We want your opinions! Subject: GOLD | Comment by March 31st!

[Shakura]

I'm not a very social player, so I mainly gain gold by posting (and some clicking) in click threads one or two times a day or selling my creatures. What I can say is, selling creatures to others can be quite lucrative. But also frustrating. Whenever I sit on creatures for too long and they don't even sell for even 50g (looking at you Decessus and arthropods), I end up releasing them. (I know I can send them to Master Belmos, but that is too tideous.

Being able to sell them to NPCs or getting some gold for releasing them would be nice. Now one could argue that people will stop selling them. This is not true. I see other pet sites with "quick sale" values and people STILL sell them on auction houses etc. either for higher or the minimum site payout price.

As someone who logs in daily to check their creatures, I would appreciate something like a daily login bonus.

I agree that the koi pond can be annoying (it's basically gatcha), but for example, the daily quests also don't always yield you the exact creature you want. I think the recent tweak to the drop rates made it a lot better and the "excess" you get is a good motivator to sell/trade them to other people. So I don't feel too negative about it.

I feel indifferent about shop creature prices, but I understand why people aren't happy about them. The only creature I would tweak that is overpriced is the Jaktus dragon. When they were released, they were a LOT cheaper (like 2k? it's been so long ago) and now they cost a whooping 10k. This is not fair for everyone who registered after this release event. They are simply not worth it. And long time players have theirs and are not ready to pay this much for it now. At least lower it to 8k or 5k or something.
I feel like no shop creature should cost more than 10k unless they are special Dark Shop curiosity's like parentless hybrids and past gift-only/quest creatures. They should stay expensive to not oversaturate the market and render them worthless. They should stay something special.

[LunatheDragoness]

Long post

Spoiler

The mini games, daily quests/log ins, and the ability to automatically sell to NPCs (like Master Belmos) would be amazing.

A mini game like Flappy Bird, but use a Gryphon instead. The goal would be for each level to get the Gryphon to its nest without hitting any trees. And in the background there could be other bird like creatures that are on Magistream. After each level you get some gold as a reward. The higher the level you get, the changes you can get a random stream born/shop born egg or if its a holiday like Christmas on MS, then you get the chance of a past event egg (limit this by 2 per user for the duration of the events, just to keep users from collecting too much and making the prices of a creature sky rocket). This helps on two fronts, gold and holding the interest of new users and veteran users. If a player gets an egg they do not want, they can easily sell it to an NPC for a bit of gold.

A match 3 game could also have the same concept as the mini game I mentioned above but it rewards random crafting items and less gold than Flappy Gryphon. If the user does not need a certain crafting item, they can trade with an NPC for a little gold or they can trade said item with another user for an item they need. Trading crafting items can only be traded if you got it from the match 3 game. You can make it so once a day users can post what they want to trade and what they want in return. You don't want to have everything be tradeable at a whim, this will cause things to get a little out of hand I would imagine..

The mini games I mentioned above, I feel like it would help eliminate the constant need to gold mine and make the site lag. It gives new players a chance to catch up to veterans who have had the chance to gold mine like bananas in the past, help new players and current players make gold having fun, and the fun chance of getting eggs.

Daily log in rewards I feel should be a must. Every other virtual pet site that I have seen/played on has this. The gold may not seem worth it but over time it does add up. It will give users the incentive to log in daily and by having them log in daily, they may play/use the site more. So win-win.

Daily quests can be something simple like
"click on X amount of eggs for 250g" [incentive to actually participate on MS to help creatures grow faster]
"play one round of Flappy Gryphon for 100g" [incentive to play a game that maybe the user hasn't tried yet]
"Visit Master Belmos to see what he has to sell/trade for 150g" [incentive to check out what NPCs have to sell/trade, how much gold you could get for selling unwanted frozen or unfrozen eggs]
"Give NPC name 3 random stream born creatures for random shop born egg"
Just small simple things like that. There could be some rare quests where you have to actually give gold to complete the quest and in turn you can get a rare/uncommon stream born egg or a rare chance of getting a crafting item from past events like Christmas.

For those who are blessed with having 1 million gold or more, having daily optional quests where you have to give for example, 10k-50k gold to complete for a reward would be a good thing. There are users who are blessed and lucky enough to be able to buy a lot of shards and they turn around and sell the shards for gold. I feel like this would be a good balance.

Edit:

Spoiler

Encourage trading and making the gold flow between players, make the system a closed gold system:
Pros: Works more like a healthy economy, gets the resources moving instead of gold piling up on the top 5-10% richest or those who at least in the past have been able to goldmine
Cons: How to do this, what would be the incentive?

I feel like you could make this sort of a GoFundMe type thing. A user makes a post with say, a donation creature they want to buy from another user. They post how much they need and then users can donate any amount of gold they would like till it reaches the gold goal. This can be limited to only once a month per user, for only donation creatures, past event creatures, and retired stream born event creatures. Each post can say who the user is buying from, how much the seller is wanting, how much the buyer needs, and the creature code. To me this will help eliminate gold diggers and trolls.

Also, having personal user shops would be great. Like how EggCave does theirs. Each user just automatically has a personal shop that they can add whatever they want, post prices next to it, ect. For MS, it could be like EggCave but instead for the shops it can be like The Keep. Say I want to sell a whole tab, I just go to that tab and select "Add All To Shop", then I can edit the prices (if its 100g for just one species of creature, then I have the option to "Add to Same Species" or something like that) and when someone wants to buy something from me, they can just go to my Shop user page, click "Buy" then it is just automatically sent to me. No need to wait on trades.

The same thing can be done for Trading. Click on what creature I want to trade, hit a button that says "Trade For.." then use a search bar to find what I want, click it, then bam. Others can just go to my Traders tab to see what I have and what I want for it. They can just click "Trade This" button if its clickable to show they have what I need, they click accept and bam. Done. No needing to make a whole post about it or dealing with accepting/waiting on a trade.

[feralkiwi]

of the angle 1 options, i like everything but the mini games option (mini games would probably make me bounce off tbh? idk, i like the creature collecting/trading/breeding and then the community stuff that goes with that like the group competitions and gift giving events, i find non-related mini games kind of tedious and diluting. I don't come here to play solitaire etc and don't really want to have to).

i think of these, I particularly like the idea of daily (or weekly even? or both would be cool) quests that award some amount of gold- gives some direction, can be really engaging, and also still gives players extra time for their own projects (plus if they're not terribly difficult to complete, it's a nice boost). possibly having quests that also give additional gold during limited events might be nice too

Selling creatures to npcs sounds good too- maybe with some kind of weekly limit so that gold remains meaningful currency (like you can only trade in so many creatures per week. destiny does something like this with their currency/material exchange npc -obvs a different game with different goals, but same idea to keep resources meaningful while still obtainable).

--
per angle 2

would trading/selling of inventory items ever be a thing to consider? that could be an easier way of income generation for newer players, esp if you can sell items that are generated by breeding stream creatures (or just to resell after big events that give them out). or even just if you could resell them to an npc instead of players as a way to generate a bit of gold from items you might never use

incentivize the richest players to share gold/put it back in the economy- maybe allow a weekly donation to a new player fund that redistributes gold to poorer players but gives the folks who donate a rarer creature or something like that? so like people under a certain gold level would get a set amount from the fund and people over that level would be able to donate to it (but only weekly or monthly so rarer creatures stay a good prize). might be difficult to implement tho

i do like giving an alternate to gold, but potentially longer way to obtain creatures as an idea too (like it should be a little longer, gold is the fast path and this would be the other way which shouldn't be that tedious really)

[Desade]

I would love to see little games added to the site that give gold. The idea of having NPC fetch quests is exciting as well!

[froglady]

Minigames: I think this would be more of a programming nightmare than it's worth unless it's something just dead simple like "pick a door". I'm not a big minigames person and don't play them unless it's absolutely necessary even where they exist.

Daily quests: This could work, but not the way people are thinking. I'd make this automated. You send a creature out and it comes back with its "discoveries". One creature per day. You could use RNG to give the creatures in each quest zone a "dice roll" to decide if they found something or not and what they found based on how high over the threshold for a prize they rolled. Say you have a d20 and the threshold is 5. So under 5 gets nothing or a common item, 5-10 gets some smaller amount of gold, 10-15 gets a larger amount of gold and 15-20 gets the largest prize plus a good item (or similar, you get the point). You might even be able to program in a "secret bonus" so a creature from a certain element gets a bonus prize (and it could be random for each user, so no posting it on the forums).

Daily login bonuses: Would work, but how much of a headache is it to program?

Gaining gold from various activities like breeding, crafting, and otherwise interacting with the site: This is what I like best. Maybe even, like I said in another post, from getting eggs (limited # per day) and progressing them through each stage (again, with a limit).

Sell your creatures for gold to NPCs or some other non-player function: As a newer player, this wouldn't benefit me much, if at all. I have no extra creatures to sell and I can't see myself wasting my collecting spaces on extras to sell. I have no objections to this, but it seems the people who have been around a while will be the best arbiters of this.

Encourage trading and making the gold flow between players, make the system a closed gold system: So you mean no earning gold in any way other than trading? No way, I'd just stay poor forever. I don't really get into trades. I really prefer a shop system 10000000% over trades. I never know what to offer or what to ask and my anxiety spirals out of control. Unless I'm gender-trading holiday pets as a straight-up swap, I'm not going to be doing trades.

Create non-gold ways of getting shop creatures: Maybe put some of the eggs into the daily quest mechanic I described above. Perhaps let us earn shop points in some way instead of gold (maybe that NPC guy who would take creatures could pay you in shop points instead of gold if you chose--I mean "Would you like 50 gold or 500 shop points for this creature?" -or- it could run a gold-to-shop-points exchange as a side gig).


Reduce prices in shops and/or quests: If we had shop points, we wouldn't really need to reduce the regular guild/shop prices for eggs, but we should look at rebalancing the prices for appropriate numbers of shop points via an exchange rate from gold to shop points and what we think is the viable average earnings/day. Maybe the specialty markets, but I don't have experience of those, yet. The quests--definitely! Most of the older players have done all the quests. I have done many of them myself, but it's a real slog for newbies to do 5000-10,000 clicks to get the gold for their first quests. And it's not really a matter of whether I benefit or not, it's more that I can see where some new players just give up trying.

[Rosehill]

Encourage trading and making the gold flow between players, make the system a closed gold system: So you mean no earning gold in any way other than trading? No way, I'd just stay poor forever. I don't really get into trades. I really prefer a shop system 10000000% over trades. I never know what to offer or what to ask and my anxiety spirals out of control. Unless I'm gender-trading holiday pets as a straight-up swap, I'm not going to be doing trades.

No, that is not what we mean with encouraging people to get the gold flowing, and making the system a closed gold system. Trading would not be the only way to get gold. The main point for this option would be the "get the gold flowing instead of piling up". We understand trading isn't everyone's cup of tea, and making the gold flow and moving between members wouldn't necessarily be trade-based. In order to get the gold flowing in this way, though, we'd need to identify a resource that the richer players rather pay for than use time to get, and the not so rich players wouldn't mind using a bit of time to get in order to be able to exchange it for richer player's gold. However so far we haven't figured out what this kind of thing would be apart from hatching things and selling them. Selling inventory items would probably be one possibility, but this whole mechanic at the moment is out of scope of what we're thinking, as the item system has a few other things that are happening at least first.

For making the gold system closed it would most likely take the form of putting in place caps on how much gold you'd be able to get (e.g. daily) from whatever activity grants it (apart from trading). That way there wouldn't be the issue of more gold being generated ad infinitum.


And as stated earlier, once we get to making the gold adjustments happen, we'll most likely implement more than one option in oder to try to make things balanced between different play styles, so whatever we ends up with, there's likely to be several different things implemented.


A couple clarifications:

The "Daily login bonuses" mentioned wouldn't need you to log out and in again. It would be more like you get a random amount of gold from a specified range once every day if you visit MS.

And another option we've been discussing with the team the past couple days:

Increase the amount of gold gotten from clicking eggs.

[CinnaminDraconna]

Increase the amount of gold gotten from clicking eggs.

Anything 'simple' that increases the incoming gold would likely be appreciated by everyone. And thank you for the clarification on the login/logout issue.

I'd like ask if something else could be added to this.. could the 'value' of each click be increased as well?

I know every creature has a different 'value' per click, as in a certain percentage earned towards hatching/maturing. Some creatures being better/worse than others; stream koi hatch fast, minicorns take forever, lol. I don't understand the why behind the differences, but it would be nice if all the 'values' could be increased so everything grows faster.

Or as an alternative, increase the number of egg slots. I've played several other 'egg' games over the years and MS has one of the most limited almount of egg slots I've ever seen. When I was playing DC they started out at 4 slots, but before I quit the total was up to 10 slots. I've also played a couple with unlimited slots and it wasn't something that broke the game; and not why I quit playing, I quit playing because it took so long to hatch them.. weeks even for one egg.

When we open gifts after gifting events we can have around 34 eggs (I think), and as far as I know it's never been an issue. Maybe the part that doesn't allow us to get more eggs until we're back down to less than 5 eggs (not counting doni eggs) makes a difference, but I don't know if it does or not. But with the way the stream works I don't see why it would/should. The system is generating all those eggs anyway, so they are available to be caught/grown regardless. Shop eggs are always available, but you only buy them as needed. Event eggs 'flood' the system for the length of the event and players try to hatch as many as they can so they can catch as many as they can.

Point being, eggs are pretty much unlimited and available, but players are denied the opportunity to get as many as they want/need sometimes due to the very small number of egg slots. I love catching and breeding and I would be very grateful for more egg slots so I could enjoy the game more. I'm not saying to let us have unlimited egg slots, but I would like to see at least 8 or 10 for regular eggs, plus the 4 doni slots (12 to 14 total).

Maybe if I had more egg slots I would trade more, but I don't know. When I use the merchant district I check Zocolo first, then Waynal.. I hardly ever use anywhere else. Maybe if I had more egg slots I would check Kancha to see if I could catch/breed something for other players.. I haven't had much luck asking for anything for myself. Maybe if I had more egg slots I could open a shop in Mercado again.. probably selling hybrids or event extras, and/or whatever stream eggs are popular. My point being that I think of myself first because of the limited amount of egg slots. When I do catch other things, it's typically so I can gift stuff during gifting events.. and I usually send a few hatchlings to the annual CTC giveaway as well. I don't feel like I have enough egg slots to run a shop, which is why I don't have one anymore.. I was using all my slots to keep the shop going and my breeding projects/lineages were suffering because of the shop, thus reducing my enjoyment of the game.

I'll shut up now, lol.. I'm just trying to say I LOVE MS and want to play more and enjoy the game for many years to come.

[froglady]

OK, Rosehill, now I understand the term "closed system". I'm all good with that.

Perhaps limited-edition (aka holiday) eggs can have their own queue and allow us to grab a few more (so holiday eggs would have their own little nursery that doesn't count against your 5 "regular creature" slots and could maybe hold 6 or 8). That would free us up to capture or breed for gifting to a wishlist.
I thought about the separate queue for holiday creatures when the last event was on. Here we are cramming our keeps with the amethyst and albino limited edition mo/el seals hoping to get a breeding pair and we have no room to breed other creatures to get the event potion. That's a problem that needs a solution, for releases and such to be more well-thought-out as to how they affect each other.

I think letting us have too many eggs if they're going to be tied to gold is not a good thing, especially if they give out more than they do now and grow faster, as well, to increase egg turnover and allow for even more eggs per day. If you're giving gold for clicking eggs (and increasing it as well and speeding up hatching so you can get even more eggs) someone snatching up 20 eggs a day and farming their exponentially-growing keep every 6 hours would make the economy a moot point. (I figured it up and with the Alicanto Heart and clicking 3 times per day a player who only farmed the 20 creatures he caught daily for 30 days would be making 9000 gold/day on day 30 and after. Make it 60 days and that's 18,000/day. And that's starting from 0 creatures. It takes me a couple weeks of dedicated forum clicking to make that much.) I think that's part of the reason behind the limit.

[castlevania]

Minigames like "match 3", "tower climb", "solitaire" etc:
In general, I personally don't enjoy playing generic minigames (such as flappy bird, match 3) often or in depth.

I have played many adopt games that offered these kinds of minigames, and personally only did the most convenient ones that were the fastest to grind ingame currency, when it was necessary- but at that point they became grinding methods for me, not games to enjoy.

Daily quests:
I am interested in this and would be willing to depending on what the quests entail. Maybe a panel on The Stream or an extra page in the navigation bar can show available dailies to complete?

Daily login bonuses:
I want this. On other adopt games that offered me this type of reward, it had incentivized me to log on more when I want to play. Another adopt game I play, Final Outpost, that automatically awards you a small amount of currency at the end of the day if people click enough of your growing adopts. I think if I automatically earned a small amount of gold from just having people click my eggs, it would incentivize me to maximize catching and breed more eggs- therefore giving people more eggs to click for extra gold (especially with the alicanto heart to multiply the gain). Even when the amount of gold earned was small each day, over time it added up (important for me when i dont always have the time to mine the IFN after work), and this system has helped me stay engaged with consistently raising creatures on Final Outpost daily. maybe this would benefit magistream too, especially when ive seen days where there are few unique daily eggs to click on the IFN and click threads in reindeer games?

Gaining gold from various activities like breeding, crafting, and otherwise interacting with the site:
I really want to do this. It can be a good incentive for me to try out more activities to supplement raising creatures. I really want more ways to engage with Magistream's world outside of the current pages and bestiary available just for reading.

Sell your creatures for gold to NPCs or some other non-player function:
I want to do this the most. If the creatures that are requested change daily (or every few days), it would give me the most incentive to actively try to explore the stream and tributaries to capture, raise and discover new creatures that I haven't raised before. Even after I hit a daily limit of creatures that can be sold to NPCs for the day, I may still feel incentivized to raise a variety of creatures in preparation of future days where they may be requested. Tie this in with my mention of the Final Outpost's model of earning small amounts of gold by having others click your eggs, and I would feel motivated to continually raise or breed things for as long as I can

Encourage trading and making the gold flow between players, make the system a closed gold system:
(Will edit this when/if I can think of an opinion or suggestions)

Reduce prices in shops and/or quests:
For standard 24/7 shops: I currently don't know. My feelings on this are going to depend on what the economy looks like if gold becomes more accessible- if the current shop prices become consistently reachable and are reasonable for how much you earn based on time investment, then I don't see why the prices should be drastically lowered (I don't mind some alteration in general). A good price to work towards saving up for can help incentivize me to earn and spend more gold for readily available creatures

For the black market: I'm unsure of how to answer this. The appearance of the black market a few months ago during a time when gold was difficult to come by makes me want to say that rather than outright reducing the price, I want the black market prices to be reasonable based on how easy it is to attain gold at the time. I would still want Black Market creatures to retain a high value- I just don't want to be stuck in a situation where I had no ways to consistently earn enough gold from months to weeks prior, and ultimately be unable to meet the high price the black market asked for

[audrei9]

I think it would be cool if they allowed you to sell items or creatures for repeat quests that you could probably do once per day or something