@Loki Yes the FR team did communicate more often in those opening months, but I think that was at least in part due to all the lag based problems.

Imo LW is new enough to where if you wanna bail out for now, I think it'd be worth it to pop back on in a few months and see where everything is at. We probably won't be seeing a bunch of major changes all at once, but id be really surprised if in a year, there wasn't a whole lot more going on.

I agree with a lot of the gripe surrounding the discord honestly. I don't use discord much personally except to share art, so I'm probably missing out on a lot of trading and the social stuff. But I'm also 27 and can understand that everything on the internet kinda revolves around discord at this point and that may be a 'me' issue... unfortunately. I really miss the old days where pet sites had active forums and a bunch of people are trading art and preselling customs without much issue.

If LW becomes FR level of active, I'll be able to fund my CA dreams while also being able to fund giveaways and stuff like that. I'm invested enough to be willing to wait it out for a while in the hopes we'll get there.

I will say I much prefer LW over the other wolfy pet sims. I played Wajas on and off since I was like, 12? And that site is a sad shell of its former self. I won't go back again. It's even less active than LW despite being much older, way more breeds, probably over 100 marking/mutations and tons of options for customs. I wonder at this point wether wajas small userbase is funding the whole site, if their staff mostly works on a volunteer basis, or their owner is just absolutely loaded lol

everyone saying it takes years to make a cohesive site like FR, that's not true in the way i was referencing it. it only takes 30 seconds to copy-paste the user guide info into the tutorial, so that the tutorial is more complete. my concerns are from the perspective of a new player that has played games like FR and neopets, both in the very early rough days and in current days and stuck with them thru the entire time to see that happen. i'm quite the seasoned pet-site player, and very basic parts of gameplay was not explained well, to the point i almost quit in frustration, which for a petsim should never be the case. i had honest thoughts like, "well, if the website itself doesn't have the full info, and i can't figure out how to do this without that info, then i guess the website isn't finished yet and i might as well quit and come back in a couple of years if i remember it exists." i got the genuine impression that the site was still half-finished or in beta because i couldn't find information on game-specific stuff within the game itself. for example, with companions, all of my "knowledge" was imported from the concept of FR familiars, but i didn't learn anything specific to what a companion is on LW, what functionally and lore-wise makes it special or different to FR familiars, etc. i didn't think/assume that i'd find a user-written gameplay guide in the forums, and didn't even figure out that a forum existed (the front page showing just the discord made me think that's all there was), much less think to check there to see if someone had written a guide. as a new player, the website is really confusing and feels very incomplete, like click page -> click tutorial but have 10 questions with no answers in the tutorial or page -> click around the page in desperate confusion -> maybe eventually figure it out thru trial/error; compared to FR which is click page -> get 3 full paragraphs explaining every detail of gameplay -> understand how to play forever. i know this isn't an isolated experience because i joined the site with my partner - neither of us was able to figure out very basic tasks like "feed pet" without doing it together and verbally talking thru the puzzle of "well, on other petsites you go to the inventory to feed pet, but that doesn't work, uhhh-" we both managed to eventually figure most things out thru that process and stumbling upon guides after a week or so, but...did it need to be that difficult?

As someone who is new(ish), I think what Lorwolf has done is take some things from FR and greatly improve them. I hate the Coliseum in FR, and LW battles are so much easier on my carpal tunnel issues. I love the activities mini quests that keep me engaged, and the weekly ticket events.

The only thing I wish Lorwolf didn't do was adopt the color wheel method as I hate that about FR too.Two games I play let you breed for color by mixing hex codes and that is interesting and makes sense to myself. I know my preferences are not everyone's so this is opinion. Other than that, this game does a lot right, and since it's only 3 months old, I'm looking forward to what's in store in its first year.

I've also done programming and art, and I can tell you these things take time and can't be churned out like McDonalds Happy Meals. Chat GPT is simply not good enough compared with real people's talents, and real people need time, food, rest, and resources (in other words, money, which means full time jobs outside of projects like these).

The thing that has frustrated me most about LW is it had all sorts of information from other petsites available and it didn't use it. LW is a new petsite, but it is not an early one. Comparing it to 10-year old FR isn't that direct of a comparison, because it was new then, yes, but it was also rather early, as far as modern petsites go. FR has had all that time to figure out what works and what doesn't -- same with other ones, like Neopets, CS, etc. Not that any of them are perfect, but the best thing about these older petsites is that newer petsites can directly skip some of those hard-learned lessons by learning from and planning around problems those sites had.

There is a lot that could have been planned or implemented to make LW start off stronger than it did, and it didn't. There could have been more instructions, QOL tweaks could have already been implemented, moonstones could have been balanced better, referrals, something to curb wolf overpopulation, allowing us to delete forum posts, not limiting site activity just because you're not logged in (honestly I feel like this one hurts LW a lot more than it might realize), HUGE image filesizes, poor site optimization, something to give trinkets a use, pebble sinks, anything. Instead, the economy is out of wack, wolves are overpopulated, the flea market is the flea market, and the userbase is rather unhappy. Some of these things I'm willing to work with because I do know that they need time: forum revamps, messages revamps, new features, yeah, I get it, putting these things together can be a nightmare, and it can't happen overnight. I'm not asking LW to rush things out before they're ready. But things that I know could have been here from the start? Things that are absent because there was no foresight or lessons taken from other sites? I don't blame people for giving up on it, that really is frustrating. I don't want LW to be another FR, but I'd like if I didn't have to relive some of the avoidable frustration of early FR all over again.

That's why I think the game is stagnating hard. Veteran petsite players are watching it make the same blunders old petsites did despite all their warnings and all their suggestions, and new petsite players are finding out why those blunders were so annoying to deal with in the first place. I don't want LW to fail, but it should really have spent more time in beta, or at least changed more since beta.

(Somewhat unrelated, but I wanted to add that the achievements delay wasn't even posted to the front page, btw. So unless you looked for it, it makes it appear that LW hasn't had an update since July.)

Been seeing the decline of users from the initial 500+ to almost 1000's to like less than 400 at a time now.. I used to hunt for ww's everyday, now its more of i just sit and do dailies and go out.

I'm having enough fun and willing to wait it out ^^ The bones of the game are solid and LW needs more time to flesh out properly. With the exception of achievements last month, the things on the roadmap have been delivered on time so far.

I’d recommend for everyone to hang in there :) good things take time and I don’t think it’s fair to be upset with a brand new site. I definitely feel the stagnation, as there isn’t enough to do to keep users engaged (i.e. Arena is the only time sink that is free) but I like how it’s starting and I think it just needs more time to grow.

I do agree that the Discord is a major problem. I’d recommend that either site forums and discord are integrated somehow, or one of the two is removed.

I tend to agree with most of the things said in this forum post and the replies. i think LW generally needs some improvements, but I also like some of the things it has added, like the little activity missions, a very large variety of activities, it’s fast paced which suits me personally, and also the freedom of CA. buuuut it would be better if they added more qol changes, and the devs definitely need to take the lessons learned from other pet sites. wolf overpopulation, the site being bogged down by heavy images, etc. a lot needs work but I feel the game has time to improve, being the new game that it is

Fair enough. Lorwolf is not perfect but I love the game and can't see myself leaving any time soon. I do worry I'll want to quit playing when I hit my "wolf cap," because breeding and collecting is the entire point of the game and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do if I can't collect any more. The cap honestly seems really strange to me. I feel like it should be unlimited or at least much larger.