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

[castlevania]

Encourage trading and making the gold flow between players, make the system a closed gold system:

like others have suggested , if automated shops are a possibility, i would be interested

i enjoy trading with other people, and would like to see this encouraged more

[Ygdrassil]

Speaking as a very non-social player, I personally would prefer something that *doesn't* require more engagement with other players. That said, daily rewards and/or quests are tedious and irritating in most cases, so it may be best to focus on implementing new ways to acquire currently gold-locked creatures and items. The solution may end up being a bit grindy, but most games involve a little bit of grinding, so that's hardly the end of the world.

[GeistStorm]

i'm a sporadic/casual player so take my opinion for what it's worth. ~also, i'm old cantankerous type o' person. so there's that.~
in my opinion, while the solutions from "angle 1" bit would make nice band-aids for the problem, it's not going to Fix the problem that's inherent to "angle 2".
and That's more of a Player problem than a Site problem in the long run. people can and will always default to whatever makes the most money. sure, there's the odd noble player out there, but sadly, the majority are not. like it or lump it, thems the truthes of the human nature. we ain't nice critters as a species, for the most part. [tire shrug]
i know. not at all helpful. but you Did ask for Opinions. which is good, because opinions, i got. alt solutions: nō clö, sorry.

[Moon487]

(Sorry in advance if anything explained weirdly, wrote this as I was falling asleep)

Maybe it would be worth combining the “ Sell your creatures for gold to NPCs or some other non-player function” and the automated shop Ayakashi suggested. Basically, you’d be able to sell creatures to the NPC for a set price, which could be based on the rarity (ex. Common/rare stream, pond, event, donation, etc), it’s generation (personally I feel like the only notable ones would be parentless, 1st gen, and then any other gen, though I mainly buy parentless so don’t know much there), maybe even the amount for sale, or the amount sold to the NPC that day (either by everyone or just that user), to prevent as much grinding (realizing I’m starting to describe a stock market now, just more “prices going down” and less “prices skyrocketing”).

Users could then buy directly from the NPC any creatures that were sold to it. It would give people a quick way to sell their creatures, even if they would normally not sell for a while. In this specific scenario, users would probably still do auctions and normal sales at a higher price probably if there was no stock for the creature they were selling and they thought it was worth more, but if the prices were set to something most users would agree on (which I’m sure will change depending on how the other changes play out), I’m sure a lot of people would just use this.

Speaking on other specific things mentioned:

For minigames, I agree with what most have said that them being related to the Magistream world would be ideal.

For the daily quests, they would need to be pretty generic (ie. hatch 3 earth element creatures, or having explore grass forest and stuff that’s already daily into a daily quest with bonus gold reward, even tying it into the other idea like play a minigame, sell a creature, etc), but I could see maybe a weekly quest that asks for something more specific and has a higher reward depending on how hard it is to do.

For the login bonus, theres a few ways it can work
1) log in so many days in a row where higher streak means better rewards: personally would be least favourite just because it’s easiest to mess up and lose it all, and also hard to put a reward cap
2) monthly cumulative, resets at start of each month, if you miss a day it doesn’t end the whole thing but you miss a days reward at end (ex. I forget to log in at day 15, check in rest of the month fine, but not enough days left now to collect day 30): personally would prefer this, could change it every month to spice it up while keeping general layout the same, last day could be an rarer creature (older event creature maybe), lot of gold, or like 1 shard, or 0.5 shard?

For non gold ways of getting shop creatures, and reduced prices in shops/quests, I really don’t have anything to add but I’d be all for both

[Eschaton]

//I used to be a goldminer when my device/lifestyle could take it, much more of a casual player these days//

Personally I'm a big fan of the grind-y methods of getting gold that are often used by other games and sites. Minigames, raffles, daily log ins/quests/activity goals, etc, but a good way to increase economy activity could be to create a Public Store.

Trading to get creatures is kind of.. tedious? Theres a lot of steps involved before a trade can even be set up, and I'm personally not a fan of that back and forth. If we had a store where users can just list their creatures (and items? and gold?) and ask for something specific in return (gold/items/creatures) that would make it a lot easier to find something you're looking for, or to get rid of something you don't really need but someone else might.

I also like the idea of having an NPC or another way to just get rid of creatures you have too many of. Maybe they could have daily special offer where they buy X creature for twice the gold or buying female pond creatures for more than usual, something like that to make it less predictable and encourages people to check back every day instead of just selling everything all at once.

EDIT:
There really should be some sort of a hatchery built into the gameplay as well. Kind of strange to have to go to a different site (yarold) or the forums to ask for clicks, when growing creatures is such a core part of the game. That could be another place to spend/earn gold, maybe we have to pay to put our creatures in the official hatchery, but then we earn gold back by clicking other hatchery creatures, more gold than we would earn by clicking non-hatchery creatures.

[LunatheDragoness]

Not completely related to the gold topic but, having one side account linked to our main account would be nice. Sort of like Egg Cave but the second account can be a little more strict (maybe the second account can't benefit from daily log ins, daily quests, and earning gold more than what the main account has in total, second account cant use the Bank feature, something like that) The second account could be helpful for those who have a ton of creatures and don't want/have the time to organize their keeps. It could be more of like, a storage account/store front account if the user wanted. It can be linked to our main account and when we want to send something over to our second account all we would have to do is click something like "Send To Second Account". Once a week you could send gold from the second account over to your main account but only a certain amount. And you wouldnt be able to send gold to the second account. Because the main account will have access to the Bank feature

Another idea, BANKS. A place where we can deposit our gold for later use/savings, to do a deposit interest rate depending on how long and how much you put down (ie- 1,000g for 5 days gets you 2% interest rate, something like that). This would be so helpful!

I saw someone mention a Lottery system. I love this idea. Set the ticket prices to 20g/ticket. MAX tickets per account is 100. You wouldn't want to set it too high because then people who don't have a lot of gold would not be able to participate. It could be every week or every other week maybe.

[Danafox]

Posted this on official suggestions...giving it a shot here.
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I am stealing borrowing this idea from a mobile game,I thought maybe we could actually use it. It could be simple to implement and easy to use. (haha easy to type but not so easy to implement/think through/go go brain boom)

So basically this idea involves a big issue for all players right now and that's earning Gold.

The idea is for our Keep/pets...to generate gold automatically for us. BUT WAIT...
The implementation idea is like this.....
- The gold can be stored in a very large treasure chest aka a Gold Button in our Keep.
- There is a Maximum Cap of Gold that you can store in your treasure chest, for example you can store up to 300,000 gold once it's at max storage you can no longer generate gold automatically until you Claim your stored gold via clicking the treasure chest button. This is ULTRA IMPORTANT.
- The gold will take a certain amount of hours and minutes to generate and fill up to max again
- You can click the treasure chest button to harvest your gold at any time and it will go towards your normal gold count/account to use freely
- Another design element could be you can only harvest your gold cap storage X number of times a day, every 3 days or per week or freely as many times as you want. If you can click freely as many times as you want, if it takes 20 minutes to earn lets say 5,000 gold for a level 5 Keep, you can click it and it automatically goes to your gold count, three minutes pass and you earned 300 gold, you can click and it goes to your gold count etc. This creates the incentive to login or check in maybe twice a day or maybe just once per day and you earned some gold and then can continue to passively earn more till you hit max storage again.

-We could create a world quest that opens up this brand new ability.

The Keep could have Levels from 1 to 5 maximum. Each level of the Keep affects how much gold you generate automatically and your maximum storage cap of gold in your treasure chest and thus can reach the maximum Level of 5 earning 1million gold in treasure chest max storage.
The quests can consist of things such as if you own X number of X stream critter you pass level 1 then move on to level 2, etc....So Yes depending on how easy or the criteria chosen for the quest, for extremely old players we might be able to fast track through the quest, but I think this is okay because we've been playing for a long time and so there has to be an advantage to that. Also, ideally we want players to be able to buy things with gold again and be able to trade with other players. All numbers can be changed etc am just throwing around random numbers to give better and clear examples.

Keep Level 1 - 50,000 gold max treasure storage/earnings
Keep Level 2 - 100,000 gold max treasure storage/earnings
Keep Level 3 - 250,000 gold max treasure storage/earnings
Keep Level 4 - 500,000 gold max treasure storage/earnings
Keep Level 5 - 1 million gold max treasure storage/earnings
Keep Level 6 - 5 million gold max treasure storage/earnings
Keep Level 7 - 10 million gold max treasure storage/earnings

Anyways, this is as far as I've thought it through so far. I already know that free to play players will absolutely love this, for donators probably not so much or maybe against it entirely. idk. I'm trying to help or offer ideas that maybe they were shot down hastily in the past but could be looked at again in a different way.
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My Current thoughts now - March 28th, 2024

I wanted to explain, my thoughts about this mechanic and why it appeals to me. I am borrowing this idea from a mobile game. This method that I tried to explain is how gold is generated and earned by players. The key difference is in that other game, gold is pretty much almost useless, it's only used for what would be termed as a customizable virtual home base that you can decorate with items you buy with gold. Other than that, gold is useless to players and it has a low gold cap of 30 million gold.

For Magistream this is obviously our main currency for all players and the major appeal of my idea is that as long as I login daily to visit and click this magical button I can "earn" gold and start to amass it once again. As a long time player and donator, the gold shortage has pretty much completely halted all of my "game play". I am used to sometimes spending millions upon millions of gold in a week or a month and I'd amass it right back in a month or two of selling older donis, new donis etc. So with this mechanic I can see myself earning back a large amount of gold and being able to finally buy and trade again with others, which I miss because it's also my way of talking and interacting with other players and friends.

So basically, I think this mechanic can work because it's flexible according to how old the player's account is and based on their collection in their Keep.
It allows for players to earn amounts of gold in a reasonable amount of time with the reasonable effort of daily logins and actions to collect their gold earnings.

If this mechanic were to be implemented, all gold prices for everything in game shops can stay the same and wouldn't have to be changed at all. The player market could return to what everyone is used to when goldmining was allowed. The only downside could possibly be prices for trading between players might go up, but that also would depend on how many players are even active on the game and how much gold would be generated this way (which right now I don't think will be an issue at all.)

Last thing to be transparent - I am in the top 5%. All of my gold comes from posting and selling retired donis/new donis. I tried goldmining many years back when I first started on this game and I had computer issues/was never ever able to be consistent at all due to carpal tunnel. The most goldmining I do is the IFN and the click threads where I always go post my stuff and then I click backwards at least up to 10 pages of peoples stuff.
My activity in game has been on a decline since 2016, and even more severely since 2020 forward due to RL work/jobloss/looking for work/working again etc. I am currently trying to be ultra stingy with my gold spending (which is ultra hard for me), because otherwise I won't be able to collect event creatures that I miss all the time now, or donis that messed up being below 1% and having to find replacements or maybe I missed a doni etc, which is why earning a large amount of gold in a reasonable amount of time is VERY important to me.


Three more ideas just flashed into my brain that can help with gold earnings that can be implemented maybe
- GIVE GOLD AS A PRIZE FOR CONTESTS....I did a couple giveaways many years back where I offered 100k gold as a grand prize and people loved this, also had other prizes such as 50k gold for two people, and then another 100k gold given in 10k increments to another 10 people. Yet we NEVER DO THIS WHY NOT?
- GOLD BONUS HOURS - Click on the three click threads between a set time, a certain number of times per day to include all time zones and make this last for one hour or maybe two hours to give folks a lil bit of leeway in case they're late, anything they click they earn DOUBLE or TRIPLE GOLD from eggs/hatchlings that are growing!!!! Imagine login at 8PM EST and for an hour or two people are all clicking at the same time, this will raise activity levels and the site can be more active!!! This can be done on a daily basis, or three times a week, or just weekends or maybe even in events!!!!
- BELMOS WEEKLY LOTTERY - he has hoards of gold he doesn't use, but we can use it back. LETS TAKE IT!


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Last notes that I thought could be important to share.

These are the things I look for as a top 5% player when it comes to buying things for gold.
- below 1% hatchlings of donis that I either don't have, or need replacement of
- donis I might have missed
- event creatures I missed, have none, or have very few of
- gender change potions - I wish I could buy 1,000 of these at once at least twice a year.
- fine tuning glass - I wish I could buy 1,000 of these at once at least twice a year.
- shop creatures from other factions/elements which forces me to trade ----I barely have spent on this area for a very long time.
For the last 5yrs majority of my gold spending is on donis I buy from others and event creatures.

[Nekoi]

Instead of a daily log in reward, I would suggest a Salary. We would have to go to a bank page or something, click a button to get our salary. Then there is no login/out necessary, just have it on a timer so one account can only click it once every 24 hrs or something like that. You can have a set salary for every account, or base the amount off of something like how many creatures the account owner has. I honestly really like the automated shops idea, as well as being able to sell/trade items. Daily quests.....it would depend. They can be good, or they can be tedious. I'm definitely in favor of lowering shop prices.

[prettyiggy7]

I'm late commenting on this, and someone may've mentioned this before me: but would there be any way to have a conversion for accrued gold to shards? As someone with a limited income, I'd love to buy some of the creatures that require shards. I've accrued between 250k to 300k gold & have bought most of the creatures with gold that I've wanted. But both the Donation and Shimmering Shops are out of reach for me, financially. If I could convert my gold to shards, it would enable me to shop there.

[Revan]

I'm late commenting on this, and someone may've mentioned this before me: but would there be any way to have a conversion for accrued gold to shards? As someone with a limited income, I'd love to buy some of the creatures that require shards. I've accrued between 250k to 300k gold & have bought most of the creatures with gold that I've wanted. But both the Donation and Shimmering Shops are out of reach for me, financially. If I could convert my gold to shards, it would enable me to shop there.

I disagree. This would defeat the purpose of donating in the first place. Donations to Magistream are what keep the site running. Converting what is essentially a freely earned item into one that is essentially the equivalent of monetary cash value is not something I've ever seen done on any website/game. More likely to happen would be that shards could be converted to gold, which I still feel would wreck even further havoc on the economy as there would be large sums of gold suddenly being dumped into the site.