Those were the days.

[Chilly Girl]

Chilly loves the idea, also. =)

[mash]

I agree. There needs to be something on here that gives players a challenge and a sense of achievement when they get there.

[Tanitsja]

um a game offer options for excelling, the levels of hardship needed will depend on skills and age

+ aims may differ, i am in the top 15 ritches players on sbf and i still got things to achive and interest in playing the game, in fact i had to limit myself down on areas to put in effort because there is only so much time i can use on playing

there is so many things you can put down as aims in the game due to its versility...its just up to you to descide which interests you to use your time on...

a backside i am seeing is that people expect to create over night, without being willing to pay to create...if it was free to create though then there wouldnt be a challenge and achivement in creating...sure you could make everything you wanted but when you did that, or someone else did it for you...then what

this game consist of more spicies, colors, details and variants then it probably is posible for any one player to collect, so there is always something to achive

what about eventing...
training..
breeding good animals...

are you telling me that you guys have created everything you want to create, got all the spicies, breeds etc that you want, have trained and breed these to the maximum of their potential and evented them to the max of their potential so they got high prestige values and winings...

and that you made enough money that you can call a million pocket money

have you done all of that? really that i'd find aplaudable

yes there is a lot of not so good things that happened that not everyone is content with, but people will always disagree about how a game should function or be played...its up to each to play it the way they prefer..and in it all i think the atmosphere is starting to get a little negative around this place...people seem to forget the good things about the game...and just playing it for fun and the small achivments as much as the big ones

one thing thats important when you are evaluating is looking at both negatives and positives...and it seems lately its been mostly the former of the two so maybe its time we start looking at the positives to regain some balance in perspectives?

[Jinxx]

Yes, we event. Yes, we train and yes, we breed good animals. It's not a challenge for those that are having issues. Of those most of us are players from either beta or just after offical opening of the game. Have we created all we want to? Hell no, and I've created a LOT. Creating isn't a challenge to me.

Is a million pocket change? When I can make it in 5 exams it is.

It's good you still feel challenged. There are others who don't. I've held, or animals I've owned held, top place in most things there are to do so in, I don't feel a need to do so again.

[Misty Glen]

[mash]

Yes, I can actually say that $1mill is pocket money, infact I call it loose change to be fair.

Like Misty I've lost interest in eventing. I occasionally will hold events but not often.

I think training is the only aspect that is still a challenge, BUT that is only because I train all my animals MYSELF and don't send them off to other players to train. Therefore the training takes longer and I'm not ashamed to admit that I have NEVER had a FULLY maxed out animal. I'm getting there though. So yes, that is still a challenge to me.

But I still think the new players are getting everything handed to them on a silver platter. It took me months to get to LMT, but it seems as soon as they register the new players have it???? I was so excited when I got there, infact I was even excited about the Large Cat Facility, and if iluvbuildings were still playing, she could tell you, we had a huge conversation about it lol.

I suppose everyone has their own theorys on this matter. I just think that some things need to be changed, something to get the community spirit back.

[A. L. Aljan]

And here, I thought I was the only one that took a hiatus from the game for these reasons. Beta mode was much more fun, and I remember how excited I was in the beginning of the "finished" game to have a multi-million-dollar earning Weimaraner when the most you could win in an event was drastically less than it is now.

I'm encouraged to see more tough competition in the horse events - it's not a walk in the park for any players, which makes me more apt to enter. I'd like to see more people compete in the dog arena. I admit that I hadn't been active at all in eventing before I did some routine maintenance on my farm that went by untouched because of the apathy I'd begun to feel here.

Lately, one of the ways I've been trying to keep the game more interesting is to TRADE for things I want, not just buy them outright with tokens. I get to know a lot more of you this way, and despite the fact that there are a lot of shifty things happening here lately, I've had some REALLY good experiences with many of you! I'm wondering if this game, more than other Orbis games, isn't becoming more of a way to buy success without EARNING it, but then, I haven't played any other Orbis games in MONTHS. I used to be a VHR junkie that contributed art regularly, but there, the forums were getting entirely too hostile, and I find VP to be too unrealistic... call me a real-life dog show snob if you must.

I don't know how to make the game approachable without making it too easy, but I have ALWAYS thought that the amount of money it costs for tokens is a little high. Perhaps if more people were able to create and have that sense of ownership, they'd value OTHERS' creations more, as they'd see firsthand how protective they are of their own creations and hard-earned investment.

I too, would also like to see more challenging enclosures, and I think there's two basic ways that these could be achieved here on SBF. Could part of this be resolved by adding experience requirements on the individual players, not just the amount they earn per turn, in order to be able to build enclosures? In real life, I would have to have multiple licenses to able to keep the animals we do on this game - could we incorporate experience in the form of turns taken, which could mimic the IRL role of "education", as a requirement for keeping larger, more demanding animals? Furthermore, as anyone who has kept more specialized or exotic animals, such as delicate reptiles (like water monitors or poison dart frogs), rare fish (like some of my beloved African cichlids or Discus), can vouch that some animals require more than just shelter, food and water to thrive... I KNOW that Jinxx knows what I'm talking about! What if the rarer the animal, the more specialized the enclosure would have to be in order to keep them? For instance, an overpopulated animal would presumably be easier to maintain, so the grooming (which could roughly translate into sanitation practices), food (quality and complexity of nutrition), health (prevention of communicable disease, etc.) and such would have to be low, as that species would be less-demanding to keep. More people own guppies and platys than Discus fish and more people keep Firebellied toads and aquatic frogs than do poison dart frogs because most people don't have the time, interest, and experience needed to keep them alive IRL. By that logic, the game could take into account that if an animal is extremely rare, threatened, endangered, or almost extinct, we could assume that it would be more difficult to keep, so a player would have to have a higher experience level
and have a more well-designed enclosure (more updated than just level 1 or 2 in each stat such as grooming, health, etc.) to keep it. You don't see delicate, exotic , or very large/potentially dangerous animals in prestigious, successful zoos simply crammed into a wooden box if that zoo expects to be able to mimic its natural conditions and have them breed. The ability for a rare animal to breed in captivity in real life is something that must be deliberately researched and planned for, and I think it add a complexity and satisfaction that this game could really use!

Since I'm laying it all out there today, something that's always had me a little irritated on this game is that you're REWARDED for "throwing away" (retiring) animals. As a person that works closely with pet rescue, that whole idea leaves a very, very bad taste in my mouth. Considering how many players here are young, I'd hope that a game like this would do more to promote ethical breeding practices and remind people that animals are NOT disposable. Sure, on this game they are, as I was sneered at by someone who was violating a contract, "just bits of information on a computer", but this could be such a great avenue to get a really, really important message across. :::sigh::: I digress...

That's more than enough from me for today!


~ Amanda @ Aljan

[Angelicious]

I really like what you're getting at with the complexity thing However, I'd kind of like to keep that cage upgrades relatively simple... Maybe instead of increasing that bit, doing something like making rarer varieties more expensive than more common ones? Like, a Long horse (endangered) would cost more to care for than, say, an Arabian (overpopulated), but the Long would also contribute more to your prestige and have a better chance of doing better in more events than the Arabian... Something like that.

[Misty Glen]

I know one thing that really gets me interested in games is updates. If new features are regularly being added I spend a lot more time on a game and go nuts trying out the new feature and stuff.

I think it was better when the Orbis staff were adding in new species. I still think it's good that the players have the option to add them in, but when Orbis added them in there were rescue-able endangered animals and such, meaning there was more interest for people to breed that species. With the player added ones the best you can get is common so there's not much incentive to breed it unless you're willing to spend tokens to get a rarer animal.

[Cecelia]

hmmm.. Very good ideas.I personally would like it to be harder to acquire animals.Such as if you have a twenty year old camelid in this game you can still breed him or her.In real life most animals can not reproduce at that age.Sure some can as well so wouldn't ti be nice if at one time when you take an exam it could say for examplae Sapphira the betta is now too old to conceive.or something like that. For another thing could the gestation periods of the animals be extended to maybe half the time their real life gestation period is. For example cats would be pregnant for 1 month camelids would be pregnant for 6 months.Horses for 5 months and so on.It would be nice to have their full gestation periods on herebut that would be hard since some players don't even stay in the game that long.....
And I agree with Aljan about about the disposing of animals not needing to be rewarded. So anyways just a few suggestions.

[Tanitsja]

well i sugested a series of article on orbis game aspects vs real life, and will be looking into doing one maybe, if those of us who have experience from real life could pull on our resources, study some, and then split up aspects and do an article each

then maybe from that the game developers could get ideas from that as well

i am not going to write like heaps of articles i dont have the time to do that, some may be dedicated enough to do that, but it is some work behind it, however there is plenty of people with knowledge in this game so yeah no reason as said to still not make it a series written by different people

start in one end and work through the process, which means breeding or adoption and sale would be natural first articles ...and thats 2 rigth there, then training, after training one on eventing, and lastly retirement

those are the 5 i can see, which makes a series of 5 articles, some of them maybe could have co authors as well if some prefer working togheter, each article cover all the 4 games and real life, so comparing 5 aspects to eachother and how each game reflect real life etc and how they dont

if this can be done properly it can be educational + may give game creators ideas, i know there are ones in here that worked with shelters, those should have avaliable resources easily at hand on how this work, as i mean not just opinionated stuff pulled from a cartoon page or whatever, but articles with actualy scientific or otherwise profesional sources

then that can also bring about discusions on the different game boards about which aspects of realism they want in the game, and which aspects they rather not deal with cause its afterall a game and not real life

i was thinking about endevouring into studying the breeding aspects, though i think i migth have to look into geting someone from the vhr games to pair up with that also know horsebreeding for such an article since i havent played the two games, and as they represent half the orbis games and is on horses there should be more of a section on it then i may be able to get at...that is i could (cause i got access to scientific search bases including within the animal field) but the studying needed for that i aint sure if i am willing to take on

[DesertBreesze]

What everyone said is true. I now most of my rarer males up for private stud. You know I'm now able to buy THR & END dogs for what anywhere from 100k to 1 mil now? Incredible 100k for a END dog!

[Tanitsja]

then dont buy it for that, tell the seller they sell to cheap and pay them what you estimate the animal is worth, if they see and get told they can get more then hopefully they will learn to not setle for less