anonrerising | Our Noble ARR

Update on this. Looks like it's been addressed in the discord publicly and the real rates are... Still not great imo.

Screenshot provided second hand since I'm not in the server.
https://imgur.com/a/cUZ3tEh

Link to the artist application form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLvD727gVe_piiC95RC6hBywxpVBVZdCbLQCH4Sm7nGTMKOQ/viewform

Screenshots of those
https://imgur.com/a/Dl12XRf

The reusing of old assets is also only vaguely addressed. It's a real head scratcher to me since while I can understand how being more open about the connection to a defunct game that was notorious for being a scam could drive people away, this route of sweeping it under the rug didn't do anyone any favors. It only makes them look worse I think.

I'm almost tempted to try joining the server to be a fly on the wall.

$40 for a whole new pet is actually insane. For one thing, pets are the WHOLE site, and youre only willing to invest $40 into each of them...? Secondly, look at the pet art - its fully rendered, very pretty. I can guess at least 8-12 hours went into each one, as an artist, if not more. $40 is pitiful

For comparison I looked back at the FR Kickstarter.

Designing an item (food/material/trinket): $70 US
Designing a familiar: $130 US
Design apparel: $300
Design a gene: $700
Design a dragon: $1,500 (thank you for Skydancers!)

And that was in 2013 with Undel as one of the artists, who owns the site and as such was probably more willing to take an initial paycut in return for later growth.

Yeah. For as many complaints as I have about FR's art direction and the way they do some things, it's good to remember the site owner has actual perspective on what commercial art costs and it always did seem like the reason for their smaller team and super long lead times is because people are actually being compensated for the work they do.

I'm thankful the stream of "just hire another set of artists" suggestions eventually dried up because there were a couple of people on the PvP forum I wanted to shake over it. I doubt any of the current artists are actually getting close to full market rates for their work, of course, but they're also not being paid the money dug out of Undel's couch cushions.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Could you say it again differently?

Which part?

The post I was responding to showed FR's kickstarter costs being much higher than Santae's. This means the artists were getting paid more. I don't personally like how FR handles some stuff on the art side related to how they roll things out or how long they take to do some things, but that's the result of a smaller team. The team is smaller because they're getting paid more. I will take the problems that come from a small team if the team's size means they're getting paid okay.

There was a phase the PvP forum went through a while back (and it could be longer ago than I'm thinking because I do - TMI - suffer from some time blindness) where comments that they should just open job applications and bring on more artists kept popping up. It was pretty clear most of the people making the suggestions didn't realize how much an artist should actually be paid for commercial work. Undel has spent a lot of years working on art in a commercial setting so I have some faith in FR's pay structure.

reading the screenshot from CJ:
"...to move away from the profit driven models that dominate other sites."

you... you mean wanting to keep the site running? or a desire to pay your staff a decent wage? there's an infinitely long list of petsites that failed to generate enough profit to stay alive. petsites are a black hole for funding. unless you keep the scope of your petsite small enough that you can pay out of your own pocket to keep it going like gryffs did, you're absolutely going to crash and burn. also, you don't get to say you're not profit driven and have paid purchases available and heavily pushed on your alpha/beta test. you're an LLC-- a business; be honest with yourself.

in searching for business info (which is something you can do for ANY registered business; it's free, public information and they supply their business name on their website), you can find out that the minimum wage in the business' state is $7.25, which is US federal minimum and lower than over 3/5 of state minimum wages. this is likely where they're basing their pay rates at, but i can't imagine wanting to churn out an animation without tweening for 15$ flat, when even 5 seconds of 2D animation can be an entire day's work. one animated twitch emote can go for 20$ each, and those are low-end rates that TYPICALLY involve tweening or use bases used for multiple clients.

Move away from profit driven models with a cash store in Alpha. What the actual fuck?

it's certainly a hell of a thing, innit? things in early access or alpha/beta states are perfectly fine; it's a great chance to develop while taking in feedback and fixing things running up to releasing a better product to a full audience. microtransactions are a woefully integral part to gaming now, but no one can discredit their benefit to keeping a steady flow of income to the developers.

to have a playable testing state with microtransactions while also refusing to pay your workers a decent rate and then to say you're not profit driven is an absolutely outlandish thing for a business to say. it's okay to be profit driven while also being purpose focused- these are things that can and should coexist in a business. gaining profit means you can expand your purpose's scope or invest in your existing state of purpose to create a stronger foundation for your business. then, your purpose can attract more individuals into your product as its quality increases, leading to more profit.

to be one or the other is dangerous; profit driven oft leads to stagnation as you chase what works to make money, while purpose driven leads to a draining of resources and funding as you implement too many things that generate no money. there's a balance here that the owners aren't respecting at the very least, or outright lying using flowery corporate PR language at the worst.

As someone who has played a lot of pay games, there are ways to do test micro transactions without putting them in for money in Alpha.

This makes a game that essentially can't wipe their servers without accounting for pay items or currency in the most fiddly stage of development. And one that at release will have testers with a ridiculous leg up of those that didn't, if there is no wipe. If the greedy refusal to pay artists hadn't kept me away, that would.

I will say, they did add they SanDust side of the cash shop, so you don't have to pay actual money for anything premium.

NAYRT
comes off as a bandaid solution to an inherently bad idea ngl. good for the future of the playerbase but it didnt *have* to be this way to begin with -_-

Ive been playing for like 2 months now and I only have 9k sandust. The sandust shop items are almost all 10k+, with minimals being 80k and divine figurines being 120k. These items are "available" in the barest sense of the word.

The main way you get sandust is through completing quests, in my experience, and it's an extremely tedious and time-consuming activity. So, yeah, while technically you CAN get cash shop items, it's so boring that they clearly want you to just buy them with rlc instead.

pretty standard MMO tactic: make the f2p experience take so much time and energy that being able to pay rlc for things is practically a mercy.

add in the fact they have limited time cash shop items without any idea of whether they'll return, too (currently they have 5 retired items), and you have FOMO.

... they have 5 retired items in the Alpha? Not just gone limited with no idea of return? Retired retired?

if the wiki is correct, yes. and not to mention, several are chests containing their own items, at least one of which has 15 items in it, meaning there's more items you can only get secondhand now.

https://santae.fandom.com/wiki/SanCash

FR has its own retired items, but at least the ones we have were free and relatively easy compared to santae's long grind to obtain when they were available. the rest are rotating stock we know will return at least twice a year. i'm not counting KS items for either game, though, because we don't know 100% for sure if santae will offer theirs ever again.

Yeah. The vast majority of “retired” items are festival skin chests, and the majority of the fest skins are available in some (?) steady inflow from Joxar, so the internal materials are still obtainable. The only really challenging items to get are the Y1 familiars and apparel and some of the downtime things. Maybe 30 items over the course of 11 years? (Not counting the Kickstarter items, those are special).

That depends on if you count player-made skins, ofc.

The only items that are confirmed to be retired are the items with "Alpha" in their names. Everything else is slated to return because the owners are extremely anti-retiring items.

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Ayrt

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