tl;dr- I think we get enough shards (insert comparison to flight rising). I do think we could use a farmable source though, so support for shards when releasing wolves, and maybe even as campaign drops, but at a MUCH lower rate than OP suggests.
To be completely honest, I don't think MS shard availability is too low. I think the bigger problem is the lack of pebble sinks and overabundance of desirable things sold solely for MS. If pebbles were more valuable, players could actually reasonably buy MS from other players. Right now everyone just wants MS and pebbles are practically worthless, making it feel like we're not getting enough MS even though the site is relatively generous with them.
I come from mainly playing Flight Rising which is generally considered to be in a good place with how it handles its premium currency. Over there you can get gems from the site itself in the following ways (i think this is all of them):
- 1 gem per day for keeping your dragons fed
- 0.13-0.34g per day per new familiar bonded (Max bonding takes 89 days and gives you 2 iron chests containing 1-5g each and 1 gilded chest containing 10-20g. These rewards are once per familiar type. Currently there are 1108 familiars on the site. Assuming you had them all and bonded with each every day, your maximum possible one-time familiar income would be equivalent to 149-373g per day for 89 days, after which it drops to zero until new familiars come out.)
- Trading items with an npc to acquire extra gilded chests. 10-20g per chest. Rate limited due to trade items being from gathering and familiars, which you can only do a limited number of times per day.
- Finding iron or gilded chests in gathering. Rate limited due to limited gathering turns per day. RNG dependent
- Finding very rare chests in the coliseum that award 1g. RNG dependent, unlimited.
- Getting a very rare gem from releasing a dragon. Data is limited but it seems to be around a 1% chance to give 1-2 gems. RNG dependent, unlimited.
In other words, the game hands you relatively few gems per day with any level of reliability or repeatability. Now keeping in mind that 1gem=1 moonstone shard, here's what we get here:
- 3 shards per day for doing 10 activities
- 4 shards per day for pageant votes (if you do the whole week)
- (apparently) max 25 shards per day from doing any profession. RNG, limited
They're hard to directly compare due to the nature of a lot of the FR sources (RNG, limited, dependent on how many familiars you're bonding with, etc), but just looking at the bare minimum 1-click-per-day style activity, Lorwolf is more generous. Flight Rising gives you 1 gem for clicking ‘feed’ (which you need to acquire food in the first place to do), and Lorwolf gives you the equivalent of 4 gems for clicking 'vote' (which requires nothing more than a starter wolf).
Things aren't even more expensive here. LW premium genes are cheaper than FR, and one of LW's premium breeds is cheaper while the other is equal.
I think what makes Flight Rising gems feel so much better is that the free currency actually has use and value. Most players likely get the bulk of their gems not from the site itself, but from other players through buying and selling. You can easily sell things for gems because they're not too valuable for other players to spend, and players are always trading premium for free currency because they need the free currency to buy desirable things. I really very strongly feel the absolute most urgent and needed change for Lorwolf is adding more repeatable, desirable pebble sinks. I think doing so would fix a lot of problems.
All that said, I do think Lorwolf is lacking in an infinitely repeatable shard grind. Giving value to removing pets from the system is always a good thing, so I do think adding shards as a possible drop is a good idea and I do support it. However, I think the rate should be much MUCH lower. Like 1%. I'd also support shards potentially dropping from any campaign enemy, at an even lower rate. This is something you can do infinitely, and as already discussed I think the site is already very generous with giving out premium currency. So these should be very rare events that are essentially there for the infinite grinders. If we fix the value of pebbles, then these infinite grinders would be happy to sell their extras for pebbles, and everyone wins.
Edited to add that I do agree with Gaia's post below this. This next idea is a bit off topic for this particular suggestion though, so I didn't want to make a whole new post for it. But yeah, I vastly prefer games that allow me to allocate my play time on whatever day I want. My solution to this would be to change the shard limit to a soft cap, where the odds of getting one from profession stuff is much higher for the first 25, then decreases drastically. That allows more casual players to still reach the ‘cap’ in a reasonable timeframe, allows players who miss a day to play longer and catch up, and still limits players with infinite time from flooding the market.
