I really didn't want to have to do this, but here we are.

So. Let's talk about the new dev update.

In my previous suggestions thread, community manager Quiche commented, stating that the economy situation (which I was ranting about in that thread) was going to be addressed in the June update.

It wasn't.

We got new items for pebbles. We got a new real-money moonstones bundle. And... That's it. That's everything that was economy related.

This looks really, really bad for staff, as many people on the June update thread have already mentioned. I'll go over the problems I can see immediately, and let the replies address other things as they see fit.

Simply put, staff, you are alienating a large part of your playerbase.

You are asked a question and instead of answering it, distract us with pretty things. We are not children to be so easily misled. In addition to this, we were misled by your community manager, as their comments led us to believe we would get an answer. I do not blame Quiche, I sincerely doubt Quiche knew this update was going to be the way it is, and I do not condone any negative feedback towards Quiche on this thread. Any and all negative feedback should be phrased constructively and be aimed towards the dev and staff team making the big decisions.

That said...

Staff, you seriously need to start talking.

Your economy is exploitative, requiring excessive amounts of time and/or real money to participate. A significant portion of your audience is under 21, neurodivergent, or otherwise vulnerable, and is simply looking for escapism. This means that you are intentionally targeting vulnerable groups and relying on an exploitative system to gain money. This is unacceptable.

We can't get the amount of moonstones you said we could get. We are capped at 25 shards a day, while you said we could get 5 MS a day. We barely get half if we put in hours of time and effort. Why can't we get more? Why does this cap exist? It serves no purpose.

Also, why can't we buy MS from the site with pebbles? Why don't we have an official currency exchange? I suggested this in my previous thread as a joke, but the more I think of it, the more reasonable it sounds. We have infinite tasks that reward pebbles, why shouldn't we be able to exchange them for MS? It's a bandaid solution, but right now, we could use anything we can get to stop the metaphorical bleeding.

Your site is poorly optimized (shoutouts to another suggestions thread for pointing this out), leading to significant and even harmful strain on the devices of players. There is no excuse for this. Fix it. Clean up your code. I am not a coder or even a techie person in general, but even I can tell that there is something seriously wrong with the way the site functions. I currently have Twitch open in another tab, and it is taking only a fraction of the processing power LW is taking. This is absurd, do something about it.

I have many concerns, and all of them, except for that bit about coding, tie back to the economy and the community. I worry for the community, I worry for the future of the site, and I worry especially for the KS backers and those who have already paid real money to buy more than just the starter pack. Something feels very, very wrong about the current state of the site, and I'm scared that it will all implode if nothing is done within the next month or two.

Once again, I will keep repeating this, do not get me wrong. I want to like this site, I really do. But in its current state, I can't.

The gameplay loop is amazing. I love the minigames. I love the lore, scattered and hard to find as it may be (can we get all that in one place please and thank you). I like the professions, I like the Gauntlet, and I especially adore the Arena. I would love to keep playing, but the way it is now, it simply isn't productive or rewarding to me.

So please, staff. Please give me reasons to keep playing. Please reward me for my gameplay with things I can actually use. And please, for the love of all that is good in Loria, please communicate with us and answer our questions already.

Lorwolf Community, you know what to do. Add your concerns, voice your thoughts, let staff know that this simply won't do. To use a site-relevant metaphor, I'm just a lone wolf howling in the dark right now, but if we howl together, we're more likely to be heard.

Please remember to stay civil in the comments. Do not ping any forum moderators or staff members, do not target or blame individual staff members, and do not target anyone within the community. I ask that you don't ping me either - just like my previous thread, I'd rather not be dragged into this discussion against my will. If I want to re-enter the discussion, I will do so on my own terms.

It’s quite possible that the economy was meant to be addressed during the recent update, but since it’s only the beginning of June, it could also be addressed in the achievement update since we have another update planned this month. Did Quiche specify that it would be in the patch notes or did she say it would be addressed in a June update in general, possibly referring to the one upcoming? I didn't see where she said this, so just wanting clarification there.

I would also like to emphasize that they only have one coder right now. They’re looking into hiring more soon, however. What is being requested is way too much for one person to get done quickly. Rome wasn’t built in a day, or by a couple of people. I think the biggest issue is that they need to bring on more staff.

Full support of this thread. They don't have to change everything right now, heck they don't even have to actively do anything big right now, but TALK TO US, address and acknowledge the problem. Instead what happened feels like blatant misdirection, with the poll, the pride apparel and new companions, it's a weak band-aid solution while the tide is rising, and these band-aids aren't even waterproof.

I don't think anyone expects them to fix it all overnight, but we DO want to stop being ignored and distracted.

@Mew

two things. one, Quiche did in fact specify the 'June Dev Update' will address the economical concerns. I can make an assumption what was potentially being referred to was the achievement system, given it's said something about moonstone rewards? i can assume that will be expanded upon-- but until then i'm unsure if this is a proper economical solution. the expansions are still moonstones, and sure, once you buy them all, there's not much to spend MS on besides custom apparel and den tabs. this point was brought up in the discord, and while it is true, i still don't believe having game-progressing features locked behind premium currency is the play.
Granted, Quiche only mentioned some concerns, rather than all-encompassing concerns. here is a screenshot for the exact post from Lai's thread where Quiche mentions communication, and here is the screenshot from the Pebble/Moonstone issue thread with the exact quote as well.

from what i can gather, the economical concerns addressed can be boiled down to additional pebble sinks (professions), companions, new bone paste recipes (which are apparently really pricey. i've never seen them stock yet, so i'm not sure), and the achievement system.

second thing, they have hired another coder. this was addressed in the second paragraph of the dev update, which you can read here.
the exact quote regarding coders, '[...] and Swell (he/him) - our newest coder! These mods will help provide extra support for our current staff in maintaining a positive and supportive community atmosphere, and Swell will be assisting JimJim with a multitude of coding projects.'
so they have an extra hand, granted, it seems to be only one that we know of, but it's still an extra hand. yes, rome wasn't built in a day, but hopefully this will help speed up the addressing of the optimization issues this site has.

honestly, I don't have a lot to add in regards to the OP itself anymore. I think the team is slowly but surely taking steps in the right direction, and although I would enjoy seeing certain things addressed more explicitly, i don't really have the energy to keep pushing. All they need to do, as far as i'm concerned, is the bare minimum: making the expansions pebbles. they can be an obscene amount of pebbles, i don't really care at this point, i'd just like to see it addressed on why you've decided to lock your game progression behind premium currency.
an official currency exchange should never be added, by the way. i can't support that idea at all. it would ruin the economy more.

also, uh... splitting the dev update into like, three separate threads made it pretty confusing for people to find information, which is why a lot of stuff seemed to get lost between users. it would be great if we could get all-encompassing updates, instead of needing to scour through two to three different threads to get all of the information.

Yes, I have just been stewing on this. The development map was great. Glad to see that there are plans for more pebble items in the future and we have an idea of what's going on and can bring our input into what we'd like to see first. This has massively improved my confidence in the team but they were totally dead silent on the moonstone balancing issue. They didn't even say if the pebble-cost bonuses on professions were an attempt to alleviate the moonstone cost of slots.

One big problem: the pebble features on the professions do NOT circumvent the fact that mining and cooking are pay to win. Now paying players have two avenues to improve their profession efficiency whilst casual players have one very small area to temporarily improve it. The mining feature is lousy compared to the cooking feature which at least gives temporary slots.

Nesting slots should also cost pebbles, as well as mining and cooking slots imo. I think this is the bare minimum. Some things (like the besprinkler) need balancing via cost reduction, too.

If the dev team aren't changing the moonstone balancing TELL US. TELL US for goodness sake. Adding pebble sinks is a band-aid fix to this massive, overshadowing issue of how much content requires moonstones. Even if a player doesn't use ANY moonstone cosmetic items (CAs, genes, breeds, besprinkler, etc), there is an unavoidable progression paywall on GAMEPLAY FEATURES. All moonstone items should be cosmetic. End of story.

I have spent moonstones on the mining profession once, and I'm planning on digging my heels in and staying at that. I don't care if it gets changed back to pebbles after I've upgraded it, eventhough I spent real money starter-bundle moonstones to get that upgrade. I think that making the game accessible for new players should be a priority because they will not be as invested in this game as players who were here before launch and this WILL drive people away, new and old players alike.

Making main gameplay features moonstones will get this site LESS money because it will thin out the playerbase. Custom apparel is and should be the cash cow, so treat it that way. Removing the gameplay required moonstones will make people more invested in this feature. More people spending moonstones on CA means artists make more of it and buy more CATs. I also think that the CATs should cost slightly less, since again more CA means more CATs bought and more CA variety will create activity on the site.

FR is just about to cross a 10 year anniversary milestone. Follow it's lead and make all gameplay features cost pebbles rather than premium currency.

Also just wanted to add that, of course, I love the gameplay loop, lore and everything that comes with the site. It just makes me all the angrier that the Devs are risking the longevity and survival of the site by not even bothering to genuinely talk about player concerns.

As the person who first point out the question here on the site, I appreciate your courage bro.

I was editing an article about what issues my mother language community members had met in the CA related system and listed over 5 pages article outline, including the issues and the way that having the possibility of implementation. With a chapter of theoretical basis and experience from related practitioners in game development and operation.

All we hope just to make this site better, we know that.

Support.

I'm also not in love with how much information we weren't given on the new stuff. Oh you wanted to buy one of the batch bone craft recipes? You have to wait for it to cycle in, AND it's account bound. You want to subscribe to a thread? Personally, I have yet to figure out how to do that.

We still weren't given the ability to edit thread titles, so we are still forced to waste staff's time by asking them to do it for us. Heaven help you if you have an art shop and want to edit it to "Open" or "Closed" at any time. Pings still look exactly like any other font, and are capitalization specific, which is ridiculous. The fact we were given signatures before we were given title editing abilities is frustrating beyond belief. I suppose this is to be expected when the forums are not, and have never been, LWs main place of community, but in that case why have them at all?

I will also say, as many people have: the art for the backgrounds could use a lot of work. They want to hire an artist to mimic the current style, but honestly I think an artist should be hired to upgrade it. I understand wanting to stay with the original artist for the wolves themselves, but the backgrounds leave a lot to be desired when the wolves, companions, monsters, and NPCs are considerably better rendered.

(Side note on NPCs, are they supposed to look so pixelated? Seems like the image used is not very good for scaling.)

I apologize if this seems a bit scattered, or if some of it has been addressed already.

I strongly agree. And I noticed that the authorities have proposed the idea of regulating the proportion of pebbles and moonstones, but I am not sure if they will only implement this on launching a few high priced and powerful new pebbles pets with imbalanced values. The new pets appearing in the arena have greatly increased the difficulty of climbing the tower...I don't know if they just want to increase the value of pebbles in this way, it's not very reasonable, I think.

I am already at work, I really don't want to work in a web game again (and my computer was roaring crazily when I opened both work software and lorwolf). I don't have that much time to invest in earning pebbles and moonstones, and I think many people are just same as me. At the beginning, I chose to create CAs, but the review cycle for CAs was too long, and there were also a lot of issues involved. I still love my wolves anyway but this makes me really tired about something.

@divine
Ahh, gotcha. Thank you for providing that information! I do hope that we will hear something about this with the next June update.

Up until now, there was only JimJim. I can't really say anything about a coder that was just brought on and wouldn't have been able to contribute until now is all. I do hope that things will start speeding up now, though.

Not a whole lot to add, but want to show support.

Recently replaced my apple pencil and was considering joining in and making CA, but honestly at this point I don't feel confident enough in the site to spend money even on just getting enough MS for a CAT. I've been wanting to get the monthly membership and financially support this site since launch, but I've held off until there is some sort of decent communication about these issues.

It's a shame, the site loop is really fun and there's a lot of potential but not even just having an announcement of "Hey, we hear you, we are addressing these concerns (and list them out so we know what you're talking about) and will improve our communication about our plans"

None of us expect everything to be fixed perfectly overnight. But as many say, just tell us you ARE listening and ARE workshopping solutions.

I mentioned this somewhere in the Patch Notes (since the convo of the June Dev update and disappointment was there for some reason) but, I really do think that these companions and new apparel and whatnot were intended to be the address that Quiche was talking about, and as you can see, it's a very poor one.

It is certainly a step in the right direction, but what then? We'll have a new coder, new artists, and new items on the way, but we haven't had a word from staff sitting down and talking to us about the issues we've pointed out. Will this new coder work towards optimizing the site better as my thread had outlined? Will these new artists work towards more content that would act as pebble sinks, such as pebble markings and whatnot? Who on earth knows. And that's what sucks above it all. We were told this was going to be addressed, and instead we just got more stuff that in staff's minds probably does feel like an address, but what it actually feels like is more ignorance. Refusing to talk about the situation. In comparison, staff was able to freely bring up the concerns we had with WW encounters and whatnot, so why clam up here?

Another thing pointed out was that achievements probably is supposed to alleviate some economic strain, but there too lies a few issues: 1) it's expected to be next month, which means we'll have to sit and wait longer while the economy continues to struggle. and 2) We don't know all about achievements. We know that it will provide moonstones, and that according to Alaunis it will allow players to "earn a substantial amount of moonstones", but this is coming from the same person who believes 2.5 moonstones a day/being able to expand professions after a full week is reasonable, so forgive me for being skeptical of how useful achievements actually will be here. I'd love to eat my words, but considering how not transparent staff has been about it, there's a lot to question. How many achievements will there be? How difficult will it be to achieve them? In comparison to the costs of expanding professions, what percentage of that could be obtained from achievements? Who knows! It's up to the people who thought reducing WW encounter rates was a good idea.

This feels like a temporary bandaid/fix to try to get us to shut up, to say "well technically we addressed you guys! Look, we added more pebble content! That's a part of what you were wanting, right?" and it just comes off as the devs not fully comprehending what it is we're so upset about. And yeah, I feel alienated. I feel ignored. I feel worried that this site is going to go the ways of Dappervolk because of how many red flags it's giving me that Dappervolk did.

We've been begging for communication for so long now, and while staff seems to be aware of the issue, they also seem to be... not doing much in regard to that. It's really not making me confident in the team going forward that they can prioritize the bigger and more dire problems first so that they're not continuing to build on a foundation of sand, lest it all come crashing down in the end.

We've been trying to tell you this since beta. The optimization issues pointed out in my thread aren't even new, they were pointed out in beta by UwU and you did nothing about it. These coding issues and image systems were something that I had come across even before EA when I was just looking at the site. I'm so, so disappointed by this lack of action and silence, and new companions or apparel just feels like you're trying to skirt around the issue, but you really can't. People are crashing, BSODing, even, and players are demotivated to continue playing the site because of the steep MS cost.

Please, just talk to us.

edit: I agree with Loki, and I realize how I've been coming off in a few posts of mine, so I want to make myself clear. I'm not blaming Quiche at all for these expectations and disappointment. In fact, I'm kind of upset at the devs for telling Quiche that they were going to address these things, and then letting Quiche tell us that, only for the devs to fall short and not say anything about it, leaving Quiche to the ire of the community. That, all around, is very unprofessional and a bit disrespectful, really.