The Frog Pond • Part 2
Part 2 of the Frog Update has arrived!
The burbling of the pond's small tributaries grow ever more cheerful as the days go on. Small fish and dainty legged insects make their way through the lush vegetation covering swaths of the water's surface.
THE FROG GATHERING EVENT
Event Ends at 11:59PM DVT June 8th, 2024
- This is a gathering event to help boost the community's initial frog coins.
- Gather Tadpole Tokens by finding gatherables around the site.
- Water other users' frog buddies in order to grow their pond plants.
- Alchemize Tadpole Tokens to receive Frog Coins!
All Frog Gathering participants will receive the Sleepy Frog Trophy at the end of the event! There are also some secret wigglers obtainable through hidden means via Paulie's quest.
With the arrival of frog gathering, Paulie's Trolley has seen an expansion of new items and pets!
There are 10 new clothing, 2 hatch shards, 1 food item, and a menagerie pen and post border to collect.
There are also 2 new quaint pets, a new fantastical and a new legendary to collect! Recipes are now stocked in the Officiator's Record Office.
This has been one of our first potato sink focused updates, so we'd like to share some plans as well as discussions with everyone about it. There have been many ideas posted about different kinds of potato sinks and mechanics we can try to balance the Trades Market, here's a short list of some key types we'll be exploring in future updates.
Additional Incremental Potato Sinks
- These are normally tied to a themed content drop of some kind similar to the Frog update.
- The idea behind this type of sink is that it tackles the max potatoes that can be earned through site mechanics daily and helps stabilize Market prices that way.
- We have several future plans for sinks of this type and are closely monitoring feedback in regards to how it's presented and how it feels in this update so far.
Large Sum Potato Sinks
- This includes any items sold in shops for a very high flat potato sale price.
- We don't currently have shop stock of this type anywhere, which is something we're planning to add in the future!
Mechanic Tax Potato Sinks
- These are potato fees for using various parts of the site, ranging from more cosmetic things to convenience based mechanics to taxes or fees on different areas of the game.
- There are a multitude of possibilities with this sink type which we're excited to explore and will be mindfully planning with future feature updates as well as new features.
Co-op Donation Potato Sinks
These could help unlock new features such as new content in shops, new NPC's etc and require the community to chip in potatoes until fulfilled. We have some ideas on how to implement this with future content drops!
We hope you enjoy the additional frogs, thank you for playing and supporting Dappervolk as always!
Comments
The future potato sink plans sound interesting and it’s good to see that feedback is being taken on board and looked into. Agree with a lot of users about taxes, I don’t think it would go down well to start taxing things on site that have been free since launch, that being said I would happily pay potatoes for extra town hops or totem slots.
The co-op donation sink also sounds interesting and if it’s something that benefits the whole community I wouldn’t mind chucking some spare potatoes at it.
The ideas of taxes and random negative currency events seem extremely user hostile for a site that is actively losing users. By the end of this all you’ll have are the whales and potato sinks will not matter. I think the only potato sink that makes any dent on the whales rn is the custom clothing/pet maker. And you can tell by how often those users manage to roll multiple custom makers.
Not all of these ideas are bad, though and I think that would be reflected in a poll! The frog mechanic is interesting, I like that it’s optional. I probably won’t use it much as a casual player in need of potatoes. The idea of co-op potato donation events seems like it could be really fun!
It’s been suggested elsewhere but implementing one use potato sink items that maybe allow you temporary avi/pet/site cosmetics or some such and would encourage players to spend more money on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, whatever timeframe. Another idea, although I’m sure it requires more thought, would be a donation system where players could put items/potatoes in and get items out like the present giving mechanic during the big winter events. Raffles like Roundsey on FR would also be worth considering, with a chance for limited/kickstarter items or custom makers.
As it is now, massive swaths of items are almost always missing from the market itself because listing each item one by one can be time-consuming (I assume), AND everyone has a very limited amount of trades that are able to be posted w/o paying for more, which leads to users favoring NPC shop items that others haven't unlocked, etc etc. On top of having so few online users, trade posts can be really hard to move before they expire as well.
As it is, just getting a single item for say, pet affection is sometimes a NIGHTMARE. If nobody has it listed in trades? Get ready to drop upwards of 30k potatoes for a single item through gacha, which is infinitely frustrating and a large part in why I haven't really bothered much with this site lately, ngl.
That's what money sinks should be. O P T I O N A L. Not like, "Hey worldhopper, I know you don't have a house but here are your property taxes anyway. Pay up." And oh gosh I probably shouldn't have said that since houses still aren't implemented and I probably gave you all ideas. ;-;
Lol Ok, that bit of joking aside. As others have said, please do not implement taxes on stuff that we already have access to/access to for free. This was tried before by raising prices on Oran's stuff, that didn't go over well, please do not try it again by adding fees to bulk alchemy or trade market lots. No random events/popups that take our Potatoes either. And especially before you start to work on or implement anything, POLLS. Please, just put up polls and ask us.
I know I'm probably a broken record by now with how often I say if so and so doesn't change or if so and so gets added then I'm out of here, but every time I've said that DV has thankfully gone back on their decision which has made me still want to stick around. But I do mean it again this time. If I ever end up having to pay for something that was originally free or if doing stuff around the site randomly takes Potatoes from me, I'm out.
i don't actually think the ultra-wealthy players (people with customs) are the problem. i used to be one in another game, and the reality is that the money i hoarded stayed in my bank account. it effectively left game circulation. the problem was more that there was nothing to spend my hoards of gold on, in the game itself. the game itself generates more money than it takes away. the economy used to be pretty stable, and then we had a huge injection of potatoes from the revamped towns. but the prices of spins in NPC shops stayed the same, so everybody has a lot more money on hand with little to spend it on, and so it becomes devalued. the problem somewhat stabilizes over time, as there is a ceiling to what people are willing to pay for the items that keep money circulating - ie. monthlies, as well as a ceiling of what people are capable of earning every day.
i think what causes inflation is an accumulation of *circulating* currency in the game. town hops are a mitigation of this, because they put a cap on the total amount of potatoes you can earn in one day. now that i've thought about this, i think it would be unwise to offer ways to bypass the town hop limit, because it would increase the baseline of what you have to earn every day to keep up with inflation.
prices in the TM raise, and it forces you to spend time doing more dailies, and so more people are reaching the earning cap. raising the earning cap would make this worse in every way. it would increase the amount of grinding you have to do, and it would increase inflation as well.
however, having a high earning cap isn't a completely bad thing when potato sinks exist in-game. sinks serve the purpose of taking money out of circulation, which should cool inflation. casual players who don't have a lot of time to play the game can catch their breath on the grind by ignoring the potato sink and focusing on saving up for monthlies, and the people who do have a ton of time to waste on the game will have something to spend their money on. if the sink serves to even out how much currency you earn each day, and is completely optional, then it can safely be ignored by people trying to save up for other things, while being something interesting to burn your loads of moldering, unused cash on for people who have a ton of it.
so i really do think it comes down to time and a steady increase of money-sink stock. i think that as long as there is something in the game that is evening-out the overall amount of potatoes you can earn every day, inflation shouldn't get too bad.
people are upset about all of this because the amount of stuff you have to grind for, and the amount of grinding you have to do is overwhelming. if you REALLY want the frog pond items, you might be forced to give up on next month's monthlies. and yeah, that really sucks, but that's just kinda the nature of having a virtual economy. i'm not a "whale" by any means, i just have a lot of free time to play pet games, and even i find myself struggling to keep up with everything. grinding is boring and i don't want to do it, but i like collecting monthlies and custom pets.
but anyways, i will re-iterate that i think taxes and fees are a terrible idea. it is incredibly user-hostile, and especially so for casual and new players who have a million things they're trying to save up money to buy. i think the frog pond is probably enough on its own, as long as it keeps getting updated into the future. even having more types of shops that are similarly themed would be a great idea - like a snail shop, or a bird shop or something. i know people would really enjoy that, lol.
i hope all of this makes sense!
I feel a better timesink would be to instead, as one user suggested in this thread, make the custom makers a monthly raffle, or if that could end up being a lot for the site artists, maybe a raffle that happens in every other event (like 1 raffle in a summer event, 1 raffle in a spring event, 1 raffle in a fall event, 1 in a winter event, and 1 for the site anniversary)
Do not put taxes in my fantasy game, I thnik that would be thing thing to make me abandon everything, it sounds so mean.
Because everything is locked behind gachas, there's little incentive to spin unless you're doing dailies or custom maker rolling. Because of THAT, the market suffers, as people who already have rolled for the clothing they want aren't going to want to buy the hundreds of items that are on offer due to spinning just simply to complete dailies/custom rolls (as it's usually the earlier towns people are spinning - no one needs those items anymore).
I think it would be so much more beneficial to take the common items out of the NPC's shops and, sure, leave the rarer items in the gachas. At least for the earlier towns. That way, when you're spinning the machines, there's a lot more incentive for you to do so.
Idk, I just think potato sinks are not the solution. I think it makes it worse for new users and casual players.