Judging this site's start compared to others doesn't feel right to me, because the climate has changed since FR's start, and DW is a completely different demopgraphic with other priorities in gameplay and monetization. I believe LW will be a great site in the future, but with a small and dedicated user base. The quality of the wolves' visuals will always rely on CA because most are very hard to look at, and fall in love with. I am sure many will stay in love with it, and the whales and dolphins will be very happy to invest in CA. I assume F2P players will stick around for some weeks and move on with the current event rotation feeling very unrewarding.

The latest roadmap looks very unappealing to me which is why I probably won't even stick around myself. Those are some big achievements for a gameplay loop that needs proper adjustments under a communication pipeline that is obviously flawed. The visuals are carrying the future of the site, but the gameplay definitely could as well, when done right.

I also want to point out that I have no clue why people are having a surpluss of pebbles. The pride release is completely unaffordable to me as someone playing dayil for around half an hour. Am I the only one who tried to stock up on those recipes? I never came close to 200k.

Anyway, ramblings aside, I hope it does well, but with the current vibe I am not too hopeful. Maybe I will find myself getting inspired on here, but the site feels, generally-speaking, off to me.

I'm wanting to add to the discussion of the 'Discord problem' but I'm fearing it's a little off-topic, but i think i'll add it anyway--

the fact that lorwolf has an official discord server is inherently damaging to the concept of having community forums. many people are going to prefer discord's snappiness and quick responses to the comparative slowness of a forum format like this-- and honestly, the forums are such a mess right now, i'm finding myself preferring the discord to converse with people. it's much easier, better laid out, and most importantly, my pings and notifications from the server don't get sent into the void, so i can go back and check them whenever I want or need to.

the forums need a lot of work before they can really even be considered a suitable replacement for the discord. it's so much easier to talk with people on there than it is on here.

don't really remember if i've posted on here but the i do agree with the concerns surrounding the forums vs the discord. i think my main gripe with it is that it has literally everything site forums should have so everyone gravitates towards it. like, why go to the forums when you have a question or have a conversation or when you want to sell something when you can instead go to the discord?

i dont know. site forums are such an integral part to my pet sim experience when it comes to community building. sure i like joining unofficial fan discords every now and then but those work because the stakes are pretty low and its optional. sorry to bring up FR for the hundredth time in this thread, but the reason FR has a healthy forum community is because there isnt an official discord. yes theres been a decline since more people started using the community discords as their primary community, but it doesnt feel like a desolate wasteland like lorwolf's forums feel like. i know another factor is just that the userbase is much smaller here but... still.

maybe this is extreme but i really hope the discord can be.. phased out or something. maybe have it eventually just become a place for announcements and direct communication with staff if needed. this could b veering a bit off topic but like, i dont know it feels like a microcosm of things that concern me about the site, somehow.

The discord will have to be shut down. That’s just a fact. We should get plenty of warning first, but this needs to happen. Preferably sooner rather than later. I would prefer if we also get some more thread topics available to match the ones we will lose from the discord (like lore discussion, wolf share, art/ca discussion).

Another thing with the forums not getting used as much (or maybe just the perception of them being unused), is that they also need their own revamp. The "latest activity" only shows to the day, so it's impossible to see just how much people use the forums compared to if they showed activity to the minute and the most recent poster, like most, if not all other forums do. I made a suggestion for these updates to the forums a while ago.

As for the site itself, it'll probably be fine, especially once they add more breeds, markings, and apparel for pebbles. I'm frustrated that profession expansions cost moonstones, but I don't think that's something they can change anymore.

In case you guys don't know. Lorwolf start just with a small website with discord link and nothing else in the past. Devs post monthly dev log on tumblr and discord to notify their patreons that's why discord is that active. It was here since begining before the game ever exist before alpha even happen. So for ppl who wonder why we even have a discord server this is your answer. There are a lot of past informations on the 3 lw discord server 1 main discord 1 alpha 1 beta.

I personally disagree with shut them down and lost part of the game heritage and history. Instead they should make forums more appealing and improve UI and put out an official guide to how to code in the forum instead. Right now me and a lot of players are quite frustrated about how the forum work reason why we're on discord for trading instead. If the forum get improved I will move back to forum for trading and selling. But then it's my two cent you don't have to agree with me just stating my point of view

The very classy move of locking update threads hasn't impressed me much in terms of listening to their player base.

I'm starting to agree w/ the sentiment that it's feeling more like a cash grab with the lack of dev response to the real important back-end stuff that needs work while they keep piling on new layers of strangely-prioritized updates to... generate "hype", I suppose?

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The discord issue is an issue with a lot of the 'net and a ton of games as a whole, where we are going to continually slow-bleed community and even relevant on-platform discussion, guides, and general interaction within the community to the walled-gardens of various chat platforms. It's unfortunate, but short of nuking the discord I don't know if anyone is going to be able to do anything about that. The discord existing past launch was a huge mistake, but putting that genie back in the bottle might be insurmountable for the playerbase.

An example consequence of this being; Icerun forum, that presumably exists to drum up some kind of community, is completely dead, with 5 whole topics since launch. Can't speak to any other pack forums, maybe they are doing fine.

@Reaves I will say that I don't especially feel that this is a "cash grab" per say. Simply because pet sites in general are not a huge market and rarely generate large amounts of income. Its more likely that the devs just have a very specific plan in mind and aren't very willing to deviate from it, which isn't always the best mindset when it comes to game design. There's a reason that the game design motto "Kill your darlings" exists. A lot of the time, you spend a ton of energy on an idea only to realize that it doesn't actually work or it has problems you didn't see. And you have to be willing to let go of that idea even though you spent a lot of energy on it, because that's the only way the game will improve.

There are a lot of issues with Lorwolf that, imo, should have been considered far far earlier in the design process. While, yes, the game is very early in it's life, it's still had a fair bit of development time and loads of feedback during the EA period. Not to mention the example of the tons of pet sites that came before it. Things like lack of pebble sinks feel like a huge oversight to many people because money sinks aren't a new concept for pet sites.

Beyond all this, I don't doubt that some of "cash grab" feel also comes from the dev just needing to make income. However it feels like they're shooting themselves in the foot a bit, cus while income is, of course, incredibly important, you still have to consider how the f2p experience is. If f2p players feel ostracized then they'll never ever take the step to actually paying for moonstones. It's the long game that matters, not the short game. I, personally, only spend irl money on pet sites if I've played them for quite a while and feel confident in both my own continued enjoyment and the site's growth. Right now? I don't feel that way about Lorwolf.

I think there's a lot of potential to be had! Don't get me wrong. But there's also a lot of things to address before that potential can really blossom.

@scribblecrumb certainly, I've been holding on the same opinion of "I don't think it's intentional, I just don't think they quite know what they are doing yet" too-- but there's a threshold of ignoring (and as we are seeing now, intentional limiting) of feedback, and over such a long period of time (not the month it's been live, of course, but going back to alpha and its entire dev cycle where other people were involved) where they have had some genuinely very high quality suggestions from people with more dev experience than I-- where regardless of intent it starts looking a little... embarrassing, for lack of a better word.

I still don't think this is going to outright kill it or anything! But right now it doesn't seem like they are building lorwolf with a long term future in mind, which is where I believe a lot of the cash-grab sentiment is coming from. The update priorities look less like they want a solid foundation to work from and more like they want to build as high as possible with minimal input and just profit while it lasts.

They have made their priorities pretty clear at this point I think, and they are geared more towards throwing new things at the wall and making a bigger future mess for themselves than trying to make what we have polished and well-thought out. A lot of the edits and expansions that we've gotten haven't actually addressed the underlying problems with things, just added more onto the top of it; cooking for example, we've gotten a lot of new recipes, and that is theoretically exciting... but most of them take up a ton of your cooking slots to give you an amount of food that equals out to less overall energy gain than just slapping raw fish in those slots and cooking them would give. It's baffling from a design standpoint.

I as much as anyone else would love for all of this to age poorly and for them to take it all much more seriously than they apparently have been up until now.

@Reave

Very fair! I feel pretty similar, honestly. The polls and roadmap have just had me in a constant feeling of "Are you really gonna focus on this instead of improving what you already have?"