Right now, between everything costing moonstones (which makes it highly pay-to-win; but that’s another issue) & the site never running out of things to give you to do, there’s a high reward for people to dump hours and hours and hours into grinding the game, but not much reward for people to play casually.

I’m a f2p player, I’m not buying moonstones, and I neither have or want to spend the time playing this game during every waking hour. The result is that it becomes very frustrating to play, since I can’t afford anything and the progression is incredibly slow. I cant compete with p2p players and people with lots of grinding time, so it becomes incredibly restricting; I can’t even customize my wolves.

To be clear, I’m not saying restrict the game, or punish people who want to grind, just make it LESS punishing for people who can’t. Please.

agreed! I too am a F2P player, and I have a lot of time to invest due to not having a fulltime job/school/anything and I still can't compete with players who pay. I can't even work towards my goal of changing one of my wolves into a Zerda because I have to invest so much time and energy into getting moonstones, I can barely get one moonstone a day on a good day. my suggestions are:

• make it easier to get moonstones, e.g. give complete moonstones rather than shards from mining, and give all players 1 moonstone/day by default, like FR's well-fed bonus giving 1 gem/day. this way people who pay for the monthly subscription aren't the only ones getting free moonstones every day, which makes the game more fair towards F2P players. of course keep the subscription at 3 moonstones a day so that people who pay for it still get what they pay for.
• getting WWs is absurdly hard and time consuming. a wild wolf token is being worked on, so I'll give this a pass… for the most part. in the meantime, though, maybe increase the odds of successfully getting a WW from an encounter to 25% until the token is implemented. also if the theory that the encounter event is on a timer based on how long the site has been open on the computer is correct, please, for the love of all that is good, remove the timer and just let rng do its thing. casual players rarely have the time to be on for several hours straight.
• make Hunting and Fishing take less stamina. there is no reason for these activities to take as much stamina as they do. why does Hunting take more than 25% stamina while all other activities are limited to 25% max, it makes no sense, so please make Hunting cost 25% per hunting trip. putting Fishing at 10% or 15% should be fine, 25% is really too much for that activity seeing as the minigame itself also demands a lot of attention and can still yield poor results if the player isn't fast enough.
• make Gauntlet more viable and fair to play. make it cost less stamina, increase the lower tier rewards, and balance it so that on the lowest five tiers we only fight 3 enemies, then 4 enemies for tiers six to ten, then finally 5 enemies starting from tier eleven. as it currently stands, it is thoroughly unfun and even getting through the first tier is simply not worth the time and stamina cost when balanced against the abysmal ‘rewards’.
• slight balancing suggestion for Arena while I'm at it, this isn't related to the main problem in this thread though. please make the bots slightly less smart. while I appreciate the challenge, having bots in the top 3 when more than 3 players are playing just seems unfair. honestly if you only make it so that bots can't get 3-stars before the first player has a 3-star, that would be fine with me. also balance out the “bosses” because they are thoroughly unfun and nearly impossible to win.
• slot unlocks, in any activity as well as the den, should all cost pebbles rather than moonstones. why do these things cost moonstones anyway, that simply isn't fair to us F2P players and has been a topic of frustration with people who can afford it as well.
• reduce pricing on moonstone genes. only on the genes, not the breedchanges or other items. just make the moonstone genes more affordable. if you want to include the breedchanges as well I will welcome that, of course, but idk if making Volmyr more affordable is a good idea considering they're the only breed that will successfully yield mostly Bracchus from a pairing with a Bracchus… actually, can we make Zerda the same rarity as Bracchus and solve that problem entirely, that would be a good reason to not make breedchanges cheaper either. I went on three tangents in one small paragraph, my apologies for that.

I think that's about all I can think of.

Sites that give premium in any form, and who let players exchange it freely are awesome. There's not a lot of currency in circulation yet and besides, 1 moonstone shard is worth 1 FR gem. Asking for more is just too much.

“Be more like Flight Rising” is a thing I see A LOT and it's a bit much. FR is 10 years old. This site is less than two weeks old. Don't compare a fully balanced game to one that is just learning to walk. Give the game economy a little time to get it's legs. FR treasure/gem ratio was WAY out of whack in the early days too.. and there were few ways to make currency (heck, so far LW is doing better than baby FR, it's super stable and no one is dying from lag. No downtime really, except for an hour for an update) If we want to compare MS breeds and gem breeds. A coatl and WC would be 200MS, veils 100MS. I think we're doing pretty good here.

Be patient. Give things a chance. Be fair in your comparisons.

I agree with most everything said here. If this site was a mobile game app i would have deleted it already for locking literally all meaningful progression behind real money and offering pennies at a rate of roughly “one every other day” unless you can grind really hard or get lucky. I'm giving it a chance because it's very new and seems to have a lot of potential, but if many players are asking for reform to the economy i think it's in poor taste to try and reverse comparisons for the purpose of saying the economy here is “fine”.

i also wish there was more to do that rewarded an active playstyle. Lorwolf at this time feels like an idle game, or an incremental one. You don't actually get to engage with it in any way beyond clicking various confirm buttons; all processes are automated (except bizarrely nesting pregnancies, which just seems like an annoyance and discourages me from breeding more), and not only don't require user input but actively refuse to have it. Battles are arbitrarily harder because wolves will randomly target every enemy instead of focus fire to reduce their numbers. Mining is just a waiting game but at least you can influence it by dropping ores i guess? I would really like to see an activity on the site that isn't just looking at a timer and pressing “collect rewards”.

As someone who hasn't put real money into the site, I disagree with most of these suggestions. My frame of reference is Furvilla and Neopets, which do not offer any free way to access premium currency at all – on Furvilla your only shot was to list stuff on the market and hope that someone was willing to pay premium currency for it.

Compared to that, getting moonstones on Lorwolf is surprisingly easy. Moonstone shards can pop up in just about any activity and can be reliably earned through voting in the Pageant.

It's okay if things take a while. I would recommend setting some other short-term goals in the meantime instead of focusing only on the really big ticket purchases. Zerdas, for example, are supposed to be special and rare. If everything on the site were easy to get from only a couple of days of gameplay, there would be no long-term goals to work toward and the whole thing would get boring too quickly.

The one change I would support here would be to make the first mining cart expansion cost pebbles instead of moonstones, since a 15 capacity cart is unusually restrictive compared to the other professions. That's not a pressing matter to me though.

“Be more like Flight Rising” is a thing I see A LOT and it's a bit much. FR is 10 years old.

My post isn't in the spirit of the suggestion but I support SCB here, because I see mentions of “well FR does this” and unless it's for the player's direct benefit (as in, “FR lets us pay by PayPal or credit card” or “FR has a Dev Tracker which is useful for finding developer posts”) it's really unfair to continually compare the two games.

Honestly given the nature of Lorwolf, seeing everything locked behind a premium doesn't surprise me. It's built like and operates like a mobile game that paywalls a lot of features. Technically you can still play without paying for the premium features, but you're gonna have a rough and slow time.

I'm also a F2P player at the moment, mostly because Lorwolf hasn't given me a reason to purchase moonstones. It does suck that basically every single customization option is locked behind this premium currency and I do hope as the site becomes more financially stable to support itself that more free content like more apparel sets will be released. There are so many quality of life updates that can be done and I think the easiest one would be removing the moonstone shard limit and also increasing their drops so we can get more of them throughout the day (and also the first upgrade of stuff being pebbles instead, please I need that).

There will likely be more ways to get moonstone shards too as the game goes on.

Yes I agree that it's really not surprising that lots of upgrades are locked behind a premium currency. The general structure of these pet sites all tend to be free to plays. The harsh truth is that ALL free to plays rely on grind for f2p players and try to bait you into spending money to expedite the process. And pet sites simply can't operate any other way, it's basically a very slow drip Games As a Service Model and I've never seen a pet site be successful on a mandatory paid subscription model either.

Right now this site has been officially open for less than two weeks and I think it's too early to judge whether the balance is right or not. There's been tons of complaints about FR being “not fun” or “grindy” and it's basically doing great for a pet site. But at the same time, the same complaints about DV being “not fun” or “grindy” has actually yielded to a very significant decline in the userbase and basically destroyed all the hype from the opening of the site. I'm not sure how things will pan out for Lorwolf.

It may not be fair to compare Lorwolf and FR but when these GAAS models all demand time and money from players, it's not going to be surprising if someone prefers to spend their limited time and money on a well established game with tons more QOL.

Agree with all of this. I managed to get over the original wall to interact with the game by selling WWs at the start, and then custom apparel, but once the price on WWs go down, I have no idea how F2P players are supposed to make ms.

Yes, that's actually exactly why i left Dappervolk (the sore lack of non-femme clothing didnt help though). There are definitely sites that don't rely on pure grind for monetary gain or make the grind rewarding enough that f2p users will continue to engage with the site despite not being able to afford the bonus features. Mweor and FurryPaws come to mind, where afaik money on mweor is mostly for bonus cosmetics and to get access to statues (basically a customized mweor that you get to design with an amount of markings based on the “tier” of statue bought), and on FP i believe it mostly gives you easier access to certain tools and the ability to have a forum avatar.

Even on FR, you're able to buy extra nests without spending gems unless that's been changed. Making a site pay to win is just kind of asking for your userbase to struggle to expand meaningfully. I think people bring up FR because it's a good example of a site that involves a lot of grind but is accessible enough that even free players can achieve many of their goals with some patience. I think the sentiment atm for Lorwolf is that it feels like some things will just be impossible if you aren't willing to drop potentially hundreds of dollars on the site. Especially once there's more WW with higher and higher IDs and muddier colored wolves become less valuable, there's no real way for free players to keep up economically, let alone compete. Even resource gathering for money is gatekept by premium currency- people who buy the expanded production slots can inherently sell more stacks of materials more often than someone who cannot or doesn't want to buy the moonstones to do it.

It may not be fair to compare Lorwolf and FR but when these GAAS models all demand time and money from players, it's not going to be surprising if someone prefers to spend their limited time and money on a well established game with tons more QOL.

This is right on the money. Nobody is obligated to “wait and see” with a game, especially if they don't get the luxury of spending lots of time/money on something they aren't enjoying.

The difference between FR and DV is how much grind is required to feel like you're “not missing out”. On FR, my dailies take maybe 20 minutes max, and that's all most people need to feel satisfied with their daily activity. They can keep playing this way and eventually reasonably afford desirables like genes, apparel, breeding projects, skins, etc even if retired items are usually off the table. The player has the option to grind heavily if they so choose, but the game doesn't punish people who can't coli grind/exalt for hours. It's left entirely to player choice and whether they can/want to attain its advantages.

DV on the other hand, took me significantly more time and mental energy to do its dailies. Its daily quests were a lot of clicking through dialogue boxes and doing several rounds of lengthy, repetitive minigames over and over. (The ones I remember were a lot more involved than Glimmer and Gloom, which requires very little brainpower to max daily.) When I played, if I didn't complete all my daily tasks, it felt like I was missing out on a big chunk of funds or effort towards plot progression/stat accumulation. The grind was mandatory if I wanted to make money or continue the story, and that was enough to make me drop the game before finishing its story.

Right now on Lorwolf, when den slots stop being desirable, there will be nowhere to spend pebbles save for the occasional, (typically low demand) MM good. This isn't just a matter of players being super into the shiny new premium patterns, breeds and custom apparel and skyrocketing moonstone value. This is giving the free currency very little use in the game's primary functions, and then putting everything a player would want to do behind either heavy grinding or paying. If you don't do your daily grind every day for months, you are missing out on your only real source of currency, your trickle feed of moonstones.

I don't think most pet sim players are looking for a game that requires no grind or effort whatsoever. They're looking to choose how much time they spend, and without feeling they need a massive time/money commitment to do the bare minimum.

Back to the actual suggestion at hand, I'm a KS backer and a heavy grinder, so I can't really offer any specific and new F2P/Casual friendly suggestions. I support more consideration for F2P and casual players, as well as the existing economy rebalance ideas.

I don't disagree that F2P needs attention given to it, and I always advocate for more pebble sinks and the like. I just dislike opening suggestion threads and continually seeing “well, on FR—” because if I wanted to play FR, I'd just play FR. :P

Sitting down to think more about it, I think the current system as it is right as this moment is fine, but there's a huge emphasis on “right at this moment.” There's nothing to compete with other players right now. There's no leaderboards. You don't need to train a wolf to the maximum level to have a steady source of Pebbles and event currency. There aren't limited time events with retiring items that will go away for months or even years. The amount of things to buy right now is such a small amount that I feel like without custom apparel as a mechanic, a lot less people would be interested in Lorwolf. So realistically, it doesn't really matter right now that moonstones are limited because there's nothing to do with them either. You don't need to gene up wolves immediately, and if you want a shortcut, you can trade pebbles for moonstones, which some people do. Even then, a majority of genes exist for pebbles (although I keep forgetting that they do, mostly because I don't look at them because my wolves need some sprinkling first).

I think the more important thing to look at here is the answer to this question: what is it that people so badly want moonstones for? Why do you feel you're at a disadvantage right now?

As a F2P player, right now I really just want customizability over my wolves. Like I said, I want to besprinkle so many of them to get better colors, but that costs moonstones. Once I get good colors for them, I'll look into genes, with a majority of them being for pebbles (luckily for me, I'm not a fan of the Stripes set, so I don't have to worry about those). The other issue is apparel, of which there's basically none of, since most of it is custom made and locked behind moonstones since they cost moonstones to make. Or different colored noses…which I'm not a fan of since I only get 5 apparel slots.

However, this doesn't put me at an inherent disadvantage against other players. I'm not losing anything because my wolves will be without clothes for another month or two (except maybe Pageant, but I make it a point to vote wolves who would definitely not win under normal circumstances for this reason). That seems like a typical curve for joining new games when you don't have much funds anyway.

The second thing is I wish I could get the three non-starter breeds, but I'm just biding my time waiting for the prices of those to go down, and they will at some point. It's inevitable with how quickly wolves can have puppies. But again, that doesn't put me at a disadvantage that I feel the game is pay-to-win (again, emphasis on this moment. I know once I finally unlock the second Mining location, this will start becoming annoying).

Since you need 10 shards to craft an actual moonstone I think the droprates of them should be increased, or the crafting amount should be lowered to 2-5, and the cap (which I haven't even run into yet I don't think, unless it's a silent cap that doesn't tell you that you hit a limit) should be removed. This would be the easiest way to help the F2P crowd. The second would be having the first profession upgrades cost pebbles and not moonstones.

This is an important discussion to have, sooner rather than later, of course. At this point in time, though, I really don't think anyone is being punished. (unless you want to dress up your wolves. that one hurts so bad right now)