anonrerising | Spring into Salt

i'm seeing this repeated sentiment about how "paywalling" will affect familiar collectors. i don't see how it's different functionally from gem familiars from holiday events, someone will sell them for in-game currency in the auction house or there will be players to trade with (likely even in your own flight). people are really wanting to gloss over the fact that it's a charity familiar that will likely be broadly accessible even after its run

they don’t care, they just want to complain that the game is inaccessible.

yeah im really not seeing the issue here. this is effectively a 250g gem familiar with a speedbump in the way of getting it. players willing and able to pay will, undoubtedly, buy multiple and list/trade them. for many players its the USD price equivalent of a bag of chips, and for those that cant afford buying it directly (either due to cost, currency conversion, or legal limitations) they can still get it from the AH.

frankly i vastly prefer this approach over a super limited one-per-player release familiar that is inherently very restrictive for any new players that join later on. and, like you said, its egregiously ignoring the fact that all of the proceeds are donated as a starting apology for the cultural appropriation baked into wind's lore. no good deed goes unpunished

Disclaimer, I don't mind that this familiar being sold for USD and I think it's wonderful they're donating the proceeds. However it is absolutely different from the gem holiday fams.

This new one is being retired permanently after the 90 days are up. The gem holidays fams will return the next year, so someone who missed it this year will know to save up when it comes around next year if they can't or don't want to deal with trading or the AH then and there.

A more comparable example would be the Willowmane Deerling. It was given out as a Galore Gift to everyone when Veils were released, and you were able to craft more at Baldwin for a week. Afterwards, they were permanently retired. Nowadays if you want one, the current LAH for them is 700g or 450,000t, and there's only 8 of them in total on the AH.

So, while I don't mind this familiar and will absolutely be able to get one, I can totally see why collectors who can't afford to get it now feel bad about it. If for whatever reason they can't get it now, it's going to be inflated to hell soon enough.

my problem personally is the 90 day availability window to purchase it and then it retires permanently. no annual cycling, no nothing. at least at present.

that feels really fomo-ish, especially given it has to be bought with RLC straight up. not gems.

so if you literally don't have a way to buy it from FR in 90 days (or outright can't because of age/country/whatever), you're out of luck. yeah some people will buy extras to sell but you're at the mercy of the player market then.

it just feels weird because they've never done anything like this with any other item post-KS with the exception of the sticker star vista and you can buy that any time of year. and it's a vista not a familiar.

I roll my eyes anytime anyone complains about something costing Gem currency on this site. It is SO easy to get gems without spending a dime of real money. I don’t play a ton of other pet sims these days, but everything I hear secondhand tells me that FR is the exception to how premium currency is handled, not the rule.

The reason the charity Familiar is going to be for straight up cash and not gems is because this is not some million dollar company - if people can get free gems as easily as you can on the site, they’re not going to be using real money to buy it. And that means FR would have to use their own funds to match the donations, which would mean they won’t be able to donate as much.

Obviously we don’t have access to their financials to see how much they actually get in profit from gems/ads/merch, but I really can’t imagine they’re making that much bank off this site. They obviously make enough to keep running it and pay their staff, but it’s not like they’re making us donate to organizations for their tax breaks while they sip caviar martinis on their private jet yachts or whatever. (Then again, you’d have to pay me a fortune to put up with the nonstop whining from this user base, so maybe they actually are filthy rich off dragon pngs.)

as someone who played a lot of other similar webgames before staying w/ fr, i was genuinely so shocked when i found out how relatively easy gems are to get compared to other sites. i think it's a large part of what led me to actually stick around, since w/ other games it tends to be like "either purchase the currency or get a small, practically unusable amount for a disproportionate amount of effort" or the premium currency is just outright unavailable (and often makes large chunks of content paywalled)

"I roll my eyes anytime anyone complains about something costing Gem currency on this site. It is SO easy to get gems without spending a dime of real money. I don’t play a ton of other pet sims these days, but everything I hear secondhand tells me that FR is the exception to how premium currency is handled, not the rule."

Agreed. It's part of the draw of the site for me, that there's nothing you can't get with enough on-site time and keyboard grease. I've never spent a dime, and I have every familiar but the Boolean. (Getting it used to be my big goal, but I've moved away from spending as much time on the site these days, so I sincerely doubt that will ever happen.)

(Yes, I know FR has to make money to exist and I'm sorry to y'all for not contributing to that. And yes, I surely 'pay' much more in my time than I would plunking down some cash. But buying online content is too slippery a slope. I don't want to deal with the mental load of 'is this a valid indulgence' while I'm playing a game for the enjoyment of it.)

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