Spend shards on one-time actions

[lexi_]

i agree with nevermore (and everyone else who've mentioned vamps, me and nevermore seem to have very similar opinions/stances on cb vamps) on the bite feature in particular. and as guillotine said, multiple clear warnings on what you're getting yourself into could deter newbies from harming their eggs on accident because they didn't understand what the thing they were buying with their shards did. i wont stay on this for too long, because ive already stated my opinion on it in the thread specifically about bringing back cb vamps, but i think that this is a great idea and compromise in that discussion. 

 

but anyway, i think this is a really really great idea. i used my shards on some cb stats when they were cheaper (so glad i did!), but now there's not anything else i particularly want to spend my shards on. i just want to say, as an argument ive thought of, for things like bite, or earthquake, kill/revive/etc, i dont think that the fail chance should just... go away. if youre getting the ability to use the action when youre on cooldown and it has a chance to fail regularly, i do not think that just buying the action with shards should get rid of the chance of it failing, or make it any likelier to succeed. youre getting another chance at what you want to do, so if you spend your shards and the bite ends up killing the egg/the revive goes wrong/the earthquake kills your eggs, then that's just the risk you'd have if you did it with a dragon's BSA spot. i can see the argument too that since BSA dragons can be used for free, they might be slightly riskier, also since they're... living creatures, prone to mistakes or biological whoopsies (having trouble with my wording here >_<), but i think this is not a great argument gameplay wise, because then it might be much better to just buy the action instead, and that just seems... not right to me. cant explain it that well right now, sorry if that makes zero sense and my point is completely lost. 

 

all in all though, i very much support this idea. id LOVE to see it in cave.

Edited November 20, 2020 by InvaderAlexis

[Ruby Eyes]

I think the price should depend on cooldown, as proposed on page 1, and not on the dragon's Market price (since that potion does not even use a dragon).

So if the price for a 1-week-cooldown BSA was 7 shards, it would be 14 shards for a 2-week-cooldown like Fertility, 30 shards for Bite, and ... um, 2 shards for Teleport?

 

(Alternatively, it could just be a single potion that reduces any BSA cooldown by a day. E.g. buy and use 14 to get one charge of Fertility back. This would also resolve the issue of players trying to use a BSA they cannot know about yet due to lack of dragons: if they already *have* a Green Dragon to use Earthquake, and it's on cooldown because they have used it, they can just reduce its cooldown to zero. A potion like this would definitely need a multi-use option, though.)

[lexi_]

15 minutes ago, Ruby Eyes said:

So if the price for a 1-week-cooldown BSA was 7 shards, it would be 14 shards for a 2-week-cooldown like Fertility, 30 shards for Bite, and ... um, 2 shards for Teleport?

i think thats WAY too low, personally. i understand where its coming from, but again, wouldnt that just make using actual BSAs a bit redundant, or pointless..? but i'm also worried about them being overpriced. 100-200 seems fair across the board, for 1 week and 2 week cooldowns respectively... 500 for a vamp bite? 300 for earthquake? maybe even double if that's what TJ deemed fair if he were to implement this, even though i do think it might be a lot personally. this is just what i'd price it as if i were in charge  but i do agree, it shouldn't be up to the whim of the market. definitely based off of specific BSA/cooldown time/etc. plus, vamps arent even in the market... (i really wish they were! that's why i said in my earlier post that that i'm particularly for this because of vampires!)

 

as for your other point, i have no strong opinion on that. i dont think i'd be in favor for that specifically, but i also cant think of any reason why i should be against it.

Edited November 20, 2020 by InvaderAlexis

[Fuzzbucket]

I think that's way too low too. 70 and 140 I could buy into. and 300 for bite;  20 for teleport.

[lexi_]

that seems a lot more reasonable to me. definitely about that range, more or less.

[Fuzzbucket]

10 x the days of CD !

[Ruby Eyes]

I was just giving examples on how I see the RELATIONS between prices ... the exact numbers are up to TJ anyway.

[Stromboli]

eh. it's not a feature i'd use, but then i've got a glut of bsa dragons at my disposal already. Might be a helpful feature for newer players.

[11th]

 I don't think 1 shard per day of cooldown is that bad, really. Remember: You can only get 100 shards per week. If someone wanted to Incubate and Influence a full set of 8 eggs, that would be 112 168 shards. It adds up quickly! If Bite is also on the table, then that should probably cost more because it would be like buying a CB Vampire egg instead of an action.

 

Anyway:

I was neutral on this at first, but I've been burning through Purples fast enough that I'm more inclined to support now.

(Even if I would probably be too stubborn to buy actions anyway. |D But having the option to is nice!)

Edited November 21, 2020 by 11th
Forgot that Incubate had a two week cooldown. :T

[lexi_]

16 hours ago, 11th said:

If someone wanted to Incubate and Influence a full set of 8 eggs, that would be 112 168 shards. It adds up quickly!

that's true, but again, i wouldnt want this suggestion to make using actual bsas from dragons pointless, or having people over-rely on this when the point of the game is to raise dragons. but i can also see why someone would argue against me on this. i dont think they should be so cheap that people will just use them instead of raising the dragon that has the bsa, but they also shouldnt be so expensive that theres no point in buying it (if you wanted to do that).

[Fuzzbucket]

I can't see myself using this - at the moment.... But over Hallowe'en I'd have given my eye teeth for a few more Aeons, so...

[HeatherMarie]

To me, buying a one-time BSA should be a 'special' thing, something done sparingly only when it's really needed, just as the Market itself was designed to 'supplement' hunting and not replace it. While I'm not too invested in the costs either way, I would definitely think *any* BSA should cost more than 7-14 shards. BSAs are Breed Specific Actions, tied to an actual dragon, it shouldn't be preferable/easier/cheaper to *buy* the action than raise more of the dragon it was intended for. If you want the BSA, you need the dragon, has always been the way it is. If you don't have enough of that dragon, it limits how much you can use that BSA, something users have just had to live with or decide to raise more of that breed. *Buying* a BSA, even for one-time use, completely circumvents that. Personally I'd think any one BSA should cost a half-week's worth of shards, ie 50 shards. Maybe take it down to 30-40, but no lower. Again, it should be a last-resort buy, not something you regularly use on a whole batch of eggs. Otherwise what's the point of a *Breed*-specific action at all?

[lexi_]

5 minutes ago, HeatherMarie said:

To me, buying a one-time BSA should be a 'special' thing, something done sparingly only when it's really needed, just as the Market itself was designed to 'supplement' hunting and not replace it. While I'm not too invested in the costs either way, I would definitely think *any* BSA should cost more than 7-14 shards. BSAs are Breed Specific Actions, tied to an actual dragon, it shouldn't be preferable/easier/cheaper to *buy* the action than raise more of the dragon it was intended for. If you want the BSA, you need the dragon, has always been the way it is. If you don't have enough of that dragon, it limits how much you can use that BSA, something users have just had to live with or decide to raise more of that breed. *Buying* a BSA, even for one-time use, completely circumvents that. Personally I'd think any one BSA should cost a half-week's worth of shards, ie 50 shards. Maybe take it down to 30-40, but no lower. Again, it should be a last-resort buy, not something you regularly use on a whole batch of eggs. Otherwise what's the point of a *Breed*-specific action at all?

these are my exact thoughts. i really am against them being super cheap, but just as you said about the market being a supplment to hunting and not a replacement, i think that this is a fantastic idea, it just shouldnt be preferrable to using an actual dragon, just a last resort. the prices fuzzbucket proposed earlier (10x the amount of days on the cooldown, i.e. 70/140 for 7 and 14 days respectively) seems the best option here.

[pinkgothic]

38 minutes ago, HeatherMarie said:

Otherwise what's the point of a *Breed*-specific action at all?

The point of raising BSA dragons otherwise is getting a renewable free source of the BSA, regardless what the price of a single-use BSA is, though, really. Looking at Red Dragons, buying a Red Dragon currently costs 700 shards. If the action cost 70 shards, that would be a bit like restricting yourself to using one particular Red Dragon on your scroll only ten times in your entire time of playing Dragon Cave, ever.

 

Let's go about this from a different angle (or rather, @11th's angle, expanded upon):

 

I'd estimate I use about 20 Incubates a week, give or take a few given whatever I'm doing that week. For the Market to be cheap enough to replace Reds entirely, even if a single-use Incubate were priced at 5 shards, I'd only just break even with my shard income, and it would remove any ability to buy anything else, ever.

 

So from my perspective, that's where the incentives lie. Lower than 5 shards and I miiiiight start having a weak incentive not to raise Reds - I can still have a net-positive outcome in my playstyle even if I use as many one-time Incubates as I want, somewhere between 20% and 80% of the shards someone who isn't using shards for Incubate (but has the same appetite for them) is accumulating.

 

But at the price of or higher than 5 shards, I'm better off raising more Reds, which ideally cost me no shards (because I caught it from the cave, or got it from the AP, or just bred other Reds I already have), just a one-time fee of a blocked egg-slot - if at all, assuming I didn't trade for or get gifted a nice, convenient low-time hatchling.

 

Now, I see why you might be baulking at this. If I were to treat a Red Dragon as having a shard value of 700, I would need to use a single red 140 times (i.e. continually for five years) for it to have the same value on paper as a Red in the Market, so I understand your ambivalence about low prices, but in practise this just isn't how the incentives work, for a pretty simple reason:

 

Even playing completely solo, if I buy a single Red Dragon, I can use it to breed myself more Reds, which don't cost but generate shards (the breeding +2, the hatching +3, the growing into an adult +3), and allow me to breed even more Reds. A Red Dragon purchase, used to breed more Reds (which in turn are used to breed more Reds), gives twenty Incubates a week after somewhere between six to ten weeks (simplifying as doubling every two weeks; egg slots muddy this a bit, but at the low exponents we're looking at to get up to 40 Reds, not very much; breed outcomes also muddy it a bit, but let's keep it simple).

 

And this is only looking at Incubate. If I also want to use single-use Influence, Fertility, and Precognition, I'm broke pretty quickly!

 

I honestly think even a price as low as 10 shards for a single-use BSA would already be plenty to discourage its use except in situations where you really, really need it, much as it might not seem that way by comparing the price of Reds to the proposed price of a single-use BSA. As such, I would really not like to see a price higher than, say, 25 shards for a single-use BSA; I would simply not use them if they were that expensive, even Halloween be damned.  If I have the choice between spending, say, 50 shards on Precognition to find out whether that ultra rare AP find, that would be a perfect mate for a dragon I have if it genders right, indeed genders right... I'd really just take my chances and keep those shards.

[Shadowdrake]

22 minutes ago, pinkgothic said:

I honestly think even a price as low as 10 shards for a single-use BSA would already be plenty to discourage its use

I see people who buy cheap, easy commons at hundreds of shards, or are otherwise perpetually broke buying things, so I have to say this is probably a viewpoint only a few people share. I'm looking at this as a literal last resort purchase, such as for when you have no reds and need that last 1 or 2 eggs incubated, or have an inconvenient siyat or xol to deal with. The incentive is its existence, an instant incubate for a premium. At 5 shards, for a newbie that's 20 incubates a week which is more than they can even burn through. What would be the point of trying to get any reds if they can just spend 60 shards a week on reds and still have 40 leftover?

[pinkgothic]

4 minutes ago, Shadowdrake said:

What would be the point of trying to get any reds if they can just spend 60 shards a week on reds and still have 40 leftover?

Because if they get a Red, they can stop spending those shards. If they really super don't want to use their shards for anything else in the game, then they have no incentive to stop spending those shards, but... honestly, I've also got no incentive to want to stop them? Is it harming me in any way that they can do that? Maybe they really don't like the Red dragon sprite, in which case I'd be really glad that it's still reasonably affordable to them.

 

(Just to stress, the price I'm suggesting is "something between 10 and 25 shards", btw, not 5. 5 is the incentive cut-off as I've explained, but I agree that it should be higher.)