Additional Growth Factors

[jaunty raptor]

Growing hatchies and juvies can be quite boring if I am honest. I'd love to see ways to increase your growth percentage that encourage you to play the game on top of time passage. As an off the top of my head example: killing a scrab on your own gives you some bonus % to growth. I would have a lot of fun growing if killing, scavenging, and doing other dragon things helped me grow faster, even just by a little bit at a time.

[spare sage]

This would be great, and could add a risk->reward feature. Killing scarabs/eating can put you at risk of harm, or exposing yourself in pvp settings. In general I'd like to see something to reduce the f o u r h o u r s of growth. Brood is going to be a pain to raise, and tbh I'm not a fan of sitting doing nothing all day.

[jaunty raptor]

100% Right now when trying to grow I just play something else or do something else while the dragon grows in the background... it's just not fun

[cursive stream]

I have a friend who fell asleep at his desk while growing a dragon.
If we can actively elder we should have a way to actively grow too. Even if it is 1% per bug or something.

[limpid sun]

I'd like an active growing system in the future, however I'm against getting exp from bugs because I worry it would cause camping their spawns and just killing the bugs without needing to eat them

so would be most sensible to have the exp be granted only when you're filling up hunger bar

[jaunty raptor]

I think there are too many scrab spawns to worry about that. Ideally that won't be a concern as more enemies are put in. Maybe it could just work for hatchies and juvies would have to kill something bigger. Lots of possibilities

[grizzled juniper]

Could have preset challenges of roam and fight? Get rewarded for each unique thing eaten every water source drank from?

[undone osprey]

I do think that if killing things is incentivized, there'll likely be a problem of people killing creatures too much and not leaving anything left to fight simply because the scrabs are quite easy for adolescent dragons to kill, and at least on pve people would probably start farming all the spawns as much as possible for that. perhaps something like exp for exploration though could work better, I think incentivizing for people to explore and move around the entire map would be healthy and give people something to do

[urban pine]

I think XP from kills should be related to age and class. Maybe scrabs are considered class 1, and therefore only give xp to hatchlings of class 5 or lower. At juvi, the scrabs stop giving xp, forcing you to switch to say snappers (or ideally something in between in difficulty). Adults would only get XP from snappers. And to try to discourage spam killing, link it to eating the food, so you are capped by a full stomach.

So to recap: if you are an eligible age/class for the prey item, and you kill it, the bonus XP gained is related to the percentage of food that you eat

This would also prevent an adult of a higher class from killing a snapper, giving it to an asd hatchie, and quartering the ASD grow time even though the ASD did nothing

[jaunty raptor]

I like the way you worded it, exp that contributes to growth. Also like your adage there, feels more mmo like.

Honestly though in a game where things spawn and said things matter in some capacity, there will always be people there to "grind" or "camp" it, it's just kinda the nature of these kinds of games. The goal I guess would be to create a state in which some players don't need the spawn for anything anymore so those who have grinded to get what they want go away and others have their chance. I suppose the main issue here though is so many people go through the same growth loop over and over and over so the need is always there. It's just going to take really creative design to balance it out. Our ideas only help the brainstorm

[undone osprey]

yeah, ultimately it depends on what the optimal gameplay loop is supposed to be. linking exp to eating the food instead of just killing certainly works to prevent camping, although I think we end up with the original problem of leaving nothing to do other than kill specific enemies when hungry. it would incentivize killing stronger enemies over just eating mushrooms, so could still be an improvement. and yeah, camping enemies for exp is a valid gameplay loop as well, it's only a problem if the game isn't set up for it. even just limiting scrab exp to hatchlings only might be enough tbh, I don't think hatchlings would kill/move quickly enough for it to pose a major issue.. but larger issue is just deciding what the optimal gameplay loop looks like first, and then incentivizing that with exp and such. small exp for killing enemies of equal level or exploring both sound like good options to me, in addition to the current over time growth which promotes a more casual survival gameplay.. lots of ways to combine those

[spring hinge]

I think this would give us more realistic gameplay. But this would probably have to wait until atleast 2 new dragons is released along with atleast 2 new AI as i think diets would be a great way to implement this but then we would need more AI and more diversity.

[terse kettle]

Options to shorten grow time would be very nice, instead of just going afk and waiting for three hours. It could be based on other factors as well I think, like how active someone is in the game maybe. If you stop moving for a long time or your thirst and hunger go up past 50% or so maybe growth slows down back to normal, then once you start running around to find food and water again, all those factors add speed to your growth. That way there are multiple ways to boost growth, not just one, that all reward playing the game naturally and discourage afk growing. This is specifically asking to keep the base grow speed the same or shorter than it is now. This would be to knock the current growth time down to like an hour or so total, hatchie to adult, depending on the dragon, I do not want to run around a square metre of space for an hour as a hatchie just to keep my growth time from being like, six hours long.

[grizzled juniper]

Take inspiration from bob trial hunt x amount of things, distance traveled not carried, find x water sources, air time as a hatchling, of that nature to keep people active?

[lament mirage]

I agree with the "explore to gain xp" deal. Guild Wars 2 did it well. ✨ Not to mention it would make some semblance of sense. Your dragon gains more knowledge of the world and true experience finding new lands. "New lands, new opportunity!"(or is it new adventures? lol) 😛 I'm kinda against the killing for xp too, mostly because for some people then it just becomes whoever can kill the most things(imagine pvp. it would increase hatchy killing maybe) gains the most experience. I get survival of the fittest but it would dissolve into endless KillForSport or xp in this case.

What if it was similar to PoT in which certain activities had timers... now one could argue this would turn in to a Dailies thing, and I know not everyone is into those mechanics. I get that. The time/cooldowns to "reset quests" can be managed though to not be daily and instead be significantly shorter. This would encourage more game play. We would just need to balance the "rewards" (xp? ... pearls? :0 )

[urban pine]

I think it really depends. If you go the bonus XP as achievements route, you can kill have kill based rewards, just tailor it so it doesn't lead to bad pvp behaviors.

Note: I'm using achievements instead of quests because functionally they are similar (complete task for reward), however achievements usually only let you complete them once per character. Whereas quests often may be repeated. Such a one-and-done quest system could also be used for larger achievements like killing raid bosses and reward appropriately large XP or rare pearls for said tasks of desired

For example, you could have each of the following be achievements which award xp:

• kill 1 [insert AI that meets your class and age requirements]
• fly above the clouds
• swim to the bottom of swamp
• discover 5 landmarks
• kill the sand slayer worm

Having a quest be kill a single AI is not imo a bad idea. I agree that killing player hatchlings or killing 5000 AI is bad, because killing defenseless players is unfun design for the killed player, and because killing the most things also leads to unhealthy play as well.

I really do NOT want quests like PoT where you have say 10-20 minutes and it's some menial repetitive task you have to repeat at every point of interest to speed up growth until you hit adult.

[lament mirage]

Fair enough on your PoT quest comment. Honestly, I haven't played it in a hot minute so I kinda forgot about that repetitive feeling with the quests. Yeah you're right, and they still need that Quest overhaul. Definitely don't want that repeated in this game...

I do like your achievement idea though. Would it be unfair or interesting to include additional achievements the stronger your dragon becomes? Maybe even pertaining to Bloodline? So they would require you to play the game more and get to that point. lol the game is one Steam, maybe it can have some of those "secret" achievments. lol