Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=44539&page=2#15 Author: Creativity Time Posted: 3/16/2017 at 12:51 PM Does it cost diamonds to hire a stablehand?

It only costs Diamonds if you hire her for 12 weeks. You can hire her for the shorter durations and it only costs Gold - but she'd save you probably a lot more Gold than it'd cost to hire her.

Adding the "Click to Hire Stablehand" makes it so much easier! I didn't know they existed until last year. And then I kept forgetting how to get back to the spot to hire one. Thanks for making this easier.

EDIT: Is there anyway you could add an alert when your stablehand expires? Like, just a PM would be enough.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=44539&page=3#22 Author: Alchemy Time Posted: 3/16/2017 at 12:57 PM Adding the "Click to Hire Stablehand" makes it so much easier! I didn't know they existed until last year. And then I kept forgetting how to get back to the spot to hire one. Thanks for making this easier. EDIT: Is there anyway you could add an alert when your stablehand expires? Like, just a PM would be enough.

Yes. I'll look into a way of sending an alert to your account or something before they expire and also add a way to 'extend the contract' without having to pay the hire fee again.

I believe it's 4 weeks and 12 weeks that cost diamonds. I always hire for 2 weeks which is the longest you can hire without costing diamonds.

i would love more stabelhands^^ and i did not notes the increase of price to be honist (and that while i have close to 5000 pets to feed, oeps i may have to start paying atention to those kind of things) and yes i have bin using stabelhand ever sins it came out becaus it realy makes a mager diferent in price (aspecialy with a big growing collection of pets like mine^^)

if there is going to be a reward for keeping your pets feed for x amound of days i would like to get a warning during the last 3 days of the contracet of my stabelhand, becaus now i know i have to rehiger the stabelhand when the next day my pets are not feed :P

sins my idea about making pets auto-tested when you have the ever lasting test kid did not work, would it be posibel to have a stabelhand test your pets? (this ofcours does mean you need to have an Exeptional Genetic Test Kit and maby earned and x amound of AP or gold befor you can unlock it)

and i would love a stabelhand that can help me hatch my eggies. like that you can already select what you want to be done with an eggie when it becomes ready to hatch. even with using philters, so that when you select that you want the eggie prismatic philtered when it hatched. the philter will be taken from your inventory already as if used so that you can't select that 10 pets need that philter when you only have 2 or something. (and i think a stabelhand like that should be earned with an x amound of scales on an acount to unlock it :P )

Suggestion for other uses of feeding:

Potential rewards was mentiond while I was writing this, but I suppose I can still post how I envisiond it.

For example, if a pet never ends up starving or going unconcious under your care, it will grow happier and happier, to the point it could give you something. Could be something like a diamond, or like an essence, or pet dye's or an avatar item that can only be found trough this manner.

(new Outfits, helds, backgrounds etc. a list of new items that will only be available trough this method)

So if you constandly keep your pets fed, they could find items/things. The longer you manage to keep them fed, the more interesting the items they find could become. Some being very rare, others being commen. But even commen ones would not pop up untill you kept them fed for at least a certain while.

There could be a limit to how much you can find as well. Like your only able to find 1 item a day if you find any. This could avoid massive stacking of items by players who have mountains of pets.

The up side to having many pets would be that if you do keep them all fed, after a certain amount of time the chances of finding one a item a day would drasticly increase. While those with few pets might not find something everyday even after feeding them all.

The way to find out if one of your pets found something could simply be the item appearing in your trades and a message in your inbox informing your pet found something while playing outside.

A much simpler method of just getting set rewards every few days that increase the longer they kept fed could also work, but it would be tricky based on how it would work. If it works by just feeding one pet all the time everyone will get the same rewards even though some might feed more of their pets and thus spend more money on the same rewards. But only making it work by feeding all your pets is also not fair, because some have so many pets they would then be forced to spend far more money to get the same rewards. Which Is why i suggested my version. Those with more pets they keep fed will also have higher chances of finding items, but everyone will find items more and more the longer in a row they keep their pets fed.

Sorry if this ended up a ramble..I'm not good in keeping things short. :(

No ranting from me, I understand the need to even out the money in/money out conundrum. It is always a very fine line from being too much or too little.

My thoughts, 25g per unit is quite high, I do use the Stablehand (and yes, it is a bit hard to find... took me a few days and asking around to find it when it first came out!). With over 3000 pets, it would be pretty expensive if I didn't. Price wise, 15-20g/unit maybe a better one. Otherwise, people may let their pets go hungry.

I do like your ideas of a bonus if you feed so many days in a row. This would be nice if it was tiered; for example, 10 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.... and maybe something special for like 1 year (ie, a cool avvie item or something)?

I would also like to see another tier in the Stablehand, I think that would work well in conjunction with the feeding for so many days.

Thanks for the heads up! And I am looking forward to seeing what others have to say!

Firstly, I didn't really notice that you upped the price for feeding pets, but I'm glad that it served a useful purpose.

Second, I think that maybe a good mid ground would maybe be 15 or 16 gold per unit as a base price without the stable hand. For the stable hand 10% bonus it could be about 13 gold per unit, and stable hand with 80% bonus would work out to being about 5 I believe(I'm not the best at math so the figures would surely need to be double checked).

Third, I'd like to say I'd LOVE to see both and account bonus and a higher tier Stablehand that comes with more discounts/bonus and I'd expect it to be a bit harder to get(like maybe it's double the AP to unlock the basic stablehand we already have).

Finally, I'd like to include my possible solutions/ideas that may help some:

1). Have a tab in the currency broker where gold could be exchanged for diamonds for a fixed rate dependent on if there's a sale active or not. I know that you can buy diamonds with gold from fellow players but no way to buy diamonds with gold directly from the game itself.

2). Make a "Gold Shop". This Gold Shop would have exclusive goods that can only be gotten with gold. Naturally a rotating or limited stock of items would help keep things interesting. Stock could include Avi Items, Philters, Costumes(for pets maybe), limited edition pets/custom from the egg pets. This may be an interesting addition as it gives folks other options that are different from the standard shops and also has completely different stock from that of the Diamond Shop.

3). Prize Tiers: For people that donate to help reduce inflation they get a prize that matches the value in which they have returned to the game.

4). Add more games with a fixed number of plays per day.

5) Create more missions that to complete need 2 pets assigned. These missions would need 1 pet that can clear Hard Missions and one pet that can clear Medium Missions. This allows for a higher tier mission class that still gives good rewards but it takes longer than the Hard missions to complete and requires 2 pets. This can also mean that in this case you can create pair combo missions, like Health and Strength or Inelegance and Agility. These missions would could be called Expert Missions.

6) Make a Sylestia Banking system.

Those are the only ideas I have for now. If I come up with any other possible ideas that don't sound completely ridiculous I'll post them here.

Thanks as always Krin for keeping us up to date on what's going on and for letting us the users chime in with our suggestions/ideas.

Ah, well that explains it, I'm not even at 1k AP yet! Well maybe in the future then, and thanks!

Concerns I have about higher stable costs are these -

Some players can not buy diamonds. This can make it harder on people who usually have to rely on gold and save up to buy things they want. It also means that some players can be forced to have to spend more time playing to be able to keep up. As much as I love Sylestia, even I need time to do other tasks.

Players will be more tempted to not feed their pets. This could basically make it where the gold sink doesn't work. And it's unfortunate but I've seen other players before who've said some things not very nice about other players who don't feed their pets.

It could impact stable purchases. People could be more scared of building up larger pet collections which would require more stables to house their pets.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Personally, I'm affected by all of these. I do buy diamonds when I can but it's not very often. I usually have to save up long and hard to make major purchases. Because I've gained such a large collection over my years of playing Sylestia (since day 2 of the site), I'm scared of not really being able to do as much as I was able to accomplish before if the feeding prices increase. A large increase would make me worried that I'll have to go without feeding pets to make progress. I also started breeding more again lately and I'd been wanting to buy more stables over time to house them. I definitely intend on buying a stable when I can again but I worry about having to stop my projects for the time being to see how things work out.


Other uses of having fed pets -
I'm not really sure. It seems like there's already one in that you can actually see the colors and traits of a pet when they're fed. If they're starved, they're grayed out unless you click on them to look at them in their profile so it's harder to actually enjoy your pets if they're not fed.

What if there's a mini game you could only play if your pets are all fed?


Other gold sinks -

I'd really would like to see other gold sinks used than increasing feeding costs again.

Unfortunately, my main suggestion probably can't really see use until the site revamp. Crafting. I think crafting will be a wonderous use for soaking in a lot of gold. And it will feel more like the player's own choice in the matter than being burdened by an unexpected increase in feeding costs.

There are all sorts of things that could probably be crafted - flasks, equipment, avatar items, eventually perhaps things for player houses.

I think the use of guilds could be a gold sink. Like you can do some improvements towards a guild and perhaps even have a guild hall.

I'm sure I can think of more, but I think there's definitely other options out there.