Baby Growth Timer Adjustments

[burnt egret]

I feel like this is a serious concern for the game and it's imo a large part of the reason people are not staying on the game or getting turned away from it when they first try it out.
The growth timer is way to long for a baby to reach Juvi and be able to do anything. Most folks can't really get into the game until they reach that percentage in Juvi were they can fly (outside of ASD who can start running at a decent pace early on)
I will give an example. I got back on to try out the IR I spent an hour rushing back and forth between a body of water and food trying my best to just surive no one was trying to kill me its just my hunger and food where constantly a problem. That's fine its a survival game the issue is once I finally reached Juvi and could fly around I got to enjoy it for maybe 20 minutes before I got attacked by 2 SS and died which means I'm back to 1 hour+ of growing to be able to try and enjoy the game again for another 20 minutes.
I think this is a very serious flaw in the game. My recommendation is shorten the time it takes to reach Juvi to around 30 minutes. It can take as long as it needs to for you to go from Juvi to Adult and even longer for Elder but there is no reason people should have to spend an hour+ of their lives trying to get out of Baby and actually able to take part in the game.
I feel like this would promote more activity in the game and death wont be the end for most folks. A lot of people are to scared to die that they don't even play the game they hide and chat or they immediately group up and the moment people die they get off some never to return. The start of the game shouldn't be the hardest part of it.

Baby Growth Timer Adjustments

[honest comet]

I completely agree with this. Maybe the timers wouldn't be so bad if we had things to do, better places to hide and etc, but it's something that completely turns me away from this game. I'm someone who doesn't really want to join a massive clan either so sitting for ages doing nothing is insane.
In the open test I played the BS and I was like "Oh! Is this it's growth time? It's actually pretty good! Long but not too long :D" and then found out the server had 2x grow speed...

[median valve]

i feel like 20-25 minutes to juvenile would be pretty fair (maybe 15 for asd/drakes in general)

Getting to adult would take longer though

[burnt egret]

I think my only issue with "content for babies" is our stamina and movement speed outside of ASD is disgusting we dont move fast and we need foot and water constantly so any other stuff would just not be possible cause you're so busy trying to stay alive. that's why I think the initial baby phase should not be all that long unless they decide to increase our speed but at the end of the day I still feel like the answer is just shorten the time it takes for us to grow up not full adult or anything but the ability to fly and do basic combat is necessary to even really play this game.

[manic dagger]

Notes: Personally i think flat boosting growth won't be the correct way of doing it, since we're going to have growth boosting dragons in the future anyway. And that it's a symptom of wider problems.

Problem: Growing takes a long time, which causes issues.

What are the issues:

1. You die before you can grow to juvie.
2. You have to be quite active to keep your needs met, unless you're a SS. So you're doing a lot of work for progress that is easy to lose.
3. Becoming a hatchling is the punishment for dying.

Why is this an issue:

1. Because you're helpless until you're a Juvie.
2. Because this is a lot of active work for potentially no payoff.
3. You get punished for dying by dying more, and you have to spend a lot of time getting back to where you were.

What causes the issues:

1. You get killed by an adult, because they find it fun to do, and because hatchlings are good food, and they live around areas with a lot of food too. You also can't leave to go to a safer location, due to the distance between bug-spawns.
2. Your needs and low mobility constantly force you towards unsafe areas. Areas that a juvie would have been able to handle easily.
3. Dying further punishes you with timeloss and further death, you can easily spend 2-3 hours just to finally get to Juvie.

How can this be fixed?

1. More content for adults, better food sources for them as well, preying on the weakest shouldn't have such high returns. with no risk.
2. More places with food, ponds can still be places you have to remain close to, but having the ability to hunt deep in the forest away from others would make ponds less of a buffet for older dragons.
3. Some sort of catchup mechanic? If you die at 90% growth perhaps you'll get a boost next life, so every percentage you grow will boost your next lives, stacking the boost until you finally survive. This would make death as a hatchling less of a hassle, because now you always have some sort of progress saved.

[burnt egret]

I'm down with most if not all of these fixes but I have a couple of issues.

1. The future dragons that will increase growth are not in the game and we are looking at months if not years away from them being added so until they are a soft fix of increase growth for babies could fix the problem. Not to mention a potential solo players game play should not be impacted by if they chose to party up with those dragons or be around them depending on how their buff works (best case some legend sits next to a pound were juvies spawns and just passive grows people but again that person misses out on content themselves doing that)
2. SS are imo the most broken thing in this game they are the only flyer that shots their attacks which is huge for air combat and they can turn invisible so growth is 10x easier for them I think either SS needs a nerf or the other dragons need a buff and future dragons need to be kept in mind. Im down for either but im sick of seeing SS being the most common thing to kill juvies.
3. At the end of the day like I had previously said this is our real lives here we are spending 40+ minutes trying to grow something just to be able to play the game. "future content" needs to stop being the argument because it hasn't happened yet even when that new ai comes into the game that doesn't mean adult dragons wont still go around killing babies cause people suck. A feature that lets babies grow faster needs to be implamented now and improved on later or else we will have what we have right now a dead game with 30+ serves and only 3 of them have activity with a total of around 120 people. this server has what thousands of people and most of us don't want to touch the game and im 90% sure it comes down to the baby and growth time just not being worth all the drama when I can just go play The isle or PoT minus the dragons.

[median valve]

SS being the only shooter is changing with IR being able to shoot some pretty powerful fireballs — they can shoot 11 at a time before reaching bile exhaust

I don’t think SS is OP, it’s just not painful to play as

FS also directly counters shadowscale cloaking with heat sense, which is also getting buffed in 1.0 to have wider range

Stop arguing that SS needs a nerf when it’s perfectly fine, its the other playables that need help/buffs

[lofty meadow]

I think one thing that would greatly help hatchies is baby skins: camouflaged skins so that babies are harder to spot. Think a deer fawn with spots. Part of what makes IR and FS so punishing to grow is that they're like a glowing red target: im here, eat me! That's also why ss is so much easier-- even though they're blueberries, they can perfectly blend with their surroundings to hide

[median valve]

I agree, since you can see your adult skin in your I menu, i think this would be a great change

[burnt egret]

I legit said "SS needs a nerf or the other dragons need a buff" if there is an argument that others need a buff then you can argue that SS could also just be a nerf. Instead of changing the machanics of 3 dragons nerfing the SS is an option. I am not saying do that but I think Buffing them OR nerfing SS is a solution to a problem.

[median valve]

Nerfing Ss is definitely not, since it only just now became stronger due to MUCH NEEDED buffs when 1.0 released. It's the other dragons that need buffing, which will hopefully be the case in 1.0.1 (IR getting a major attack change for example and some elemental buffs that were much needed)

[lofty meadow]

I don't think the plasma bolts are all that much better than what the FS has got in terms of damage, however... The FS really needs some TLC in terms of the visual of their attack. The SS plasma shot hit box mostly (except for desync issues) lines up exactly where the plasma shot FX are on the screen. The FS damage Ray does not match where the visual flame is, especially at Max range. I think the fire fx should feel a lot more powerful/fast and actually match the hit box of the attack

[burnt egret]

Okay Lol this is slowly turning into a discussion on if the SS is broken or not which isn't the point. My argument was that baby dragons are a problem due to a lack of content and reaching Juvi is way to long of a process for little reward if you are just going to get murdered 20 mins after you reach it by an adult dragon. I think an adjustment needs to be made. I also don't want "well future content will fix that" argument to be made because currently its unplayable (and just to be clear since there is a 30 min timer on posts) when I say unplayable the reward for taking the time to try and grow a dragon doesn't out way the risk. If I spend over an hour of my day trying to grow a dragon only to lose it 20/30 minutes later I have no interest in playing the game. Which is again why we see 30+ servers with no players. Even when the Isle did the evirma update it had activity despite its flaws because at the end of it all the growth wasn't the issue so people could still play it. All other issues this game might have should imo be pushed behind the need to improve baby content or growth timers improvements.

[amber prairie]

Please try to avoid emote, hashtag, gif and short 1-2 word/emote responses. If you agree to a forum post, please react with or emotes. Additional posted comments in feedback/suggestion forums should directly add to the original post. New topic = new forum (comments that did not directly add to the original post have been removed). Thank you!

[spark forum]

And I think the argument saying that future content will fix it I think we need to take into account how slow updates are coming and probably going to come along, baby growth should be fast just generally because this is a game which surrounds the late juvi and adult stage where you can nest, hunt other dragons, and participate in combat and such, which is basically what this game has to offer. No one wants to spend 3-4 hours just reaching the stage that enables you to do anything in this game. I feel like it’s pretty reasonable to ask for a cut in growth when adult stage is the only stage that you can really do anything and is where the bulk of this games content lies

[onyx sun]

I only ever play two-times growth servers for this exact reason-the time spent just getting to the stage where your character is useful at all takes so long that it doesnt feel worth it. In games like the Isle where growth times are also long, you have many other options compared to DOD; hiding is MUCH more viable even for full-grown characters, the foliage is lush and thick and doesnt disappear when you’re looking at it from miles away. The locomotion is also much better, allowing players to juke an opponent multiple times even if severely outmatched. DOD doesn’t really have these, you have to either be far away from the populous (and struggle with food), get lucky when coming across strangers, or have friends guarding you to survive.

[spark forum]

And honestly the isle has a whole lot more to offer in terms of hatchling content, you’re able to hunt ai and get your nutrition, check out the giant map available, find other players, maybe even hunt other players and that’s not talking about the species specific gameplay option like climbing and whatnot while not having super long growth times. DOD has almost nothing to offer for players who can’t fly, which is usually about an hour where you can’t do anything but hope that an adult doesn’t come along and kill them. For most animals (especially flying ones) they grow as a baby at extremely rapid rates so I feel like the hatchling stage should be a breeze, and I feel like it should be fast also for player enjoyment especially when there’s so little this game has to offer at the moment. I just don’t think it benefits anyone to have such slow growth times I mean maybe pve it’s fine because there is no threat but PvP? It’s not fun for anyone except the adult who probably needed help growing or just got lucky

[subtle venture]

All PvP servers you should just spawn in at the start the game at Juvivnal stage.. (Hatching out of eggs in players nest should be x2 growth speed yes you get nested you begin life as a hatchie just hatchie stage should be x2 faster), same for juvie stage tbh..

Isle legacy did it.. Works surprisingly well

[spark forum]

Honestly I like somewhat equating the dragons to birds, in this own way specifically. Birds have to grow at extremely fast rates because if they can’t fly, they can’t take care of themselves and their parents will abandon then, so basically if you can’t fly you die. Which I feel applies to dragons in a lot of cases as you need to fly if you want to defend and hunt for yourself. Sure these are big hulking creatures but at least until they can fly they should have pretty fast growth, and at least fast growth would justify the god awful food and water depletion for some of the dragons. Also it would work simply for player enjoyment, who wants to sit there doing nothing for 2+ hours until they can fly and do anything

[subtle venture]

Could just do a minigame with the parrent yeeting the baby so it can fly.. Say yeet it once and it flies..

[idle moss]

I believe being a baby should be really short. as in like at MAX half an hour short, MAYBE 45 minutes for when the firedrake behemoths are added, but make juvie to adult progression MUCH longer as this is when you can start basicly actually playing the game and not being in a chat simulator, this would make growth more meaningful and it would make it so that its not as impactful when you lose a dragon, you dont have to wait for over an hour to have some semblence of fun in this game.

basicly:
baby growth time: 15 minutes to 30 at max
juvie to adult: 2 hours to 4 hours possibly across days so you FEEL like your actually putting in work to get stronger
adult to elder: whatever

[lofty meadow]

I think hatchling stage should be under an hour, with the sole exception of behemoths, since they're kind of like raid dinos in ark, and they're supposed to be more of a group effort to grow anyways. Lots of effort in = powerful raid dragon out, basically.

But I think 15-30 minutes is too short, especially 15 minutes unless you're talking bio, micro, etc. I see asd being about 25, ss about 30-35, FS/IR about 40-45, and hybrid/brood watcher at 50-55 minutes

[spark forum]

My thoughts exactly, in the wild if you are incapable of taking care of yourself for THAT long you’re basically free lunch, now I believe that if you’re nested in you should naturally have a longer hatchling stage even just slightly longer since you have higher chances of food and protection. You shouldn’t have to pray and hope that you don’t get munched on before you can do anything to get away for defend yourself (being juvi). Now it should be that juvis should be able to fly as soon as they hit juvi even if it’s slightly more trivial than later on and this is the stage where you really have to work but at least you have the means to defend and get away from any threats. What’s the fun in waiting for your useless baby dragon to become slightly viable as juvi? No one. That’s why I haven’t played this game in ages because there’s nothing to do as a hatchling besides waiting.

[idle moss]

nah those are way too long. honestly the idea of hatchlings being completely defensles and not able to do basicly ANYTHING is insane enough already and a terrible game choice. 30 minutes of that? yeah nah most sane people would log off but we are addicted. its boring, theres no point, and theres nothing you can do in that stage that is actually worth your time

[storm geyser]

I think under an hour is reasonable if the juvenile>adult takes longer instead. Also have to consider new players getting into the game. Looking at controls and such will roughly take the time you'd need.I also think people should have the attention span to wait that much.

[lofty meadow]

I would argue that the fix is to give players something to do, so it's not boring and worth your time. And hatchlings should not be completely defenseless. Sure, I agree hatchling phase is too long, but just skipping it as quickly as possible is a bandaid to a gap in the game's gameplay loop. Hatchling needs to be more engaging and interesting for players too

[idle moss]

I wouldnt say a bandaid, its a definitley needed patch, I mean your right about the interesting thing, maybe hatchling could still be long (obv nowhere near as long as it is now) if we could do stuff, but that seems unlikely and it would be easier to convince the devs do simply reduce the time instead of adding more mechanics specificly suited for hatchlings. maybe later, but right now 30 minutes max is what we need

[subtle venture]

Or keep it 15 to 30 mins for hatchies... (Hatchies can fly if parents yeet them)

but every dragon other then behemoths spawn in as juvies...

Like how isle legacy did it..

You spawn on a beach as a fresh juvie... It be better then you cant do anything to not defend your self at all..

[spark forum]

Yeah yeah and I feel like juvis should be able to fly as long as they have a hill or something (fresh juvi I mean) like it is now but they should be able to fly from flat ground earlier than it currently is, also I feel like there should be a pretty decent food demand as juvi because I mean you’re big hulking dragon that’s also growing pretty fast and you have a means to get food pretty well cause you can fly and whatnot. Also I feel like you know adults are going to hunt down fresh spawned juvis so maybe like a 30 second timer that juvis can’t be spotted (invisible so they can slide away) and a minute before they can be injured (so the invis wears off but they can’t just sneak up to an adult so the second the timer runs out they can attack) I feel like this will ensure a fighting chance to get to a preferable position before you can be hunted

[burnt egret]

I am happy this post is getting some traction I really hope something get implemented sooner than later. I still stand firmly on the idea that reaching juvi should only take 30 minutes Max. Tbh I dont care what dragon you are there is no reason a human should waste more than 30 minutes of their life growing these things when the moment you can fly your chances of dying increase significantly. If I spend an hour growing a dragon the moment I start flying is really the moment I am able to be easily spoted by the server. Outside of scummy people who go scout hatch spots to kill fresh spawns everyone sees fresh flying juvis as fair game and the fights are still not balanced but at least there is a sliver of a chance to fight back not to mention if I die after growing for 30 minutes it doesnt feel like the end to have to grow again for another 30 minutes but right now when i die I know im wasting at least another hour of my life just to be able to fly again which is why i stopped playing and again I think this is why there are so many dead servers right now no one wants to do that and they have every right to not want to.

[burnt egret]

I am assuming the best route is to just keep the conversation active with new people and additional ideas to improve on the concept if it gets enough traffic the devs will probably consider it if enough of the community is in agreement on a topic

[sinful hare]

Well u can fly as a baby with a high ledge or parent help but or mostly defenseless until but a juvi. It really takes to long

[civic thistle]

in some games, like "the isle (evrima)" there are safe zones for cubs, where access to adults is limited in various ways (for example, in "the isle (evrima)" it is bees what attacking adults)
maybe adding separate arcade servers with similar mechanics can help keep an audience that has not yet mastered the game, as well as not lose a more casual audience

[median valve]

The Isle’s bees are very hit or miss because they go off of weight rather than age or size, so troodons and other small dinosaurs can easily slip in and slaughter babies

[civic thistle]

But it's better than nothing.

[torpid sierra]

if you're interested I posted about partial growth loss as an additional option to servers, it should be among the first posts

[median valve]

This post is about adjusting the speed of how fast hatchlings grow

[steel summit]

I would love to have baby growth increased but make juvi growth a tad bit longer. That way you can fly much sooner but have to grow longer.

[wanton bone]

I agree… growth rate is too long when you can die so fast as a hatchie… no defense, no mobility, and hatchies give more food than the average bug. So I’d say it’s an incentive to kill hatchies.

[burnt egret]

And again since this has so much traction going on in it I think the intial post needs to be brought up again. The Growth from a fresh spawn to being able to fly/defend yourself needs to be adjusted to something shorter so people can actually enjoy the game. However increasing the time it takes to reach full adult as a result is totally fine so long as we can actually enjoy the games content sooner than the current 1 hour+ growth time.

[manic dagger]

I would take being hunted as a baby by a baby-killer type dragon over an SS swooping down to mess me up for no reason any day.