Retire lead wolf early without ”killing” it.
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Posted 2021-10-25 15:54:46
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 hannaH #45844 |
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Posted 2021-11-02 09:59:32
With the mentor role now available I was thinking that retiring your leader could auto-lock them into that role or grey out every option except mentor/pupsitter/none (to prevent paying to replace multiple leads to get a lvl20 hunt team in harder biomes, lvl20 desirable pair bonds, etc). They could also be locked into a special ex/retired leader role, if the coding would be easier, but I prefer the idea of mentoring or babysitting younger generations. I feel like retiring should also prevent them from being traded, being on the leaderboards, or being the lead again. Though a retiree leaderboard might be nice. I think the only potential downside is that it would be possible to use the lead wolf position to quickly level up replacement breeding males if you're aiming for stats, but I'm sure there'll be some way to discourage that. |
 VagueShapes #828 |
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Posted 2021-11-10 02:40:31
I am sooo going to miss him. So for me it's emotional + lore reasons :) SUPPORT SUPPORT!! |
Spirit #43327 |
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Posted 2021-11-10 11:48:25
even though shes a "starter wolf" i really love my current lead, i made pack lore and spent a LOT of game currency for her and for her to just DIE ON ME?! i really support the idea that they should be able to stay in the pack |
 kila #49603 |
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Posted 2021-11-10 11:49:50
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Spirit #43327 |
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Posted 2021-11-16 01:20:33
I actually thought you could immortalize ex-leaders, it's kinda odd to me that it kills the lead? It should definitely be something in the game. There should also be a cooldown in between switching-- maybe once every month or 3 months? Just so people don't switch wolves out to level them up faster. I also think it'd be cool if the day before your lead dies of old age, you can choose to immortalize them and switch leads. |
 Multimoon #34640 |
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Posted 2021-11-29 03:39:56
At present, the highest possible stat pups can only be obtained if two players with lead wolves of opposite sex breed their leads together. Ero and Addy are good examples of this, and recently produced the highest ever stats seen on pups on this game. If it were possible to retire leads into being usable pack members again, this would become standard, and there would be no point in the metagame to meticulously raising and stat grinding hunters, which is a big part of the game for a lot of people like me. I do not want it to become essentially pointless to hunt a wolf its entire life, because putting that kind of consistent effort in and having it be worthwhile is the major part of why I play Wolvden. I think it would be possible to balance this feature, were it introduced, if the former lead wolf was not able to breed. That would be my primary objection after all - the way it would mess with the stat breeding meta. I'd also want these wolves to not be able to show up on pack member leaderboards. Unless these two things were true, I would strongly object to this change being implemented in the game. |
 Spontaneite #2993 |
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Posted 2021-11-29 04:31:00
It already costs GC to retire early, and even more if you want to retire during the new lead cooldown. I personally think that's already enough of an incentive to not farm leaders, but I guess the price to retire without killing could be the same as by-passing the cooldown if that's a concern? That would make farming for stats cost nearly triple the price of regular retiring, and retiring once every 30 days is pretty much unviable, because that's over 1 year of game time. Not only that, but if they were locked into roles that don't give random stat gains (mentor/pupsitter, or an exclusive new role for ex-leaders) then once they were retired, that's it. That's their final stats. If you're going for the maximum stat gain you'd want to keep your lead fighting enemies to get the +1-2 stat gain chance for as long as possible. The easiest way to level up pack members is to scout until level 15-20, and, to gain the most possible stats, put them in a hunter role for the rest of their life. Or hunt until level 10-15 for the highest chance of stat boosts per day, and then scout to bump up their exp gains. Lead farming requires spending a load of GC to force retire, and that's excluding the cost of the healing salves, guarana and lucky feet needed to level up each wolf quickly enough. I'm confident it wouldn't become standard, and I'm also confident that raising high stat hunters would definitely still be useful and widespread. |
VagueShapes #828 |
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Posted 2021-11-29 06:49:13
I'm primarily a stat focused player, with an emphasis on raising and breeding certain bases. In my experience, you get the best stats on a pack member wolf if it either hunts all its life 10 hunts a day, or does this until lv20 and then is stat ground via pup training for the remainder of its life. I have multiple pack member leaderboards wolves and my former lead Khatvana held the previous record for highest stat NBW, and still holds the record for highest str NBW (550). At present, I pay other users to stat grind wolves for me via pup training, and other users to train certain of my wolves via hunting or scouting (3gc per week per ground wolf; 5gc per week per levelled wolf). While the amount I spend on this varies by availability of trainers, it generally isn't less than 20gc per week. I also spend around 7gc worth of lucky feet on my lead every day to ensure optimal stat gain by winning the majority of battles. If swapping leads was viable as a way to quickly train wolves to lv20, it would definitely be worth it to me, and probably to a lot of my fellow stat players as well. There's a certain comfort in the current system - you can theoretically level more than two hunting teams worth of wolves if you're willing to pay other users to do it for you, but there's a strict limit to how high the stats on those wolves can get due to how pack member stat gain works. I could easily see us lead farming to speed level our wolves, despite the GC cost. As for unbalancing the stat meta: if you're very very dedicated, and use a few Guarana a day, you can get +8 or more stats on a lead wolf daily. I did this with Khatvana towards the end of her life, and this is around the stat gain that players like Naike and Websteak get on their leads most days. I know that Mavric aims for +10 with DreamWalker most days. A normal pack member can gain +2 a day except for rare +3s. Assuming the pack member gets their stats every day from 1yo to 7.5yo, this is a total potential stat gain of 312 over 156 days. By contrast, it would take a highly dedicated lead wolf farmer only 31-39 days to get this many stats on a wolf, and then either keep going or swap the lead out to be a hunter to get another potential 200+ stats via regular pack member things over the remainder of their life. Speaking as a lead wolf grinder, this sounds viable to me, and I don't want it to be an option. Even if I played 'relaxed' like I do with my current lead, gaining only around 4 or 5 stats daily, this is still incredibly unbalanced if I'm then able to swap the lead out and breed it. This would be most unbalanced for Finishers in particular, who have terrible native levelups and stand to gain the majority of their strength points via daily grinding - and strength is the easiest stat to reliably gain on a lead wolf. Lots of players on this site are very dedicated towards stat gaining on their leads, and if lead swapping were viable as a way to train up breedable wolves, I think some of us would feel forced to do so in order to stay on top of the meta. I don't see lead swapping being a functional balanced mechanic unless the retired lead was completely unable to breed, or had extremely strict restrictions on their breeding that would probably be a pain for the devs to implement. Personally, I would be happy with an 'immortalise from dynasty' feature for lead wolves, so we could have them in our dens but not necessarily make use of their potentially completely broken stats. I'd love to have Khatvana 'alive' and hanging out with the rest of my wolves, I adore her and I miss her so much, but I really don't want to open the can of worms that swappable breedable leads would represent. (N.b. I, and several other of the lead wolf grinders of the game such as Websteak, are free to play. I have income from custom decor, but Websteak doesn't - our kind of lead grinding is fully possible for dedicated free to play members.) |
Spontaneite #2993 |
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Posted 2021-11-29 07:28:39
You said you spend no less than 27GC per week, but if you were to replace your lead every week with the extra retirement fee I suggested, that would be closer to 70GC per week. For arguments sake, lets say the feature did mean that those wolves were unable to get into the leaderboards and unable to breed outside of existing pairbonds, do you think it would still be worth it? I also wouldn't rule out "pain for devs" as a deciding factor, since the pair-bonding feature has quite a few of the suggested restrictions and was implemented pretty fast. My main problem is that I wouldn't want the wolf frozen, I would want it to live out it's natural life. Having deceased wolves able to be frozen, including leads, is a different suggestion that I'd also support. We have grandpaws on Lioden that are aged up if retired early, and live up to one year extra, unable to do anything but give some nice flavour text. I'd like for this feature to sort of play off of that, but give them more time and actually something useful to do to justify feeding and playing with them. It wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me if they couldn't breed, but if we could keep limited breeding allowed then I felt it would be a nice addition, so I'm glad you pointed out some of the flaws with it. |
VagueShapes #828 |