on by breeding - that will devalue a lot of max stat projects. I am glad I only ever bought a few max stats, since with the mana increase and superstats available now, it would have been millions in wasted gold. I don't plan on buying any max pets again until there are super/200 mana maxed available, since anything less would be wasting gold and stable space at this point. Especially with the caves in the grove apparently requiring max stat + high ranked pets now. If the trend continues, max rank/max superstat will be needed for whatever comes next. Prestige points would be nice for someone who has high ranked but not new-max pets, since it means they won't be left behind when they enter the caves. I'm sure it's possible for super strategic players to use non-maxed pets, but for ordinary/casual players, I can't imagine the caves being at all possible without high rank max stats. I certainly would find it completely impossible without max stats. Gaining ranks alone is way too tedious and boring to justify having more than a few teams anyway, and no one is ever going to sell high ranked pets because of how long and difficult it would be to rank - such a pet would likely be worth millions. And only maybe 2-3 players in the game could afford that. I only recently managed to rank up my main team to 3-4 on most skills, and I have been using those 3 pets since the grove opened. It took me this long to rank up, so I can only imagine what a nightmare a new or casual player would have to face getting left out of all the new content because their pets get demolished. Sure, they can 'catch up' eventually, but it really sucks to feel like everyone else gets to see the shiny new stuff. Especially when catching up requires absurd amounts of tedium and grinding, which isn't remotely fun. At least prestige might help with that somewhat, since 90% of the grove feels like making zero progress or reward at the moment. Maw of Madness As with a lot of key-requiring things in fests, I will probably do it once and then skip it unless the rewards are interesting/useful. What is Expertise supposed to be? Is it going to give ranks to our pets? And how much exactly? Are we going to get buried in a lot of useless lost grove materials, with few real rewards? Will prestige points be enabled for this when we get experience, or would it be a waste to use level 70 pets? And lastly, considering how hard it is for me personally to get gold, I've never really seen the inflation problem on Sylestia. I know we have a bunch of multi-millionaires around, but how does that compare with regular players? A lot of the gold nerfing seems to be aimed at punishing these players at the expense of everyone else. I'm sure that's not your intention, but that's what it feels like. I am constantly trying to save up for more stable tabs/diamonds/fest-exclusive stuff. I sit on a bunch of gold all the time because I don't know when I'll need it for something I missed because of Sylestia's gambling mechanics during a fest, or on stuff I'll need so I don't get left behind when a new grove area opens. I am still waiting to start doing projects because I'll need a few million more for new stables/tabs - that seems like what I spend 90% of my gold on, really, outside of festivals. And with the nerf to growing agents, spending hundreds of thousands of gold on catalysts likely won't be worthwhile anymore, at least. I'd personally like to see more that was worth spending gold on, with less gambling so that it didn't feel like a huge waste most of the time.

In regard to what this poster said about changes 3 through 5. EXACTLY. Changing the auto-complete requirements in this recently-ish ended fest at the last minute was bad enough, though I somewhat grudgingly accepted it. But getting rid of that ENTIRELY and virtually stopping pet-growing supply, and presumably, catalyst drops in the fest zone? That's just too much B/. Not happy about those two changes at all B[!

Ah...so Krin, in regards to number 3 in your list of proposed things to happen. Did you mean that pets being created during fests will no longer auto-grow...or auto-complete after fest is completely over? Reading the rest of the point, it seems to me that you mean that they won't auto-complete. I just wanted make sure that I understood you correctly.

Though I do have to say that I would agree with you that auto-complete needs to be stopped. Even with a higher percentage needed, people can still use that to their advantage. Because honestly...you work hard enough as it is without having to then finish everyone's pets for them. That includes any pets that I also needed finished, though I try to get them all done on my own.

I would try to argue for the people complaining, but I won't. Because seriously, if the pets being created during summer...the only fest with no auto-progression, start to get that progression, then I don't see what there is to complain about. As long as a pet is started in time for that progression to help the pet to be finished, then they won't be losing out on it.

Though I do agree that a timer would be helpful/nice for people. Maybe one that says, "This much time until planting pets is no longer feasible" or something like that. Ah...or something similar, like a ping for everyone or something.

^-^

In regards to currency, Since its no longer going to be expired, will it still be usable for the fest come the following year? Or will it simply just stay in our inventory and rot? I know that you said that the festival will officially end maybe a week after the zone closes. But, some players may still have unused tokens in their inventory.

I am only asking because I'd rather not have tokens sit in my inventory and take up space is all. If I could, I would propose a new way to use tokens that are of no value after the festival is over. But, at the same time, I feel if that I did, more players will just take advantage of it all. So, with that being said, I would like to have the ability to use tokens the next of that fest or have the tokens roll over to the next festival currency so that it doesn't just sit in a players inventory forever. If tokens could roll over of course, they would of course have to be a certain amount of the last token to create a new token. For example 10 sun tokens = 1 chocolate coin. So that players do not take advantage of that feature. If I had 1065 sun tokens then the rollover amount would be 106 chocolate coins and if I had 12,000 sun tokens I'd only get 1,200 chocolate coins on the roll over. So it reduces the amount of tokens received, which means players would have to work harder in order to get more of the other token. Of course all these ideas have its flaws and there are always loopholes around it.

So, I could settle with just having the tokens usable for next year is fine with me.

As far as keeping tokens for future use, it would still create an imbalance. Older players would start with a leg up on the newbies. Even if you don't actively hoard, just have a few hundred tokens left over, that's still a few hundred more than others have.

As I understand it, one major issue Krin's trying to fix with the tokens here is the instant wealth that people gained at the beginning of festivals. Though keeping tokens usable wouldn't be the same as gold pouring into the economy, it's still a form of currency that gives certain players a major advantage over others.

I don't really have any solutions to put forth here. I'm not good at economics. Just wanted to point out some potential issues there.

I may have missed something, but I thought that the tokens would just go poof at the end of the festival.

No redeemable value, no keeping for next year, just gone.

I wouldn't mind having the tokens able to be kept year after year, but if at least part of the idea is to make it so that things aren't quite so easy to obtain during the festival itself and there isn't a huge influx of gold every year, then keeping them would be counter productive.

FR keeps their tokens festival to festival, and I love it, but few of the items are really worth much, not only because tokens are easy to obtain, but because players can have hundreds of tokens from one festival and use them to buy anything they want the next (I have done this myself) without having to even make one token or touch the coliseum.

That works for FR due to how their festivals are set up, 11 a year, at the end of each month, with 11 different tokens, and only a week long. The items aren't necessarily meant to be valuable.

However, Sylestia is set up differently, with fewer festivals, and much longer ones, and some of the items or pets, at least, are meant to be more valuable. Keeping tokens around year to year would create a huge imbalance in that respect, especially with the numbers of tokens Krin was talking about were still around after the end of the last festival cycle. IMagine if those tokens WEREN'T redeemed for gold and just stuck around, how many would be around by the next festival cycle, and it would only keep getting worse.

Fall and Spring Growing Features do indeed grow automatically with every hour. Using the agents and such just speed it up and grant the special bonuses. With an additional extra week at the end of the Festival, that should allow for enough time to get things finished up.

Additionally, I can increase the amount of free growing containers from 2 to 3 and increase the max at any time from 30 to 50.

Increasing the max is a good idea. I know last festival I was growing right down to the last few days, because I had more catalysts than I had room for despite having been growing them to max capacity throughout the entire festival. If we're required to get them all to 100 then having additional slots to do them in would be a huge relief.

I would suggest that you also create a way to translate the different types of growing agents into each other. Maybe trade two water for one sunshine, or something like that, so that people cursed with 50 of one thing and none of another can still get them. Or ensure that ALL festivals have a 'greater basket' option that comes with a guarantee of one of each. Especially now with the necessity of always getting to 100%, there really has to be a guaranteed way to get what you need. Especially toward the end of the festival, you can't always rely on trading with other players to happen in a timely fashion.

There's a serious disconnect between the perceived value of things and the token cost. Is it really worth ten boss fights to get a single sculpting agent? Is it worth nurturing thousands of pets for a single pink goo? I suspect that one reason people prefer to cash out rather than spend the tokens in the shop is the rather ridiculously high prices on things. If we're reconsidering festival economies, then I'd add that to your list. Rethink token-item ratios until they're actually worth what is being spent.

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I want players to get playing the Festival economy. I don't want players playing Festivals to hoard 500,000 to a 1,000,000 extra Tokens to cash out 12 months later [,,,] now turned into essentially a global mass enterprise and it's incredibly anti productive for the game as a whole for a multitude of reasons.

I would contest this point, honestly. I can only speak from my own experience, but the influx of gold I receive from tokens at the start of the festival is all going right back into festival stuff. Both by purchasing avatar items/catalysts/growing items from other players, and unlocking/upgrading from the festival itself. There is no hoarding to it - I end a festival with roughly the same amount of gold I went into it with.

You can't say I don't participate. As the person with the current highest stake in this debate (as far as I've seen, no one else comes close to my numbers for tokens) I really wonder what you're talking about. I put an insane amount of time and effort into festivals, I've been pushing myself to frequent leaderboard victories, grinding the zone, trading actively on the forums, and growing pets non-stop.

And, yes, I buy tokens from other players at 450g each with the intention of making a small profit and jumpstarting my available gold at the start of the next festival. Because I need it. Because I know I'll spend it all, and it seemed like a safe investment at the time. Other people would rather have gold upfront, I'm willing to wait and have it set aside safe from my overspending.

You can't tell me that I'm hurting the economy. It's a win-win for everyone involved. Without people like me willing to pay now and wait for on the value of tokens, they will be WORTHLESS.

I will acknowledge that this is clearly not the way you intended the feature to be used. Fair enough. Like I said previously, just give us the festivals where we had no inkling of it being a problem [winter and spring] as previously, then remove the feature and everyone has plenty of notice and no loss of weeks of effort and millions of gold.

I can't stress enough how important it is that we know in advance what's going to happen. If we'd known that we could have a max of 5000 tokens and they'd be worth only 400, I bet some of the people with less would have been selling them to newer players without them for 350 each. Then they wouldn't lose everything, and the new players would get a nice bonus. This is the kind of community we are. We can adapt, AS LONG AS WE AREN'T SPRUNG ON WITH THESE CHANGES WITH NO NOTICE!!

I feel like you're spending too much time looking at one statistic [amount of tokens converrted to gold] and not seeing how it actually effects the economy. It's easy to think 'Wow, that Asviloka is going to get 33 million gold at the winter festival if I don't put a stop to it.' - but you haven't looked at my spending patterns, my participation rates. You act like I'm some aloof czar greedily exploiting everyone around me to collect endless hordes of gold, when really I'm just a very very dedicated player who is willing to make long-term investments.

Would players who are waiting for more than a 7.2 million payday be open to an alternative reward for pending Gold beyond that 7.2 million mark? Or are you strictly only wanting the Gold returned?

I'm reluctantly open to the idea, but it would have to be something truly epic. Forum avatar item for each 10k stack, perhaps, or 3-vis festival pets. I spend millions of gold to obtain these tokens, spend hours on the trade broker searching for good deals on them or convertible items. It's not a 33-million void that I would get from nothing, I spend a lot, willing to take even a tiny profit margin because, as before mentioned, if I have the gold in-hand I know I'll just spend it and then be left without anything when the festival comes. So it was a perfect system - enough profit to satisfy my inner munchkin, and a safe banked amount of gold that I would never be able to spend until the festival.

I know this wasn't what you intended, but I again must emphasize TIME. Give us time to adjust, and we will. Don't punish players now for decisions made a year ago which were reasonable and sensible at the time.

To not even get back what I spent would be a huge financial blow. And a pretty devastating emotional blow, as well. Even just going from 500 to 400 is a serious reduction - since a lot of the time I was buying at 400 or 450, that reduces my profit margin to basically nothing. But at least then I'd recoup my investment, if nothing more. Reducing the value AND capping the total amount, no. I hate it, it makes me furious and frustrated and wonder if anything matters anymore.

What's next? I have too many pets, so you'll just delete them too? First you cap and delete AP, then fest tokens, then . . .? gold? Diamonds? It's going toward a place where I can't trust in anything on the site. If this established mechanic and that established mechanic are unintended, then what else? Oh, you're killing too many enemies and earning too much stuff. From now on, you only get drops for the first 100 in a given day? Oh no, you're running missions every day? Better stop that, you're making a profit. From now on you can only do a given mission once in a 48 hour period. Breeding pets in batches of hundreds? No, no. That's not intended behavior! You can only breed once a day, with no more than five pets.

You know what I love about this game, over every other pet game I've played? The freedom. We can trade gold for diamonds, so free players willing to grind can still get them, in return for their effort, from players with less time and more money. We can breed unlimitedly, trade exclusive pets and ultra-rare items. Nothing is locked down, nothing is impossible for a newcomer to earn if they're willing to put in the effort.

I've been playing for years and years. I've watched the prices on everything plummet, to where what cost 50k in my early years is frequently sold for 5k these days. Where is the difficulty? If inflation is a problem, it certainly isn't currency inflation. Gold is getting less and less valuable, so why does it matter if people have a lot of it?
[This is not a hypothetical, if you have reasons I would love to hear them. I may just be blind, but I fail to see the problem here.]

You have plenty of gold-sinks in place, plenty of ways to get gold out of the economy. Even with the influx of gold from token expiry, I can hardly keep ahead of my expenditures. I really don't understand where this concern is coming from.

Please, explain it. If I'm harming the game's economy, let me know. We shouldn't be adversaries here, everyone wants what's best for the game. Can't we work it out together? You're only one person, and no one is an expert in everything. And, again, I must reiterate - please remember to keep us in the loop and give advance warning before doing anything drastic.

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I have nothing to say on the prestige matter. I only battle during festivals, lost grove is way too boring and annoying for me to care. It makes sense to me that trained stats wouldn't be genetically inheritable at all, like leveling, something that stays with the pet who earned it, but I have no stake in that argument so will defer to the max-stat breeders as those with the most insight into the process.

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Sorry this post is so late and so long, but I was way too emotional to be reasonable immediately after, so I've taken some time to calmly consider things before posting (and even now some of my angst slipped through).

I love this game, and it remains one of the best as far as admin-player relations. The fact that we're having this discussion at all is a testament to why I'm still playing. Thank you for taking our concerns seriously. I look forward to your reply.

1. Expired tokens for this fall fest;
This hasn't really affected me much, so i will refer to the ones who has been more affected.

2. Expired tokens for the rest of the year, and 2020;
not gonna lie, im kinda sad about this. I get that inflation is apparantly a thing (which i understand basically nothing about so bear with me) and it you seem to have a good point, but i personally liked the expired tokens=gold feature a lot, since it gave me a boost at the start of the festival, so i had more gold to use during the fest.

3. Pets no longer autogrowing;
Not a fan... at all. Mostly because im very much a casual player, and sometimes i only want to/have time for a few days, or one week of fests. The autocomplete allowed me to finish pets, even if i didn't have time to come online and add ingredients every 2 hours.

4. Fest growing items not dropping in the zone i do not agree with at all. I already find it difficult to get enough of them, since i dont buy them from the shop, since i think they cost too much on there.
I feel like i wont want to play in the zone, if these things stop dropping, because im really not that into avatar items, and i already feel that not enough tokens drop.

5. Period to spend fest stuff extended;
sounds reasonable, though it sound like people could get to be missing growing items, if they dont hoard enough tokens beforehand.

6. Players due expired tokens;
i am so confused about this, but i assume it doesn't affect me much, since i dont normally have a lot of tokens at the end of fests.

7 - Pet prestige. I am of two mind on this.

One one hand, i just started my first max stat project, and im now a little worried that it wont pay off...

On the other hand, im a big fan of it for my lost grove party, which is not max stats, and are having a tough time.

I like one of the things other people proposed, which was that prestige and wild stat be seperated and not breedable, but i feel like that would then be a big blow to the supermax stat breeders.

still 7- experience philers increasing prestige sound very nice too, for my grove team especially :)

still 7 - Maws of Madness;
Huge fan. Everything sounds good, and i especially like the part about getting hard-to-get lost grove materials from it.

Asviloka makes some really good points. One of the most dangerous things to a game is the staff attempting to meddle with the economy - especially when they look at it purely from a limited statistical standpoint and don't participate in the economy themselves. If all you see are incoming and outgoing numbers according to how much gold is entering the economy from the festival currency and not following the money after it's out there, how do you know it is, for a fact, a bad thing?

I will admit, I don't see the problem with people gaining the gold from festivals either, especially considering the gold sinks you have in the game. For example, looking at my 960k and then looking at the fact things in the Lost Grove can take hundreds of thousands to make and the fact my current next tab on my first stable costs 480k... Well, hoarding and converting festival tokens seems like a darn good idea.

You say it's 'anti productive' for the game if people are making this much gold off the festivals, but I see it making players happy and funding the market. Not to mention it allows people to actually make the gold required to buy a lot of the game functions - tabs, Lost Grove, etc. - that could otherwise take forever and a day to obtain. Prices set by the staff, not the players.

Let's get into some hypotheticals here. This market funding includes the max stat market - I'm not going to buy more than a single team of max stats if I feel I can't afford it and I'm sure others are the same. There are actually about 10 or so max stats I have been eyeing for months now and haven't purchased because of lack of funds. I've seen people go onto the max stat threads and order several pairs of max stats at a time. If they're getting their gold from the festivals - or their Diamonds from the broker using gold they got from festivals - you've just cut off gold and Diamond supply to max stat breeders. It's a chain. No incoming money means no buyers, no buyers means no money for the breeders. No money for the breeders means they are going to have a really hard time making any new projects. Something that, from what I understand, was already difficult enough suddenly becoming near impossible without spending real money to fund the entirety of the project means some of these breeders might just up and quit.

On another end, debating whether to participate in the economy or funnel all my resources into improving my gameplay by purchasing game functions... If I only have limited funds and it takes forever to get what I need, I'm not only going to prioritize the game functions over the player market, but I might not ever have anything to contribute to the player market.

Following the money is extremely important to knowing whether you're harming or helping the economy by cutting it off.

Asviloka also mentioned prices... I don't know about you, but gold inflation causing things that were 50k to only be worth 5k now sounds backwards to me. If gold inflation was an issue, those 50k things would be worth 500k. Gold inflation means the gold itself is worth less. Things being a lower price means either gold is worth more or the problem isn't the gold.

Not to mention, there's a side effect that I haven't seen mentioned... If you're forcing people to spend all their tokens on things to avoid them being wasted, you could cause severe devaluing on everything bought with the tokens. People could buy extra catalysts to grow... and therefore cause a drop in value for a particular Themed. People could buy extra avatar items in hopes of selling them after the festival to recover what gold they usually would have gotten... only to have them be so common their value just can't hold. All of that just turns into wasted time.

The more I think on it, the more I honestly feel this is just going to cause festivals to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouths. It's going to remove what sounds like/is being made out to be an absolutely enormous part of the economy and cause a lot of things to just feel like a waste of time. It won't just affect older players either. Newer players may never gain interest in the festivals if they feel it's pointless.