Increase Egg/Hatchling Limits

[KageSora]

I know there's a suggestion for adding a trophy level with new limits, which isn't a bad idea in and of itself, but I think at this point a slight increase in limits for all levels--including no trophy--may be in order for consideration.

 

The egg limits make sense!  Removing them would totally unbalance the game without an entire rework, so I'm not suggesting that.

 

But there's over 300 breeds in the game now, and we see some releases that have so many eggs even platinum players have to use up most or all of their slots to get them all (and at times can't even get one of each adult sprite) due to the size of the release.

 

It doesn't need to--nor should--be a massive increase, but even something as simple as a 2-egg increase for each trophy level would be amazingly helpful in letting players grab more eggs.

 

I just think that as the game continues to grow, there are parts of the game that need to grow with it--and as the total breeds in the game increase at some point the slots we have available to collect things should increase as well.  Honestly this is probably something that could use periodic reassessment if the game continues to grow over the years in the future.

 

Yes, yes, "but releases are permanent" that's besides the point.  The game has always had elements of resource-management in that you have to juggle limited slots vs total breeds available, but as the total breeds expands the resource-management becomes more and more of a challenge to deal with because you have to pick much more carefully to achieve whatever your personal goals are.  It would make sense to increase limits to keep this aspect of the game in line with the total resources available to obtain rather than unbalancing the mechanics in favor of making players make more and more restrictive decisions on what they'll pick up and what they'll leave.

 

tl;dr:  There's an ever-increasing number of unique breeds in the game, but egg/growing dragon slots have not really increased to keep up with the added breeds so a small increase to all levels of users feel in order to keep up with the growing pool of dragons you can try and collect.

Edited May 31, 2023 by KageSora

[NightEagle]

Absolute support from my side.

 

I think egg / overall slots should be proportional to what is available to fill them. That means I absolutely follow your logic of more unique breeds -> more egg slots!

 

Thank you for typing this out as detailed as you did!

[seventeendeer]

I think the argument that more breeds should equal more slots makes perfect sense.

 

I wonder if it might not be time to give the limits an overhaul in general. They worked just fine when we had fewer breeds and fewer mechanics, but I feel as the game has gotten more intricate, it would be interesting to reconsider if there might not be ways the system could be reworked to support other parts of the game better. I once saw someone bring up the idea of having separate limits for commons and rares, which I thought was interesting - I think we could get away with introducing a couple of extra rare slots and several extra common slots at the same time for every trophy level, if a divide like that was introduced. It might alleviate other problems the game has at the same time (ratios, cave-blockers, etc etc). Other dividers between different kinds of slots could also be considered (biome-specific, generation-specific, element-specific? These don't solve problems, but might inspire new game mechanics that could be fun and add to the resource management aspect of the game - especially if they came with more egg slots than we have now across the board, to keep things fun and no more challenging than the game currently is).

 

Support for this suggestion + putting the idea out there that it might be worth looking into more in-depth development of the limits system too while we're at it.

[Brite]

I'm definitely all for this. And you explained it better than I ever could.

[purplehaze]

I definitely support increasing the limits.

Large releases like we have had some months require a long time to get the CBs I need to meet my scroll goals -- which ends up leaving me very little chance for breeding and other aspects of the game that I enjoy. Yes, I know, my scroll goals were my choice, but once chosen it doesn't feel right to change them. The sad thing is that my goal of 4 male and 4 female CBs of each breed and variant was chosen for the purpose of being able to build checker lineages up to G4 from dragons on my own scroll, but now I end up choosing between giving up my goals or giving up breeding!

 

Having more breeds means more lineages that I would love to be able to breed! So many! Beautiful pairings of dragons that I would love to build on. But not enough scroll space to be able to do even a small portion of what I would like to.

[Brite]

12 minutes ago, purplehaze said:

The sad thing is that my goal of 4 male and 4 female CBs of each breed and variant was chosen for the purpose of being able to build checker lineages up to G4 from dragons on my own scroll, but now I end up choosing between giving up my goals or giving up breeding!

 

 

This. I have my own special lineage project(s), and I'm constantly having to choose between working on them or cave hunting every week..

[Skadi]

Full support for one reason alone: Holidays.

 

there is one week a year for each Holiday to breed. We have 16 holiday dragons now, for each holiday. Platinum trophies only have 8 slots. You see the problem here! It is becoming inefficient to have holiday breeding projects, and that's really tragic.

 

I wouldn't mind so much about the other year-round dragons, but 8 egg slots is too small for a week-long interlude where you can only get these 16 dragons. It's even worse if you're a new player and you have no means of catching up because you only have 4-5 egg slots.

 

And if this doesn't change, in 4 years, we'll have 20 holiday dragons, and only 4 egg slots for new members... Yikes!

[zippuzzle]

I support this idea. While having there BE limits is an integral part of the game, there's so many dragons. Especially as Skadi said above, having to pick and choose Holidays during such a limited time is painful even to the players with the most slots. I enjoyed getting to see all the NRs with the birthday release, but I also felt kind of bad knowing that most people wouldn't have space to pick up even just one of each. It seems like there's an amount of frustration with the slot limits (4-8) vs quantity of dragons (300+) that could really do with some sort of adjustment, one number has continued to increase while the other has stayed largely the same.

[Fuzzbucket]

14 hours ago, seventeendeer said:

I think the argument that more breeds should equal more slots makes perfect sense.

 

I wonder if it might not be time to give the limits an overhaul in general. They worked just fine when we had fewer breeds and fewer mechanics, but I feel as the game has gotten more intricate, it would be interesting to reconsider if there might not be ways the system could be reworked to support other parts of the game better. I once saw someone bring up the idea of having separate limits for commons and rares, which I thought was interesting - I think we could get away with introducing a couple of extra rare slots and several extra common slots at the same time for every trophy level, if a divide like that was introduced. It might alleviate other problems the game has at the same time (ratios, cave-blockers, etc etc). Other dividers between different kinds of slots could also be considered (biome-specific, generation-specific, element-specific? These don't solve problems, but might inspire new game mechanics that could be fun and add to the resource management aspect of the game - especially if they came with more egg slots than we have now across the board, to keep things fun and no more challenging than the game currently is).

 

Support for this suggestion + putting the idea out there that it might be worth looking into more in-depth development of the limits system too while we're at it.

 

Support increased limits, but nothing that involves "rares" - as TJ has said many times, rare is primarily user defied.

[seventeendeer]

53 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

 

Support increased limits, but nothing that involves "rares" - as TJ has said many times, rare is primarily user defied.

 

Oh I didn't know that, that's interesting! Yeah, then that addition doesn't work out, that's true.

 

But yes, OP's suggestion is at least a good start to ironing out the limits. There's a lot of potential in the system, but scaling it with the number of breeds should be the bare minimum update IMO. Further development can always be added later if TJ thinks of something or someone has any concrete suggestions.

[Skadi]

4 hours ago, Fuzzbucket said:

 

Support increased limits, but nothing that involves "rares" - as TJ has said many times, rare is primarily user defied.

also as a "common" collector, i don't want my slots being defined by "rarity." I would like to pick up as many common dragons as possible with my slots. I know a few other users with similar playstyles, who prefer to collect specific dragons, and i think they'd also be annoyed that the empty slots are for dragons they don't collect.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Skadi

[GhostMouse]

Support! The game keeps growing but our available slots have stayed the same for years. Any extra room to work with would be great.

[Fuzzbucket]

51 minutes ago, Skadi said:

also as a "common" collector, i don't want my slots being defined by "rarity." I would like to pick up as many common dragons as possible with my slots. I know a few other users with similar playstyles, who prefer to collect specific dragons, and i think they'd also be annoyed that the empty slots are for dragons they don't collect.

 

Ooh that too !

[trystan]

support from me too!

 

(fwiw, the other egg-hatching game i play has 5 slots for everyone, no matter how many creatures you have.  but when there's events, which have defined start and end dates, the egg slots increase to 7 for the duration of the event.)

Edited June 1, 2023 by trystan

[StarlightLion]

Support! I think it might be worth talking about temporary slots for holidays too. Even hard-focusing two breeds only for Valentines and Christmas, I simply don't have the space to do even half the things I want to. There's too many dragons and too many pairings, and it also means I'm extremely unlikely to have space to breed my CBs that I'm not using for other people, whether as gifts or trades. And having a huge handful of different breeds to chase isn't any easier - there's just so many dragons and so little space.

[Stormcaller]

On 5/31/2023 at 5:54 AM, KageSora said:

...but even something as simple as a 2-egg increase for each trophy level would be amazingly helpful in letting players grab more eggs.

 

IMHO, an increase of that size would be wonderful! 

[NightEagle]

Tiny add-on (just an idea, though)

If egg and hatchling limits are increased, following up with freeze- and kill-slots would be nice, too! Since many people use freeze slots for sprite collection, so I think that should be raised in accordance with "more unique breeds" as well.

[KageSora]

39 minutes ago, NightEagle said:

Tiny add-on (just an idea, though)

If egg and hatchling limits are increased, following up with freeze- and kill-slots would be nice, too! Since many people use freeze slots for sprite collection, so I think that should be raised in accordance with "more unique breeds" as well.

 

I fully agree on those, but I figured they'd be worth their own suggestion if the growing things limits ever got boosted!  I also think those would be good to re-assess regardless, so perhaps raising one or both of them even if the egg and/or hatchlings limits weren't increased.

 

Kill especially as we now have more zombie types as well as more breeds that require using high risk actions or BSAs to obtain where failure results in a dead egg/hatchling.  There's simply more things now that one needs to risk a kill slot on to obtain.

Edited June 4, 2023 by KageSora

[seventhdevil]

Full support.

[Keileon]

Throwing in my support.

[KittyHawkMC]

This is a great idea! I particularly agree with the argument concerning Holiday dragons and their attainability, especially for new players. I'd love to see this implemented!

[PrincessLucy]

On 6/4/2023 at 5:03 AM, NightEagle said:

Tiny add-on (just an idea, though)

If egg and hatchling limits are increased, following up with freeze- and kill-slots would be nice, too! Since many people use freeze slots for sprite collection, so I think that should be raised in accordance with "more unique breeds" as well.

Support for the extra egg slots, plus this as well. I am a heavy freezer, and am usually pretty close to out of freeze slots.

[Nimrodel]

This suggestion absolutely has my support too. 

[AzureZeroX]

Support. 

It would be nice to be able to collect new release dragons, work on lineage projects, and also have room to try to work on long term goals like maybe breed a Stat, make a neglected, work on the encyclopedia, etc. Giving the older players more options on how to use their slots is never a bad thing in my eyes,  as we can always use more slots to play with.  Sometimes large releases can take all the slots even on Plat trophies.  And I love the big releases, I would rather get more slots to hold more dragons than suggest smaller releases. 

Additionally,  this is helping the newer players as it allows them to keep up with the increasing breed numbers, especially holidays which are getting to be numerous. 4 slots on a new member is just too small in my opinion with the 300+ dragons there are to collect and it could be too daunting on newer players who may also be trying to keep up with the monthly to bi-monthly new releases. Since the number of dragons is only going to get larger, I think it is time to increase the base slots. 

[_Charky]

No objections from me either way, but if people are loking for some kind of caveat to add: having extra slots only work in the AP (and/or perhaps from breeding, like we used to have) might help with those pesky xeno walls.