I love these threads, it's very nice to see what people point out that I myself may not have noticed about the economy.

I think removing the daily cap on moonstone shards would already be a significant help. When FTP players can make a maximum of 2.5ms per day, it takes insanely long to save for anything, especially when everything worth buying is being sold for moonstones. Those who put in the effort to grind for shards should get rewarded, and those who don't, well, don't.

I feel like a lot of the ms currently in circulation do just hop back and forth between CA creators, as I read someone mention a while back. Moonstones are constantly being permanently removed from the economy faster than they can replenish, too. Merle anything? That's 50ms gone into the abyss, unusable by anybody else for anything (as opposed to a CA creator getting the ms to spend elsewhere). That'll take you a solid 20 days of maxxing your shards to get a single merle gene. Nobody can use those moonstones afterwards, twenty days worth, gone. 30 days for 1 stripes gene. 60 days- two entire months- to save for a Zerda BC. 80 days for a Volmyr BC. Then the time needed to expand your den goes up exponentially, too. 10ms? Easy, just like four days right? 20ms? Okay, we're up to about 8 more days to save for the next expansion. And then 12 more days. And then 16 more days. To fully max your dens as a FTP player, assuming you get every possible ms shard (not including pageant shards) it would take you ONE HUNDRED FOURTY FOUR DAYS to max your dens. Assuming you're buying no sprinklers, no sex changes, no breed changes, no MS companions, and no wolves (which are more and more going for only ms).

I'm trying to help by selling pretty WWs for pebbles. I use a lot of pebble genes and eye besprinklers, which sinks a TON of pebbles. I was even a whale buying moonstones, because I wanted this site to succeed! I thought if I helped get them over this initial hump, then the money I've spent will be worth it, since the staff needs money to keep doing their jobs. But we've had very few updates and my willingness to spend on moonstones has plummetted. Any wolf I have any interest in is either several hundred to several thousand moonstones, or the seller is only interested in Flight Rising currency.

I think layer-specific besprinkles would kill the WW economy, and that's where I get basically any moonstones from that aren't USD converts. Any wolf selling for a large amount of moonstones that isn't a WW is either a 4 digit, palindrome, G2 brac, or other unique IDs like 100011. Even G2 vols and zerda go for single digit moonstones. Doesn't mean anybody buys those, just that those are the only alternatives to make large amounts of MS through wolf selling if the value of WWs plummets. If we get layer-specialty besprinkles, then only wolf IDs will really matter. A special WW (doubles, triples, greyscale, etc.) won't fetch much moonstones if you can just keep dumping pebbles into sprinklers on other wolves to make it what you want. That'll kill the game for me, personally. I'm not here to argue about that particular position, just stating that I don't think layer-specific besprinkles are a good idea. Now, color swapping besprinkles, where you take the already given RNG colors and just swap where they're at on the wolf, I feel is a better way to give people more control over some slightly unsightly WWs while not butchering that particular market.

Lowering the threshold for CA would be another good idea. 100ms is 40 days of maxxing your shards, just so you can submit a piece, and hope it gets approved in less than 2-3 weeks. That's a lot of time and moonstones to put into something that might not even sell a single copy. I saw a prior suggestion of having a cheaper CA token for small pieces, and a more expensive one for the larger pieces. Maybe even making the small CA token be for a million or so pebbles, so people have an incentive to price CA for pebbles. 100ms is a big down payment for something that probably won't pay off, since so many people are clinging to their moonstones right now (myself included) CA isn't being bought as much.

I think a pebble breed, or at least new pebble genes (even if they're expensive at 100k-200k per) would significantly help. Many people with basic WWs would love to have a bit more variety that doesn't cost two or more months to save up for a single breed change. They've already said CA will be the majority of apparel, so hoping for a bunch of pebble apparel feels kinda weird. I think if more artists were able to jump into the CA space, and if the CA space wasn't dominated by a few creators with dozens of designs, moonstones would be spread out a bit more. There's so many CAs I'd love to buy! But one particular outfit has all three pieces at like 75ms each. That's 90 days worth of maxxing ms shards to get that CA set. Better hope that set doesn't sell out in the three months it'll take you to save for it!

I completely agree that having the ability to scatter all colors separately would be bad for the economy. The idea I support, and I apologize that I can't remember where I read it, was a base scatter (or accent scatter). Either/or, but not the ability to scatter all colors individually. That would take away a lot of value from WW that have good color combos. But a single option, like base or accent, would maybe perk the market up for the less desirable ones without overly hurting the value of nicer WW. :)

Obviously the biggest problem is that there's not a lot to do with pebbles. But I think if you arbitrarily put in some kind of a 'pebble ceiling', that would drive away the few active players left. It's basically punishing the few people left on this site playing for fun by arbitrarily deciding they are having 'too much fun'

I do suspect that this game outputs a lot more currency than FR does. FR's Coliseum loot doesn't directly drop any currency at all, and the fairgrounds gives out currency but has a cap. Dragon training/exalting is a thing but I'm hearing lots of people say that it's just too easy to make pebbles but I never hear how it's too easy to make treasure. There's just not a lot to do on this site outside of engaging with the campaign or professions system and both will get you currency. So I do concede that this site is too generous, but it's too late to dial back on the one thing keeping people here. One possible compromise is to not outright stop pebble income, but to cap it at lowered rates after you hit a certain milestone. But again, I don't know how popular this would be and right now this site badly needs users

So what's left? More sinks like genes, breeds, apparel, companions. I also think a pebble only scatter like the one suggested above would be a decent compromise. It could even be very expensive, like 5-10 million for a base scatter

I don't think the campaign is an issue. FR's coli can net you way more treasure if you exalt dragons since it's 100x faster to train a dragon to the 10kt exalt range compared to training wolves.

I think expansions should all be changed to pebbles. I paid MS for mining expansions and I won't mind the change. Expansion prices for non-premium currency here are dirt cheap compared to FR.

I don't think recipes are a good pebble sink because you can just pay people to craft stuff for you.

Most expansions need to become pebble purchases instead of ms purchases. As someone who spent moonstones bought with actual cash for them, I STILL HIGHLY SUPPORT CHANGING THIS now, after the fact.

I'd rather have 'wasted' a bit of cash than watch this site's economy continue to crash and burn for good.

-points up at Sherushi- This (first paragraph). Plus hoardselling items can net you a lot if you coli a lot.

I don't think expansions are going to be changed now since it would likely make an "official" pebbles/ms ratio since it's been long enough and idk if the admins want that. But like someone else said, the first thing that could be done is either removing the moonstone shard daily cap or making it higher. Would be a good start.

Plus, you know, pebble items. Which we're apparently getting at some point, at least. More patterns, especially ones costing around Maned's range or higher would probably help too. I know people really want things like spots (including me) and african wild dog markings.

I do want to second the points made on how "easy" it is to earn pebbles here. I think the amount is decent overall and shouldn't be lowered. I feel like the cause of our broken economy right now is more tied to the low numbers of active players, the lack of sought-after pebble items (breed changes, markings, specialty items (i.e. base besprinkler and color shuffler)) and the overwhelming amount of uses for MS.

To fix this, I would first either change expansions back to pebbles (maybe reimburse players who already paid in MS) or add expansions for pebblels. One major, deserved criticism for this site is that gameplay features were road-blocked by premium currency. That should never be a thing, honestly. Premium currency has it's place in aesthetic features and stuff that is nice to have but not actually needed. But capacity in game-play features? That have a pretty big impact on level progression? Yeah, no, that's not purely aesthetic/convenient.

Next I would put the focus of developement more on incremental, small updates over big game changers. While it's nice to have a shiny new feature once in a while, if the meantime is filled with silence and lack of content, players will likely lose interest and faith in LW and go back to other sites that they're already established on.

What would be some nice, smaller updates? Those could be new fishes to be caught, new recipes to be cooked, new seeds to be sown, new items drops in the campaign. Top that up with new markings/apparel every other month and you have at least the general feel of a site that is a WIP/cared for by it's dev team even if those changes are relatively small.

On top of that I also like the thought of big specialty items for pebbles to give players something to save up for. I'm thinking base color besprinklers or color shuffles. Those could be very high in price and low in numbers to make them scarce on the MM.

To be fair, online game economy is tricky, unsteady and very difficult to control for devs and I'm not saying that my ideas would be an instand fix to anything. But I do believe that there are things the devs can do to breath some life into their game if they want to. Honestly, at this point I feel like any change would be a welcome one.

As someone who plays more casually, I don't actually earn that many pebbles, and even though I'm learning a lot in this thread (time to get myself a pebble familiar farm), I think implementing one easy, obvious way to earn a limited amount of pebbles per day (like FR's fairgrounds) would make the start way easier for less experienced players, without limiting the grinders' extra income. Especially when we get more pebble sinks, which we desperately need. I felt super frustrated in the beginning when I had no good way to make pebbles and even the super moderate prices in the MM felt astronomical to me, and I can imagine quite a few players just stopped playing after a few days because they couldn't be bothered to "git gud"

I'm very fond of Nobody's idea to add some seperate pebble expansions. Like this, the site won't suddenly be flooded with MS like it would be with an reimbursement (which might negatively affect MS sales the site might need at this stage), and on the other hand people who already expanded wouldn't be angry they "wasted" their moonstones. FRs hibernal den has the option to trade in items or premium currency for slots, with both methods having their separate slot cap, I'd like something like that here.

I also think the devs need to decide between giving us more pebble apparel or making CATs more affordable, so artists can lower CA prices. Dressing your pets is such a well loved mechanic in this type of game, and demanding your players pay 2-10$ for ONE apparel piece is insane if 99% of all apparel can only be acquired this way. Especially with the cap on moonstone shards.

The most important thing to me overall is that the game becomes more ftp friendly and adds more things to do with pebbles. Right now, the atmosphere on Lorwolf is very "give us your money or leave", so people unwilling or unable to spend real life currency do just that: They leave.

I agree here, one issue with lorwolf is that starting is actually kind of hard (especially because a lot of progression is locked behind having more than 2 wolves.)

Yet once a player gets over the main hurdles progress goes up exponentially resulting in players able to steamroll any future hurdles with barely a scratch in their pebble funds.

This leads to another issue as any hard caps or other such ways to nerf grinding will mainly harm newer or more casual players.

I think another reason why LW's economy is failing is because CAs are so important, if you actually like customization aside from breeding. There is so little pebble/official apparel and frankly, it's not all that interesting. The problem is a lot of moonstones are trapped in the CA market - the artist gets the MS, uses it for tokens, maybe buys another CA, and basically the same money just keeps getting passed around between different CAs. Relatively very few moonstones make it out of that cycle, because either it's poofed out of existence (expansions) or there's just no other reason to trade them away. Selling CAs for pebbles is almost always going to be a loss for the artist. And this isn’t their fault at all, it’s just how the system was set up.

This is the unfortunate result of requiring the playerbase to make most of the site's apparel. Which would have not been a bad thing itself, but CAs were supposed to be a supplement - when the site receives no other updates, art or apparel or gameplay or anything, there's basically nothing left to do BUT rely on CAs for customization. (Really, we should be thanking CA artists for keeping the site afloat so far.)