I started a discussion to test the waters on how much people are gaining moonstone shards. The discussion started due to a comment (5 posts down) a dev had made on the average moonstones that players could get by doing basic gameplay. From what I had gathered, it is nearly impossible for the average player to get 3-6 moonstones per day doing just gameplay, so I decided to open a suggestion thread to express my thoughts and allow other players to share their experience and ideas on how to make this more fair and engaging.

A few notes to make before I get into it:

• Yes, I understand the developers / artists / moderators need to make money. I will go into more detail regarding this.
• This is ONLY through gameplay. Through tasks, activities and gameplay. This does not count buying or selling through the premium shop or Flea Market.
• I'm not trying to make moonstones so easy to get it'll make them useless.
• Please read the entirety of the post before adding your opinion. Discussion, ideas, and criticism is encouraged as we're all trying to make Lorwolf successful.

As I stated in my previous thread, I had spent hours and hours from launch until today grinding both the campaign and the tasks and I have only gotten 60 moonstone shards (6 moonstones) in 3 days. That averages 2 per day. It's close to the expected amount, yes, but this is hours of grinding. As embarrassing as it is to admit, it's around 5-7 hours of farming. Now that I have to return to work that's not going to happen any longer. The casual player will never be able to achieve that unless they got super lucky with the drop rates.

My concerns for this is as follows:

• This will make the game frustrating for casual players. Eventually, if they feel they can never get something without dishing out the money, they will stop playing.
• As players stop playing, the ad revenue drops, thus the devs will lose money in the long run.
• If it was purely cosmetic, I can sort of let it pass, however, its not. Moonstones are used for expansions as well. Cooking, Mining, Den and hunting slot upgrades, etc. These things, in my opinion, can lean into more pay to win aspects, as players who buy moonstone shards can upgrade their stuff and get more materials, food, etc. That, and these upgrades get extremely expensive, all the way up to 100 MS ? Holy geeze.
• Even if it is cosmetic only, I feel it will only make casual players feel sad that their wolves cant have as much stuff as those who are willing to pay.
• A lot of people (me included) are willing to support the game if they believe the system is fair. If they know they can make moonstones at a fair rate, they're more likely to spend money to speed up the process or just support the site and the developers! If they believe they are forced to buy moonstones to get anywhere, they're more likely to stop playing.
• The harder it is to get ahold of MS, the harder it is for people to let it go. People will want to sell most things for MS versus pebbles. People will also not want to buy things for MS due to the difficulty. The economy already leans heavily towards MS.

Now, here are some ideas and suggestions, some of which was mentioned in the previous thread. Keep in mind, I'm not wanting the devs to implement all of them, this is just a list of ideas that could help balance it better.

• Simply put, increase the drop rates.
• Instead of just a shard for completing the 10 activities, give a moonstone once a day.
• Instead of just getting a single shard for completing 10 activities, give shards per activity with a limit. For example: the first 6 tasks give you a shard, after that, pebbles only.
• Campaign. A rare chance for it to drop either through combat or something else. @/Notos suggest hard limiting this so that people don't spam it all day. This will also encourage people to do the campaign daily even if they're not interested in WW.
• Add more pebble buying options. Allow us to buy expansions with pebbles. Give us nice cosmetic items with pebbles. In the future, allow some genes and/or breeds to be purchased through pebbles.

Thanks for taking the time to read this thread. Any suggestions or ideas will be added to the main page with credit to make it easier to view. Again, discussion is encouraged, so even if you disagree, feel free to let me know why!

Back in the beta, I believe we were able to buy expansions with pebbles (Please feel free to correct me if I'm just imagining this! Either way my point stands) and it was great. It was a good high-value pebble sink, which would keep the market from oversaturating considering how easy they are to get. I know there's den upgrades, but those aren't exactly large sinks, even a bit later on. Even playing casually around work hours, I've gathered over a hundred thousand pebbles through hoardselling and tasks, but I've only found about 30 moonstone shards since launch. I'm not saying to decrease pebble availability, but switching some of those moonstone sinks to pebble sinks would be great.

Agreed with both, it would be wonderful if expansions costed pebbles and moonstones were easier to obtain.

Yeaaaah - while you can upgrade your first den with pebbles, there's so many things locked behind moonstones that I feel limited on what I want to spend my actual pebbles on. There aren't a lot of sinks that seem immediately appealing to me, at least early on - and what sinks I am looking into are expensive (if it's a sink at all, it's that custom apparel page.)

I heavily support this, but I’m starting to think this is intentional with how long it’s gone unaddressed as it was something talked about in EA as well. The only real pebble sink right now is the MM and it isn’t much. I feel like we’re headed towards a heavy P2W system and I am afraid that’s what the devs want. Addicting gameplay to encourage people to grind for hours and eventually spend money because they are frustrated. I see it too much in mainstream gaming and I had hoped my beloved browser games were above that. But it’s disappointing and disheartening to see be seeing it here.

I wasn't around for EA, but my advice as a long-time SIM player and former dev member of another SIM game: give it some time before we question the balancing - it's always easier to scale up than to scale down. I've earned at least 2 moonstones worth a day outside of my membership. I have more waiting in the queue for me to get more bone paste. I could see it needing to be bumped if this is all that is planned for the game, but I'm sure as the game grows and builds, it will balance itself out a touch better with added features.

Support for all of these. The more I look into this rabbithole, the more I realize how badly both the moonstone and pebble systems need to be reworked. It's especially disheartening as someone who was told pre-beta that not making the game P2W was a priority for Lorwolf.