A proposition to TL on how to save this game and maintain "balance"

[zenobia42]

Team Lava,

If you read the forum at all, you can see there is a lot of frustration here. I have a simple idea I have put forth before in different contexts I would ask you to consider. You worsen the odds on breeding a unicorn, then make breeding an emerald nearly impossible. This has resulted in a privileged few having more than a handful of ultra rares, a significant number with a unicorn who will never get an emerald because they won't try after you changed the rules on us, and a very large group who every day are nearer to quitting the game because it refuses to give us the unicorn it so easily gave the early lucky ones. To make matters worse, those who have ultra rares are able to actually continue to develop their park with the income they rake in, while those of us condemned over and over again on a daily basis to being unlucky, we have that bad luck magnified hugely by the inability to expand. Because expansion and obstacle removal prices are clearly only reasonable for those with huge incomes.

And yet, you claim the changes you are making, the same changes that keep widening the income gap, are in the name of "game balance." So I ask, HOW does this ever-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots create BALANCE? All I can think is that your idea of balance is not that everyone, at the end of the day, have as much chance of filling their albums as anyone else (because those who did not begin when the game was released AND get lucky early clearly do NOT at this point have anywhere NEAR equal odds to the others at this point). You don't care how incredibly imbalanced it is from that perspective. Your idea of "balance" can logically only be some sort of overall ratio you go for: how many ultra rares are there in the total game divided by number of players. That is the only way that what you are doing could possibly have any twisted sense of "balance." A few folks got more than you expected from the odds you set up, so making everyone else worse off, but counting only total number of ultra rares and total number of players, gives you the overall ratio you want. But how can you NOT see that what you are doing is in fact creating a huge imbalance growing wider by the day from the perspective of each individual playing the game? Because we are not just a number. We EACH, INDIVIDUALLY need to get something out of the game. And we each deserve an EQUAL CHANCE to fill our albums. Make it harder for those already behind makes it more IMBALANCED, not balanced, to us.

You want to keep the number of ultra rares down. Fine. That makes sense. I just beg of you to do that FAIRLY. To allow everyone a decent chance to get one of each. Not make it super easy - it should be challenging, but not as impossible as it is now. Then make it more difficult to get multiples. My proposed solution for this huge inequity is the following:

• Make the odds of getting a unicorn increase a very small amount over time for those who do not have one. Then revert back to the low odds permanently for that player.
  For example, let's say that the odds right now of getting a unicorn when 4 elements are in the den is 0.5%. After a player puts 4 elements in the den 10 times and has not gotten a unicorn, those odds become 1%. Another 10 fails and it becomes 1.5%. Etc., etc., up to a cap of let's use 5% in this example. Once that player has a unicorn egg, the odds drop back down to the baseline (0.5% in my example) forever for him/her.
• The cap on the unicorn odds should = whatever the odds were the day the unicorn was first released.
• If a player has zero emerald dragons, they get the 20 second panda fail. When a player has 1 or more emerald dragons, they get the 1 hour panda fail.
• The same rules for the emerald dragon apply to any future crystal hybrids.

That's it. In this way, there is no sudden explosion of dozens of each in a kingdom. But those of us who were unlucky early in the game are not condemned for life to never get decent income unless we get rid of nearly all our other animals and only hatch & level up super rares, giving us suky and un-fun parks.

Please.