DC Gold

[olympe]

On DC, I can get an egg I like with enough time and perseverance, or even a little luck. It makes it so much more rewarding having worked hard for an egg than just clicked away for money... I just don't like the idea of DC having currency. Because then the rich users with the time to spend getting money have an advantage, whereas things are mostly fair right now (only really not when it comes to connection speed and suchlike).

Well, I must admit that I've given up on getting rares and uncommons after about a year of playing and most of the time not even seeing them in the cave. I know I can see them by now, at least occasionally, and I actually managed to nab a couple of uncommon eggs from the cave, but, really, I have kind of given up on rares about two years ago.

 

Also, if you get money for raising dragons, you can only speed it up so far (getting a gold trophy, incubating, keeping your scroll constantly logged and, well, trading), no matter how much real-life money you're willing to spend or how much time you can afford to put into it. In the end, even without a forum account and the ability to trade, without good reflexes and connection, you can get all the rares - eventually. After a very long time. But you can.

 

I just have to ask: In what DragonCave universe is breeding considered "spontanious egg creation"? Sure, they are wild dragons, but feral/wild dragons are going to breed just like "tame" dragons do. Breeding is a natural part of the game, I don't know how it can be considered spontanious egg creation just because they are wild.

If you hit a breed button/link, it's not necessarily spontaneous egg creation, although even that is debatable. But if some dragons nobody owns and nobody cares about suddenly/spontaneously "decide" to make eggs... I'd say it is spontaneous egg creation. Wild dragons breeding is not a natural part of the game, as far as I can tell. And splits/pygmies/drakes breeding with regular dragons most assuredly isn't.

[schmupti]

@Dolphinsong:

 

The cave: Area of spontaneous egg creation.

GoN: The avatar of spontaneous egg creation.

Wild dragons "breeding": Spontaneous egg creation.

Prize dragons: Epitome of spontaneous egg creation. And a DC-currency printing press to boot. (See trading section for 2nd and 3rd gen tinsels.)

Purple monkey dishwasher. On its own, a nonsense sentence, but there's a meaning to it based on shared understanding of context (and viewing of "The Simpsons").

 

Trying to argue that eggs appearing in the cave are a form of spontaneous egg creation and therefore the rule against suggesting spontaneous egg creation is somehow null and void is ignoring the context of the rule and the fact that those three words together mean something specific in the context of DC.

 

Trying to force a loophole through semantics seems like a way to disregard the rules rather than promote the suggestion.

[DarkEternity]

The cave: Area of spontaneous egg creation.

GoN: The avatar of spontaneous egg creation.

Wild dragons "breeding": Spontaneous egg creation.

Prize dragons: Epitome of spontaneous egg creation. And a DC-currency printing press to boot. (See trading section for 2nd and 3rd gen tinsels.)

You forgot HM dragons as 'DC-currency printing press'. Even common babies from HMs are at worth a minimum CB Stripe or CB Black - rares.

Edited November 9, 2012 by DarkEternity

[Millennium07]

What is this I don't even.

 

I'm agreeing with the 'No' side here. Adding currency (And maybe a shop!) would just be silly. I noticed I was missing a Blusang Lindwyrm about a month ago, so I added a note in my sig saying I was looking for one, then posted in the trade threads. Y'know what? 3 days later I get a PM - not a trade request, but a gift. My Holly was aquired through asking nicely, and two years patience.

The clincher? I'm Autistic and everytime I asked for a holly, I was so embarressed I wanted to cry. If I can do it, you sure as hell can.

 

Forgive me for asking, I haven't read the whole thread yet, but how would it even be distributed? How would I, who only has the time to spend about an hour actively searching on the cave a day, aquire enough money to get an egg I need, wheras right now, through perseverence (and, admittedly, a lot of help), All I need to do is go try and breed some dragons, and I've (hopefully) got a trade going.

 

And the only thing a shop would do is balls up the ratios.

[olympe]

I don't know what's wrong, but somehow, my quote tags don't work. Not even if I use the tags you get when hitting the quote button on top of your posting window. So, quotes will be underlined now.

 

Forgive me for asking, I haven't read the whole thread yet, but how would it even be distributed? For raising dragons. Raise one dragon to adulthood or frozen stage, and you get one gold. It might be debatable to make rares not "give" you gold, but that's more like fine-tuning things.

 

How would I, who only has the time to spend about an hour actively searching on the cave a day, aquire enough money to get an egg I need By patiently raising dragons over dragons. Commons are really easy to acquire, even with only one hour online time per day. Just go to the cave or AP and click any random egg. Or breed.

 

wheras right now, through perseverence (and, admittedly, a lot of help), All I need to do is go try and breed some dragons, and I've (hopefully) got a trade going.

You can still trade - either for eggs or for gold. You can still gift and be gifted. With a currency system, you can do everything you can do now, depend on sheer dumb luck, perseverance, good reflexes, help from others, trading ability or whatever suits you.

 

And the only thing a shop would do is balls up the ratios. Not really. First of all, the amount of commons you (or your trading partners) would have to raise in order to buy a rare would be two or three times as high as demanded by the ratios - at the very least. So, the ratios demand (random number) 300 commons to be raised for a gold? Then a gold egg from the shop would cost you 600 to 1000 (or more!) gold pieces, which is the equivalent of that number of dragons raised. With the dragons you - or your trading partners - have raised, the ratios would have produced 2 or 3 (or more!) golds eggs anyway, be it for breeders (=>sheer dumb luck and a lot of rares to begin with) or for the cave (=>for the person with the best reflexes and best connection). Why shouldn't it be you to get one of these eggs for raising all those dragons - or offering other people something they deem worthwile in return?

Edited November 9, 2012 by olympe

[brairtrainer]

Olympe one of the problems I see with this changes peoples playstyles. What if you only want matching sprites of each breed? you're suddenly forced to raise many commons to get get what you want, altering your own playstyle unless you release every dragon you raise for gold, further altering the ratios by taking another dragon out of the population.

 

The only way I could see this working is if the cave switched from ratios to probablities. Only then would this make sense because breeding would not be as connected to the cave (what I mean by probabilites is that the cave has a 1/200th chance to drop a silver, but every time someone breeds a silver there is a 1/200th chance that if an egg is produced it will be a silver)

 

but once again that changes a fundemental aspect of the game.

 

Also, while I don't expect people to become greedy and not give gifts of dragons over night in this system it would very likely happen, and actually leave newbes, who this was supposed to help, far behind in the dust.

[olympe]

Olympe one of the problems I see with this changes peoples playstyles. What if you only want matching sprites of each breed? you're suddenly forced to raise many commons to get get what you want, altering your own playstyle unless you release every dragon you raise for gold, further altering the ratios by taking another dragon out of the population.

How so? You can still catch rares, or trade for them, or breed them. Nobody forces you to buy dragons.

 

The only way I could see this working is if the cave switched from ratios to probablities. Only then would this make sense because breeding would not be as connected to the cave (what I mean by probabilites is that the cave has a 1/200th chance to drop a silver, but every time someone breeds a silver there is a 1/200th chance that if an egg is produced it will be a silver)

With that, you still have a ratio system - only a system that doesn't take dragons into account that already are on people's scrolls. Overall, such a system has several effects:

- no more overbred rares being as good as unbreedable (like the current tinsel breeding draught)

- no more over-producing rares (like tinsels shortly after their release)

- no more ratios getting out of wack (like seasonals) due to them being picked up a little bit too often for a while

- no more cycles of abundance and scarcity of a given breed...

But TJ would have to do something about new releases, like make the original drop be a pure drop for a whole day and assign the new eggs heightened ratios for the following few days.

 

You know, these probabilities might be a very good idea. Want to start a suggestions thread about them?

 

but once again that changes a fundemental aspect of the game.

And all for the better. No more mass breeders affecting your breeding success...

 

Also, while I don't expect people to become greedy and not give gifts of dragons over night in this system it would very likely happen, and actually leave newbes, who this was supposed to help, far behind in the dust.

That is a possibility, but not a fact. Personally, I own a number of messy-lineaged metallics. Their eggs wouldn't be worth squat if I tried to trade them, so I gift them as often as I get them. A monetary system wouldn't change that. And even if I charged 10 or 15 gold pieces for one of those (which I can't see myself doing), even a new player with zero dragons would be able to get 16 gold within 15 days if he tried.

[brairtrainer]

How so? You can still catch rares, or trade for them, or breed them. Nobody forces you to buy dragons.

 

With that, you still have a ratio system - only a system that doesn't take dragons into account that already are on people's scrolls. Overall, such a system has several effects:

- no more overbred rares being as good as unbreedable (like the current tinsel breeding draught)

- no more over-producing rares (like tinsels shortly after their release)

- no more ratios getting out of wack (like seasonals) due to them being picked up a little bit too often for a while

- no more cycles of abundance and scarcity of a given breed...

But TJ would have to do something about new releases, like make the original drop be a pure drop for a whole day and assign the new eggs heightened ratios for the following few days.

 

You know, these probabilities might be a very good idea. Want to start a suggestions thread about them?

 

And all for the better. No more mass breeders affecting your breeding success...

 

That is a possibility, but not a fact. Personally, I own a number of messy-lineaged metallics. Their eggs wouldn't be worth squat if I tried to trade them, so I gift them as often as I get them. A monetary system wouldn't change that. And even if I charged 10 or 15 gold pieces for one of those (which I can't see myself doing), even a new player with zero dragons would be able to get 16 gold within 15 days if he tried.

Nobody can force you to buy dragons but if you choose not too you quickly fall behind. Let's say you decide not to buy dragons but you need a female blusang for your collection. Trades become more focused on gold, hypothetically, and you need to offer more than just a lucky catch egg or one of the few eggs you breed to get it because blusangs have: 1 A rarity worth, they are hard to come by and so are more expensive than some of the other commons 2 blusangs are classified by the game as a common since only golds and silvers are considered rares by TJ so you would get some sort of money gain for raising them. So the player who is trying to get a blusang egg to get the illusive female blusang is stuck trying to catch eggs that not only over-value the blusang in a group to entice the person to trade for eggs over gold as well as provide an egg that is worth the amount of gold that raising the blusang is worth.

 

With the ratio system you mentioned, statistically speaking it isn't a ration system anymore its a probablitiy system, with the silvers (using my 1/200 example) have a .005 chance of producing an egg when they are bred (probability is out of 1).

Also

-rares would still be overbred because the chance is static (never changing) and we will see droughts when people get unlucky

-overproduction would happen if a few users get lucky or decide to mass breed causeing the worth of rares to be driven down

-probablitiy wouldn't get out of wack but because the chances of breeding rares on the site you'd cause rares to become more common and people would have no incentive to raise commons to right the fact that they are becoming scarce. Dragons no longer being bought/used as long as player interaction is used in the site may cause for breeds to be retired (happened on a game called Equintium, several breeds were retired from the store because enough people didn't buy them and then became extinct in the user base as people became inactive)

-cycles would be there but it would depend on players and what they decided to breed and when breeds were retired

 

I also think that if TJ wanted probabilites he would have programed them in at the start, ratios would be harder to code for (because ratios are hard to program for when you have to allow for extra factors like mean(average amount the breed is produced at any time) maximum (how big the breed can get) minimum (the ammount the cave must produce in a period of time) and standard deveation (a safe area around the mean for production for the eggs) I'm taking a guess here that this stuff is used from my brief expierence here and my stats class so don't quote me and say this is how it works.

 

And to finish off, the possibility of the userbase to become less giving and more focusing on making money is enough to make me not like this idea. This place is friendlier than other games I've played (with the exception of Runescape but that place has changed emensily and is now only like that on memeber servers) and I'd hate for DC to loose that.

 

[RainDear]

I, personally, am against this idea. If a poll is added, I would vote no.

 

It would certainly change the game, but I am not sure that it would change the game in the ways some of us seem to think it would. If it were installed, I would probably use it, and continue playing, at least until I see it changing the game in ways I didn't like.

[Ashes The Second]

I would vote no in the poll. I just see no way to make this work, despite seeing many posts trying to figure it out.

 

it would change the game drastically. Many people leave good games for that exact reason. I don't really want to leave dc just because getting the egg I want became impossible, or difficult.

[Draco Knight]

Only for some time. A new player can gain their bronze trophy after 42 days with no effort involved. (Meaning: no incubating, no catching low-time eggs or even hatchlings.) It takes between 60 (full incubate) and 90 (no incubate) days to go from bronze trophy to silver trophy, and an additional 100 to 150 days to make the transition to the gold trophy. At the most, that's 182 days - 6 months. Compared to the 9-10 months for a gold player to reach the 1000 raised dragons, that's not that much. (Plus, when you're at gold level, you already have half your gold dragon. So, the first CB gold would take you 11 instead of 9 to 10 months - wow. Big, fat disadvantage.)

 

Well, that's really assuming that the new player can fully utilize the space on his or her scroll right off the bat. There is a learning curve the first few weeks, perhaps longer if the user in question never peeks into the forums.

 

Lets assume that I don't dedicate the full use of my space to raising common dragons, only four eggs slots. Both me and the new user start at 0 gold, he isn't even sure exactly what gold is or how to use it, doesn't get that gold dragons are so highly valued.

 

I have Incubate and knowledge. I'll be able to plan ahead, realize when my eggs will hatch, be online to replace them within 15 minutes of them hatching(not all the time, but most of the time), rinse and repeat. Yes, in the long run the initial gap will begin to close since the new player will eventually gain this know how. But I'll still get my CB gold way before he does, as will dozens of other player like me. We will breed them, and perhaps we'll devalue them. I'm pretty sure the Gold standard in the Trade section will be a thing of the past, but some other dragon will rise to take its place.

 

I'm just having trouble seeing a problem with the way things are now, I guess. But then, I don't put all that much value on CB metals either, except as trade fodder. I've been here 4 years and have two CB golds(one of which is just a glitch that looks CB because her lineage is lost), and one CB silver that I traded for.

 

And re "good reflexes, excellent internet": Speak for yourself, please.

I was. Hence my use of the word 'I' and not 'we' or 'us.'

Edited November 9, 2012 by Draco Knight

[Pixxelation]

Please, no currency. Almost everyone but the OP and Olympe are against it. Please, don't. It would make this a pet site, and I;d have to find somewhere else to hang out

[pinkieseb]

I just joined Magistream, its a good site and all. I wanted to buy a dragon with 5,000 gold I worked for weeks to get. I then found out the economy was collapsing. The cheapest non-common dragon was 450,000 gold!

 

NO TO DC GOLD!

 

Allthough.. My nebulas might go up in price...

[Fuzzbucket]

Please, no currency. Almost everyone but the OP and Olympe are against it. Please, don't. It would make this a pet site, and I'd have to find somewhere else to hang out

Can we PLEASE have a poll so that we can be sure of that ?

 

I'm with you, as you know, but if the majority is in favour I'll just get me back to ferryhalim, where I used to hang out...

 

But it's NOT the same !

[RheaZen]

I just joined Magistream, its a good site and all. I wanted to buy a dragon with 5,000 gold I worked for weeks to get. I then found out the economy was collapsing. The cheapest non-common dragon was 450,000 gold!

 

NO TO DC GOLD!

 

Allthough.. My nebulas might go up in price...

Our economy hasn't collapsed, there's nothing wrong with it. You're probably thinking of a doni dragon, which has to be obtained with real money - so it makes sense that it'd sell for a lot.

 

There are guides on how to mine for gold, and it's not that hard to sell creatures for gold - you don't even need to grow them yourself, just post them in some of the daycare threads.

 

Just sayin'...

[olympe]

See? These are the differences between magistream and DC:

- No paid perks on DC. Not ever.

- No mining for gold on DC. Raise your dragons, or trade them. No way around that.

- Since the amount of gold is directly tied to the amount of dragons raised and there is a "money sink", the economy shouldn't be collapsing.

 

[RheaZen]

Also, I'm not really sure by what everyone means with the whole "collapsing economy" thing. From most of what I've read you're just talking about inflation...

 

And technically DC does have paid perks, just not ones related to obtaining new dragons.

[Rally Vincent]

Adjusting the difficulty of games to the abilities of gamers who don't want to invest effort and/or time is regrettable a trend in retail gaming. Well, it does broaden the userbase and makes for better financial success, but it also leads to a lot of games that virtually give no challenge. A game that gives no challenge is boring and in my opinion a waste of time.

 

While I can understand that for companies financial success > making a good game, a charge-free game (that apparently is not in financial trouble) has no need to lower its standards.

[Mystic_Solara]

Hmm... while having the opportunity of getting a CB rare dragon without having the need of going egg hunting is tempting, I really don't like this idea.

 

There's a bunch of reasons why I am saying this: the first one being that DC works fine as it is. Adding gold to the equation would, in my opinion, make it similar to many adoptables sites. I prefer the breeding and hunting system for later trading, it makes the site original.

 

Then there's the challenge factor. In my particular case and perhaps in many others, the main thing that has kept me interested in the site for so many years is that it is particularly difficult to get rare and popular dragons, and so there's always a challenge. If gold is added then everyone will be assured to have those dragons in one year if they do everything correctly... at least I will lose interest in the site if everything becomes so... time based?

 

What about ratios? Rare dragons will lose value and popularity if we become able to buy then. What will happen with the drops when people start using gold to get them? Will commons fill the biomes even more than now?

 

Yep, I prefer that the site is kept as it is right now, and will vote for that when the time comes n.n.

 

 

[demonicvampiregirl]

Please, no currency. Almost everyone but the OP and Olympe are against it. Please, don't. It would make this a pet site, and I;d have to find somewhere else to hang out

This is how I feel.

 

DC Gold would never benefit the game at all and would ruin the simplicity of it. You want to play adoptable sites with money try Valenth or Magistream. Don't ruin DC with it.

 

May sound harsh but it is how I view it. I would probably no longer play if it was changed like that.

[Pixxelation]

And if there was a cap, it would instantly lose value because you can't gain more of it.

[CNR4806]

And if there was a cap, it would instantly lose value because you can't gain more of it.

Mentioned it several pages back, which is exactly why this idea is... not very bright.

[RheaZen]

Why would a cap devalue gold?

[Dolphinsong]

The reason a cap would devalue gold is because people would price EVERYTHING at that cap. Doesn't matter if the egg/hatchling is considered worthless or not to others it would be the same price. CB Gold for 200g (cap price example) while another would have a 16th sloppy looking gen white for 200g. Eventually everyone will sell at the max price simplely because they can and want the max allowed gold per sale.

 

Think about it. AGES ago, an 8oz bar of Hersey's Chocolate used to sell for only 25 cents. Now it is only 86 cents and some places have it as a $1.25 depending on where your at. This is because the value of the American Dollar decreased over the years due to the shear amount out in circulation.

[RheaZen]

Then just don't buy the overpriced things.

 

Now, if you're looking for something specific, then of course it's going to be harder to find and the "seller" might jack up the price a bit, but the same would happen if it were just trading eggs - they'd just ask for more eggs and/or rarer eggs, or some "pricier" equivalent.