We want your opinions! Subject: GOLD | Comment by March 31st!

[froglady]

Hey, I just had a thought related to those "shop points" I posited earlier. Maybe those who are in a faction could do a daily quest for the faction to earn tokens that were good only in that faction's shop. You know, "herbal tokens", "dark tokens", "water tokens". It could just be an automated quest rewarding random points with a simple RNG. And each faction could run an exchange where (if you are a member) you can "buy" that faction's tokens for x gold each. (Gold sink for richer players!!) Then you use those to buy in the faction egg shops instead of gold. Then the major daily quest(s) that's open to all would just give gold and items.

Another gold sink I can think of is to run a (I'm thinking monthly) raffle for a prize. Something even rich older players would think worthwhile buying tickets for. Maybe a rose imp or a gryphon/direwolf/phoenix, etc egg where you choose which variant you want or an item that would guarantee an egg would hatch male or female. Or a "guaranteed breeding" potion to use on pairs that have proven themselves finicky in the past or a potion that would guarantee twins. You'd need to set a limit for entries to keep it somewhat fair, but I should think 20 tickets/day/person would suffice. Make the tickets something like 500-1000 gold so everyone could get at least one ticket every week or so.

[Revan]

Another gold sink I can think of is to run a (I'm thinking monthly) raffle for a prize. Something even rich older players would think worthwhile buying tickets for.

I don't think we need another gold sink. The Pond is the official one. Master Belmos, unofficially, is another. He sells all sorts of critters en mass, but where exactly does the gold he make from those sales go? No where, as far as I know. What we need is gold in the economy. There is hardly anyone buying anymore because they simply can't afford to do so. I admit I am up in the 5% apparently, but that gold is running out. I'm not hoarding. There are things I want to buy, but I cannot afford to. Sales in the MD/Shops have become stagnant compared to even just a year ago.










If I am being honest, gold was never an easy thing to earn here, especially for those of us that never had the capability of mass gold-mining (now banned anyway) due to limited hardware. The best, and easiest way, to actually make gold, has generally been to donate shards to the site and sell donis, at least until recently. Those who earned mass gold from the gold-mining were generally the ones who bought, and so there was that back and forth relationship between the two groups. The economy has, in my opinion, never been good, because of this.

All the suggestions made in the first post have merit. Not sure how easily they can be implemented, but I feel they all have potential. We could have errands or tasks given by the NPCs. Like, Thane for example: 'Bring me ten Water Prism Foxes' for whatever reason. Bring him the foxes, you get an award of some sort. It would be interactive, plus you potentially can earn some gold or a special critter or item or whatever.

Besides gold, I believe another issue is the traffic on the site. We need a way to attract new members. If it means dealing with a basic ad or two, fine by me, but as it currently stands, the user population here mostly consists of older players like myself who have been around for years. That said, I literally I found this site by chance; someone happened to have an egg in their post I think over on Deviantart or something. If not for that, and my curiosity of what it was, I might never have found this site. Nothing has changed in all these years. Besides that and word of mouth, Magistream has no way to attract new members, and I feel that new members coming in would also help stimulate the economy.

[blockEdragon]

I think adjusting the shop prices like mentioned above would be a nice change. 10,000 gold is harder to get than before so Jaktus dragons shouldn't cost 10,000 gold for example.

Maybe they could even fluctuate to keep in line with the player economy.

[froglady]

I'm one of the impecunious newbies, despite my join date. I think I played for a week in 2012 before my father had to be put into residential care and I sort of blanked everything, then clicked on an egg in a signature in Sept 2023 and got reminded I had an account. So I've never goldmined and I might have misunderstood Rosehill saying we needed to move gold out of the hoards as needing a gold sink or two. I've just been throwing out ideas from my brain and from the other 100+ games I've played over 30 years online, since it seemed very few people were here with any ideas.

I agree wholeheartedly that this site does need some new players coming in. Even I can see that the site activity is very low except during holidays and limited releases. The older players have most everything and now that they're carefully conserving their gold waiting for a replacement for gold mining that makes the site even more dead. Why empty your coffers when there's no way to even start to refill or even conserve them?

[kitsunefire]

I like daily quests, daily login bonuses, gaining gold from various activities, and selling creatures to npcs for gold. I think having a lot of options makes it easier on people so they don't have to do all of them to make significant progress to getting the things they want to get from the shop. I think one possible thing that could help too is if the heart that increases gold doesn't rely on gold to buy it from the shop, so someone can get it without grinding a bunch.

Overall I like the suggestions a lot and look forward to what's ultimately decided on! Hopefully it's not too difficult to implement on the coding side.

[blockEdragon]

Increase the amount of gold gotten from clicking eggs.

Now THIS would help a lot. Stuff grows so slowly between holidays, making egg clicking profitable would be wonderful.

[NaoKitsune]

Let me begin with I love that you are asking for user input on this! When I first joined the days of AIM and more forum based interactions were starting to phase out in favor of social media and "feed" structured interactions like Instagram. We may not like it, but we have to evolve with the times! I'm going to be really, really honest in my feelings so I hope no one takes offense. I'd also like to note I have also not read anyone else's responses yet.

Minigames like "match 3", "tower climb", "solitaire" etc.:
Pros: could be fun
Cons: Have a risk of steering away from the spirit of the actual heart and purpose of the game. Take a lot of time to implement.
I'm going to be honest, don't love this idea. Seems like a lot of time and effort to implement for not a lot of reward when it comes to user to user interactions. Would be cool to see player v player games, but then that seems like a whole lot more work and what if someone goes inactive in the middle of a game?!

Daily quests:
Pros: you'd have a regular and steady way of getting some gold
Cons: You'd need to remember to do them. Depending on what kind they would be, some might feel tedious or not worth it. Could feel a bit separate from the normal game play unless well executed.
I really like this, especially if it came with 'tiers.' For example, the easy tier(1-500g) would be to submit a Phoenix. Something found in the stream, possibly found in your keep already and easily replaced, or even purchased in the forums to be able to submit for a profit. This could boost user to user interaction, plus a forum post for gold, plus keep users more active on the forums on a daily basis. Moderate tier (500-1000g) would be a live egg. Advanced tier could be multiple creatures or more difficult to get stream creatures.. but this could get tedious in terms of favoring older members who have larger keep breeding advantages. Gold numbers just added as an example.

Daily login bonuses:
Pros: Steady and reliable way to get gold even if you're tight on time, just log in and get some gold.
Cons: Relying solely on this would require quite a bit of patience to get enough cold to afford something. A bit more tedious to implement.
I love this idea, not in solidarity but as an added bonus. Possibly get an additional bonus for first forum post for the day or something to get users interacting with one another again (I'm admittedly awful at user interaction)

Gaining gold from various activities like breeding, crafting, and otherwise interacting with the site:
Pros: Could be quite easily tied to the normal game play and existing mechanics, making gold a by product instead of the main goal.
Cons: Need to be mindful that the gold gains remain meaningful instead of becoming yet a new way of grinding.
Pro's and Con's super accurately lined out. Don't want to feel like it's a game of grinding, either. Would be kind of cool to have a 'quest' like navigating a certain page on the site once a day has a random drop of gold. Or even random drops of gold as you navigate the site!

Sell your creatures for gold to NPCs or some other non-player function:
Pros: You have a pretty good control over when and how much gold you get
Cons: another more tedious grinding mechanic?
I do like this, but it could come with a daily cap? To deter the grinding mechanic? Creature purchased for gold is found in the stream, rotates weekly or bimonthly, can only submit for gold 10 a day for example.

Encourage trading and making the gold flow between players, make the system a closed gold system:
Pros: Works more like a healthy economy, gets the resources moving instead of gold piling up on the top 5-10% richest or those who at least in the past have been able to goldmine
Cons: How to do this, what would be the incentive?
I think this could be tied into the quests for money mentioned above, and the NPC function. After completing/maxing out the goodies for yourself, you could continue to breed/catch the creatures but would be forced to sell them in the forums for a fraction of what you would get but would still encourage user to user interaction, gold flow, etc. ie. Phoenix are bought for 500g each by the NPC but you've sold your 10 for the day and are now selling them for 250g each in the forum so other users (who might have less time to catch/raise themselves) are still able to capitalize on the 250g profit when reselling.

Create non-gold ways of getting shop creatures:
Possibilities would be e.g. quests, crafting like mechanic, exchanging a number of creature X to get a creature Y, or something similar
Pros: You don't have to rely on gold to get the creatures you want
Cons: Could take a bit longer to get the creature, could feel like just another type of grinding mechanic
Feels a bit like grinding and like it would be really tedious to implement. I do like exchanging a number of creature X to get creature Y but it would have to be a LOT of creature X and might subsequently raise their price in the forums, similar to when the new achievements come out and then we're right back at the gold problem where we started

Reduce prices in shops and/or quests:
Pros: things are more affordable
Cons: shop history statistics need a tweak so they don't get skewed
I do think shop and standard creature prices need a bit of a tweak since we're not able to gold mine anymore, but I'm not savvy enough to calculate what that would look like or how to go about implementing it. I'm honestly shocked to read 50% of users have 2948g or less, but I do remember back when I came back from Hiatus it was SO easy to spend gold collecting all the beautiful creatures I missed out on. I would be curious about HOW most users choose to spend their gold. Is it amassing an army? collect them all? Items? Quests? Events? I don't even want to know how much gold I've spent during my Magilifetime.. ha!

[NaoKitsune]

Another gold sink I can think of is to run a (I'm thinking monthly) raffle for a prize. Something even rich older players would think worthwhile buying tickets for.

I don't think we need another gold sink. The Pond is the official one. Master Belmos, unofficially, is another. He sells all sorts of critters en mass, but where exactly does the gold he make from those sales go? No where, as far as I know. What we need is gold in the economy. There is hardly anyone buying anymore because they simply can't afford to do so. I admit I am up in the 5% apparently, but that gold is running out. I'm not hoarding. There are things I want to buy, but I cannot afford to. Sales in the MD/Shops have become stagnant compared to even just a year ago.










If I am being honest, gold was never an easy thing to earn here, especially for those of us that never had the capability of mass gold-mining (now banned anyway) due to limited hardware. The best, and easiest way, to actually make gold, has generally been to donate shards to the site and sell donis, at least until recently. Those who earned mass gold from the gold-mining were generally the ones who bought, and so there was that back and forth relationship between the two groups. The economy has, in my opinion, never been good, because of this.

All the suggestions made in the first post have merit. Not sure how easily they can be implemented, but I feel they all have potential. We could have errands or tasks given by the NPCs. Like, Thane for example: 'Bring me ten Water Prism Foxes' for whatever reason. Bring him the foxes, you get an award of some sort. It would be interactive, plus you potentially can earn some gold or a special critter or item or whatever.

Besides gold, I believe another issue is the traffic on the site. We need a way to attract new members. If it means dealing with a basic ad or two, fine by me, but as it currently stands, the user population here mostly consists of older players like myself who have been around for years. That said, I literally I found this site by chance; someone happened to have an egg in their post I think over on Deviantart or something. If not for that, and my curiosity of what it was, I might never have found this site. Nothing has changed in all these years. Besides that and word of mouth, Magistream has no way to attract new members, and I feel that new members coming in would also help stimulate the economy.

I think this is a really interesting point..
How did the top 5% earn their gold, to begin with?
1. Gold mining
2. Buying Donation creatures for real money and selling them
3. Literally hoarding event creatures throughout the years and selling them later on

Is any of that feasible for new players?
1. No
2. Only some
3. No

I have to say I feel like the problem is less of old players having a lot of gold, and more that new players are not able to easily earn it in a means that keeps the site engaging for them. As an older player, I'm not interested in buying the stream critters that are about the only thing available to new players who haven't joined a shop or anything yet. Even then, there are so many (myself included) that sell shop critters at shop prices (no profit) just to get the achievement for 100 creatures bought. So even if the new players were to manage to get into a shop, there's still not a whole lot of profit to be had. Even if selling each creature for +200g.

Increase the amount of gold gotten from clicking eggs.

Now THIS would help a lot. Stuff grows so slowly between holidays, making egg clicking profitable would be wonderful.

More gold per egg clicked is an option, but with the forums less active it's still hard to find enough eggs to click!

Maybe let's all take a step further back and ask, what's the main purpose/attraction for the site? What is the point of gold we're trying to implement? Collecting all the critters, right? Yes, we want it to be a challenge, but we also want it to feel achievable and engaging especially for new players. Thoughts?

[froglady]

I don't see gold held in older accounts as much of a problem, either, because it shouldn't affect us newer players at all, but I thought Rosehill was hinting that they wanted gold from older accounts to re-enter the economy rather than just generating new gold. I probably took that wrong.

I still think having the "quests" be a one-click "lucky dip" sort of thing giving gold, items, eggs would keep grinding to a minimum and have many benefits. You get what you get a day, no need for limits (except how many lucky dips you get if it's felt that more than one per person is needed).

I also still think that gold for picking up eggs from the Stream (with a limit per day) and again for raising them to each stage, for breeding successfully (more for harder difficulties), etc would be a good passive way to increase gold AND encourage interaction with the site, even more than just giving more money for clicking eggs. It would mean more eggs out there to click, as well. It would encourage use of the Stream even by older players and might increase the number of rarer Stream creatures up for sale for newer players finding it hard to get them (1500 creatures rotating is harder to get what you are looking for than 150). Plus it would incentivize collecting enough of each for the achievements.

[silentstarelly]

I love the daily login bonuses, daily mini quests, selling to NPCs (especially frozen eggs omg, even just 1g per egg would be great), and automatic shops (I like how Final Outpost does their market).

The daily mini quests and selling to NPCs could even be combined by having a "bulletin" where each week(?) a couple of NPCs post things they want that you can sell. (Stardew Valley has something like this - you have 2 days to complete each task you choose.) For example: someone wants 10 sand gryphons, someone else wants 3 gender potions, someone else wants one of each color farir, etc. To complete them you would need to play the game (eg: buy mystery bags, breed creatures, maybe trade with people), but they're naturally limited so a veteran can't just sell 5000 of some creature they've hoarded over the years. You could have the rewards be gold or eggs from shop creatures or hatchlings, etc. There could be 1-2 "public" ones, where everyone has the same goal (might encourage people to help their fellow magis complete the goal, if they personally have extras) and 2-3 "private" ones (unique to just you, so you don't have every single person on the site looking for the exact same things).