Yep. You read that right.

Let us buy moonstones with our pebbles directly from the site at a consistent and official exchange rate (my suggestion would be 10k pebbles for 1 moonstone).

TO CLARIFY: THIS IS A JOKE SUGGESTION TO DRAW ATTENTION ONCE AGAIN TO THE CURRENCY PROBLEM

okay disclaimer out of the way, now let's get into a bit of a ramble aka the actual point of this post

Is this a stupid idea? Will it break the already fragile economy? Abso-fluffing-lutely. But we have too many things that cost moonstones and not enough things that cost pebbles, on the forums the exchange rates are inflated and inconsistent, and basically anything on the site is just as easily valued by off-site currency (FR gem exchanges, anyone?) as on-site currency. When the only way to get things done on the site is to spend quite frankly absurd amounts (I'll get back to that statement in a bit) of real money or exchange currency from another site for currency on this site, there is no on-site economy.

Speaking of real money, practically forcing us to buy moonstones with real money to get anything done on the site is exploitative towards the site's audience and especially towards the minors, neurodivergent players and otherwise vulnerable players. This looks especially bad for LW when you see how inflated the real money price for moonstones really is. Since LW's economy is basically leaning on FR's economy for support anyway, let's compare: Buying the lowest moonstone bundle five times gets me 50 moonstones. Spending the same amount of money on FR gems gets me 500 gems. Another difference between FR and LW is that gems are surprisingly easier to obtain by on-site means than moonstones, even though moonstones are craftable. Keep your dragons fed by gathering food in just a few clicks or getting food from coli in like half an hour in a lowlevel venue and you get a gem a day consistently. Compared to grind for 5+ hours a day and get a moonstone a day, maybe two if you're lucky with shard drops. Do you see the time and effort discrepancy? A LW player spends way more time and effort or irl money on a single moonstone than a FR player spends on a single gem.

Something has to be done, and stupid problems require stupid solutions. If the currency problem is bad enough to warrant a suggestion as stupid as an official currency exchange, you're doing something wrong.

Of course, the logical way to fix this would be to turn all those upgrades that cost moonstones into upgrades that cost pebbles, turn some other moonstone sinks into pebble sinks as well (e.g. the little site apparel we have should not cost moonstones), and make it easier to get moonstones (e.g. make it so that moonstone ore in the mining minigame drops complete moonstones instead of moonstone shards). All of this should already have been implemented when the site launched, but I digress.

Now, don't get me wrong. I know I come across as angry. I promise I'm not. I'm exaggerating my frustration. The gameplay loop of this site is great for instant gratification with the constantly renewing little tasks, I love spending time on this site and getting those little tasks ticked off, but it's completely pointless to go through as a free-to-play player because it costs far too much time and effort to get any currency that will actually help me get anything done. I can't get wolves from other players because everyone is asking for moonstones which I don't have. I can't sell my own wolves for moonstones because the only two that are actually valuable to the playerbase are wolves that I am unwilling to sell. I can't get more wild wolves to sell because I don't have the time to grind for hours upon hours upon hours for maybe at most 5 tokens a day with the encounter rate I'm getting. I haven't had a single success in the over 30 encounters I've had in the past few weeks of consistent an-hour-and-a-half-of-grinding-a-day sessions and I didn't even get anything for like half of those encounters because they were before the tokens were implemented. I can't make custom apparel due to artistic limitations and the moonstone fee required to even get started on creating any. Simply put, I have no options to make playing this game any easier on myself without spending real money. Am I angry? No. I'm just disappointed.

I am sick and tired of this site's exploitative economy. Start implementing economy-fixing solutions already. You've had more than enough feedback about this mess, start responding.

Friendly reminder before I end this post: My initial suggestion of an official currency exchange is a joke. What I want is an economy that doesn't need to lean on FR (or other sites) for support and doesn't exploit vulnerable players. If that requires an official currency exchange as a bandaid solution, okay, fine with me, but I'd rather have a proper solution to a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Please do not ping me in replies. I don't want to be involved in whatever discussion this ends up starting, I've given all my thoughts on the matter already. This post is out here, do with it whatever you will, agree, disagree, add to it, give better suggestions for solutions to the problem, I would love to see better suggestions actually! Just don't drag me back to this thread with a ping. I won't hesitate to block people if I need to.

EDIT TO ADD:
clarifying a small point I made bc I see it being addressed (thank you to the people who pointed it out btw): yes, 1 MS is 10 G and 1 G is 1 MS Shard. I don't mind that exchange rate.

what I DO mind is that MS, not the shards, are the currency used on the site. MS, not the shards, are the currency being traded for. but SHARDS are what we get from gameplay. therefore LW is NOT more generous with its premium currency, it is more generous with 1/10th of its premium currency. in the greater scheme of things, we still get at most 5ms every two days - which, yes, is more generous than FR's 1 gem a day, but ONLY if you can put in the time and effort to grind for it; for a casual player with little time to spend online, it's more likely to be 2ms every three days.

(also note that I'm disregarding the existence of Pageant and its shard rewards for voting in my calculations for simplicity's sake. haven't seen comments about that, still felt the need to bring it up just to be clear)

While I do agree with a lot of this, 1MS = 10G. So getting a free gem at FR is getting a moonstone shard here. So Lorwolf is a lot more generous about giving out premium currency. The difference is that LW uses MS for too many things and has not a whole lot of things that require pebbles.

I agree 110% with this post, and amen to the last part about not dragging the OP back into this too. Sometimes we just need to let stuff off our chest, especially given how many of us really care about the game and want it to succeed. But with the way it's going now, it's not looking good. The only reason it looks as good as it does RN is because of Flight Rising.

As I’ve said in all related threads like this: stop forcing people to spend money. There should be a legitimate free to play option that doesn‘t involve off-site trades (my main source of income on LW). as OP said, more, useful pebble sinks, fewer MS sinks - especially MS sinks that restrict actual gameplay.
FR has treasure sinks for Nests (LW is MS and wayyy too many MS); FR offers lair and hibden tabs for treasure (a purely organizational sink) lair slots for treasure, and den slots for gems AND items.
FR has a significant number of treasure apparel, familiars (companions), etc.

I dont agree that it should be as easy as 1:1 for gems and ms, because the prices of things are different too, so I agree with this being ok - MS breed costs 200ms and 150ms - FR gem breed costs 2kg; besprinkler and scatter scroll 35:350, i could go on but i digress.

what isnt ok is the professions costing moonstones, and having no real pebble sinks. At this point, LW’s lack of response IS a response, which is going to turn people away.

The pebble to MS conversion rate on FM has gotten better in the past several days. Was running 20kpbs per MS or worse for a while there; last night it was 15kpbs per MS. I know because I bought a bunch and now I'm pebble-poor. It may continue to drop.

The game is less than a month into full release and I don't thinking making any major changes is wise without seeing how things settle a bit as they are.

I'd say that I could dream of a world where pebbles were used as currency for expansions, but I don't have to, since this was the case during Early Access. They just changed it to moonstones at launch for… some reason. Apparently it was due to “rebalancing efforts”, but that's all the explanation we're given. They don't go into details about it or nothing as to why it's a rebalancing effort, and frankly, it feels like a de-balancing decision.

Edit: and we already know what having upgrades that cost MS is like since I'm pretty sure it was changed from moonstones to pebbles. It was changed back after EA.

In that same post I linked, the devs said that, “Users can earn around 3-6 Moonstones per day on average through regular gameplay, so we felt that about a week of grinding was fair for the first Mining and Cooking upgrades.”

Even though the moonstone shard cap is set to 25, meaning users can only earn around 2.5 Moonstones per day? I don't understand where they could get that 6 from? Trading, maybe?

And I love how they think a week's worth of grinding (restrained and capped, possibly without the player knowing) for the first upgrade is a reasonable thing to ask for a player. It's not reasonable, actually, it's a very steep climb and it's going to turn away players in droves. Especially when they think, “oh my god that took a whole week what are the other upgrades going to be like?!”

Why isn't this just a reward earned for increasing your level? I'd like there to be some lull when I'm in between levels of mining that will actually net me a new area, because in the meantime I'm like, what's the point in leveling up? What's the difference between reaching lvl 12 to unlock the next area and just have lvl 2 cost a loooooot of XP? I have no clue! I barely notice a thing! I rarely mine because I don't see a point nor do I see any real benefit for this climb.

The economy is getting to a point where the ratio is actually more or less at 1 MS = 14 G ( I sell my MS pretty quickly around this ratio). Even though they cost relatively the same amount to get, USD-wise? That's how much people really want MS, I guess… (And I mean, an argument could be made that getting gems is indeed easier, but turnips on DV are also hard to obtain and I've only ever seen the same ratio all this time for them as it compares how much you get for your RLC.)

They seem to be listening to their playerbase for everything but this massive glaring economy issue. It feels like they're willing to change the small stuff but refuse to change massive things that are negatively impacting players, and then sweeping it under the rug by locking a topic talking about it when a player is a little less than happy about the dev's explanation. It doesn't inspire confidence going forward.

About the breed thing, something I feel peeps forget is the Zerda is ‘green rarity’ which is right above the starter breeds, annnd it already costs 150 MS, which is roughly 1500 flight rising gems.
FR has a lot of treasure breeds that are more expensive than the starters but not gems. I feel concerned that LW won't have that.
And we don't have a proper legendary breed yet but that will probably cost more than 200 MS (I'm guessing 300) since the bat breed is Epic at 200.

“About the breed thing, something I feel peeps forget is the Zerda is ‘green rarity’ which is right above the starter breeds, annnd it already costs 150 MS, which is roughly 1500 flight rising gems.”

At the very least, we don't know if price will = rarity here, like on FR. Since those two and the starters are our only examples right now, we might be proven wrong. At least, I hope so.

And yes, as a beta tester, beta was ms for expansions. It's probably why I didn't have a problem throwing ms at mining again, since I did in beta and I had credit/ms set to the side for that specifically. That being said, I have bought two expansions now, and tbh I have no problem if they wanna change it back to pebbles. They should, at least for mining. For cooking it seems like it's more convenient over actually needed and it might be fine staying as ms (thinking on activities, mostly. It gets eventually cramped with all the different types of ore for mining and getting the 15 can be two trips and not one. Nothing stops that with food. No matter what, one batch = over 10).

But yeah we do need more pebble sinks no matter what.

I absolutely agree with this! However, as it’s already been said, the value is at 1ms:10g, sometimes even being 1ms:14g at most. Therefore the value of a single FR gem is essentially the same as one ms shard here.

I do think that there are way too many items that cost moonstones, and the things that cost pebbles are quite expensive. Pebbles are also not valued very high by players since the things you can purchase with them aren’t as appealing as what you can get with moonstones.

I also noticed that this economy relies on other site’s currencies in order to function. What if tomorrow, FR closed down? How would that hurt LW? It would destroy the barely standing system as it is right now. That needs to change because that means something is wrong.

clarifying a small point I made bc I see it being addressed (thank you to the people who pointed it out btw): yes, 1 MS is 10 G and 1 G is 1 MS Shard. I don't mind that exchange rate.

what I DO mind is that MS, not the shards, are the currency used on the site. MS, not the shards, are the currency being traded for. but SHARDS are what we get from gameplay. therefore LW is NOT more generous with its premium currency, it is more generous with 1/10th of its premium currency. in the greater scheme of things, we still get at most 5ms every two days - which, yes, is more generous than FR's 1 gem a day, but ONLY if you can put in the time and effort to grind for it; for a casual player with little time to spend online, it's more likely to be 2ms every three days.

(also note that I'm disregarding the existence of Pageant and its shard rewards for voting in my calculations for simplicity's sake. haven't seen comments about that, still felt the need to bring it up just to be clear)

The economy is in shambles right now…the conversion rate is bonkers high, everyone's relying on off site trading to get MS…pebbles hardly do anything on the site…it just feels like decoration at this point lol