"Why should anyone wait for you to give them 400-500 gold per unused token when they literally sell for that amount at the broker during the fest?"

The only reason they sold for that in these last festivals is because people knew they had an inherent value that could be cashed in the next year. There have been festivals before this happened where festival tokens couldn't be sold except for absurdly low prices. Without a value set to them, tokens near the end of a festival become actually worthless for some of us huge grinders.

Would players who are waiting for more than a 7.2 million payday be open to an alternative reward for pending Gold beyond that 7.2 million mark? Or are you strictly only wanting the Gold returned?

As one of these players, I would be open to other compensation. The loss of gold kinda hurts but mostly I would like to see that my efforts did not go to waste.

With regards to autocompletion.

Since I am new, I came in on the tail end of the spring fest and don't really remember it that well, I was unaware that winter fest sculptures were instant completed and spring and fall grew over time without additives, so with just summer really being affected by this change, it probably won't be as bad as I feared.

With regards to what Xavion said I believe, where you can have X of one additive, Y of another and 0 of the third, and all your pets require the third, I have always felt that being able to change the additive required for a nominal token fee (10 tokens to reroll with the chance of getting the same additive required as before) would definitely help, especially when you just can't seem to find anyone with the correct additive.

For the prestige pets, I would be completely fine with the extra stats not passing on, but would like them to have the same cap as max stats.

I believe that there still would be a market for max stats for one main reason: most of those are also 6 vis and/or carefully selected to look pleasing. I feel that many of the players who would go for prestiged pets, like me, honestly would not be that interested in max stats, unless we were forced to buy them to remain competitive. I have a team of max stats I bought (one was gifted to me), and it was difficult selecting them, because I wanted max stats whose looks appealed to me. Unfortunately (and this is aimed at my taste and not breeders of max stats) most of the max stat projects I saw simply were not appealing to me. I love the max stats I have, and potentially would have bought them anyway due to their looks, but I also love the looks of my original team, and love the idea that I could still potentially use them competively against max stats.

One thing that potentially could mitigate it is pretty much making it so that using prestige to get pets to max stat not only doesn't pass those stats down through breeding, but it also would take much longer than it would to breed a pair of max stats. It already can take a bit to get pets to level 70 (though to be honest, I would have gotten my pets pretty close or at level 70 during the spring fest I joined if I hadn't stopped them gaining experience) and so gaining levels over that (or to 75 if/when the cap is ever raised) would take even more, and if each prestige level only gave a boost of 1-5 points? How long would it take to get a starter pet to max? (I honestly don't know)

Perhaps... Prestiged Stats just simply are not passed along during breeding at all? Additionally, perhaps they are capped at 1000/100/100s? Significant enough to make pets such as Starter pets very viable for competitive play, but max stat Breeding projects still reign superior?


I'm not sure on that one. The only GOOD thing I was looking forward to with this change was the poor species that have been left behind. The Ny'vene, Puff, Griffi, Aeri, Ryori, and Lighira. Some of the most popular species of pet, left with NO WAY to gain wild stats. This was going to be their ONLY chance at having superstats projects available so they can be a match for the rest.


But the alternative... Maxed stat projects NEED to hold their value. If a project requiring so much time and currency to build isn't worth anything, then why would any pet be worth anything?


This needs a lot more thought and planning put into it, I think.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=4#35 Author: Krinadon Time Posted: 10/21/2019 at 2:11 AM I couldn't sleep~ Okay... so... I have hashed out a lot of ideas pertaining to a plethora of festival economical related issues. I am just going to write out my proposed plan for everything here, step by step. Please read it over and comment with your provided feedback. I think that this is a very fair and balanced proposition with solutions to a lot of issues. I believe it will also attempt to tackle the problems directly at the source and do so right now which will enable us to then further adjust and improve things starting much sooner than just enduring and waiting it out and attempting to slowly mitigate things over an extended period of time. One last point of emphasis: I love all of you. Seriously. I know sometimes these announcements/plans seem like I am just trying to punish people or make things awful, etc. Absolutely never. If I could go back in time and change how so many features were initially set up - I 100% would. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. And now we ended up in Egypt when we were supposed to be in London - or something. You all now love sand. It's all you've ever known. I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. I like clouds. I like rain. If we had started in London, you all would love clouds and rain too. So now I am trying to adjust things to end up in London which obviously means significant change. I believe Sylestia would be so much better in London and would grow so much faster and everything would be great. But that requires significant change and almost every human on the planet is inherently resistant to change. (Disclaimer: Absolutely nothing against Egypt or London. They were literally the first two absolutely random geographical locations that popped into my head so I just ran with it.) My Proposal 1. In regards to specifically the expected Fall Festival Expired Tokens for this year... I am inclined to just call it a wash. I botched multiple things with the script as highlighted earlier in this announcement/thread. Many players ended up getting more than the cap of 5,000 due to the mistakes, some I'm sure ended up with 10,000. IIRC, there were only a handful of players who significantly were over the cap. I would much prefer those players just send me a PM and I will work something out with them. The alternative is spending an entire day (during a period of time where I literally have no spare time) doing a partial database restoration, writing a ton of data scraping scripts, and then manually recalculating people's values when the majority probably were hardly affected by the cap to begin with when you consider all of the issues. 2. Moving forward, meaning for the 2019 Fall Festival, 2019 Winter Festival, 2020 Spring Festival, so on and so forth - Festival Tokens and Festival Items will cease being reimbursed. They will not have a Gold value. They will not turn into Expired Tokens. They will just be removed at the end of a Festival if not consumed. I believe there just is no alternative and I believe this will directly attack the issue at the source. This isolates each Festival into its own little world and greatly reduces the effect it can have on the global economy. This also allows for much more control over the supply/demand of each Festival's rewards. Example: Currently, players obviously weigh the value of said Festival thing vs Token cost x500. The majority will probably just rather take the guaranteed Gold b/c maybe something down the road is more interesting to them since Gold is universal. This leads to hoarding. This then just continues infinitely and gets worse and worse and worse with every iteration. I do not believe just simply reducing the amount of Gold returned will solve anything - in fact, I think it'd potentially even make it worse. People would still hoard probably just as much but then it'd also probably intrinsically reduce the value of static items. Reducing the Gold value really doesn't solve any issues. It just kinda smooshes things around and hopes for a better outcome. 3. Pets will no longer auto grow after a Festival completely ends. What you complete is what you get. Now, if a player completed a pet but didn't claim it, I will process those for players. But if the pet is not at 100% growth by the end of the Festival, it will be lost. This will help boost the demand of consuming growing agents and the use of tokens on said agents. 4. Festival growing items will mostly cease dropping from the Festival Zone. The Festival Zone will be focused on rewarding players with the unique Avatar Items, the unique Themed Pets, a grind-able method of obtaining Festival Tokens, and a way to easily level up pets. Players will be expected to mainly obtain the Festival growing items through the Festival Shop and/or other features, such as the Task Log, Haunted House, etc. 5. The 'spend your stuff' period will increase from 1 Week to 2 Weeks after the Festival Zone closes. This will increase the amount of time for players utilizing any Forum Game prizes and allow for a lot more time to plan and finish growing their remaining pets and whatever else they were wanting to do before everything is removed. 6. For the last 3 remaining Festivals where players are due Expired Tokens, I will go ahead and calculate all 3 Festivals as one joint event. Instead of a cap of 5,000 Tokens per Festival, I will do a total cap of 18,000 Tokens. This will be calculated prior to the 2019 Winter Festival and players will receive one-third of their owed Gold prior to each of those 3 Festivals. I believe doing this accomplishes the following: -Doesn't greatly penalize a player for having 15,000 Spring Tokens and 0 Winter and Summer compared to a player who kept 5,000 in each. This way, everything is treated entirely equally and limited to a maximum return of 7.2 million Gold per player - which is a lot of Gold. -Everything will be calculated up front, all at once. This way everyone knows what they are due in total and knows what to expect and when to expect it. No more last minute surprise calculations. -The total amount of Gold awarded will be spread out over ~9 months, reducing the impact of dumping all of the Gold all at once into the economy. "Okay. All of this sounds awful. Where is the good stuff?" While, yes, all of the above are "nerfs" in a sense... it is all in the name of improving value and making time worthwhile. And, just as importantly, it greatly reduces the stress on myself, Faiona, and the artists for churning out content. Honestly, A LOT of Sylestia's content is relatively easily obtainable. I mean, every Festival, we're pushing out like 150 new Avatar Items, 40+ new Themed Pets, new Pet Traits, new Features, on and on and on. And despite all of that, people are still ending up with 20,000... 30,000 Festival Tokens leftover to rake in tens of millions of Gold the following year. I'm sorry, but that really is not sustainable. =\ We have to do what we can to preserve the value of the things we are investing thousands of dollars on and hundreds of work hours on. Obviously, it's all about finding the balance. I am not literally saying, "Things too much. Must give players less!" Even though that's probably how the above sounds - that's not at all the point I'm trying to make. I am essentially wanting to "reset" things to a normal starting level and then work to improve everything so that, not only are the root issues fixed (tons of Gold inflation), but we're also serving you guys more meaningful and interesting content. And that... leads me to: 7. MORE THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR STUFF! MORE STUFF TO DO WITH YOUR THINGS! Here is what I am planning for this upcoming Fall Festival broken down into as much detail as I have figured out thus far: Pet Prestige: Is your Pet at the current Level Cap? Is it at like 1092% of Level 70? Prestige it! For every additional max level a pet earns, it will have the ability to increase its Wild Stats up to a maximum of 3,000 Total Health, 300 Total Mana, and 200** Total Str/Int/Dex/Agi. Wild Stats and Base Stats will be added together towards the above totals. Meaning, a current max stat Pet can unlock an additional 1,000 Wild Health, 100 Wild Mana, and 100 Wild Str/Int/Dex/Agi. If a pet is not max stat, it can still reach those same Total Caps, however it will require more Wild stats to attain it. This will allow players to take their favorite pets, that may not be max stats, and grind a whole lot of extra levels out of them to be on par with max stat pets. As you may already know, while Wild Stats are passed along during breeding, they are significantly reduced. The higher the Wild Stats prior to breeding, the more that will be lost when carried over to an Offspring. Whereas Base Stats are generally increased through Breeding. Experience Philters: Experience Philters will now also increase the amount of Expertise a Pet earns through defeating enemies in battle. The Maws of Madness: Now, this is the main thing. This will be a brand new feature added with this year's Fall Festival. The plan is to have two options for it: A Level 20-60 version and a Level 60-70 version. At a maximum of once per day - or with a small Diamond fee - players can reset and/or choose a different version for themselves. Each version will have 10 different Levels to it and players will start at Level 1. Each Level will require a Key of Madness to unlock. The key will be consumed and one unlock grants one successful play through. If the player fails a Level, it will still remain unlocked. If the player resets the Maws of Madness, everything will reset and any unlocked Levels will return to their locked status. Each Level will offer the player with all sorts of various rewards if successfully completed. For the Level 60-70 version, this will include: Gold, a ton of Experience and Expertise, Lost Grove Materials, Festival Supplies, and exclusive one-time rewards for first time completions. Keys of Madness can be obtained once a day by completing all Daily Tasks in the Task Log, purchasing them with Festival Tokens, or purchasing them with Diamonds. They will not be tradeable. They will cap out at a maximum of 10 saved Keys at a time. Back to the whole reset thing... Players will be able to utilize the Reset option to replay through the Maws of Madness and collect the rewards over and over again. So for example, if they can only reach Level 5, they can reset it the next day and replay Levels 1 through 4 rather than being permanently stuck at Level 5. As for the Levels themselves, they will be Arena Style battles set in the Lost Grove rule-set. Meaning, Lost Grove consumable rules and such will apply. As a player progresses through the Levels of their version, the battles will get progressively more difficult, but way more rewarding. Before and after each battle, pets will be healed to full, cooldowns reset, and stripped of any buffs they may have. Wins and loses will not count towards the player or pet's battle records. This feature will offer players a great way to spend their Festival Tokens on an exclusive feature that offers tons of premium, unique rewards that may be hard to come by elsewhere. And again, huge amounts of Experience and Expertise will be awarded from this feature. Players can be encouraged to use the Level 20-60 version to fast track level a new party of pets up. Players can be encouraged to use the Level 60-70 version to grind out a lot of Wild Stats for max level pets very quickly. Players can utilize the Level 60-70 version to obtain hard to get Lost Grove materials under their own control. So on and so on. Obviously, this type of feature will be improved and built upon as time goes on and we will attempt to add similar features to the other Festivals as well. But this is significantly more in the direction that I want Sylestia to go in. I want to stop the bleeding of immense Gold inflation. I want to increase the demand of Festival Rewards by isolating them more. And I want to offer players ways to obtain actual progressive content through participating in Festivals - which should greatly increase demand all across the board for all things Festivals. Lastly, again, keep in mind, nothing is ever set in stone! We will always, always, always constantly be trying to improve things. Even if the above doesn't work... or creates new problems... or whatever - we will then make adjustments to attempt to counter those.

Here's a bit of a concern or maybe a suggestion: With regards to tokens, I often find that I am left with too little of them to buy anything from the store that I am interested in, so when there's just a few days or a few hours left of a festival to earn tokens in, I often sell them on the broker. You've removed the ability for tokens to be converted automatically to gold (I hadn't even known that was a thing), why not just add something similar directly to the festival token shop? Something that costs 1 token and is useful for everyone in whatever quantities they end up getting. (Okay, so maybe a gold value would make sense here, but I'm sure there are other things that qualify.)

Not sure if I should've pinged you or not. I apologize if I wasn't.

Didn't want to quote and have everything potentially show up, but there was a suggestion in the economy thread about being able to turn pets in for scales, so why not have something where you can turn in 1 token and get 1 scale or 10 tokens and get 1 scale back (not sure how it would have to be balanced).

I feel like anything of that nature just leads us back to square one. I strongly believe Festival Currencies should 100% only be eligible for the specific Festival they are used for and nothing else. Let everything else fall into place and adjust from there depending on where new gaps are created.

Krin, may I strongly suggest you break out the Wild stat / max stat / prestige stat discussion into another thread? Because that's not so much Fest related.

I'm still really worried about auto-complete. A slow auto-progression on all fests would take care of my concerns, but still. It takes far too many supplies, over far too long of a time. All it takes is a RL hiccup at the start to screw someone over by the end. That adds extra stress, and this is, at the end, a game. So for something so special, I think auto-progression (like hte 2 fests that have it) is the way to go, to balance things.

As for my thoughts on the Prestige stats.... I am a max stat breeder, a super stat breeder, and I have some pets with a ton of reserve xp points. So I can see all sides of this particular mess.

1. It takes a brutally long time to level up a pet to 70, even using tips and tricks.
2. It takes a brutally long time to rank a pet to all rank4.
3. It takes a brutally long time to breed up and manage a max/super stat breeding project.
4. You've said that the last stage in Lost Grove will have Supers of the Legendaries.
5. Super / Max stats are a Major Advantage in Lost Grove.

Unless you make each level of Prestige Points worth 10 points per level, its going to take a really long time to rank up a pet the same way you can a super / max stat. So as long as the Prestige Points are quite low for each new level, I think its ok to have them.

As for breeding....
1. Max stats are like a breeder breeding in more speed into a pet. Its genetic.
2. Wild Stats are like wild vitality: the strength of natural selection. Its genetic.
3. Prestige stats are based on the pet's actual accomplishments. Not genetic.

I feel that given that Prestige stats are not genetic, they should not be passed on. That retains the value of max and super stats, while also letting someone who wants to use their starter to do so.

Still think the Prestige Stats need to be in their own thread....

Cheers!
C4.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=81803&page=9#84 Author: Krinadon Time Posted: 10/21/2019 at 1:22 PM @Xavion, A lot can be done to both include the changes and also address your concerns - some of which kind of already has taken place. For example, the extra time after the zone closes provides more time to use the rewards that get processed 'late' (like from forum games). You should most definitely end up with more than a week to process those rewards - which is more than the time you've currently had at any point in the past. Secondly, almost anytime we award a catalyst as a forum game reward, it's accompanied with a slew of supplies and agents. With the proposed changes, we can just simply add onto this to include a quick growth item and sufficient agents to grow it to full. That way the player is guaranteed to have that catalyst completely grown assuming they don't wait until 11:59 PM the final night to start it. And we don't have to stop there with further changes. We absolutely most definitely can adjust other things as needed to accompany the changes. In my opinion, keeping auto complete in or adding special fast grow periods at the end of Festivals, etc - they are just more artificial bandaids.

For example, the extra time after the zone closes provides more time to use the rewards that get processed 'late' (like from forum games). You should most definitely end up with more than a week to process those rewards - which is more than the time you've currently had at any point in the past.


I think you missed the main point there. When the festival closes, usually that's it. It's extremely hard to get supplies with that gone unless you've got a treasure trove of gold to throw at people. You could give me all year long but I still wouldn't be able to gather up any new supplies without a way to access them. I love the idea of ensuring the prizes come with everything they need to be fully complete - that I can 100% say "yes, please" to. I believe I only got... what, 12 additives with the Summer Fest prizes? And unlike Spring and Fall, I'm pretty sure the Summer pets MUST be given additives to progress - no timer-based increase. Summer definitely needs the full shebang of additives included with catalyst prizes. Summer sand pets are painfully slow...

But there's still one issue I can foresee with it, even with 100% additives given, and that's one reason why I'll still be hoping that we can get our prizes with a full week of open festival zone to go.

Say a player gets lucky and tadah, here's a Majestic Catalyst from your prize pouch! But the visible quality they get included with the prize is 1V. To a lot of players it feels like a waste of a Majestic Catalyst to settle for 1V. With a full week to grind out the festival zone? They have a fair shot at making that a 2V. With only a day or two..? Or worse, with the festival zone already closed? It's pretty unlikely unless they were hoarding supplies from the beginning, which is now pretty much discouraged so most players probably won't be hoarding on the off-chance they get lucky at the last minute. Guaranteeing players a week in the festival zone after getting their prizes sounds like the best possible option. It also gives them reasonable time for "Well I got the Majestic Ny'vene but I wanted the Majestic Nephini. Maybe someone would be willing to trade catalysts?"

I guess what it mostly comes down to is that for all the benefits, I don't see a reason that it can't be done? Forum contests and such may have to be closed out a bit earlier, perhaps, but if it means getting prizes in a manner that leaves the festival zone open another week for material gathering, that... that sounds great. Where's the downside o.o?


(I'm also going to add a note to say how much I appreciate that you're willing to negotiate and consider player feedback. I know that as the admin you see the numbers that we, as individual players, have no way of knowing. But at the same time, as players we have perspectives that an admin won't, like knowing where the system likes to reign terror upon our efforts with cruel RNG that stymies all progress until it decides to be nice - if it even does. It's wonderful having the chance for open dialogue and I'm sorry if I ever come off as harsh.)

Having slept on it, and read & discussed this with others, it seems like a "reset" is really needed.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, painful as the adjustment is. So expiring currency, finishing catalysts during the fest, etc. all make sense to me. Even growing things not dropping seems fine, since they can be bought for *no longer hoardable* fest tokens...

The only issue for me is that forum games are processed in a timely manner (or their prizes are not fest making supplies)...I still have about a hundred shamrocks just sitting in my inventory, which were given as a late prize, which I never got to use in the end... Then again, the 2 week extra period seems to deal with this.


Hearing just how much people love their starters, and how excited people are about getting their pets potentially to the top...if the process is long/difficult enough, maybe it is for the best to have, for example, +180 wild stats if they are not breedable...

In fact, if we are doing a "reset", it makes more sense to me to make all wild stats completely non-breedable... yes this affects me somewhat as I have superstats (like almost all max breeders now). But it simplifies things, and makes a clear distinction: base stats = breeding & wild stats = experience/valuable wild pets.

Non-breedable, but more flexible wild stats would, in my opinion, be the most sustainable, and would allow people to gain useful "favorites" from actual long-term use.

But with all such resets, some people would be negatively impacted. I think the idea of rewarding hoarders with something valuable is a classy move, and as Ley stated, is important to make sure that all that effort didn't go to waste.

It might be nice to try something similar for wild/superstat breeders? Something to say that all that effort didn't go to waste?

But I still think cutting off the breedability of wild stats would be sustainable. That way, someone could catch a wild legendary pet in the zone, and use it effectively right away in their party. So it's still valuable. But breeding max stats would still be based on prisma philters...seems much more sustainable to me!


Edit: by non-breedable, I meant wild stats not getting passed on at all...not that the pets themselves are non-breedable! xD