Dragcave metaish stuff
Sep. 25th, 2009 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelI had sort of half known about DC before I joined, vaguely, and I have no idea what it is that got me to join. Most virtual pet sites, particularly click-to-grow ones, I don't end up with the patience for. But anyway, I ended up getting kind of somewhat addicted. Obviously.
And for a while it was all just about the ooh-shiny. About finding cool eggs, and discovering what they hatched into, and being all a-squee over them regardless of anything else. (Well. I still take exception to the balloon dragon [which was one of my first four], but that's just me.)
But then things changed. I looked for, and found, egg guides, that showed pictures of egg/hatchling/adult stages, which was a mixed blessing, because it meant that I could aim for the ones I wanted, but also took some of the mystery out of it.
And then I got more into it, and ... okay, you know how you pick up something (like, say, knitting) as a hobby, and you're fine with craft-store-quality needles and cheap acrylic yarn, and then you start learning more and obsessing more and all of a sudden you're buying the expensive but Proper[tm] yarn and a full set of hand-carved bamboo needles and a swift and ball-winder; and you've promised socks to a bunch of people and you have to finish up the baby blanket before the baby graduates college, so you can't just work on whatever you feel like; and it starts getting more restrictive than fun?
That kind of happened here too.
It got especially bad when I went from being more or less solo to being involved in the community; the forums are another of those mixed blessings. As are the things I learned about -- lineages, and breeding, and rarity, and trading, and all that.
I didn't care, when I started, what the source of my eggs was. Whether they were bred eggs that had been abandoned, or whether they were caveborn. I didn't care whether they were popular overall, or common, or whatever. I just cared about Teh Pretty.
But now my view is skewed by popularity. Some of the dragons I found pretty (magi, purples, frills) are considered common and therefore "low-value", which means I'm not as likely to go for them any more. (Not as "undesirable" as pinks and mints, but still not as "valuable" as other dragons.)
And there's also the trading factor. You can trade with other players, and there's an informal currency based on how "valuable" the dragon is. Being CB tends to raise the value of a particular egg/hatchling, especially for rare drops (gold, silver, even black); being of a popular lineage can raise the value; being inbred (where, for example, A and B are bred to produce C, and A and C are bred to produce D) lowers the value, even though inbreeding has no actual effect on the dragon itself) drops the value. There's a general exchange rate of what people will trade for what: I have a stripe with CB parents and a CB summer, will give 1:1 for sun dragons, 2:1 for a gold or whatever.
...which means that even though I don't like the gold quite as much as others, I'm still happy about having one just for trade leverage (if it is ever willing to breed).
And lineages have been a mixed bag, because it's given me Dorkfaces (I am so in love with DFs, it's insane) and it's given me breeding projects, but it's also meant that I want CB for most things, except for Dorkfaces (or sometimes short-lineaged eggs), and some breeds can be hard-to-impossible to find in the cave. Metallics, obviously, but I almost never see blacks or stripes.
(there's a mechanism in the coding that tries to balance out breed ratios, which means not just that common dragons drop more than rare ones, but that it depends on the ratios of existing dragons as compared to the ideal ratios [e.g. if it's supposed to be 30% pink dragons, but people are raising and keeping other sorts so that over all the scrolls it's only 10% pinks, the cave will drop a heck of a lot of pinks to try to get the ratio back in balance], which inevitably means that the commonest dragons appear way more often than wanted, and the rarer dragons, which people are trying to breed as well as catch, appear way less often.)
AND there's times when I look at someone's scroll and go "I could/should have done that." Like ones that are just one specific breed. Or ones that have one adult of each gender with a family of frozen hatchlings in between. (I actually wanted to do that with my whiptails once I got my original one a mate, but they refused each other, and it seems weird to have CB or other-parented hatchlings.) Or ones that have naming schemes. Or...
...
...I kind of wish I could go back to when it was just OMGPRETTY.
And for a while it was all just about the ooh-shiny. About finding cool eggs, and discovering what they hatched into, and being all a-squee over them regardless of anything else. (Well. I still take exception to the balloon dragon [which was one of my first four], but that's just me.)
But then things changed. I looked for, and found, egg guides, that showed pictures of egg/hatchling/adult stages, which was a mixed blessing, because it meant that I could aim for the ones I wanted, but also took some of the mystery out of it.
And then I got more into it, and ... okay, you know how you pick up something (like, say, knitting) as a hobby, and you're fine with craft-store-quality needles and cheap acrylic yarn, and then you start learning more and obsessing more and all of a sudden you're buying the expensive but Proper[tm] yarn and a full set of hand-carved bamboo needles and a swift and ball-winder; and you've promised socks to a bunch of people and you have to finish up the baby blanket before the baby graduates college, so you can't just work on whatever you feel like; and it starts getting more restrictive than fun?
That kind of happened here too.
It got especially bad when I went from being more or less solo to being involved in the community; the forums are another of those mixed blessings. As are the things I learned about -- lineages, and breeding, and rarity, and trading, and all that.
I didn't care, when I started, what the source of my eggs was. Whether they were bred eggs that had been abandoned, or whether they were caveborn. I didn't care whether they were popular overall, or common, or whatever. I just cared about Teh Pretty.
But now my view is skewed by popularity. Some of the dragons I found pretty (magi, purples, frills) are considered common and therefore "low-value", which means I'm not as likely to go for them any more. (Not as "undesirable" as pinks and mints, but still not as "valuable" as other dragons.)
And there's also the trading factor. You can trade with other players, and there's an informal currency based on how "valuable" the dragon is. Being CB tends to raise the value of a particular egg/hatchling, especially for rare drops (gold, silver, even black); being of a popular lineage can raise the value; being inbred (where, for example, A and B are bred to produce C, and A and C are bred to produce D) lowers the value, even though inbreeding has no actual effect on the dragon itself) drops the value. There's a general exchange rate of what people will trade for what: I have a stripe with CB parents and a CB summer, will give 1:1 for sun dragons, 2:1 for a gold or whatever.
...which means that even though I don't like the gold quite as much as others, I'm still happy about having one just for trade leverage (if it is ever willing to breed).
And lineages have been a mixed bag, because it's given me Dorkfaces (I am so in love with DFs, it's insane) and it's given me breeding projects, but it's also meant that I want CB for most things, except for Dorkfaces (or sometimes short-lineaged eggs), and some breeds can be hard-to-impossible to find in the cave. Metallics, obviously, but I almost never see blacks or stripes.
(there's a mechanism in the coding that tries to balance out breed ratios, which means not just that common dragons drop more than rare ones, but that it depends on the ratios of existing dragons as compared to the ideal ratios [e.g. if it's supposed to be 30% pink dragons, but people are raising and keeping other sorts so that over all the scrolls it's only 10% pinks, the cave will drop a heck of a lot of pinks to try to get the ratio back in balance], which inevitably means that the commonest dragons appear way more often than wanted, and the rarer dragons, which people are trying to breed as well as catch, appear way less often.)
AND there's times when I look at someone's scroll and go "I could/should have done that." Like ones that are just one specific breed. Or ones that have one adult of each gender with a family of frozen hatchlings in between. (I actually wanted to do that with my whiptails once I got my original one a mate, but they refused each other, and it seems weird to have CB or other-parented hatchlings.) Or ones that have naming schemes. Or...
...
...I kind of wish I could go back to when it was just OMGPRETTY.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-28 02:47 pm (UTC)