Communication from staff could be better but coming from FR I'm used to that lol. I'm hopeful though, I'm really enjoying the game so far and I can't wait to see how the site grows over the coming months and hopefully years.

@Lycoris

Oh, I'm not saying DV had (or has now) the variety of clothing that it would ideally have, but it had enough at launch that you could at least play with it, compared to LW's extreme dearth of pebble clothing.

I think people expect to be able to dress up their wolves extensively for a couple reasons. First, LW has been positioned as more of a parallel to FR than DV or Subeta, and one of the big activities on FR is dressing up your dragons. Of course, I'm not saying it's fair to expect LW to have the variety of apparel that FR has -- FR's been releasing apparel for 10 years -- but I do think there's a mismatch in the devs' attitude of "most apparel will be custom" versus the users' expectation of being able to dress up their wolves.

Bit of a tangent here, but not being able to cook the crops is emblematic of a bigger issue to me, which is that the professions should feed into each other more than they do. Right now fishing feeds into cooking and there's a loop between mining and crafting, but farming should also feed into cooking, and I wish we could craft more useful things with the metal we mine.

@Sherushi

Thank you so much! I completely missed that. It's at 683 right now, which is certainly not terrible, but also not huge for a site with such a recent, widely-anticipated launch.

@Reave

I agree with pretty much all of what you're saying but I want to particularly second the fact that the poll priorities are so borked. Like you said, a new profession when the current ones aren't balanced? Puppy apparel when we can barely dress our adult wolves? A minigame, to presumably earn more pebbles, when there's barely anything to do with pebbles now?

The promise of loads of new stuff, when the current stuff is lacking is my biggest concern. As someone with ADHD, starting new projects and never actually finishing any is a huge issue.. so red flags pop up when I see someone else doing the same *laugh*

We should be able to grow cotton. Considering the highest seed is level 27, there's a fantastic opportunity there to add more seeds at the tail end. I cannot imagine it would take much effort.

We should be able to cook many more things into recipes. Cooking mechanics are hugely popular. They're satisfying and somewhat time consuming, win-win for a game.

The timed gates on gauntlet are driving me bonkers. I get easily distracted so gauntlet takes me ages to finish because I tab away.. waiting repeatedly for short bits of time is bad. This is the issue I have with fishing too.. the pauses between fish are just long enough for me to get distracted. (my personal vision for fishing is to have more elaborate graphics, with the shadows of fish moving, giving some indication where to expect a bite next.. feasibility of that, unknown.)

I do LIKE this game. I do. The gameplay loop is satisfying. But I've got tons of wolves that aren't selling and I am setting them free without training because the reward for training them up is abysmal. I can't dress my wolves, CA is way out of reach and I can only slap scarves and noses on so many wolves. The forums feel fairly dead. I don't like Discord. Heck, I didn't even HAVE Discord before LW. I joined it because I felt I had to, so I could post pictures of my wolves easier. I'm at a point now that the only recipes I need are like.. 500kp.. so that's not really happening fast. I've hit the doldrums. I'm still going through the gameplay loop, but the satisfaction is waning.

(Adding that I left DV pretty early on. I was a Beta player. I did come back for a week or so and then left. Made mad cash on FR selling my Beta stuff and low digit pets, but I haven't been back since. The repetitiveness of the quests got to me. It wasn't satisfying at all.)

I'm happy with the progress that's been made in the last month. I'm enjoying the game so far and I'm willing to stick it out to see how things evolve.

I think one month is far too little time to project anything long term. More time is needed to see how things unfold and how staff responds to issues that come up.

I stuck with DV for 18 months before finally deciding it wasn't worth the time and energy, so maybe my pain tolerance is higher than normal. XD;

@Reave

Glad I'm not the only one who felt the poll was a bit bizarre. I didn't even vote xD cus I truly didn't... want any of them? I would highly prefer for the existing mechanics to be fleshed out. As was mentioned by others, the current professions feel so lackluster and I have zero interest in adding more lackluster professions to the list. The fact that there's so many raw food items that still cannot be cooked, that cooked items still have some issues with being worthwhile, that so many farmed crops have zero use outside of being a bulk raw food source, that higher level fishing spots give uncookable fish, and mined metals have very little use outside of a limited range of apparel; all points to a greater issue with the profession game loop. Many of them feel very disconnected from each other.

In the end, why add more features when the current ones still need quite a bit of work? Seems like the work will just continue to compound.

i think it's alright. a lot is going to depend on how things progress in the next few months--i definitely agree with others that while the gameplay loop is satisfying, professions could certainly be fleshed out/feed into each other a bit more. in most cases i think this is actually a pretty easy fix (adding more food items that crops can be cooked into, allowing you to grow materials like cotton for crafting, etc), so i don't think it really points to any major foundational issues in how professions are set up. the site still feels a little bare bones without enough items to fully integrate, which is... not great, seeing as it's in full launch, but i'm also willing to give it a pretty wide margin of error given that the site is barely a month old.

the main issue seems to be the economy and the relative lack of uses for pebbles currently; i think this is an issue again of there not being enough items to spend them on. lorwolf definitely needs a good, solid pebble sink, but i also think that this is something that'll be greatly alleviated as time goes on and more breeds/genes/clothing/items get added to the game. i don't think worries about inflation are unfounded, but i also think that it's reasonable to expect the economy might be a little bit wonky in the first few months after launch. who knows--maybe in a year there will be no pebble sinks and the site will be mired with hyperinflation and i'll have to eat some crow. but i don't mind giving the dev team the benefit of the doubt for now as they find their footing.

i also don't think it's really fair to compare the time it took for dappervolk to get criticisms with what people are saying here. imo, i think people are more gunshy about new petsites/more vocal in their criticisms because of DV--it had a massively hyped up launch and ended up being, by most people's metrics, pretty disappointing, so folks came out of the whole ordeal feeling a little bit burned. that's not to say that people shouldn't discuss issues with lorwolf--it's good!--but i don't think people discussing it is indicative of like, some massive failure of the site. not to mention that while i do think dappervolk had more content at the start, a lot of that content was artificially stretched out via stat gates and timers. maybe this meant it took longer for issues to appear, but i really don't think the problems here are as foundational as they were with DV. personally, as someone who can only be online a couple of hours a day at max, i much prefer LW's style of constantly looping gameplay that doesn't make me wait for ages to progress, even if that does mean i'll "run out" of site content faster. i can almost always find something to do on petsites to enjoy myself, provided the site lets me, you know, play the game--dappervolk's issue was that it didn't let me do that. maybe lorwolf will get to that point as well, but for now, i think it's a perfectly fine game in its awkward growing stages.

Honestly I think it'll last solely because it provides a more casual experience than Wolvden, the only other wolf game around rn that I know of.

I'm probably not going to be a regular user myself, though. It feels like the biggest concerns from Alpha have gone kind of untouched, and its weird to see a new breed launch prompted already when like... the easily available appearance options are pretty bland.

I put in money to buy one of the backer packs, because I wanted to support the site, but it already feels fairly "pay to play" with the lean towards customization being MS-majority, all the banner ads, and the daily pack. It's a shame, because I feel like the site has a lot to offer but im getting a distinct "monetization-forward" mindset from staff actions rn, plus the whole... 100 knucklebone release shows they're very much out of touch with folks.

However, I do like that I'm not penalized for not checking in on a daily basis. I also like the low breeding cool down.

We need more incentives to release wolves, but that's something which was voiced already.

"plus the whole... 100 knucklebone release shows they're very much out of touch with folks."

But hopefully that's a good sign too... something like this happening earlier on here than on FR (the original eye update 5 years after the site's beginning, with them apparently not realizing users get attached to their dragons and almost leaving older dragons out completely with that event) means that they can learn sooner and get more in touch instead of making larger mistakes later on.

I'm tentatively hopeful. The economy should iron itself out as the site gets older; hopefully they'll address the expansion thing soon, though I don't blame them for being careful with it since many people have bought some of those expansions already. They're at least starting to address some of it with new pebble items, including ones that might cycle out at the end of this month, since they're pride month things. Hopefully that new breed they're teasing will be a pebble breed, since only the starters are pebble breeds atm. And that pebble addition to fishing? I imagine that'll help a lot since fishing seems to be the least liked profession. And more apparel should definitely help too.

I'm willing to stick around and see it through as of now, just to see what happens. To be honest I agree with a lot of people, things are not looking too good. The economy and transparency issues are still not being addressed properly or anything really done about it.

There were seemingly less issues in the open beta. The economy definitely didn't feel as imbalanced as it is now, probably because people knew the data will be wiped so it didn't matter as much and people sold things for less. Still, profession expansions were for pebbles. It's fine that they made some changes, but it was still not what people were asking for.

They're actively avoiding making the site less monetized. It feels like it's turning more into a cash grab than what seemed like a project of passion. It would feel less like that if they at least communicated with us, but they don't. Quiche said they would address the economy issues in the June dev update, which they did not do. I don't blame Quiche for it. She probably didn't know and didn't expect for it to go that way.

I am staying neutral for now, but things are not looking very good.

I've sort of dodged this thread since it's inevitably attracted lots of doom and gloom. I think that, with the current problems with moonstones, the site won't fail or shut down, it may just decline over a long period. People will probably leave over this. The moment they change Minecart and cooking expansions back to pebbles most of the people who will have left out of frustration will come back, since LW has no pet death which is apparently not as common as I would have assumed. If they don't do this then the playerbase will shrink but I'm not convinced it will disappear for a long time.

I feel like Lorwolf has at least two to four years in it, likely more, but this is the first time I've been able to witness a pet site opening so maybe this is an optimistic estimate

Seeing people saying it's unfair to compare LW to FR but people are comparing LW to FR to try and show where LW needs work. No-one is expecting a new site to be amazing but people are saying 'this is what I think a good pet site looks like and it's worth following suit in some places'. The fact that Lorwolf has other petsites as examples to look up to is a useful tool for improving where things need it. Obviously it's still worth considering the early states of these successful sites to show that LW will probably do quite well despite early problems.