Husky's take is pretty good. The drought really damaged a span of time we needed more pattern releases to keep breeding interest up; there are tons of easy straws to grasp out there right now even in just the "natural animal patterns" department, and given so far we have patterns that are flat layer masks with some selective blurs or gradients on the edges, I will say that I'm fairly surprised at how few we've seen released in a year, with that in mind. Several CA artists have firmly whooped that record solely by themselves, bit of a shame.
The site needs some desperate QoL updates in a bad way-- I personally really am hopeful wolf sorting re-configs so applying patterns, using items, listing them on the FM, etc-- are taking up some of the coders' time right now. Professions still need some tweaks, farming is the most egregious of these. For folks with a job, having to babysit timers like we're playing farmville or alternatively paying the farmers for a 12 hour chunk of time we know we can't utilize most of just feels awful. ):
The change from ms to pebbles was a great change for expanding the cooking pot and mining cart, credit where it's due there!
The quarterly events are cute and fun, I like how relaxed the pacing has been! I love that even people that can't participate for the whole month aren't left out, and the gauntlet gives those that can something to keep pushing against. PVE arena has probably been my favorite thing the game has added since it launched, hands down.
I was glad to see staff adjust ticket gain during the first one-- was less thrilled with the speed of boss encounter fixes with the second, but I do recognize they went out of their way to apologize to the player base for that! It was appreciated, but would have been nice to hear from the team that the problem was recognized and that a fix was in the works before the event was almost over.
The pebble path is great, the variety of apparel has been nice. I'm very glad they reconsidered immediate retirement of everything, that was a fantastic choice for keeping the game attractive to new people joining-- the "epic" rarity sets give them something to save up for and for people to ""invest"" in, without completely locking away a whole apparel type behind a loot box system. That also ensures the loot boxes themselves in future years won't get slogged down so quickly with just endless recolors of everything going into it. A++ choice there, no notes.
More den expansions would be nice, but I feel we're at the point where we need den cost caps in place as well, they don't need to keep increasing in price per den forever. The value of 50 slots is already dubious at 90ms imo. I'd also like to see den slot expansions, with pagination if necessary.
Head mod Q has been doing their best to bridge communication gaps, but I think the devs still need to work on getting more open lines of communication going on the whole, especially after the discord closure. The patch notes are a good start, but they are very by-the-minute, and I think people would like to hear more about some slightly longer-term plans and how they are going as well. People don't need to know every time someone sneezes on the back end, but a bit of a pulse check on some longer-running issues would be nice.
There is a lot more I could say, but in the interest of brevity, those are some of the biggest wins (which have been lovely to see) and most glaring sore spots for the year so far. :P
