I really hope the site does well, but I also know there are a lot of changes that need to be made. The new pebble stuff is definitely a step in the right direction bc based on my memory of FM rates the pebble:MS ratio has gotten a little more reasonable since the new stuff released! imo for a site that's just hitting the month mark it's doing well, and while I don't have game coding experience ik from coworkers/friends how long this kind of thing takes to do. With that in mind, slow change is still change and while I think a few things need to be prioritized to balance the game and keep interest, I really think time will let this site get even better and that there are things that will sort themselves out as more things are released!!

I'm just going to say that it took almost a year plus to get open letter essays written in the forums on Dappervolk.

And Lorwolf has gotten to that point in a month.

Things aren't looking great, but there's still time to turn things around. It's going to be an interesting time either way and I'm ready for the ride!

@Loki

It did not take a year to get open letters written in the Dappervolk forums. By January (6 months after release) I had a moderately popular suggestions thread asking DV to straight-up put the site back in beta, and I was far from the first person to point out DV's issues. Some people realized within a few weeks that DV had never fixed its structural problems from beta.

I'm not saying Lorwolf is doing well, mind you. But I certainly wouldn't say they're doing worse than DV. DV staff has had so much longer and so many more feature launches in which to disappoint users.

EDIT: Actually I looked further back through my threadlog, and in October, 4 months after DV launch, I was posting things like "they could release a new town tomorrow and it wouldn't do much to bring back players."

@Bees

I know my post didn't specifically say, but I'm more talking about the very long and detailed posts where people are very carefully breaking down why aspects of the site are not working and why they need to improve. Here's why this event is impossible, why the economy bad, etc

Personally I didn't start see those being the norm until well after launch as most of the forum topics at launch where people enjoying the game with a smaller group of people pointing out issues like here on LW.

DV definitely had a lot of problems early on, but I don't remember one of the few active general discussion topics being people questioning if the site will manage to make it lol All within a month.

Honestly I feel like people have given DV a lot more grace than they have given LW. People were actually fairly optimistic about DV but that optimism petered out when it became clear that the game was not going in a good direction. I think it became more obvious to me at around the launch of guilds and how that feature actually got pushed back (they ultimately launched in late Oct so it was about 4 months).

Maybe people are just a lot more negative after DV but I think it's important to realize that DV is still alive. And actually finally managed to push out a fairly decent event (despite it being like 6 months late). DV also had more to separate itself in the form of a very different artstyle, "rpg elements", and also human avatars (though the site itself seem divided into 'pet players' and 'avatar players' so I'm not sure how much the avatars even mattered to FR players since most of the 'avatar players' were from avatar sites like gaia). I still saw a lot of comparisons to FR though.

Personally, I'm surprised by how negative the feedback is. Like I said earlier, people were initially willing to gloss over DV's core 'quests style' gameplay issues (which the staff are in the process of addressing, but for many it's too little too late). There were definitely complaints, but not to the same degree. I'm not as mad about LW as I was about DV, but I also had that initial period where I was more interested in 'completing' the game and enjoying the early game experience.

Ultimately it boils down to what everyone thinks and how many people end up leaving LW. Right now people are angriest about the optics of MS expansions. They're also very worried about the long term, which is simply something that can't be predicted. The long term pebble issues can easily be solved with more apparel etc. It's not like FR completely 'solved' inflation either, despite it being constantly brought up as an example; it's something the team has to continuously stay on top of and the ratio got as high as 1:1400 before. I think people are also getting bored and also complain about the grind. It's all down to what kind of 'games as a service' mechanics people are willing to put up with and that's highly subjective and unpredictable

@Loki

I saw long and detailed posts like that long before a year had passed on DV. That said, I don't really see any point in arguing it further when I agree with you that LW is struggling. You definitely make a really good point by saying that this and other complaint threads are the only ones really active on the forums, which makes it feel like LW has a much higher percentage of dissatisfied users. And that may be true! But there might be other factors contributing to it -- DV is a lot more forum-focused than LW, for example, which could lead to a higher volume of positive forum posts.

I wish we could see users online to give us an idea of how the site is actually doing in comparison to DV and other sites.

@Lycoris

I also agree that people are being much more negative much earlier on LW than they were on DV. It may have something to do with the way issues are presenting on the two sites. On DV, there was lots to do at first, especially for beta players who wanted to re-unlock content they'd already played. It was only over time that it became obvious how tedious that content actually was. Plus, because the story took so long to move through, it took more time for people to realize that they hadn't implemented most of the beta critique.

However, LW's issues are much more upfront. I started feeling them my very first day when I grew some corn and went to cook it for my wolves, only to discover that most crops can't be cooked. I will also say that, as many issues as I have with DV, it did launch with a better quantity of F2P content -- you could actually make decent outfits even when the game first launched.

@bees

Yes, I agree that it would be nice to get a real sense of how LW is doing. Not having the online user data is strange, because it's the best way to gauge how things are going.

Actually there were quite a few complaints about the variety of clothing for DV. It was hard to mix and match, and the lack of masc clothing was always a sore point. The wardrobe also has the worst usability out of all the wardrobes I've personally seen on games.

I do agree that there's truly a lot fewer clothing for wolves on LW though. I wonder if there's just a mismatch between the expectations of users vs the devs, in terms of pet dress up. There are still pet sites out there that don't have any kind of clothing for pets. DV obviously, but also ones like Subeta or Aywas. But I think that's a bad comparison due to the pets being on a different 'system', they are not breedable in the same way (or at all) and are customized in different ways. Or maybe devs were expecting CA to fill the gap, which honestly would be a bad judgment due to how expensive CA is. I think it's better for devs to just roll with the user expectations, if they can. I already suggested that maybe they can hold CA contests like the skin contests on FR that goes with each FR festival.

If it makes you feel better about the farming, I swear at one point that crops actually died on you if you didn't water. So you would get 0 corn if the fertilizer/water wasn't filled. But yes, I do think that more things should be cookable in the future, especially simple recipes that are easier to cook and doesn't make the pot size mechanic as pay to win (since with a basic pot, you can still put in 10 single-item recipes that fulfill the pebble task)

@Bees @Lycoris

You can see the online user count on the top right on desktop


and in the dropdown for mobile

But I think the main reason it took longer for DV players to realize that there was an issue was because stat gates kept users from rushing the game and running out of stuff to do for a while. People on LW are able to rush through the game and end up with little to do since customization options are super limited.

I think this game would do fine if staff just addresses the MS expansion issue and release more f2p wearables in the future.

Unfortunately, the recent update has not done a lot to instill more faith like I was hoping it would, lol.

Though I'll say, people wouldn't be as vocally frustrated if they didn't want LW to do well, and be a fun and balanced experience. I certainly do.

Some of the "early" frustration is likely because people are more experienced with the rise and fall of various pet games since the old Wajas days, they know how to read between the lines and spot problems before they get too zany; but most of it is still because most of it just isn't new to Lorwolf itself, there was a long span of time before the official launch when most of this could have been addressed even if not in the exact way the userbase expected or wanted; but despite the monthly updates... nada. The people got nothin'.

Communication has been... poor, even with these recent implementations. The changelogs are often nonexistent or come a week+ late, so things will randomly change around the site without any warning, and nobody knows if something is a bug or intentional change.

The roadmap and poll priorities are... bizarre, we wanna add new professions (and many of them?) before the existing ones are balanced? Every single existing profession still needs so much more work, adding coding debt to that right now seems ill advised. If the professions we have aren't balanced and the QoL for many of them is dubious, how is anyone gonna imagine the new ones to be anything but?

The new bulk crafting recipes could have been nice QoL, but the level requirement for them is just goofy. By the time you get to the crafting level to unlock them, will they even be relevant?

The 15mil random statue that does nothing is hilarious, but seeing as its implemented before there is anything to do with it, it just feels like a passive aggressive gesture to the popular request for repeatable and permanent pebble sinks (that they had implemented before changing them, apparently randomly, to moonstones-- and could have expanded on the future with ever more slots and higher pebble prices to unlock them as the site aged).

All in all; we really hope they get some wild stuff implemented to improve the state of things as they are, and soon. People wouldn't be skeptical if there wasn't a reason to be.