After a couple of months of official live-play, EA and beta, one of the things that continues to 'break' the flow of gameplay most drastically are the cooldowns. Specifically the companion cooldowns, but to some extent also the breeding cooldowns (or rather expecting and nesting cooldowns) and even the cooldown on Tiny and Bigs' accepted payment offer.

In short my suggestion is to change their cooldowns to work similarly to the Mole Market refresh and claiming a free item. Meaning that regardless of when you perform an action (or in case of farming, refresh te page), the counter to do something started at the hour on the dot.

For example, playing with companions with a 1 hour cooldown. At 0.00 (midnight) the button becomes clickable. But regardless of whether I play with them at 0.01 or 0.59, at 1.00 the button becomes clickable again. For 2 hour cooldown companions this would obviously be at 0.00, 2.00, 4.00 etc.

Using Nana is only really worth it if you have expensive, high rarity companions like those exclusive to moonstones or the kickstarter companions, ánd only if they reward pebbles. When you have a large amount of common companions and/or companions that award stamina, experience or items, you often end up losing out when using Nana. This in and of itself isn't an issue. The issue arises that when you decide to manually play with each companion, their cooldown doesn't reset at the same time. Cycling through them at different speeds often means I have to wait a couple of seconds or sometimes even minutes if I got distracted for a moment during my previous cycle, before I can play with the next companion. As I said, this completely breaks the flow of gameplay, makes the process of bonding with companions take longer and longer on each cycle, and ends up being pretty frustrating and not fun.

And while for the more common companions with the shorter cooldowns generally this lag in the cycle is reset when you go to sleep, when it comes to the rarer companions and breeding and nesting, the delay just continues to grow. Specifically for the breeding cooldowns and nesting I would like to see a day countdown rather than one down to the very second you bred them. Basically if I breed my Lupin today, regardless at what time I bred him, the cooldown ticks down to 7 days at midnight, to 6 at the midnight after etc. Same for nesting. Regardless of what time I put the wolves on the nest, the next day at midnight they can be born.

I feel that this makes it a lot less punishing if you happen to forget for a few minutes or hours, or if some RL obligation stops you from being online the very second the cooldown is up, potentially messing up and slowing down your entire schedule.

Same goes for tiny and bigs. Especially now that the amount of items they can potentially ask for has been expanded, having the cooldown start the moment I open the page rather than on the hour, is pretty frustrating if they keep asking for food I cannot make because I don't have the right ingredients.

So in short, rather than make the cooldowns specific to the very moment I clicked a button, make them dependent on the Lorwolf clock, and anywhere within the timeframe of their 'cooldown' period (whether it be 1 hour, 2 hour, 6 hours or 1 day) I can perform the action, and it will reset again at the lorwolf clock, and not exactly x hours after I pushed the button.

As a side note, another ideal change I'd like to see to the companion cooldowns is that companions can still be removed or swapped out even when they can't be played with. But IIRC I already made a rather elaborate suggestion about that elsewhere. Let's just say here that I hope that perhaps a change like this doesn't remove the (technical) possibility to remove companions or maybe even opens up an avenue to make it easier to code.

No support.

When you have a game where cooldowns are balanced around precise timing, having them auto-reset on the hour means that you can sometimes essentially slip in 'bonus actions' by being around at the right time, not to mention it changes how items are obtained / collected. It very much seems like the flow of the game is currently designed around keeping players coming back and rewarding them for diligence (whether or not that's a good thing is a personal opinion of course) so changing that would break the current relative balance of everything.

It also introduces a problem of continual activity spikes on a server's end, which isn't a great thing for a growing game. When you have everything reset at once, the server has to process it all, and while you can do the checks when the player comes back, if you have things at set intervals then everyone will come flooding to certain places at the same time which creates a strain that is much more easily spread out by having a precision timer that is individual to the player.

@prog it is not really a 'bonus' if you can only do it once an hour. I get what you mean in that it feels like a bonus if you log in say 2 minutes before 2, bond with all companions, and then 2 minutes later you can do it again. But that is still 2 hours worth of bonding, not a magical extra turn you get. If you had bonded earlier that hour, you wouldn't have been able to do it again 2 minutes before the hour.

And I don't think people will come back less. With a companion with a 1 hour cooldown, you could technically play 24 times a day (practically only 23, because of the delay I mentioned in the OP). That is not changing. You still need to come back hourly. I'm not suggesting bonding with it 24 times in one go for the entire day. I still need to come back once an hour to play with it. I just don't have to sit on the clock so that I do so at the right second.

As for the server strain: I am not /that/ savvy in IT, but I wonder if it is really so much less straining to have literal thousands individual timers for companions, cooldowns and whatnot, as opposed to one single timer and reset. But those are thoughts I would like to leave to the devs as they will know best. The feasibility is up to them to decide

no support

the cooldown allows us to have multiple of the same companion equipped to different wolves.. it would require a whole lot of new coding/possibly companions having individual IDs to work around it and still allow us to use the same companion on multiple wolves if they can be removed while on cooldown (also, it would be very unfair to the KS backers as well as people who traded for multiple KS companions if suddenly we couldnt equip multiples after lots of money was spent)

as for Nana, if you equip most of your wolves with pebble companions, Nana pays for herself & you profit, though not as much as if you manually play with them. it doesnt require KS companions or MS companions to do this

I do support the bug for Tiny & Bigs to be fixed.. it should not start the timer based on when you enter the page.. it should reset hourly period (which appears to be a bug, not a feature.. iirc it used to reset every hour/when it was supposed to switch)

@Gaia It IS a bonus in the context that if I login for one hour, with precise cooldowns I can have one action, but with imprecise I can have two. If I stayed around for 1hr 10 min, with precision I can start / have two actions, but with rollover I could potentially have three (say at 9:55, 10:15, and then 11:02). It is minor but it adds up.

And I can at least say I am a systems administrator as part of my actual job so I can tell you for certain that having more users log on and things processing at one time is a FAR greater strain than doing things spread out over time. I couldn't say how much of an impact it would make on this site without actually being in the back end, but simple network / processor logistics makes it that a spread load is much easier than a condensed one. That's why things like MMOs and such will crash or have issues during say, major content release days, because all their players are piling on at once versus spread out like normal. Hardware can only handle so much at one time easily.

Edit: Thousands of timers don't matter though as likely those are only checked on page load. It's not like they're all running in the background realtime. They're probably stored as a timestamp and js calculates time remaining when a page is live.

Support for Tiny and Bigs being changed. I really don't like how it currently operates, it feels really frustrating and confusing at times.

I do like the idea of the companions also being adjusted in that way, but I really don't have much knowledge surrounding the logistics of how possible that would actually be.