so. i've been playing videogames and web-based games for a long time. (about twenty years, give or take.) i consider myself to be something of a connoisseur when it comes to the ways that live-service games (LSGs) attract and keep their players. that little fracas in the update announcement thread today got me thinking about good monetization vs bad monetization practices in free-to-play (f2p) games.

some caveats: i don't dev games for a living. i never went to school for it either, lol. however, i have done a lot of personal observation in game communities, and i have a biopsychology degree with an emphasis on behavioral science. i know a thing or two about incentivization and how carefully game devs have to straddle the line between “we need to make money to keep developing our game and feeding ourselves” and “our players may be driven away if they feel that we're just grabbing for their cash.” i don't intend this to be an end-all, be-all lecture on how all f2p games should work, just a broad discussion of things that i've seen work well in the past.

are you still here? i'm somewhat impressed and a bit flattered as well. allow me to take you on a journey through the world of free-to-play live-service gaming.

first of all, some definitions. (this is how i'll be using these terms in my post. if you've seen them defined differently, please refrain from engaging me in a semantic argument. ain't nobody got time for that.)

what is a live-service game?
any game that functions on a model of “some amount of content exists already, and there is an expectation that content will continually be added throughout the game's lifespan”. final fantasy 14 is a live-service game. league of legends, destiny 2, and warframe are as well. these titles have a lot in common with more traditionally published games, but with the definition i'm using, browser-based games such as flight rising, neopets, and lorwolf are live-service games as well. some content exists, and we the players can expect updates/tweaks/additions into the foreseeable future.

what is a free-to-play game?
by my reckoning, f2p is any game that allows you to access and play a significant amount of its content without being required to pay money. obviously, “significant” must be left up to personal interpretation. there's an entire separate conversation to be had about where the lines between “free to play”, “pay to win”, and “pay to play” are. that's not what this thread is for, and we're just going to accept that the definition of “free-to-play” is somewhat nebulous.

so, lorwolf is a f2p browser-based LSG. cool! what does that mean?

1. lorwolf dev team must manage ongoing costs.
2. lorwolf dev team maintains the ability to make whatever changes to gameplay they want.
3. lorwolf dev team is taking on a lot of risk making this type of game.
4. lorwolf players are taking on a lot of risk when they spend money to support this type of game.
5. lorwolf players are here to have fun, not take on a second job.
6. lorwolf players have unusually frequent opportunities to affect game development.

starting from the top: ongoing costs. the devs need to pay employees, pay for server space to host the site, etc. it is not a one-time cost of development and then the game is printed on a CD and shuttled out the door. some of this cost can be offset with ads, but large portions of petsite userbases use adblock full-time, and lorwolf doesn't get any revenue from ads if the players are not actually seeing them.

now, i personally use an adblocker, but i have a lot of sympathy for browser-based developers who rely on ads for revenue. i'm a champion at ignoring quiet, still-image banner ads; they hardly affect my player experience at all. but lorwolf has been showing us a lot of ads that are intrusive, annoying, inappropriate, or even make playing the game hard or impossible. we get annoyed at the devs about this, but it's surprisingly difficult for devs to find advertising partners who aren't terrible! this is because ad services don't care that popups and intrusive banner ads make the player experience worse. they don't have to, because the players aren't The Customer, the developers are. so devs are fighting a constant battle to keep intrusive ads off their site, so that their players will willingly turn off adblock, so that the site can make some revenue to pay for ongoing costs. phew.

this means ads are pretty much my least-favorite way for a f2p game to make revenue. the players hate them, the devs don't actually make that much revenue from them and have to resort to other, more "predatory" monetization tactics, and then nobody is happy.

next: ongoing changes to gameplay. we the players obviously hope these will be in our favor, but LSG devs are frequently stuck making unpopular changes (nerfs, anyone?) that they feel will be in the long-term health of the game. sometimes they're right, and i've seen LSGs implement nerfs or balances that cause an uproar for two or three days before everyone realizes “hey, this isn't that bad actually” and moves on.

but nobody can see the future! sometimes nerfs are overbearing and make gameplay less fun, and sometimes buffs can take a challenging gameloop and make it too easy, losing player engagement or causing the game economy to fluctuate wildly. sometimes the same exact change can result in BOTH THINGS, each for different groups of people. balancing a game while it's live is an art, not a science, and devs are going to make mistakes. just like players sometimes make mistakes when they think a nerf is going to completely ruin everything!

LSG developers that are willing to listen to player feedback, and balance the game around the majority of their players having fun, are going to have much more success than developers who think their changes are always Correct™.

then: devs taking on a lot of risk making LSGs. admittedly, there's a lot of risk involved with traditionally published games as well, but LSGs have the unique danger of becoming ongoing financial nightmares due to sunk cost fallacy and a desire to salvage the time and effort you've already put into it. a traditionally published game might tank, but the developers can only shrug and take notes for next time. with a live-service game, devs are likely to feel a lot of pressure to keep a game afloat or try to redeem it even if it might be better to abandon ship. this can tie in with game nerfs as mentioned above, or potentially result in the devs publishing gimmicky, shallow content to keep players around just a little bit longer, to get just a little bit more money from them.

the problem is, players can often tell when devs are doing this! nobody wants to feel like they're being manipulated or backed into a corner, especially not when engaging with something that's supposed to be a fun past time. on the other hand, good substantial content requires time and money to make. that money can (and should!) come from the players, but how players are encouraged to spend money is the heart of the issue.

LSGs are not "completed" games, and a player can't know if the game will even still be around in a month, a year, five years. it's not like buying a Super Mario 64 cartridge that sits on your game shelf for you to revisit whenever you feel like. spending money on a LSG is a question of “will i get [x] dollars of enjoyment out of this game purchase right now or in the near future?” some part of this decision means weighing the value you will get in terms of gameplay versus the value of your dollar if you spent it elsewhere.

a free-to-play game with many options to progress through the game completely free is probably going to be more appealing than a f2p game that requires many $$ worth of premium currency to access core game features.

• users being able to make small amounts of premium currency via regular gameplay? very appreciated, but becomes very frustrating if premium items are priced so high that they take months of saving up anyway.
• the option to upload user-made cosmetic content via premium currency? pretty nice! not a core game feature/blocking progression if i can't spend $$!
• clothing that requires premium currency to purchase? reasonable! also not a core game feature or blocking progression.
• the option to spend small amounts of premium currency to skip occasional hurry-up-and-wait timers? probably acceptable. f2p players can just wait and paying players can have a slight edge, which they've “earned” by helping the site stay afloat. might be for a core game feature, but does not completely block progression if i can't spend $$.
• having most of your core game features blocked by timers that can be skipped by spending small amounts of premium currency? the player is starting to feel like they're being forced to spend $$. sure, they can wait, but there are limited or no features that they can play on your game while they do so. they may start spending their money on other games that they feel value their time and effort.
• having certain core game features completely reliant on premium currency? such as, i don't know, locking expansions to cooking and mining behind premium currency and thus giving paying players a significant gameplay advantage over free-to-play players? this is the recipe for a very upset userbase.

this sort of segues into the next point: ultimately, players are here to have a good time. it's a game, it's something people want to do to relax or entertain themselves while recovering from the barren, life-draining capitalist drudgery everyday work/school schedule many of us are saddled with. it's really important for devs to identify why their players started playing, and what they're interested in seeing going forward, if they want to have a steady userbase and thus a steady income.

to borrow today's example: a significant chunk of lorwolf players really like searching for and recruiting wild wolves! this tells us it's a system with a pretty good reward structure. rare encounters, rarer success rates, and even rarer chances of getting a really lovely colored wolf actually provide incentive for many players, up to a point. we saw today how that random-chance reward can quickly be rendered so improbable as to completely discourage people from playing at all. the knucklebone tokens are a shuffle in the correct direction, because highly desired game rewards should never ever be 100% dependent on RNG.

having a pity-system in place where people can earn their way toward getting the thing even if RNG is working against them is extremely effective in terms of balancing player frustration with ingame rewards. however, forcing players to collect 100 knucklebones for one wolf is totally unreasonable (again, as we saw today). having watched these kind of reward/pity systems in practice, i've come to the conclusion that players will generally feel a pity system is fair if they are guaranteed the prize after grinding twice-ish as much as if the RNG had given it to them “on time”. sorry i don't really have better words to describe that idea, lol.

for example, this would look like: wild wolf encounters are successful 1 out of every 10 times, going purely off numbers. 10% success rate. but people know stats aren't guarantees, and are still engaging willingly with the game as they hit encounter 11, encounter 12, encounter 13. by the time they hit failed encounter 20, the player has started to feel pretty frustrated, and possibly like their time would be better spent elsewhere. without a pity system, that might be a player you lose. but with a pity system, the player can take those 20 knucklebones and exchange them for the wild wolf prize they were chasing.

there will always be lucky players who get 3 wild wolves out of 10 encounters, but for the ones on the other end of the luck bell-curve, a decently balanced pity system can be the difference between a game they sink hours and money into, and a game they take a pass on. we aren't playing this game to take on a second boring, pointless, low-reward menial job. we don't even have dental!

this is why i would argue that 50 knucklebones and a 15k pebbles cost is still completely ridiculous and unfair, but i guess time will tell with that one. :shrug:

finally: players have SO much opportunity to affect a live service game's development, compared to a traditionally published game. not only is the game being created as the devs get to it, which means someone's random comment or OC could be integrated into the game later, we players have a lot of collective bargaining power. it's (mostly) our money that lets the game stay around. so it's in the devs' best interest to make changes that the players like, or at least don't hate. it was such a relief to see a developer respond to today's update post with “we hear you, we are making immediate changes and will be observing how it plays out, to see if more changes are needed”. players love a dev team that listens to them! this is a major strength of one of the oldest successful f2p LSGs on the market, warframe. i've drawn a lot of my experiences on f2p models from them.

this ramble got a bit away from me, and i'm losing my train of thought, so i suppose i'd better wrap it up.

tl;dr: doragon's opinions on f2p games, LSGs, and f2p LSGs.

1. players really fricken hate intrusive ads. allowing only quiet banner ads on the site would probably mean a lot of us voluntarily turning off our ad blockers. we want to support the site but not at our own detriment!
2. developers listening to player feedback is much appreciated. we know we can't have everything handed to us on a silver platter but if we're not having fun we'll go elsewhere!
3. locking core game features behind premium currency gives an unfair advantage to paying players, and is a major way to alienate your free players. limit premium locks to cosmetic features rather than mechanical advantages.
4. RNG can be really nice, or really horrible, it's all down to luck. having a “pity system” to let people slowly work toward that super-rare, super-desired drop is something players adore and appreciate. we don't want 0 randomness at all, we just want to feel like all our hours and hours of effort will pay off eventually.

there's probably more i could say and maybe i'll edit more thoughts in later, but i wanted to get this rant off my chest, lmao. thanks for reading! i'd love to hear other peoples' opinions on the topic.

ps: the word filter on this forum is draconian. we already have a 13+ age requirement, why am i being prevented from using basic gradeschool pseudoswears? c-r-a-p is censored??? really???????

Oh I love your breakdown here and how you lead up to your points. Very easy to read analysis.

I agree with everything you said here and I hope the dev team reads it and takes it to heart. I want to spend money here, but I just can't bring myself to do it because of the expansion issue. It was pebbles before launch. I don't see why that had to change. And a lot of changes seem geared to making people spend money; or I may just be mistrustful now of changes. My thought with the campaign food decrease was they were doing it for money, but I realize that was probably more of a balancing attempt.

Anyways, excellent post. I am glad we are not staying silent; I really love Lorwolf and how engaging it is! Makes me nostalgic about first joining FR when it launched. In a good way. :)

i wouldn't care about ads if there wasn't one in the middle of campaign, i don't mind fr's ads on the side and bottom

also, this game really shouldn't be created right now, that's what beta and early access was for

“My thought with the campaign food decrease was they were doing it for money, but I realize that was probably more of a balancing attempt.”

What Ezra said- and I am inclined to believe this, especially since even with the “nerf”, in “The Neck”, Darkspine's first sword area, I am not having issues with food at all. The monsters drop lots of cookable food and I can't keep up in cooking :') Not a bad thing, though! Hopefully they'll fix the other areas better.

But yes. Well written! We really do need more pebble sinks. Though I can see them being hesitant on changing the gem expansions now since a good amount of people have already bought them (including me, couldn't stand only having 15 cart slots) by now, and that might make things a bit more difficult. But it would be good to change, regardless.

@ezra

thank you! i'm glad it was an easy read. :)

i've been thinking about the campaign changes from yesterday, and while the food nerf is probably going to be okay in the long run, the other changes bother me.

1. boss fight changes to make the encounters significantly harder to win
2. adding in the “something?” encounter in Beta, and then the moth encounter yesterday, both of which dilute encounter pools and make earning currency much slower and more annoying

these changes feel like the devs are discouraging us from engaging with the only timer-free gameloop the site has to offer. like, do you actually want us to play your game, or not??

in my opinion, timer-based cooldowns are fine as long as there is something in the game that can be engaged with for as long as the player desires. if i want to drop four hours of my saturday grinding hard on lorwolf to save up for something i want, it is incredibly disincentivising to find my efforts completely blocked because garbage encounters in the campaign have drained me of all my food stores with very little to show for it. it feels like the devs are actually punishing me for putting time into their game.

but doragon, pebble inflation is through the roof right now!! pebbles are too easy to grind for!!

i am going to stop you right there and say: i have 7000 pebbles. i am not actually rolling in the dough! this is because i'm a casual player who isn't interested in grinding the campaign for hours at a time.

the campaign changes have made pebbles much harder to earn, so grinders are earning a “reasonable” amount (the issue devs were trying to address), and casual players are earning effectively nothing (the unintended side effect). solving game currency inflation can't be done this way, or you'll chase all your casual players off.

what the game needs are pebble sinks. “sinks” remove currency from circulation entirely, which would have the intended effect of making pebbles more valuable. currently there are almost no pebble sinks! anywhere! there are basically no desireable things onsite that cost pebbles. there are the most basic genes, den expansions, and… … … help me out here if you think of anything else, because i can't.

now i know the game is in its very early days still and there's simply not that much content yet. but this is one of the reasons i think making cooking and mining expansions cost MS was a mistake. that was a pebble sink and helped the pebble be a valuable currency. as it is, nothing players REALLY WANT costs pebbles, so super-grinders can afford to trade for small amounts of MS, and casual players can't afford to trade at all. and this discrepancy is only going to get worse with campaign changes that make grinding harder and less fun.

@c h i v e

i feel your sentiment, but thats another hazard of LSGs. there was a ton of stuff that was ironed out and improved in beta, don't get me wrong! but for updates after launch, unless they're massive enough that they can form test groups to test every time they want to make changes, devs just sort of have to… make changes and pray they were the correct choice. i don't envy being in that position!

@stellori

i've seen the warframe devs run refund scripts when they make hotfix changes to the cost of stuff. i'm no coder, but i assume it's a little program that checks each account one by one and says, did this person unlock the expansion before [date and time]? if yes, put [correct number of MS] into that account. if no, move on to check the next account. perhaps the devs could do something like that here? i just think it would be a mistake to let the problem sit only to realize it needs to be changed in a year or two.

Really appreciate your breakdown and agree 100%!

I was excited for the Knucklebone launch, then became immediately disappointed. Honestly even with the change they made (50 tokens) still feels so difficult. My WW encounters are so rare to begin with, it feels almost pointless to look forward to collecting tokens. But yes, time will tell how effective this will be.

One thing I really appreciated about this site is how easy it is to keep playing. My day job is incredibly slow and boring, so I always have a tab open with Lorwolf where I can easily cycle through all of the Professions and slowly get my levels up. When I know I have a good chunk of time, I'll explore a bunch. Having the Campaign drop enough food where I can just keep exploring and feed solely from my earnings was really nice. I was happy that a fun/casual part of the site was so accessible. Now I've got wolves to level up and it's gonna take much longer due to less food. (I am sticking to “The Neck” with decent luck, always cycling through cooking but still…)

I dunno, I understand the game is still very new and the devs are doing their best. I've been wanting to support by getting the membership, but I'm holding off for a bit longer until there's a reliable balance to everything.

As for pebbles, that's something that is genuinely discouraging. At this point, everything I want to purchase in game is in moonstones. I want more apparel, to expand slots, etc. But I'm not convinced it's worth spending real money. Where do my pebbles go now?

Nice write-up! I really like how you broke things down, and I agree with you on a lot of points.

re: ads

I totally agree with you here- it's tough for devs to moderate ads when the servicers don't care about how disruptive they are. I know everyone is tired of comparisons to FR lol, but they just did an ad server change that caused lots of problems. Being a decade old site and with plenty of staff they were more equipped to crack down on it, so my heart really goes out to the little LW team having to deal with that on top of all the other brand-new-game full-launch issues.

re: WW

One thing I think might help public perception is the re-framing of the WW tokens by the devs as a bonus, not a pity system. At at 10% encounter rate, you have a 0.0027% chance of going 100 encounters without befriending a single WW. Obviously anything non-zero can happen, but that would be exceedingly rare! In reality, players are going to naturally end up befriending several wolves along the way to their “guarantee”- this would make this “guarantee” by definition more of a bonus, not a pity/mercy reward. A long-time player/loyalty perk, if you will. Yes it will definitely suck to go 20+ encounters without a WW to show for it, but I am also glad we will have a way to get a guarantee that we can presumably use whenever we want (special dates, etc). I think this is something the devs are going to keep a verrrry close eye on, and was set so that there is little to no possibility of a further nerf, but still leaves room for a potential buff. And because buffs feel good and nerfs feel bad (see the announcement thread reactions lol), I think this was ultimately a smart move for the long-term health of the game.

I also see a lot of people upset about tying it in with hunting for some reason?? I'm not sure why, because I just assumed that this was chosen because it's the easiest/most logical way for devs to implement a “turn in x to get y” system without reinventing the wheel, since that's essentially what hunting is. The only thing I can think of is that people are worried they will have a failure chance/have to wait to roll the quest, which I guess is fair, but until we know what the actual quest will look like I think it's a bit silly to grab pitchforks over it. I'm hoping the devs had foresight to have things already coded so that they can implement a permanent quest with synergy:none requirements, but who knows.

edit: oop just saw the knucklebone update. There is a 0.515% chance of going 50 encounters without a success, so the system has indeed moved closer to a pity system. It is still likely to befriend at least a wolf or two along the way, so I'm leaving the rest of the text up because I still think it has aspects of a bonus system, and it's worth considering. Also yay confirmed guarantee on hunting!

re: campaign

I feel that the campaign food nerfs were sorely needed (and I generally HATE nerfs lol). The fact that you could profit large amounts of stamina from the Campaign did not feel right to me, and made the entire stamina mechanic pointless. As a caveat to my feelings on this, I will admit that it is likely I will never really feel the effects of this, because I have such a massive stockpile from the campaign already, and that was only when I was going “hard” during the 4-digit period.

Buffing the boss fights though? With our current level cap of 10 I'm not even sure they're possible to win right now lol. This was a bit of a strange move to me. Boss fights are generally used to slow/limit grinding, but because LW's fights are auto-determined at the start, they can't really serve this purpose- the stamina to find the boss was already spent, win or lose there's no harm in starting and then immediately refreshing out of the fight. This leaves my only idea on why this was done to be to slow currency/item gain. But the moment a winning team is designed, we will be right back to where we started, except those without that winning combo will be left to hopelessly struggle. It's a much better option to add more sinks to the gain instead. Which brings me to-

re: free/paid currency split

I agree with you on changing expansion prices to pebbles instead of MS. Perhaps later, more truly “convenience”-based expansions could be MS, but all petsites are always in need of free currency sinks- you can never have enough imo. It's really odd to me that this most obvious venue was not taken. I ground the MS to expand mining once, but even that has proven to not be enough space to really be able to make the equipment/time cost of mining the second area worth it, and I've since gone back to the first area. This does not feel good to me as a player; to have worked so hard to unlock something only to not even be able to use it. In all the other professions, leveling up improves things- you cook faster, catch more fish, unlock more plots/hunts/recipes… in mining you get a chance to get ores that you will not even be able to collect enough of to smelt. The expansions here are content gating in a way that I feel the cooking expansions are not. Having more cooking space (with the recipes we have right now) just marginally improves the convenience of the feature- I would have to visit it less to do the same amount of work. Activities cap at 10 cooked food, which is easily doable with the base cap of 12 (especially if the profession is leveled). With the base cap of 15 ores, the “smelt 3” task becomes difficult, and can quickly spiral into making the “mine 15” task difficult to complete as well.

The CAT system seems super popular, and while I haven't really dived too much into it it seems like that + breeds/genes should be enough of a premium sink. If we end up needing more of premium sink, CATs would be the area I would target first if I was a dev. I'm guessing the devs are currently operating on fears of the unknown on how much premium currency the subscriptions will generate- I know it's something I'm wondering about, because I've personally never seen a model like that in action.

General:

Now that I've dropped to a more normal amount of activity after the opening frenzy, I've noticed that (like you) pebbles are not as quick to come by as they used to be. I agree that the balancing right now is aimed at the “hard” crowd. I think one way to bridge the gap between “hard” and “normal” is to buff the “dailies”- those first couple activities tasks. That way the campaign nerfs more directly target the hard players, and help reduce the wealth disparity between the groups.

It will be interesting to see how the economy of LW as whole, free and premium, settles once people begin playing “normally” and there is plenty of currency and wolves in the system. I always appreciate when devs are responsive to the community, and it can truly make or break a game, but I would also advise the LW team to use caution right now. It's possible to listen to the playerbase too much, and I'm sure it's very tempting to do so (no one likes being the “big bad balancing guy”). Wait-and-see approaches are risky if you lose too many players while waiting, but making changes prematurely can hinder the long-term health of the game. I think frequent communication and establishing an active presence, without rushing into accommodating player complaints, is the best move right now.

This was a great read, I love the detail and writing style! Also, as someone who does have a game design degree, it is all basically just applied behavioral science, so I'd say you are more qualified than most.

I also really appreciate the tone and thorough explanation of just how hard all of this is to do, and how expensive it is. Especially considering someone skilled in engineering could take a job elsewhere and easily make more than $100k a year, whereas this is a niche browser game whose kickstarter only raised enough for one person to have a job for one year at a rate of ~$20 an hour. Of course there have been bundle sales since then, physical merch, and now subscriptions and premium currency to buy. But, based on the May dev update saying over 5k accounts have been created, and based on various studies (google what percent of free to play players spend money), only somewhere between 1.5%-20% of players actually spend money, with on average 50% of a game's revenue comes from only 10% of players. So, in all likelyhood, revenue is tiny, and I really doubt they could afford to pay a legit community manager.

All that said, it makes sense to me if that's why the expansions were changed to moonstones. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the intent was to launch it with moonstones, wait a little bit for people to pay money for that, and then change it back to pebbles. It sounds shady, but considering the likely monetary situation, and that I don't know how versed the dev team is in virtual economy design, I can understand it. And again it may very well not be that specific reason. Personally, as I too loathe outr capitalist hellscape honestly and trust goes a long way in a game like this, it might even be worth it and helpful to be fully transparent about whether the game is currently profitable and sustainable. That way the community actually understands the needs, and can offer more targeted suggestions, as well as understand that it's not just about lining their pockets but about being able to run at all. Kind of like how some Patreons show how much they are earning each month from their patrons.

Overall though you hit on the best point of looking at other LSGs--the best and longest-lasting ones are very open and collaborative with their community on the hows and whys and whens. It is probably more important than actually creating new content at this point, because in order to have faith that new content will be cool, people have to have trust in the site to stick around. I wrote a little blurb about this idea in the suggestion thread “Urgent Communication Needed.”

I basically agree with everything you said, but I personally don't have a ton of experience with virtual economy design specifically and so I am neutral on the knucklebone situation. Besides the reality of the community response, ahaha.

Also Blizzard makes a fantastic point about wording of the ww token system as a bonus rather than a pity system. In my experience pity systems have their odds reset if the player get the intended rare item before pity kicked in, and this isn't working that way. Framing goes a long way. :D

So, yep, biggest things to work on imo are putting more focus on vulnerable, honest, detailed communication with the community. And secondly, making pebbles be useful ahaha. Once you've bought all the recipes up through silver, there's no real point in spending any pebbles because the most popular genes are ms, and it'll takes ages to get to the mining level that rarer metal recipes require. I'd like to hope that the upcoming change to community food supply will further encourage a pebble market for selling food. Third, don't design the game for the power players--design for the majority who will be casual. Power players don't play when there is nobody to play with.

Oh, also, I posted about it on the patch notes, but agreed on the food changes. I wrote that the system as it was felt pointless too, so I am glad I'm not the only one wondering why a feature that had no difficulty existed at all. xD It was a waste of clicks, but I liked the idea, so I am glad the game is leaning a bit more into resource management on that end. Encouraging community interaction by removing complete autonomy is a good thing, especially with a flea market so that people don't have to be social to get the benefits of a multiplayer game.

I basically rambled about a bunch of random points, but uh, good thread. I like

I'd like to add my views, as someone who has played /a lot/ of pet games in the past. I have no other credentials...

My thoughts have to do with the premium currency vs the f2p currency:

I think the flow between the two currency's is really important if you're playing a game where that is allowed. I'm going to use an example because I'm not sure how to explain it:

I budget $10-$20 a month to buy currency on whatever pet-sim I'm playing. I'm pretty busy in real life and for me, the exchange of enjoyment for money is worth it.

Player Wolfman5000 doesn't like to spend their money on pet-sims. They enjoy them! But the value isn't there for them to spend their cash. They are willing to play the games for long amounts of time and have a huge pebble hoard.

If I want something that normally costs pebbles I'll gladly exchange them. This gives Wolfman5000 the ability to use their time to get moonstones, I get pebbles without using my time. But, if there's no reason for me to exchange my moonstones that ebb isn't going to flow. So much costs MS so little costs pebbles, I have no desire to exchange. Expesically while the game is so new and there's so much I want to get that all seems to be MS based (expansions for professions, clothes, some breed changes ect. )

I do thinking (an sincerely hope) that as Lorwolf ages and more content is added this issue will become less noticeable.

i'd like to add in something mildly unrelated but kind of also related for the ad section you included

Pixel Cat's End (PCE, another free to play cat petsite that is in beta) had a sort-of similar situation where the ads were Not Paying Well. you can read the post here on their forums, but if you're not going to read through it then here's a tldr:

squid, PCE's only dev, wasn't getting any money from running ads on PCE. they ended up spending two dollars because of an activity spike during a registration window. shortly after, google's awful weird coding system decided that this was suspicious, and suspended them for 30 days. they decided that instead of running google's ads, they turned to the playerbase and let them put their own ads down instead. the price is four dollars to run an ad for 1 month, and all of the ad's images are filtered through.

the player-ad thing has been in place for a few months on PCE, and it looks to be going pretty well? it's mostly used to be silly or to advertise writing/art selling threads. i'm kind of curious if this could be applied to lorwolf? the only downside is that the “ad free” perk for the subscription could be made useless because the ads would be less intrusive.

i've heard some folks with the subscription say that they don't buy the subscription for the adblock, but for the extra moonstones & to support the game, but that's only a handful of people i've heard that from. so i have no idea if people would oppose that. i dunno this whole thing has just been in my brain for a bit, maybe it's interesting for someone to take a look at

but yeah!! you have some really good points here and it's nice to hear someone elses detailed perspective. i've got nothing else to add, behavioral science cool :)

Player ads sound super fun and handy if you sell custom content or have loads of breeding pairs with a constant flow of pups or well.. to be silly.