It has a lot of promise as a concept! There is (was?) a huge audience for a decent pet sim that doesn't use AI slop, but the lack of communication (that seems to stem from a prideful refusal to engage with the community in a constructive way) hurts their potential a lot. I don't say that to be a hater, I'm still here & I will be 'til the lights get shut off. But, the site isn't in the state it's in on accident, the fact it can't pay its own bills & is not solvent as a business is a direct result of how the business is being run.
We get a lot of new users and keep very few of them longer than a few months, and what is really the incentive they have to invest in CA after they see that there is no dev activity, barring the 4 static events a year? Chapter 2 is still under development as far as we know, but "well, we haven't heard them say development is stalled or canceled so we have to assume it's still going" is... not very reassuring?
The community is, largely, wonderful-- has a problem with some toxic positivity at times, but I totally understand the impulse and the fear it stems from. There is a lot of uncertainty, but the place brings people joy, so they don't want to lose it. There are more user run events than ever, and that's nice to see! It's a shame all the onus is on the users to compensate for the fact we have no head Mod to engage with or to pass feedback back to the devs any longer, I believe that was very important since they don't seem to read anything themselves.
The site needs a lot of massive changes that wouldn't have been too late a year ago, but now I'm not really sure how they can accomplish what needs to be done without alienating the users they have left. The economy is inherently broken and has been since the beta, pebbles are worthless. Achievements helped buffer some of the moonstone drag for new players, but the site could stand to raise the shard cap or lower the price of extra dens (they have a sitewide refund system already set up if necessary, from back when they changed the mine cart and food slots to pebbles, but I don't know how much existing users would really care about a den price change even without it). Given the recent, ah, "activity" with new users having trouble understanding what goes into expanding their dens and how many moonstones it takes to get new tabs, this is definitely not an old user just guessing at what pinch points are for new ones. ;)
The breeding system is nice, I enjoy the challenge of 4 slots! The color ranges are nice, our existing breeds are cute. I am less satisfied with the rate of marking releases in the first couple years, since they are flat, single-color layer masks and don't require the dev time of complex, multi-layered and colored marking sets. We have sooo many natural animal marking patterns that we could have been getting shotgunned to us and could have lasted for years of content almost no matter how fast their releases were, and that is of course before we get into the limitless more fantastical patterns that would make great MS releases. I think that would have done a lot for the OG players' goodwill, cuz most of us love a good breeding project.
The battle system is also kinda novel, I enjoy we are at least still getting new synergy combos from the quarterly event companions even if we haven't seen a normal companion release in ages. Year round PVE arena would be an easy win, I have no idea why they want to push folks towards PVP arena when it just shines a light on how small the community is, but eh. It's not a massive deal, I just ignore it off-season.
Most of the professions are pretty well implemented. Not necessarily exciting, but they don't need to be; they just need to support the gameplay loop. Farming is the exception here, but I have no idea what purpose a mobile-style hurry-and-wait minigame is serving. It's not used as a predatory way to press micro-transactions here, yay-- but then why is that framework even used at all? Currently it's entirely redundant because cooking raw meat and fish is a more efficient use of the cooking pot than any complex recipe (wouldn't be the case if complex recipes gave you more than one finished item). It's true you don't have to even bother cooking nuts or carrots and they make wonderful dog fodder, but the cost of leveling farming to even get there vs the cost of just passively fishing does not add up at the moment.
I could go on forever, but I will end it there for now. I try to always offer routes forward or solutions with the things I don't think make any sense! :P Beautiful concept, baffling implementation and management, we'll see where it goes or if it keeps treading water for another year.
lalierre
