Alright, honestly there's a lot to unpack here (pun intended)!
First of all - genuinely, I was looking forwards to the Befriend Token, since getting Wild Wolves to drop or the encounter at all seems pretty few and far between, and I'm frankly shocked that it's 50 of the items needed plus a 15K pebble tax on top of that, only to come into the comments and see it was originally 100 items + nerfed encounter ratio? While I'm glad the team has been open and transparent in communication about it, 50 still seems like a lot to me. If it's a 1 in 10 chance to get a WW out of the scenario, logically it should take 10 of the items to guarantee one. 50 still seems quite excessive to me as a casual player; I rarely ever see those encounters to begin with. So I'm going to be frank that this update is still rather disappointing to me.
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Secondly, the food nerf really needs to be addressed. You've headed in a step in the right direction by addressing the Befriend Token issue, but many players throughout the comments addressed concerns about that, too. Not providing any feedback on why it was implemented and whether or not you're going to do anything to address this issue is not a good thing, especially when it negatively impacts gameplay as much as it does. It's taken a system that people enjoyed how it worked, and making it worse and not fun for just about everyone.
Food is a huge part of the game; every single activity pretty much requires food/stamina to sustain gameplay, so nerfing food sources is not a good idea. It just makes it more difficult to actually do any other activity, especially since getting food from other sources is a slow endeavor, and has a timer or a limit on it. Part of what makes Flight Rising so successful as a game, is its ability to allow any type of person to play it - be a casual or a intense gamer, the amount of content you get from the game is dependent on the individual effort you put into it.
For instance, you're able to make money on FR continuously by training + exalting in the Coliseum. While it does have a cap on the Fairgrounds with how much treasure can be made there daily, the Coliseum is an activity that's endless and dependent on the player's input for how much someone gets out of it. So if you don't have that much time to devote to it, that's okay, because you can still make some money from it - or if you have tons of time, you can get things too. It's friendly towards all playstyles, and the amount of time/effort people can spend on it (assuming it's accessible to that person).
Lorwolf has this to some extent; the tasks you're given that continuously refresh. However, this is not a constant source of gameplay, since many of these tasks take time to finish, and they're a lot more like how Baldwin's from FR would work. For someone who has focus issues like with ADHD or autism (read: me), being able to fixate on a single thing for the amount of time I want to stay fixated on it is an important aspect to gameplay. So, this is where your Campaign/Explore comes in. For that, it's literally your constant gameplay loop. And for that reason, it REALLY should not have its food nerfed; if you can no longer sustain constant gameplay from it, people will have their runs cut short. They may WANT to spend more time on the game, but now they're unable to because they don't get enough food to sustain that run for however long they wish to focus on it. It stops being something that is friendly towards all gameplay styles, and pushes it towards a fixed gameplay: only check back every few hours once your stamina has regenerated over time, or wait on the other various food sources to “finish.” It interrupts gameplay, and let me tell you as a person with ADHD/autism: if my focus gets interrupted at all, forget it. I'm no longer fixated on that task; I've been distracted, my immersion broken, and executive dysfunction can make it a real pain to get focused again when you're constantly being interrupted. It breaks that gameplay loop, and it will 100% lower the interest in playing the game for many people.
Nerfing the food is an incredibly bad idea because of the fact you can no longer sustain a single wolf in the Campaign - how are you supposed to bring an entire team there? It becomes a frustrating endeavor instead of something fun to spend your time on, instead of something that you can choose how much or how little you'd like to invest in it, especially for people that may have a limited amount of time to already spend on the game - why limit that even more? It's very unfriendly design-wise, especially for newer players who are just starting out and already struggling on having enough wolves to spread throughout the various activities so that they have enough stamina for everything.
At this point, it also makes it difficult to even level up wolves - how is one supposed to get enough food to sustain leveling when you don't even get that amount from a single wolf's Exploration? By comparison, Flight Rising nets you food in ALMOST every single battle, which is ALSO used for an energy/stamina bar that is used in various activities like breeding. Meaning that if you just actually play the game, you can sustain your Coliseum run. For THREE dragons at a time, not just one. For Lorwolf, not all encounters even guarantee food to begin with, and nerfing it even more makes it a lot more difficult to, for even just ONE wolf. Do you see why FR is successful in its design, and the way you're approaching Lorwolf doesn't quite work if you're going to nerf it?
The food nerf either needs to be addressed as to why these changes were implemented, or reverted. It actually kills your gameplay and how fun it is for people. I would really like to see this in particular have some open communication about why these changes were made when it makes the game quite unfun in my opinion.
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Thirdly, I do like some of these quality-of-life updates. The cooking one having the most you can add to it is super useful; I sometimes play on mobile, and that makes it a lot easier to throw things into the pot, so thank you for that. :> And the issue with cooking disappearing, because that was beginning to get kind of inconvenient / frustrating. So thank you for the other updates; I just wish the other primary concern would be looked into!
