Sylestia has a very dedicated player-base (myself included), and some of those very dedicated players are also extremely smart (myself not included). If you want to solve the problems with the economy, open up a brain-storming thread. Let some of these geniuses in your community talk it through, bounce ideas off one another, and give you suggestions. Don't make these decisions alone, Krin! We care about this game, too, and these sweeping changes to the fabric of the economy affect us in ways you can't guess before making them.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=4#31 Author: Xovinx Time Posted: 10/20/2019 at 11:40 PM Sylestia has a very dedicated player-base (myself included), and some of those very dedicated players are also extremely smart (myself not included). If you want to solve the problems with the economy, open up a brain-storming thread. Let some of these geniuses in your community talk it through, bounce ideas off one another, and give you suggestions. Don't make these decisions alone, Krin! We care about this game, too, and these sweeping changes to the fabric of the economy affect us in ways you can't guess before making them.

THIS OMG THIS

I'm certainly not the only one to care about the economy. You aren't the only one either. No one wants a broken economy. Let us help.

And most of all, keep us informed ahead of time before you instigate these sweeping changes which have no impact on you and a severe impact on us.

Edit: ok it's on purpose. I didn't check my overview thing.

hello? so I randomly got 77 expired chocolate coins? is this a glitch? I haven't been a player long enough to have played the last winter or fall festival. Help?

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=4#31 Author: Xovinx Time Posted: 10/20/2019 at 11:40 PM Sylestia has a very dedicated player-base (myself included), and some of those very dedicated players are also extremely smart (myself not included). If you want to solve the problems with the economy, open up a brain-storming thread. Let some of these geniuses in your community talk it through, bounce ideas off one another, and give you suggestions. Don't make these decisions alone, Krin! We care about this game, too, and these sweeping changes to the fabric of the economy affect us in ways you can't guess before making them.

I second this motion. This was far too quick, and I was saddend to hear that my summer fest activity, mind you was the only fest out ofmy 1600 days of playing here, I managed to save 20k tokens. I tend to spend, spend SPEND, every fest. Now, I will have to seriously make adjustments each fest.

Will be interesting to note what new 'things' krinadon has planned for fall fest, but I wont hold my breath that it will happen as such for every future fest. I think, the game is still in beta...Honestly, any major change to the economy like this, should be held off until a massive announcement is made about beta coming to a close, economy will be rebooted, etc etc etc. Or, as mentioned prior, brainstorm ideas for awhile...let the community help, put an end date to taking opinions, go thru and evaluate ideas, and not just spring something like this for the entire player base. It was scary, and I see both sides of the argument..

However, this has been ongoing already for years with every fest. Game is still being worked on, tweaks finalized.. if there must be a cap now, make it 20k or 15k, as the economy stabilizes until beta comes to a close. 5k is harsh.

I couldn't sleep~


Okay... so... I have hashed out a lot of ideas pertaining to a plethora of festival economical related issues. I am just going to write out my proposed plan for everything here, step by step. Please read it over and comment with your provided feedback.

I think that this is a very fair and balanced proposition with solutions to a lot of issues. I believe it will also attempt to tackle the problems directly at the source and do so right now which will enable us to then further adjust and improve things starting much sooner than just enduring and waiting it out and attempting to slowly mitigate things over an extended period of time.

One last point of emphasis: I love all of you. Seriously. I know sometimes these announcements/plans seem like I am just trying to punish people or make things awful, etc. Absolutely never. If I could go back in time and change how so many features were initially set up - I 100% would. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. And now we ended up in Egypt when we were supposed to be in London - or something. You all now love sand. It's all you've ever known. I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. I like clouds. I like rain. If we had started in London, you all would love clouds and rain too. So now I am trying to adjust things to end up in London which obviously means significant change. I believe Sylestia would be so much better in London and would grow so much faster and everything would be great. But that requires significant change and almost every human on the planet is inherently resistant to change.

(Disclaimer: Absolutely nothing against Egypt or London. They were literally the first two absolutely random geographical locations that popped into my head so I just ran with it.)


My Proposal

1. In regards to specifically the expected Fall Festival Expired Tokens for this year... I am inclined to just call it a wash. I botched multiple things with the script as highlighted earlier in this announcement/thread. Many players ended up getting more than the cap of 5,000 due to the mistakes, some I'm sure ended up with 10,000. IIRC, there were only a handful of players who significantly were over the cap. I would much prefer those players just send me a PM and I will work something out with them.

The alternative is spending an entire day (during a period of time where I literally have no spare time) doing a partial database restoration, writing a ton of data scraping scripts, and then manually recalculating people's values when the majority probably were hardly affected by the cap to begin with when you consider all of the issues.


2. Moving forward, meaning for the 2019 Fall Festival, 2019 Winter Festival, 2020 Spring Festival, so on and so forth - Festival Tokens and Festival Items will cease being reimbursed. They will not have a Gold value. They will not turn into Expired Tokens. They will just be removed at the end of a Festival if not consumed.

I believe there just is no alternative and I believe this will directly attack the issue at the source. This isolates each Festival into its own little world and greatly reduces the effect it can have on the global economy. This also allows for much more control over the supply/demand of each Festival's rewards. Example: Currently, players obviously weigh the value of said Festival thing vs Token cost x500. The majority will probably just rather take the guaranteed Gold b/c maybe something down the road is more interesting to them since Gold is universal. This leads to hoarding. This then just continues infinitely and gets worse and worse and worse with every iteration.

I do not believe just simply reducing the amount of Gold returned will solve anything - in fact, I think it'd potentially even make it worse. People would still hoard probably just as much but then it'd also probably intrinsically reduce the value of static items. Reducing the Gold value really doesn't solve any issues. It just kinda smooshes things around and hopes for a better outcome.


3. Pets will no longer auto grow after a Festival completely ends. What you complete is what you get. Now, if a player completed a pet but didn't claim it, I will process those for players. But if the pet is not at 100% growth by the end of the Festival, it will be lost.

This will help boost the demand of consuming growing agents and the use of tokens on said agents.


4. Festival growing items will mostly cease dropping from the Festival Zone. The Festival Zone will be focused on rewarding players with the unique Avatar Items, the unique Themed Pets, a grind-able method of obtaining Festival Tokens, and a way to easily level up pets. Players will be expected to mainly obtain the Festival growing items through the Festival Shop and/or other features, such as the Task Log, Haunted House, etc.


5. The 'spend your stuff' period will increase from 1 Week to 2 Weeks after the Festival Zone closes. This will increase the amount of time for players utilizing any Forum Game prizes and allow for a lot more time to plan and finish growing their remaining pets and whatever else they were wanting to do before everything is removed.


6. For the last 3 remaining Festivals where players are due Expired Tokens, I will go ahead and calculate all 3 Festivals as one joint event. Instead of a cap of 5,000 Tokens per Festival, I will do a total cap of 18,000 Tokens. This will be calculated prior to the 2019 Winter Festival and players will receive one-third of their owed Gold prior to each of those 3 Festivals. I believe doing this accomplishes the following:

-Doesn't greatly penalize a player for having 15,000 Spring Tokens and 0 Winter and Summer compared to a player who kept 5,000 in each. This way, everything is treated entirely equally and limited to a maximum return of 7.2 million Gold per player - which is a lot of Gold.

-Everything will be calculated up front, all at once. This way everyone knows what they are due in total and knows what to expect and when to expect it. No more last minute surprise calculations.

-The total amount of Gold awarded will be spread out over ~9 months, reducing the impact of dumping all of the Gold all at once into the economy.

"Okay. All of this sounds awful. Where is the good stuff?"

While, yes, all of the above are "nerfs" in a sense... it is all in the name of improving value and making time worthwhile. And, just as importantly, it greatly reduces the stress on myself, Faiona, and the artists for churning out content. Honestly, A LOT of Sylestia's content is relatively easily obtainable. I mean, every Festival, we're pushing out like 150 new Avatar Items, 40+ new Themed Pets, new Pet Traits, new Features, on and on and on. And despite all of that, people are still ending up with 20,000... 30,000 Festival Tokens leftover to rake in tens of millions of Gold the following year. I'm sorry, but that really is not sustainable. =\ We have to do what we can to preserve the value of the things we are investing thousands of dollars on and hundreds of work hours on. Obviously, it's all about finding the balance. I am not literally saying, "Things too much. Must give players less!" Even though that's probably how the above sounds - that's not at all the point I'm trying to make.

I am essentially wanting to "reset" things to a normal starting level and then work to improve everything so that, not only are the root issues fixed (tons of Gold inflation), but we're also serving you guys more meaningful and interesting content.

And that... leads me to:


7. MORE THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR STUFF! MORE STUFF TO DO WITH YOUR THINGS! Here is what I am planning for this upcoming Fall Festival broken down into as much detail as I have figured out thus far:

Pet Prestige: Is your Pet at the current Level Cap? Is it at like 1092% of Level 70? Prestige it! For every additional max level a pet earns, it will have the ability to increase its Wild Stats up to a maximum of 3,000 Total Health, 300 Total Mana, and 200** Total Str/Int/Dex/Agi.

Wild Stats and Base Stats will be added together towards the above totals. Meaning, a current max stat Pet can unlock an additional 1,000 Wild Health, 100 Wild Mana, and 100 Wild Str/Int/Dex/Agi. If a pet is not max stat, it can still reach those same Total Caps, however it will require more Wild stats to attain it.

This will allow players to take their favorite pets, that may not be max stats, and grind a whole lot of extra levels out of them to be on par with max stat pets.

As you may already know, while Wild Stats are passed along during breeding, they are significantly reduced. The higher the Wild Stats prior to breeding, the more that will be lost when carried over to an Offspring. Whereas Base Stats are generally increased through Breeding.

Experience Philters: Experience Philters will now also increase the amount of Expertise a Pet earns through defeating enemies in battle.

The Maws of Madness: Now, this is the main thing. This will be a brand new feature added with this year's Fall Festival. The plan is to have two options for it: A Level 20-60 version and a Level 60-70 version.

At a maximum of once per day - or with a small Diamond fee - players can reset and/or choose a different version for themselves.

Each version will have 10 different Levels to it and players will start at Level 1. Each Level will require a Key of Madness to unlock. The key will be consumed and one unlock grants one successful play through. If the player fails a Level, it will still remain unlocked. If the player resets the Maws of Madness, everything will reset and any unlocked Levels will return to their locked status.

Each Level will offer the player with all sorts of various rewards if successfully completed. For the Level 60-70 version, this will include: Gold, a ton of Experience and Expertise, Lost Grove Materials, Festival Supplies, and exclusive one-time rewards for first time completions.

Keys of Madness can be obtained once a day by completing all Daily Tasks in the Task Log, purchasing them with Festival Tokens, or purchasing them with Diamonds. They will not be tradeable. They will cap out at a maximum of 10 saved Keys at a time.

Back to the whole reset thing... Players will be able to utilize the Reset option to replay through the Maws of Madness and collect the rewards over and over again. So for example, if they can only reach Level 5, they can reset it the next day and replay Levels 1 through 4 rather than being permanently stuck at Level 5.

As for the Levels themselves, they will be Arena Style battles set in the Lost Grove rule-set. Meaning, Lost Grove consumable rules and such will apply. As a player progresses through the Levels of their version, the battles will get progressively more difficult, but way more rewarding. Before and after each battle, pets will be healed to full, cooldowns reset, and stripped of any buffs they may have. Wins and loses will not count towards the player or pet's battle records.

This feature will offer players a great way to spend their Festival Tokens on an exclusive feature that offers tons of premium, unique rewards that may be hard to come by elsewhere. And again, huge amounts of Experience and Expertise will be awarded from this feature. Players can be encouraged to use the Level 20-60 version to fast track level a new party of pets up. Players can be encouraged to use the Level 60-70 version to grind out a lot of Wild Stats for max level pets very quickly. Players can utilize the Level 60-70 version to obtain hard to get Lost Grove materials under their own control. So on and so on.


Obviously, this type of feature will be improved and built upon as time goes on and we will attempt to add similar features to the other Festivals as well. But this is significantly more in the direction that I want Sylestia to go in. I want to stop the bleeding of immense Gold inflation. I want to increase the demand of Festival Rewards by isolating them more. And I want to offer players ways to obtain actual progressive content through participating in Festivals - which should greatly increase demand all across the board for all things Festivals.

Lastly, again, keep in mind, nothing is ever set in stone! We will always, always, always constantly be trying to improve things. Even if the above doesn't work... or creates new problems... or whatever - we will then make adjustments to attempt to counter those.

Thanks Krin for explaining all this!

Yay, wild stats are finally here!! :D

But, um, why nerf max stat projects so much? :( Doesn't this pretty much make max stat projects--and base stats in general--nearly worthless? (Since wild stats can make up for any type of base stats?)

My question is basically why would anyone want to buy prismas or mana potions when wild stats are so much higher, and just as effective on a low stat pet?

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=4#36 Author: Malikas Time Posted: 10/21/2019 at 2:33 AM Thanks Krin for explaining all this! Yay, wild stats are finally here!! :D But, um, why nerf max stat projects so much? :( Doesn't this pretty much make max stat projects--and base stats in general--nearly worthless? (Since wild stats can make up for any type of base stats?) My question is basically why would anyone want to buy prismas or mana potions when wild stats are so much higher, and just as effective on a low stat pet?

I am sure changes will come based on how things go about.

But it will require a lot of grinding to really achieve that. People have been at the Level Cap for quite awhile now and just going down the list of the top 24 pets with saved Experience... the 24th Pet only has enough Experience for 30 Wild Levels at this point.

And passing Wild Stats along through breeding will be very inefficient.

But, most importantly, I am sure the systems will both be adjusted once we can start to see some actual data from the new feature. I can say that I most absolutely definitely want max stat breeding to remain a prominent thing in Sylestia and I will do what needs to be done to maintain that.

This all sounds really good. My one gripe with the changes to auto-completion last festival was that i liked to save a lot of my building materials until after the zone had closed so I knew what I was working with, but an extension to the time definitely helps that.

Gold inflation is a huge problem that I think really contributed to the boiling over of some tensions around releasing from people who were trying to help the pet economy.

The pet prestige sounds amazing, I expect it will probably be pretty hard to max a pet, so it's still easier to get a max stat, but being able to strengthen my team to max even though they were all bred well before the mana cap was raised is fantastic.

Sounds good Krin the only things i am not 100% on board with would be the non-coin for tokens, removing the auto complete and the decrease in fest supplies within the zone.

Particularly the latter of the three due to me always struggling to get both tokens and supplies.

Maybe an option for now would be to decrease the coin refund to 10-20 gold each rather than none at all. That way it decreases their value for hoarding.

Though i love the prestige idea.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=4#38 Author: Silverkitsu Time Posted: 10/21/2019 at 2:43 AM This all sounds really good. My one gripe with the changes to auto-completion last festival was that i liked to save a lot of my building materials until after the zone had closed so I knew what I was working with, but an extension to the time definitely helps that. Gold inflation is a huge problem that I think really contributed to the boiling over of some tensions around releasing from people who were trying to help the pet economy. The pet prestige sounds amazing, I expect it will probably be pretty hard to max a pet, so it's still easier to get a max stat, but being able to strengthen my team to max even though they were all bred well before the mana cap was raised is fantastic.

The changes to auto-completion is a huge source of anxiety to me for this same reason. I always have so much anxiety about being sure of what I have before deciding on what to make. I am glad for the extension though but I still think I'll be stressing the whole time. There should maybe be a timer on the site that shows when it's basically pointless to plant anything anymore unless you have some sort of quick agent. Otherwise it'll just feel awful if something ends up at like 95%.

I think I'm going to have to reread through about the wild stats and such once more when I'm more awake.