mass pinglists (& moral superiority for not using them)
There's been concern lately over the newest update and the announcement that at some point, far into the future or at least after New Year's 2024, mass-pinging as a concept will be retired from Flight Rising. On one hand, there's people concerned about this.
There's people who are also, frankly, being wildly vitriolic about those who rely on mass pinglists, disbelieving that anybody could ever be affected by this. They're also out here openly calling skinmakers/G1 collectors/dominance organizers delusional for thinking the things they do are in any way, shape, or form, an important part of the site.
Which like, if people don't use user-run tools like GASP or the G1 pinglist, that's fine! That's your playstyle. But I don't understand where the attitude is coming from that the concerned groups are only a 'loud minority', and that they don't somehow contribute massively to the game economy. (The same people, by the way, who call G1 collectors & UMA makers a plague upon dragon society for being an elitist rich boy's club, then turn around and say they're not at all a driving force in the site's economy.) Which one is it? You can't have it both ways. Do these people spend thousands whaling for their perfect XXY G1 wildclaws then hundreds buying gem genes for their fancy showoff dragons, or are they at best a negligible population in the game, whose activity and monetary contributions to the site are far outweighed by the tens of thousands of 'nice, normal, sane' players who log on once a week to hatch a nest and post on forums once in a blue moon?
There's 825 pages of user-made skins on the site right now. At 50 items per database page, that's 41,250 skins. 41,250 skins that had to be submitted with blueprints that can only be bought with gems.
Let's give these numbers the benefit of the doubt and say each skin was only submitted once, using a 10-print blueprint at 5000 gems, and each accent was only submitted once as well, using a 10-print blueprint at 2500 gems. That's 13,687,500 gems sunk into blueprints - if each individual usermade skin on site has only an average of ten copies on site. (Which is categorically not true, I've had multiple skins print over 300 copies. And I am just one person, and far from the most successful skinmaker on site.)
This is 1,3687,000 USD in skin blueprints alone, by the way, using the most barebones and least generous numbers possible. We're not accounting for skins that sell more than one run, or the fact that no skin artist sells their skins to the public at print price (you can add another 30-40% to that number if you want to estimate how much money is actually spent to circulate those skins). Even if none of these artists pay money to buy gems, these gems are coming from somewhere. Even if you, as someone who doesn't care for G1s or never even heard of GASP, has never set foot into these places, these gems are still circulating and being sunk into the site. And it helps no one to scoff and say you doubt there's no real impact on anything if all of this goes away.
There's 51k items on the site, and over 80% of them are skins. There's 5k users actively signed up and using GASP - more than the average amount of users logged onto the site at any given point that's not a new breed release or anniversary update.
Are you getting the picture yet? It's not self-absorption to say that the UMA market has a very real impact on the game economy. It's just numbers.
I need to get my thoughts out about the new mass-ping update somewhere. My thoughts on the actual tool are entirely positive, it's a great change for the site and not one I ever thought I'd see. But there's people concerned about the future of tools like the GASP & G1 sales pinglists for very good reason.
I think game economy is a very real concern if you're a dominance participant, a skinmaker, an old dragon collector, a G1 hatcher, an ID hunter, or anyone else whose community relies on mass ping lists. You aren't wrong for feeling this way. I'm sorry people are dismissing very valid concerns about the state of your community out of some misguided 'i don't do this and neither do my friends, so everyone who does must be a loud overexaggerating nitwit' attitude.
gummygunk
germansingergirl
origamiaround
prguitarman
dededos
janainaart
