Fixing the Current CB Prize System

[Paradisiske]

4 minutes ago, Dragon_Arbock said:

@Rekha If there had been other limited dragons from the start of this game- if Prizes were not the first- you might have a point, but as it stands, there was nothing in the game like the Prizes, and the Prizes have changed the game in a way many of us do not like. Before the Prizes, every dragon was obtainable by everyone in CB form. The holidays were available to everyone who was around for them at release- and since then, they have been rereleased, as they and their offspring never were meant to become valuable.

The Prizes are a nasty outlier that excludes many people. Just because the raffles have returned, it means very little for my, or anyone else's chances of ever getting one- let alone all 6 of them. I could win a prize, but I've got a better chance of dying in a horrible accident. Just because I have a chance to, does not mean I will, and does not make the system work. I may very well never get one. It would be much better from a gameplay perspective to allow users to earn them. Even if I could afford to trade for all the 2nd gens I would ever need, I still don't get to own the dragon in its purest form. I can't make a lineage of all my dragons, with all my names, and make all my own choices. I am at the mercy of others. I have already seen people kill dragons and ruin lineages, and having to depend on others not to disrupt my gameplay is not something reliable.

The biggest issue with the Prizes is simply equality. If you have a prize, you can trade for anything. Even if you believe the raffles themselves are fair, or users having dragons others cannot is fair, having more trading power than another just be given to you is not fair in the slightest. Prizes have ruined the trading ever since their release, and continue to do so. Even with 720 or so being given out a year, most of those users do not use the forum, and prices are still high. And no, I do not want prizes to produce more prize offspring than they do now- that only gives more advantage to their owners. I would love to have a dragon that I could breed and get 8 CB golds and 5 Negleteds and everything under the sun with no effort. It's simply overpowered and way above what the rest of us can do. It's even worse when prize owners only ask for prizeswaps- that cuts out the rest of us entirely.

There are only two ways I see to fix this- remove Prize dragons entirely, or allow everyone to earn them fairly. No random chance. They are not gifts, they overpowered exclusives.

 

@Dorchet This is a game- it is bad game design to make something only a few users can ever have, and then on top of that, make it breedable, so a small group of users has more power than everyone else.

 

 

well i mean prize owners are allowed to ask for prize swaps. its their egg. doesnt really matter if it cuts the rest of us out because we dont have something of interest to them. they cant be forced to trade their stuff

 

secondly

if you remove the prize dragons entirely this game will shut down lol ngl

and how would people earn them fairly? grinding? because i refuse to grind. i dont have the time to grind im a full time uni student in an honors college. 

 

i do agree that they overpowered exclusives but they werent as they were years ago. also at least with random chance you dont have people saying that they deserve to have won over someone else because its rng

 

also this game was never about equality. thats why ratios and different rarities exist.

 

i do agree the way prizes were introduced was absolute horrible game design

[Dragon_Arbock]

@CellyBean There was equality of users. Everyone could get everything (not counting anything special TJ has). Everyone cannot get everything now. Even if you were too bad to catch a CB Gold, you could and still can trade for one. You cannot trade for a CB Prize. It's not even physically possible to transfer Raffle Prizes.

 

Trader's canyon would not be grindy. There's a very low cap on how much currency can be earned in an 8-day cycle. All you have to do is be active as you are now.

And even if it was grindy, I would much rather grind then have to pray for the chance to win. At least I could control if I ever got one or not.

[Paradisiske]

Just now, Dragon_Arbock said:

@CellyBean There was equality of users. Everyone could get everything (not counting anything special TJ has). Everyone cannot get everything now. Even if you were too bad to catch a CB Gold, you could and still can trade for one. You cannot trade for a CB Prize. It's not even physically possible to transfer Raffle Prizes.

 

Trader's canyon would not be grindy. There's a very low cap on how much currency can be earned in an 8-day cycle. All you have to do is be active as you are now.

And even if it was grindy, I would much rather grind then have to pray for the chance to win. At least I could control if I ever got one or not.

but i cant be as active as i am now. im on winter break. that ends next week and then i have to study for finals because i get 4 of them for each class each semester. i dont have time to spend 8 days on this game once classes start up again. 

 

also not everyone could get everything. not every user here could get a cb gold or neglected simply due to its rarity and having lack of stuff to trade it for. the best they can offer were/are mass cb commons and not every single person who can catch cb golds wants that stuff. also spriters alts, upside down mints and other stuff exist. users who dont have them cant trade for them they can only trade for their offspring. and it used to be possible to trade cb prizes. 

 

and just because you would rather grind doesnt mean others do my dude. its hella boring and honestly if thats more your style i would recommend checking out flight rising. warning tho thanks to ingame currency there inflation has risen drastically making everything so expensive and theres so many money sinks that it gets quite hard to play it without paying actual money.

[Dragon_Arbock]

@CellyBean Every user could get everything. I'm not saying it was easy. CB golds are certainly not easy, but they are possible. I have seen them, I have had a chance to get them. I have just failed- and the chance of me seeing them is much much higher than the chance of me winning a raffle. CB Golds are also not limited in supply. The cave can generate as many of them as the ratios deem fit, and there are certainly a lot more of them than there are prizes.

And you mention the mints and Spriter's Alts- they are a variation of things we can, in fact, get. There's no variation of Prizes that are in-cave. There's no 'common prize' or 'tin prize' so to say, or the shiny versions might hurt a bit less. Spriters also didn't get their alts for nothing. They did a service to the site, and work for free otherwise.

 

Go read the trader's canyon. I do not imagine it would take more time than 5 minutes to grab eggs every few days or 5 minutes to add them to a hatchery to make sure they grow to get points. Maybe 15 minutes to breed dragons, since you can also get points for that.
And be this as it may, if a person does not have even 5 minutes to do that, must the whole game cater to them and only them? You make your choice as to what you use your time on, that includes real-life responsibilities such as exams. That shouldn't stop others from choosing their own priorities and being able to achieve things in a game they wish to achieve.

 

Also I already play Flight Rising. Have a page and a half full of gened gen 1s. The problem with their economy currency is two-fold. One, there's a premium currency you pay real money for. It is obtainable in small amounts outside of pay-to-win, but is inflated because it is constantly disappearing. Any time you buy something from the site itself using the currency, the currency is gone forever, so the cost of the currency when being traded for the non-premium currency between users has gone up. Trader;s canyon would not have this problem as the currency is not tradable, and neither are the dragons you would buy from the canyon. It is also not something you can pay real money for.

The other problem with Flight Rising is exclusive items from the kickstarter and the first year Holiday items, that are in such low supply, they go for ridiculous amounts- this second problem is very equatable to CB and gen 2 Prizes.

[Paradisiske]

3 minutes ago, Dragon_Arbock said:

@CellyBean Every user could get everything. I'm not saying it was easy. CB golds are certainly not easy, but they are possible. I have seen them, I have had a chance to get them. I have just failed- and the chance of me seeing them is much much higher than the chance of me winning a raffle. CB Golds are also not limited in supply. The cave can generate as many of them as the ratios deem fit, and there are certainly a lot more of them than there are prizes.

And you mention the mints and Spriter's Alts- they are a variation of things we can, in fact, get. There's no variation of Prizes that are in-cave. There's no 'common prize' or 'tin prize' so to say, or the shiny versions might hurt a bit less. Spriters also didn't get their alts for nothing. They did a service to the site, and work for free otherwise.

 

Go read the trader's canyon. I do not imagine it would take more time than 5 minutes to grab eggs every few days or 5 minutes to add them to a hatchery to make sure they grow to get points. Maybe 15 minutes to breed dragons, since you can also get points for that.
And be this as it may, if a person does not have even 5 minutes to do that, must the whole game cater to them and only them? You make your choice as to what you use your time on, that includes real-life responsibilities such as exams. That shouldn't stop others from choosing their own priorities and being able to achieve things in a game they wish to achieve.

 

Also I already play Flight Rising. Have a page and a half full of gened gen 1s. The problem with their economy currency is two-fold. One, there's a premium currency you pay real money for. It is obtainable in small amounts outside of pay-to-win, but is inflated because it is constantly disappearing. Any time you buy something from the site itself using the currency, the currency is gone forever, so the cost of the currency when being traded for the non-premium currency between users has gone up. Trader;s canyon would not have this problem as the currency is not tradable, and neither are the dragons you would buy from the canyon. It is also not something you can pay real money for.

The other problem with Flight Rising is exclusive items from the kickstarter and the first year Holiday items, that are in such low supply, they go for ridiculous amounts- this second problem is very equatable to CB and gen 2 Prizes.

so i guess you could say that every user could get a cb gold just like every user could get a cb prize every month?

 

cb golds are limited in supply tho. ratios will never be in our favor. because of ratios the cave will only produce a set amount of cb golds and will not produce anymore until the ratios of other breeds are met which frankly wont happen

 

upside mints and spriters alts are their own sprites tho especially in lineage view and are breedable. i would be more than okay with a tin prize variant available incave

i never said that spriters got their alts for free my dude. i gave them an example as something that exists that is exclusive to a few players that the rest of the userbase cannot get and can only trade for their offspring. 

 

am i saying the game should cater to me with my busy schedule? lmao no. if i wanted that then i would be saying that i only want cb rares to pop up in the biomes when im online or better yet just put them all on my scroll immune to sickness and hatched immediately. 

 

why should the game cater to those who arent devoting time to real-life responsilbilities? honestly what im getting from this is that the game should cater to people who have extra time (hooray for them!) and are able to invest hours into grinding :/

 

im not stopping you from choosing your own priorities my dude.

 

i hate flight rising

 

however there isnt a steady reliable increase of those exclusive kickstarter items in flight rising like there is with cb prizes which bring 2nd gens here with monthly raffles. 

[Whirlaway]

The raffle gives a chance for everyone, it just turns out to be luck that wins you the Prize. The same can't be said of Golds. They aren't handed out at the end of every month like Prizes are. You actually have to work to get Golds, not Prizes, which are earned in a raffle anyone can enter as many times as they so desire.

[Guillotine]

The Trader's Canyon thread, if anyone complaining about it had ever bothered to read it, addresses exactly the issue of time/grinding for currency. The limits would be very low; as a fairly active player, I would likely ram into the cap each week long before the week is up. A less active player would probably hit it as well, just at a later time. You would have to be so busy that pixel dragons are the last thing on your mind to not get anything (and quite frankly, no game can compensate for that degree of busy-ness).

 

And no, it really isn't as equal-opportunity as grabbing a Gold given how tiny the pool of winners is compared to the userbase (versus the number of golds produced in that same time frame). It is, in fact, worse.

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by Guillotine

[Dragon_Arbock]

@CellyBean The supply of Golds is not limited. It is not a set number, as the Prizes are. It is not set to 60 a month. It is an algorithm that is in the control of the users, and it is not a thing placed on the scroll of the chosen, and only the chosen. You can say it is, but it's not because there will always be more, as long as the game is up and running (unless TJ removes Golds spawning from the game). The raffles are not a normal, cave-generating-eggs function, and have a very tangible, hard limit put onto them, and a random distribution with no actual effort put into the obtainment of them. @Dorchet Random is not earned. That is the very opposite. I am not sure what you are missing about the fact that most of us will never have a Prize, even though we all can enter. The odds are way, way stacked against us. You have a much better chance of getting a Gold for the simple fact that there are many more in existence.

 

Did you ever wonder why things like the CB hybrids aren't a popular request for trades? Because you cannot continue that lineage. There are only a few, which no hope of ever getting more. Same to the upside down mints. Spriter's alts have some novelty, but they too cannot be continued and often do not look good when paired with their non-alt counterparts. They are technically things we also cannot get, but they are recolors- and as for the hybrids I do think that the honorable mention category should be restored.

 

There is not a steady increase in those items, but at the same time, once you trade that item, you lose all advantage of having it. It is broken in the same way that people who just happened to be there to get them, got them , but not as broken because you cannot keep gaining advantage from it multiple times over, as breeding a Prize does.

 

I am not saying the raffles themselves should stop, but I am saying that there should be an alternate way to get Prizes alongside it. Heck, add Golds and Silvers and the honorable mention category to get CB hybrids back, but only if the store is also implemented. But there should be no dragon in the game that can only be gotten by chance, and the numbers of which have a hard limit of 60 a month set on them- and it's not even 60, that's 60 split between 6 different dragon types; 15, 15, 10, 10, and 5, 5. 5 a month, 60 a year, for the gold tiers is way way to impossible of odds when split between 40,000 possible active users.

[Feesh]

If everyone could buy a cb prize, the value of 2nd gen offspring will go down. Eventually, you won't be able to use it to trade for rares like CB Golds, spriter alts and NDs. The best thing you could probably get is a 2nd gen prize swap for new blood. 

Edited January 8, 2018 by Feesh

[Paradisiske]

4 minutes ago, Dragon_Arbock said:

@CellyBean The supply of Golds is not limited. It is not a set number, as the Prizes are. It is not set to 60 a month. It is an algorithm that is in the control of the users, and it is not a thing placed on the scroll of the chosen, and only the chosen. You can say it is, but it's not because there will always be more, as long as the game is up and running (unless TJ removes Golds spawning from the game). The raffles are not a normal, cave-generating-eggs function, and have a very tangible, hard limit put onto them, and a random distribution with no actual effort put into the obtainment of them. @Dorchet Random is not earned. That is the very opposite. I am not sure what you are missing about the fact that most of us will never have a Prize, even though we all can enter. The odds are way, way stacked against us. You have a much better chance of getting a Gold for the simple fact that there are many more in existence.

 

Did you ever wonder why things like the CB hybrids aren't a popular request for trades? Because you cannot continue that lineage. There are only a few, which no hope of ever getting more. Same to the upside down mints. Spriter's alts have some novelty, but they too cannot be continued and often do not look good when paired with their non-alt counterparts. They are technically things we also cannot get, but they are recolors- and as for the hybrids I do think that the honorable mention category should be restored.

 

There is not a steady increase in those items, but at the same time, once you trade that item, you lose all advantage of having it. It is broken in the same way that people who just happened to be there to get them, got them , but not as broken because you cannot keep gaining advantage from it multiple times over, as breeding a Prize does.

 

I am not saying the raffles themselves should stop, but I am saying that there should be an alternate way to get Prizes alongside it. Heck, add Golds and Silvers and the honorable mention category to get CB hybrids back, but only if the store is also implemented. But there should be no dragon in the game that can only be gotten by chance, and the numbers of which have a hard limit of 60 a month set on them- and it's not even 60, that's 60 split between 6 different dragon types; 15, 15, 10, 10, and 5, 5. 5 a month, 60 a year, for the gold tiers is way way to impossible of odds when split between 40,000 possible active users.

golds are kind of limited. fastest catchers will grab them and ten ratios have to play catch up. 

 

users dont HAVE to have a cb prize. same with cb golds. it would be nice to have them yes but it wouldnt harm you in any way if you dont have them.

 

i dunno about you man but i love cb hybrids. gonna get me a 2g hellhorse fron winya and i can continue that lineage. heck you can continue all lineages with cb hybrids granted you get an egg thats the same type as its hybrid parent.

also its a personal opinion that spriters alt offspring dont look good when paired with non alt counterparts.

 

im all for the honorable mention category coming back

 

its also as broken if as spriters alts breeding is is it not?

 

fact is no one is forcing people to collect or trade for 2g prizes or alts. they're nice to have yes but not required. if people dont want them then they wont trade for them and demand will go down.

 

im okay as an alternate way to get prizes to something similar chickensmoothie (curse that game) did for events where you just do normal gameplay and you would randomly get a pop up saying you won a prize

 

and thats why im saying to up the amount of winners to 25,000 per year if not more

[Guillotine]

Prizes losing value is not a bad thing. Consider how much trading power a 2nd gen Prize has compared to literally anything else in the game. They've only recently gone down to one CB Gold instead of two or more. It's unreasonable. Even Neglecteds don't have the same kind of trading power behind them, and they're essentially designed as a secret breed.
 

[Paradisiske]

Just now, Guillotine said:

Prizes losing value is not a bad thing. Consider how much trading power a 2nd gen Prize has compared to literally anything else in the game. They've only recently gone down to one CB Gold instead of two or more. It's unreasonable. Even Neglecteds don't have the same kind of trading power behind them, and they're essentially designed as a secret breed.
 

i never said it was a bad thing my dude. im all for it

[Guillotine]

Someone else implied it, though, and it's come up a few times in the thread before as well.
 

[LibbyLishly]

12 minutes ago, Feesh said:

If everyone could buy a cb prize, the value of 2nd gen offspring will go down. Eventually, you won't be able to use it to trade for rares like CB Golds, spriter alts and NDs. The best thing you could probably get is a 2nd gen prize swap for new blood. 

This would be the opposite of a problem.

[Feesh]

4 minutes ago, LibbyLishly said:

This would be the opposite of a problem.

My point is that the trading economy would take a hit and be in shambles for awhile. 

 

Edit: And the focus would just shift to another dragon that people would find issues with obtaining, kind of rinse and repeat. 

Edited January 8, 2018 by Feesh

[Dragon_Arbock]

12 minutes ago, Feesh said:

If everyone could buy a cb prize, the value of 2nd gen offspring will go down. Eventually, you won't be able to use it to trade for rares like CB Golds, spriter alts and NDs. The best thing you could probably get is a 2nd gen prize swap for new blood. 

That is part of the idea. Many of us do not like how they dominate the trading market- especially as a tool for trade that many of us do not have access to ourselves.

 

@CellyBean

Golds are much more common than Prizes, even so. the game is about catching and raising dragons. I see no problem with those who have more time to catch, catching more Golds, so long as they are not cheating.

 

You can breed with the second gens of hybrids and alts, but you cannot create prefect checkers with them. If there's very few or only 1 CB female Hellhorse, I can't get a mate for that offspring that also has a CB Hellhorse mother. It wouldn't look right. Like, I like spriter's alts and the like, but I don't try to breed mine cause they don't match.

I would very much like the ability to own CB alts or hybrids (excluding spriters alts) but that is unlikely to happen, even with traders canyon. But I don't think that they exist should pull down the idea of Prizes being in a shop.

 

I don't play chickensmootie, but GPX plus has something like that where a random event could give you a certain pokemon. I don't know that that's the best though, because that could be more 'grindy' than the proposed shop, and is still random.

[Guillotine]

If we're bringing GPX+ into this, and if the store is really that much of a problem, something akin to that site's explorations would be better than nothing. I feel like something like that would run into the playstyle thing, though.
 

[LibbyLishly]

2 minutes ago, Feesh said:

My point is that the trading economy would take a hit and be in shambles for awhile. 

I personally believe that the overpriced 2Gs currently on the market have already messed up the trading economy and devaluing them would restore a semblance of order (and the monthly raffles have already assisted toward that end but more could be done).

[Feesh]

Not everyone holds the same ideals and values checkers as "perfect." 

[Jazeki]

1 minute ago, Dragon_Arbock said:

-snip-

 

I don't play chickensmootie, but GPX plus has something like that where a random event could give you a certain pokemon. I don't know that that's the best though, because that could be more 'grindy' than the proposed shop, and is still random.

Chicken Smoothie is very grindy during those holiday events where you can maybe get banner pets. You have to play every 20 minutes to get a banner to pop up.Trader's Canyon is shaping up to be far less of a grind than that. 

 

 

[Paradisiske]

1 minute ago, Dragon_Arbock said:

That is part of the idea. Many of us do not like how they dominate the trading market- especially as a tool for trade that many of us do not have access to ourselves.

 

@CellyBean

Golds are much more common than Prizes, even so. the game is about catching and raising dragons. I see no problem with those who have more time to catch, catching more Golds, so long as they are not cheating.

 

You can breed with the second gens of hybrids and alts, but you cannot create prefect checkers with them. If there's very few or only 1 CB female Hellhorse, I can't get a mate for that offspring that also has a CB Hellhorse mother. It wouldn't look right. Like, I like spriter's alts and the like, but I don't try to breed mine cause they don't match.

I would very much like the ability to own CB alts or hybrids (excluding spriters alts) but that is unlikely to happen, even with traders canyon. But I don't think that they exist should pull down the idea of Prizes being in a shop.

 

I don't play chickensmootie, but GPX plus has something like that where a random event could give you a certain pokemon. I don't know that that's the best though, because that could be more 'grindy' than the proposed shop, and is still random.

i wouldnt play chickensmoothie if i were you the mods there arent good

 

just wanted to point out that not everybody prefers checkers or breeds them. again its a personal preference

 

i can see where you're coming from tho

i would like to own cb hybrids/alts too

 

it wouldnt be more grindy than the shop tho because with the shop as i understand you have to play for 8 days in a row to get what you want. what im thinking is basic site exploration done in a day or two and in that time frame you have a random rng chance to "stumble" across a prize

 

[Guillotine]

But the majority do, and that strongly influences what you can trade for. There is much less trade value for the 2nd gen offspring of SAs and CB Hybrids/breed-onlies than Prize 2nd gens. It's a lot easier to get one of those than it is to get a 2nd gen Prize of any sort.

 

e: I think like the only exception is the newest Spriter Alts and Thuweds, the latter of which are valuable for completely different reasons.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Guillotine

[Paradisiske]

1 minute ago, Guillotine said:

But the majority do, and that strongly influences what you can trade for. There is much less trade value for the 2nd gen offspring of SAs and CB Hybrids/breed-onlies than Prize 2nd gens. It's a lot easier to get one of those than it is to get a 2nd gen Prize of any sort.

thats not..thats not completey true tho imo

 

it depends on the sprite and the spriter. some of them are super nice and give them away for an uncommon or multiple commons. others want rares and they get the rares. i feel that it would be harder to get 2g from odeens christmas alts than it would be to get a 2g prize.

[Dragon_Arbock]

7 minutes ago, Feesh said:

Not everyone holds the same ideals and values checkers as "perfect." 

You don't have to- I wasn't saying checkers are the best ever; 'Perfect Checker' is a term for a checker where every male dragon is the same breed, and every female dragon is the same breed, and are all unrelated (no inbreeding).

 

@CellyBean You don't have to play for 8 days in a  row- you can only earn 'x' amount of currency every 8 days. You could hit that cap in 2 or 3 days most likely, depending on how much you play, but you can't get an overwhelming advantage over someone who plays less.

 

I've said most of what I think on the manner. I would, in the end, like to see a way alternative to the raffle to obtain prizes. Doesn't have to be a replacement, but something that exists side by side with it, for the less lucky.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Dragon_Arbock

[Paradisiske]

Just now, Dragon_Arbock said:

You don't have to- I wan't saying checkers are the best ever; 'Perfect Checker' is a term for a checker where every male dragon is the same breed, and every female dragon is the same breed, and are all unrelated (no inbreeding).

 

@CellyBean You don't have to play for 8 days in a  row- you can only earn 'x' amount of currency every 8 days. You could hit that cap in 2 or 3 days most likely, depending on how much you play, but you can't get an overwhelming advantage over someone who plays less.

 

I've said most of what I think on the manner. I would, in the end, like to see a way alternative to the raffle to obtain prizes. Doesn't have to be a replacement, but something that exists side by side with it, for the less lucky.

hmm i guess it isnt that bad then. i still would prefer upping the amount of winners every month drastically first and seeing how it works