Team P.U.G.

“Welcome back,” the wizard greets me tentatively. “Have you helped out an acquaintance yet?”

the last several minutes flash before my eyes. the wizard’s initial request– calbet’s instruction on being popular– and her.

tears form in my eyes as i whisper “yes, i have.” he says something as i take his potatoes and sweet blue conecake with my dirty, tainted hands. and then, as i ask him for another task, he starts it all over again.

“Ah, yes. Do you correspond regularly with your fellow scholars?”

i choke back a sob, knowing i will inevitably end up stealing once more. 

for pet food, potatoes, and affection – the cycle continues.

I made a meme! This is how the kids do it, right?

I was looking at old Rugrats screenshots and stills for reference material for a project and the Angelica/Buli connection screamed at me. Almost literally. About Cynthia and the turnips.

…unless you count logging in, doing the easiest dailies, hatching a pet, selling said pet, and then liquidating the potatoes to FR, then I’m a very, very active player lmao.

No, but seriously I haven’t progressed or touched anything since late June, I just lost any and all motivation for the game. 

Progressing is far too tedious and there just… isn’t any real incentive TO progress? I mean, sure you can spend 17 years grinding up your stats to pass the next gate… or you could just buy the item you want from another player when it inevitably becomes devalued to a few thousand potatoes when more than 2 people get to it. Why would I do all the work to spin a gacha for the chance of getting an item when I can just buy it from another player and not deal with rng? What is the point of progressing? I guess the pets stay relatively decent priced, but I can still save up the money to buy a pet in a future town faster than I can pass some of the later gates.

I am not surprised that the number of users online is continually dropping. Whenever I log on to farm potatoes for like 20 minutes, no matter what time I log on, there’s never more than 1.3k on, and I’m sure it’ll continue to drop. 

This is what happens when you force players to play at a certain pace (ex. 3’s forest taking 5 days minimum for everyone) and implement a false difficulty to impede user’s progress because the game didn’t release with enough content. The game isn’t difficult by any means, just time consuming because they’re trying to spread the relatively low amount of content as far as they can go. Someone compared this game to an early nintendo game, and I think that’s a great comparison.

I know they’ll implement new towns in the future, but how long will they take between each one? Will the gates just get more and more tedious to pass as new towns are released in order to make them go further? The idea of this game is great on paper, but it just doesn’t really work in reality, at least in its current form. There’s just no incentive to progress and very little reward for the time it takes to progress.

And honestly? Dappervolk has more content then FR did when it first showed up. Yes, the DV storyline isn’t long, but it wasn't meant to be blown through in a couple of days because it defeats the purpose of immersion. And having a storyline in general makes it unique. Meanwhile all FR ever had going for it is “me likem the shiny durgs! me breed!” which at it’s core base is really cool and all but...it’s been years now and they haven’t really expanded outside of that niche to add some more compelling content. And that’s okay! It doesn’t have to be more than what it is. 

All in all, Dappervolk is a sweet, wholesome pet game with quest lines and character development that is still ‘fresh-eyed and baby faced’. 

I think the real problem here is that humans get these jaded perceptions of what a starting website is supposed to have for content because of being on websites that are years, even decades old and are far too impatient to give these new things the time to get better. Y’all just expect things to be just as good or better and if that doesn’t just scream being spoiled idk what does.