soft uwu deathlord

HGR was asking me, what’s the appeal of the lion game?

I told him it’s a jank, mechanically inferior version of the wolf game. But it’s got lots of aesthetic options! And, most importantly, I can play casually without having to worry about the leaderboards.

Couldn’t you do that with the wolf game? he asked.

No, I said, I could not.

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ngl, even if I could start a new Wolvden account and play casually without ruining my existing pack, I wouldn’t do it. The mechanics are much better, but that only matters if you’re shooting for the stat leaderboards. As a survival sim, it’s too easy; from day 1, you can effortlessly feed your pack with brand new NBW hunters, and it only gets easier from there. As a collect-colorful-wolves sim, it’s fun, but I already got the full experience of merle & lunar marks.

Lioden’s appeal is the sheer breadth of novelty and customization. This game has existed since 2013 (as old as FR). In WD, merle is pretty much the only game in town for a mottled/textured look. In LD, there’s vitiligo, cheetah, hyena, lycaon, quail flecks, panther, nimravus…the list goes on and on. And so many variants and colors! And mutations! And hybrids! And a new event every month with loads of new apps!

(“New” from my pov, of course. They add event apps at roughly the same rate as WD, but there’s so many by now. Every shop is overwhelming in a good way.)

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The stat game in LD is utterly unhinged because there’s no cap on pack member stat gain, and stats are so easy to get. Hunters always gain one stat per hunt (sometimes two), and you can refresh your hunts infinitely with sc. (It’ll cost more than the food income you’re getting, but if you’re serious about stats, it’s the way to go.) As for scouts, every hour they patrol 10 tiles, and each tile has a chance of dropping a stat. The average stat gain per patrol is slightly under two, and you can do it all day for free.

It's no surprise that genuinely good stats are out of my reach. YoRHa has 46k stats; Ysdaar has 48k stats. Their pups have 5k+ stats. Every time they roll, it’s an event (as I type this, Ysdaar’s next roll is scheduled for January 25). I wonder if my entire account net worth would be enough to win a stud slot from either of them.

Futility is freedom, as they say. Making numbers go up is always fun, but the pressure is off. Most of my pack is 1k+. My lead traffic scone, a Ysdaar grandpup, recently hit 2k. My heir casino night zone (unrelated to both YoRHa and Ysdaar!) had starting stats of 1200, and I’m hoping to get him close to 3k by the time he takes the helm in early February.