the knucklebomb incident

The official Lorwolf launch came on May 5. I still don’t think it’s a particularly good game, but I’m playing it…for now.

At the start, everyone just had their progens, so there was a scramble to befriend wild wolves to get a full team (you need three wolves + companions for a full campaign/gauntlet squad). I was lucky enough to befriend two 4-digit WWs which I immediately hot potatoed for 400 moonstones each. My play was to liquidate as quickly as possible before the whales got full teams and WW value plummeted. It’s possible that, years from now, 4-digs may become very valuable…but who knows if the game will still be going by then, or if I’ll still be playing. Best to cash in now.

That plus selling progen pups has given me a decent amount of cash to spend on custom decor and quality-of-life upgrades. (Why does making a new cave cost moonstones? Why does upgrading the minecart cost moonstones?? Ugly change from beta, smacks of cash grab.) It’s a good life.

We’re currently into the second wave of progen pups. I sold a pup from my first litter for 40 ms, and pups from my second litter for 29 and 28 ms respectively. I’m content to wait for a month or so before buying anyone; I’m not in any rush, and pups will hit the fodder floor eventually. Since both progens are fully designable in this game, there’s an abundance of good-looking pups.

Under these circumstances, I feel like WWs are largely obsolete. There’s no stat inheritance or inbreeding to worry about. Also, most WWs are flagrantly ugly—having four randomized colors with no equivalent of a basic tert will do that—and there’s no way to “fix” them with this game’s extremely limited gene and decor options. Why bother when you can get a nice G2 every time?

This is not the common sentiment. People love G1s. In fact, people were getting salty over how difficult it is to befriend them: the WW encounter is rare, and the befriending rate is around 10%. In response, the devs announced that they were going to implement a pity system for WW encounters.

The pity system rolled with today’s patch. The rate of WW encounters was decreased; each failed encounter gave a knucklebone token, and 100 tokens + 15k pebbles could be exchanged for a wild wolf (who, as noted, is probably ugly).

The Lorwolf community instantly turned into the world’s largest salt mine. People love G1s. The patch notes topic was ten straight pages of invective against the devs. It was glorious. I got a jumbo bucket of popcorn and sat down to enjoy the show. A few hours in, the devs hurriedly announced changes to the system: they were reverting the WW encounter rate, and reducing the number of required knucklebones to 50. People were still not entirely happy, but the pitchforks got shelved.

I was largely indifferent to the whole thing (besides enjoying the drama) because, even setting aside the knucklebone cost, 15k pebbl for a probably-ugly wolf is too rich for my blood. However, I got interested when Embers mentioned you could sell the knucklebones. Now we’re talking. I managed to get a couple knucklebones and sell them for 1 ms each (which, as Mav pointed out, is not the best rate, but it was the prevailing rate at the time).

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Pictured: Clive and Raquel, my progens, and Zoryk Crownsbane, the only WW I kept. I befriended him on May 6 (the day after launch) and have not gotten another successful befriend encounter since. It's fine; better to get luck early than late.