This month we welcome the mysterious Shoreline Sage, along with their Sage’s Secrets and Sage’s Shawl. The sage and their items were all designed by none other than the magnificent Rhyme! You can purchase all three in the Out of the Shadows shop through the end of the month!

June’s Creative Collective has drawn to a close! Thank you to everyone who posted a submission, engaged in a roleplay, or offered some feedback this past month. The raffle has been drawn and new prompts are up!

A new item has also been added into the Bag of Wonders!

We opened up applications to join the beta testing of our new Adventure system, first introduced during the Quest for the Icy Soul event. Our first group of testers for the worldbuilding functionality have been selected, and beta testing is already well underway. All applications received are being held, and we will be echoing additional testers over the upcoming weeks as needed. Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply — we are very excited for this new feature, and are working hard to prepare it for full release!

Mycena Cave celebrated its fifth birthday on June 21st, and to celebrate, players could collect the free Confetti item through the end of June!

Additionally, we introduced a new forum activity, MycenaDeck, which will run through July 5th. For this activity, players are creating their very own playing cards. The Community Deck includes cards that feature our players, and the Character Deck features their favorite characters! Two new items are being offered as participation prizes — Inner Peace Background and Rainbow — and additional prizes will be raffled off after the activity concludes.

As of July 1st, our new bank changes are officially in effect. You are now able to collect a daily payout between 50 and 100 nuggets, depending on how many consecutive days you have collected. Additionally, you can now store gems as well as nuggets!

Bruc’s shop has rotated its stock with the returning summer seasonals, including an all new coat: Fledgeling Phoenix, created by Hush!

This coat has a number of toggleable edits, and you can preview both versions with all toggles switched off by checking out the Bone Monster‘s account!

Fledgeling Phoenix will join Ethereal Ebb, Nishikigoi Paradise, and Gerbera Daisy in Fungimental Magic until the return of Fall.

Last month, we opened a survey to our players to collect feedback on desired changes to our Marketplace. 132 players participated in this survey, and we have summarized the results here! We will be reviewing all submitted feedback carefully and taking these trends into consideration as we begin our Marketplace revamp. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your thoughts with us!

Summer is now in full swing, and with it, we’ll be introducing our summer event soon! This will be a storied activity event similar in structure to last year’s Legend of the Lost Trove, and it will be running in early August. It’s sure to be a stellar time for everyone!

You can never say no to more kelph coats.

I still don’t see why the bank change was necessary, many of us worked hard for our higher bank interest, a lot of us also don’t have time to play games every.single. day.  So we’re pretty much screwed over for earning more, you literally didn’t listen to your player base at all.  I have less of a reason to play now

Oh no.

They’re gorgeous.

I only /juuuust/ got to earning 100nug bank interest a day before the change and now I want to buy a bunch of gems to get the coats. ;-; I’m gonna be broke again and I definitely don’t have enough to buy everything. I don’t even have enough to buy one of the phoenix shrooms, let alone both and the monthly. rip me I guess

I still don’t see why the bank change was necessary, many of us worked hard for our higher bank interest, a lot of us also don’t have time to play games every.single. day.  So we’re pretty much screwed over for earning more, you literally didn’t listen to your player base at all.  I have less of a reason to play nowFiniteFeline

For what it’s worth, I am with you on this sentiment, though I don’t really care about the why… I think I know but I’m not getting into it.  What I do care about is the fact that this actually kills Mycena Cave’s de facto endgame.  With the loss of interest comes the loss of people wanting nuggets, and so now people who want customs and sprouts either have to pony up USD or be rich on Flight Rising to get PP.  For people who are not going to be playing Flight Rising or spending USD, sprouts and customs become locked away from them.  This is a devolution of the site.  They are doubling down on RP type things with the Adventures feature while removing something to do for people who don’t care about that sort of thing.  The end result of this is a niche site becomes more niche, even though the niche nature negatively impacts user growth and retention in the first place.

I have over 2.5m in nuggets, and I actually feel broke.  Sure I can get any given trinket on here because most things cap out at 30k, etc. but the whole point of grinding and saving on here (I am probably one of the top players on MC in terms of grinding frequency) was to get sprouts and customs.  With that option removed for me, there is no reason to grind and save other than in anticipation of a future site feature that I could like that somehow requires a nugget investment.  The only game-related reason for me to stay on MC is to chase Spellstones glory.  But board rifling isn’t fun and playing for the 3k, which is how I got most of my top scores, is pointless and I’m not sure I even want to earn 3k a day from it.  I 40% want to leave 60% want to get a few more top tier scores before I do so.  That’s where I am, essentially.

I think this wouldn’t be so big an issue if it had been handled better. Evidently, new features are on the horizon, but there’s extremely little stress placed on those, and instead, the bank interest removal was shipped on its own, ahead of time. I understand not wanting to make your staff wait much longer for cross-site trading, but I really don’t understand what the expected reaction was to this update when it was pushed on its own, rather than bundled with whatever new feature it’s being pushed in anticipation of. I believe the only reason there isn’t really outrage is because the only people left playing this site are loyal enough that they don’t care - because it is a pretty outrageous change.

The Adventure feature doesn’t count as “good news bundled with the bank changes” because we got an announcement for the beginning of beta testing, and, well…how long has Mushroom Meals been in beta, again? By the time it’s anywhere near ready to launch, damage will have already been done. And there isn’t even much confidence built up in your userbase that it’ll be ready even within the year.

But maybe the bank changes are, in fact, in anticipation of something else entirely - well, in that case, whatever THAT was should have been the focus of the update - give the tone an “adding to” feeling rather than a “taking away”. Spoilers, sure, but it should have been teased or something, to take the edge off the announcement. Because, as I said when bank changes were announced, no matter whether or not they were made for good reasons, they feel like users have lost something. And right now, when the site struggles to even maintain 50 players on a non-event day, that’s the last thing it needs.

Everyone has stayed civil about this update, but “everyone” is an incredibly small number, and are also the only ones who have stuck with a site that has barely updated in more than a year. We all want to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, and trust that you’ve got good things coming, but shipping a change like this - again, on its own - does not feel like you care for your userbase or the work they put into the site. I want to stress that I am 100% sure that you do care - you care quite a lot! - but that is irrelevent here. The update feels like you are taking our loyalty for granted, and have made a decision that is founded on the basis of “well, they’ll stick around no matter what we do,” and that’s an extremely dangerous mindset to have as a business and even as community managers. I worry that that sort of mindset has led to the extreme languidity regarding updates to the game part of the site, leading to its stagnation, and this crisis of usercount we currently see.

So…I just wanted to express this sentiment, as a user-side opinion that didn’t seem to be taken into account regarding this update.

As a side note, I feel like the marketplace survey and any changes to its structure are really secondhand problems - the main problem is there’s so few buyers and sellers that nothing ever moves anyway. My advice is to address that problem before putting focus on QOL adjustments, because I guarantee you the main reason people are barely using it is because there’s nothing to buy and nothing to sell, and no one to buy and sell to or from.

Finally, before anyone accuses me of pointing out problems without offering solutions, I am currently working on a new feature proposal that should address most of the site’s major problems while utilizing minimal resources and effort, and welcome feedback. I am planning to formally submit it after the Adventure feature launches, as I understand the staff is busy and the current project is a large workload for everyone. Feel free to echo me if there’s any comments you’d like to make regarding the proposal.

Yeah, I agree with many of Chandelure’s points.  We seem to most be on the same page with regards to the marketplace revamp.  Here is what I said back in May about it:

 

How much I use or don’t use the marketplace isn’t really due to anything wrong with the marketplace.  It’s more that buyers are scarce and if we all dump our items into the shops it would just be a downward undercutting spiral between sellers until the items are cheaper than they “should” be. 

The bazaar doesn’t have an infrastructure problem.  It has a player base problem. 

Yo, staff! I just wanna bring some positive vibes here, I LOVE the adventure system being worked on, it’s a unique feature that perfectly suits the site’s base mechanics — writing and character creation!

I’m very excited to hear more about it, I do hope beta testing is going well :D

You guys talk about the “de facto” endgame and how the site hasn’t been updated in a year. Or having a small userbase as if it’s a bad thing. And I wonder if we’re playing on the same site? Like, yeah, objectively the bank update sucks for the individual. I am not going to argue that it feels bad and will make money a bit harder to come by sometimes. But… I am not sure where you two are getting the idea that this site is stagnate, or that market play or customs are what this site is for. People play for a ton of different reasons. Character creation and roleplay, collection (that me!), customs, dress up, for the actual games, etc. I think part of the reason the bank issue is hitting you so hard is you think that your way of play is the way to play and without it, the site is on its way to perishing. Well, I can assure you that this site will be okay, and people play for tons of different reasons!

sees the word “stellar” and screeches in hope of space related event!!!

im excited for all the updates, especially the adventure system!

Well I am not necessarily looking to get into a drawn-out discussion here.  I did that in the earlier thread.  I will respond to your post, though, because it’s clear there is some miscommunication at play here.

 

You guys talk about the “de facto” endgame and how the site hasn’t been updated in a year. Or having a small userbase as if it’s a bad thing.Shima

 

These are actually fairly big issues.  It’s like yeah there can be upsides to things like a small user base, but it’s also the case that there are downsides.  One downside of a small and shrinking player base is that it can have a disruptive effect on the economy.  The infrastructure starts to warp a bit and then they have to start trying new policies and changes to balance that out.  And then there’s the practical aspect of more players = more money to support the staff.  Now perhaps things are just fine but generally speaking it would be better if things can be better.  Like yeah the feeling of a tightly-knit community can feel good, etc.  But that’s just one part of the phenomenon, and not all parts are inherently good.

As for the “de facto endgame,” that actually matters too.  Just on a game design level, these sorts of games need long-term goals.  Something absolutely must replace this vacuum.  Maybe it’s coming, fair enough.  But you can’t just take away the thing that takes months of work and leave players with dozens of 1-2 week goals.  If people don’t have to grind for months on end then you can’t count on them logging in frequently.  This can ripple through the player base in a negative way.  Maybe it will be minimal but there is a threat of the player base dwindling further, which can have in-game and IRL economic consequences.

 

 

And I wonder if we’re playing on the same site? Like, yeah, objectively the bank update sucks for the individual. I am not going to argue that it feels bad and will make money a bit harder to come by sometimes. Shima

 

It doesn’t just suck for the individual.  It actually has an effect on the economy, which it is an interplay between all these individuals for whom it objectively sucks.  The interest system actually encourages people like me to invest in items to later sell to other players.  This produces more items across more players which keeps OOTS prices low across time for newer or inactive players, or those who have issues grinding because of time or even health constraints.  The removal of interest actually isn’t as trivial as people might think that it is.  I personally might have to alter my pricing structure if I am even going to buy items in the future, though I probably just won’t buy things at all anymore.  There is no incentive for me to buy these items to sell to players (which helped them out because the prices were beyond reasonable) because I have nothing to save towards.

Interestingly, the removal of interest doesn’t make money hard to come by for me.  I am one of the like 5 people on MC who can grind the daily 3k in 10-20 minutes much of the time.  That said, there are people who DO have a hard time.  It would have been a much more intelligent and kind move to not get rid of interest but to keep it and make the daily 3k cap apply to interest and games combined.  Nuggets would still be coveted for the interest AND people with time or health issues could be met halfway by generating some of their daily 3k via the interest.  I never really figured out why staff couldn’t throw us that particular bone.  Both sides would get what they want, as far as I can tell.

 

 

But… I am not sure where you two are getting the idea that this site is stagnate, or that market play or customs are what this site is for. People play for a ton of different reasons. Character creation and roleplay, collection (that me!), customs, dress up, for the actual games, etc.Shima

 

I agree that people play for many different reasons.  And I even agree that this is, at its core, an RP site.  That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad to offer little bits here and there that are outside of that focus, though.  And when a feature of the site that appeals to both RP people and non-RP people is effectively being removed from the game*, we need to pay attention.  We need to pay attention and discuss and question it.  You know, except for “the actual games,” everything you listed has a connection to custom pets: character creation, roleplay collecting, dress up….  Almost all areas of the site intersect with custom pets.

*The game being defined as effort made within MC itself, not from FR or working your 9-5 job.

 

 

I think part of the reason the bank issue is hitting you so hard is you think that your way of play is the way to play and without it, the site is on its way to perishing. Well, I can assure you that this site will be okay, and people play for tons of different reasons!Shima

 

This is probably the thing I most wanted to reply to because when I read things like this, it seems like I have done a poor job explaining myself and my reasons for protesting the bank change.  Let’s see if I can make things more clear.

This is not about my way to play being the only way to play.  But it is about my way to play deserving to exist.  And I’m not talking about buying things to sell later, or the idea people have of me trying to play an economy simulator or something.  (I don’t treat MC that way, by the way.  I don’t try to just get richer and richer; I plug the nuggets I make into goals I have just like anyone else.)  I am talking about making effort within the confines of Mycena Cave itself (for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say grinding) and being able to turn that effort into a custom or sprout.  With interest, it takes about 6-8 months to earn enough for an UH sprout.  Without interest…it takes 8 months to afford the old nugget price but no one is selling PP for nuggets and so what happens now is you just can’t get a sprout.  If you grind every day for 8 months straight… you should be able to get a sprout.  Mycena Cave sprouts should not be a Flight Rising perk.  That is silly.  And as far as USD goes, it can be pretty complex.  Maybe staff sees me as IRL economic dead weight.  But I did bring Pisha on here and she has purchased PP and helped to support the site monetarily, etc.  And I have tried to convince people that grinding gets easier across time so maybe they should stick around, etc.  My point here is people may contribute to the site indirectly if they don’t do it directly.

Long story short here, if we define “my way to play” as grinding can lead to a sprout…  well “my way to play” is legitimate.  It might even be hyper-legitimate.  If you want to define it as something else then maybe we can have a discussion on that.  I might not agree with how you frame the term and we’d need to work that out first.

It’s hard to say if MC is on its way to perishing, but you’d have to acknowledge some people are going to drop off here.  The argument, essentially, is that MC isn’t swimming in 1000s of active players and each one lost is kind of a big deal.  If the player base shrinks from here for a while, that could negatively impact the in-game economy as well as IRL.  For example, maybe someone used to buy PP for the nugget gain so they could increase their interest and so have to grind less to earn nuggets for the day but now they just stop buying PP.  I don’t actually think MC is going to have to shut down or anything, and it might rebound as new features like the Adventure system are rolled out, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to degenerate to some degree in the immediate future.

Shima - I can’t speak for frieza, but I, myself, am also a collector (my 92 unique site coats say hi, and that’s not even counting the 11 mushrooms I have waiting for fodder)! I would say that’s the main reason I play this site. I also collect clothing items (I try to have at least one copy of each OOTS and event item), enjoy RP and character creation (I try to at least finish either the canvas or scribe circle each month, I participated in the profile drive, etc.) been on the high score tables for both Echolocation and Spellstones, and have earned two gold medallions for speed in solving site event puzzles. I also own a high-edit custom, and have sold - and bought - art.

With that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve more or less partaken in every aspect the site provides. For me, the bank is really only a place to put my nuggets after I’ve hit each day’s grind cap, so that I’m not carrying around a huge, tempting pile of moolah and I know how much I’ve made toward my current goal (which, right now, is purchasing this and last year’s seasonals). To be honest, I’ve only gone from 200 nuggets a day to 100 - so not actually that much, even in the grand scheme of things - and as a result, personal experience has very little bearing on my opinion towards the bank interest update.

Again, my issue with the update has never even been the update itself (which I understand the reasoning behind and have even expressed support for) - but, rather, the way the update has been handled (shipping it as its own separate change), and what such a decision may reveal about the staff’s attitude towards its userbase. To restate what I’ve been saying since its announcement, such an update - no matter what the intent was - inherently feels like features are being taken away from people. That’s why I’ve said that such an update should have shipped with an added feature: to make it feel less like something is being taken away, and more like something new is being added, and changes are being made to accommodate it. The fact that this is not what happened instead makes the update feel like the staff is taking user investment for granted, with an attitude that they don’t have to worry about how their decisions may impact their users because “oh, they’ll stick around anyway.”

The problem is, they won’t. There is no arguing with the hard, simple fact that user retention has been on a steady decline for at least the past year, though, really, it’s been for longer than that. Average user counts per day don’t lie, and they’ve definitely been on a downhill slope.

So, perhaps you are asking why we think this is such a bad thing, why I use language like “crisis” to describe it? Simply put, no matter what reason you have for playing this game - character creation, collection, the minigames, the roleplay, whatever - ALL of them suffer from having low usercounts. Finding RP partners is extremely difficult when the pool of users to RP from is so small and insular; buying and selling clothing items and pets is difficult when there’s so few people to buy and sell to and from (I’ve been trying to get my hands on a chestnut-eared aracari for MONTHS and my problem is largely that no one’s selling); and I guess the minigames are alright, but can you seriously see yourself spending hours on the site per day on the same four repetitive games?

If the trend continues, MC may begin to see usercounts in the single digits. That means there’s not enough users paying to support the site’s infrastructure. That means the site will be dead. Of course, that’s an exaggerated, worst-case scenario, but it’s also a very real possibility - which is why, before it becomes a do-or-die scenario, I feel the need to raise these issues.

Thus, the question to be asked is: why is user retention declining? Because once we know that answer, the next question becomes: how do we stop it?

I feel like words have been put into my mouth: I do not see a “de facto endgame” for the site. In fact, as a sandbox MMORPG,  an “endgame” isn’t even correct for the genre. What I do see are factors contributing to low user retention: the lack of an engaging gameplay mechanic that keeps players returning multiple times per day, the lack of a consumable items market that would fund and drive a dynamic economy, the lack of updates leading to stagnant gameplay and limited “things to do.”

The RP side of the site can only be improved by an influx of users - heck, compare MC’s roleplaying to Flight Rising, and you’ll see Flight Rising’s is better despite not even being a roleplay-focused site! - in fact, it’s likely that such an influx would be one of the only ways to bolster that community, so that’s why my suggestions are aimed more at the “game” aspect than the character creation/RP. For those, Adventure, Creative Circles, and Profile Drives already do more than enough to encourage them. At this point, the only real thing the site can do to improve its RP aspect, that the site is not already doing, is to increase the usercount in general.

And it’s much easier to do that by increasing features - making more game - than it is through any other feature on the site, which is why I’ve been stressing its importance. I also like MC the way it is, but I don’t think it’s sustainable. So for me, the question I’ve been asking myself is “how can we redress these issues most effectively with the least effort and resources?” - because bank interest, marketplace surveys, these are all dealing with fringe problems, with symptoms, when the root problem is simply that the site isn’t engaging enough to hold new users.

If you read through my proposal, linked in my previous post, you’ll see that I attempt to use a single feature to address site engagement, incentivize collecting, AND create a dynamic economy all in one go - essentially, putting my money where my mouth is. If you feel any of my points are unclear in any way, please let me know, so I can address your concerns. I only want the site to succeed - if I have a “de facto endgame” in mind at all, it’s one where ALL the activities you mentioned are celebrated by a bustling and growing community. And I’m sure you can agree that you’d like to see that too, right?

In any case, thank you for your feedback - it really is valuable to hear from all sides on issues such as these, and I’m really glad you are enjoying your time on the site. In the end, we both want MC to succeed, and while our viewpoints may differ, the essential point remains the same - so I hope you forgive me for my huge wall of text, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t being misunderstood. Thank you for your time!

Chandelure  The de facto endgame thing was a response to me.  In an economic sense, sprouts and customs are the dead end of mycena cave.  So if you’re going to be here for years and years and you eventually accumulate millions….your wallet points you in the direction of spending your nuggets this way.  It’s not all that there is to Mycena Cave…obviously it’s an RP site.  But outside of the RP realm, or maybe even inside the RP realm but along economic lines….this is where your resources go.  If you don’t just sit on your nuggets, that is.  Hence me calling it a de facto endgame. 

I’m a collector too.  I collect neat sprouts.  I don’t RP so it’s just nice things to look at…. but MC isn’t just Economy: The Game for me.  The economy is a means to that end, collecting.  As far as the minigames go, I think you could make a case about a shrinking player base negatively impacting that as well, even if it’s a bit of a stretch or affects a very small number of people.  So if the 2 or 3 players not named frieza who have gotten 20k multiple times left, I wouldn’t have anyone to challenge or push me to achieve more high scores.  Boo to that, I say.

Earning nuggets here now feels like a job. :/ I used to enjoy spellstones. Now I don’t. Same goes with cave in.

We’ve added a bonus reminder button to help you remember to collect it. If you have not yet collected your bonus, you’ll see an entry up at the top menu-bar:

If you would prefer not to see this reminder, you can disable it in your Community Settings:

BLESS YOU GLITCH

Thank you for implementing something bright and in my face. My days blend together so this will 100% help me make sure I get my bonus!

god bless thats so helpful

I will echo what others have said… the bonus, at least the way it was presented, feels like the removal of a feature plus a bandaid on it. I would like to see more to pull other users to MC and to encourage users to stay on MC; until then, economy changes are going to have minimal effect. Engagement with the economy will not increase without people to engage with it.

It takes me ages to sell or trade years-old limited items and coats even under the market price—when there would at least be interest and most likely sales on any other site. I know it is difficult to sell or trade anything I ever obtain. I have sought out RP—but with the Seeking forum extremely slow, I have little choice in the threads that are there and would have few or no responses if I posted my own thread. (With the lack of choice, it’s best I RP elsewhere.) The Art Gallery forum is so dead I’ve looked at it about once a year with the idea to make more MC art to share and ended up ditching that idea the moment I saw the dates on those threads. Art Sales are and have always been slow. The monthly prompts are neat and people interact with them, at least, but I’d like to make art outside of a prompt that gets more than just crickets. (Which isn’t to say I’m entitled to attention for my art—just that I see next to no engagement with art outside of the prompts.)

For anyone saying there’s a lot to do here… I’d love it if there was, but there’s just not people to interact with. I find much more lively communities in a lot of DA groups. Until I find that on MC, it’s not going to be a site I check daily and it’s not going to be a site I spend my money on.

The adventure system is a step in the right direction—providing something to do on the site in the absence of other player engagement and that’s not the same repetitive games. A factor that will help keep players here. Chandelure’s proposal would do that as well. Both could become pulls for new players to join the site.

I get that it’s a small, tight-knit community. But I’ve never felt a part of it. There’s not really any discussions going on in the forums outside of news posts and, with MC, I am not interested in realtime chatting. The community is too small for this sort of site, but the focus on economy seems to indicate that the site is interested in growing, since the economy won’t improve or become less stagnant unless the site grows. I’d love to see more added to it, because the reasons I joined—collecting and art—just aren’t enough to keep me here anymore.

I like the phoenix coat though.

Having maxed out the bonus, it feels pretty underwhelming. I think I’ll just skip a day to watch the numbers go up again.

Maybe it would be nice if there was a little note letting us know how long our streak is? “You’ve collected your bonux X days in a row!” - even if it doesn’t change the payout it would be another reason to bother collecting it.

(Though the downside is the negative of getting a streak reset. I know that, even without any consequences at all, I was pretty sad when I lost my 150+ day Duolingo streak).

Jacq That’s an interesting idea. I’ll spin it up and we’ll see how people feel about it :)

I actually prefer that we don’t have some sort of streak marker.  I play on 3 sites that have this and am not a fan with how depressed I got when I lost a streak once.  Even with my 2nd site, I freaked and the 3rd.  Well, I’ve come to grips with the fact I think their site counter must be broken as it adds days and then resets my whole streak, but I can tell ya, there’s not a lot of love I’m feeling towards that.  I’d love to skip the whole ‘your streak is blah’ on here if possible.  Maybe a thingy to shut off the feature if this gets implemented?  Like the way we can turn off the Bonus notifications, that way we can chose to ignore a streak if we need. 

=p sorry to be so contrary.  I’d no idea I was so fickle about these streak things until I encountered them on other sites.  They became stress inducing and then downright awful after a short time.

i think a lot of the reason the ‘community’ looks so slow is that at least 80% of the interaction that used to go on on-site or in main chat now happens in discord tbh. discord friend groups have always existed and while those aren’t an issue, since we’re such a teensy community having ‘unofficial official’ discords (like FR’s flight chats for example) aren’t necessary OR helpful to the site in general.

BUT on a more relevant note i’d like to throw my hat in with oregoncoast’s opinion and vote if it there is a streak counter, that it be optional :D;

This discord isn’t that busy though? It’s essentially the same 6 of us talking to each other most of the time. It’s just a different 6 than use the onsite chat :B
(aside: Even if the official site chat was shifted over to Discord, I would still use the unofficial one over it, unless the rules/content were revamped some. Not to start anything, just to iterate that my reasons for using the unofficial one aren’t just UI.)

As to the streak, I’m not too bothered either way by it, and understand it can cause people distress. If it can easily be toggled like the bonus notification that would be cool (customized experiences are always a+ to me!), but otherwise it seems maybe more trouble than it’s worth. Pretty much every mobile game (and almost every other pet game I can think of) uses a daily streak in some form (e.g. direct log-in bonuses, energy/food meters, etc), with material consequences, so I guess it didn’t occur to me the same kinds of stress tactics those games work on would apply even without consequence, though I can definitely see now that it does. (In Duolingo, for example, pretty much the only premium item you can buy is essentially a “steak saver”).

edit: To address cosmo below, I didn’t intend/want any award or consequence to be attached to the streak, just essentially as a counter to complement the nugget reward (“you’ve collected free nuggets X days in a row!”).

I agree with Ore here; I’m reallly not a fan of extended daily streaks. Short streaks, even with rewards, can be a good way to keep players engaged over time: they don’t feel as insurmountable as long streaks can seem, and it’s not too hard to build them back up if you forget to log in one day. But the longer the streak, the more likely you’ll miss a day, and losing an almost-90-day streak just because (for example) your Internet went out on day 89 can feel like a smack in the face, especially if there’s a reward for hitting a 90-day streak. _{*cough* Furvilla}

If MC did start keeping track of users’ login streaks and adding rewards for them, I think it would be best not to have rewards for streaks over…uh, maybe about a week (?), since beyond that point, having a broken streak can actually be a deterrent from logging on instead of an incentive to start over. (I do think it might be cool to have smallish rewards for short streaks, like “Congrats, you logged in for 7 days straight! You receive 1 gem!” or something similar. I’m not totally sure about that, as I realize that it’s a non-trivial amount, especially of a premium currency. But that’s a different conversation.) Plus, I’d personally prefer if login streak information was private (so that each user can only see their own login streak) and listed under Community / Account Settings instead of on the Daily Bonus page, mostly because I know I’d get kinda stressed if I had to see my login streak staring at me every day when I collected my nuggos. Even if there were no consequences either way for completing/breaking it, it’d make me a bit nervous 8’)

_{Also I’ve been wondering what the Discord is for MC; is there a thread with a link somewhere that I’m missing? :v}

EDIT: Jacq, I didn’t mean to imply that’s what you were saying (sorry if that’s how my post came across!); I was just noting that I have seen some sites add incentives for super long streaks and pointing out the potential drawbacks for that. But since no one’d really touched on that idea yet, I guess I jumped the gun a bit there :‘D

-scuttles in, whispers ‘here you go Cosmo’, scuttles out-

Wanted to chime in on the lack of activity onsite re: the Discord server, and…I honestly disagree that such a vast majority of activity has just moved locations. User counts have halved from when I joined three years ago, and like Jacq said it’s for the most part the same users who participate in conversations there. I could name them if I needed to tbh, and at least half of them I don’t see in live chat.

Additionally I don’t really think it’s fair to single out a very recent chat server as the biggest reason people aren’t using the site’s social features when it’s been brought up several times in this and other threads that Mycena Cave has a Big user retention issue due to a steep learning curve and a niche demographic as well as an economy that just…is not doing well.

That being said I fully intend on leaving the server up as long as people continue to use it as a way to chat, just like I’m sure people in their private friend group servers intend on doing the same.

Something I’ve noticed in the Discord server is that there’s a lot more general chatting going on, whereas site forums and the live chat are more Mycena based. If someone has site related things to say, that discussion generally stays on site as far as I can tell. The Discord was always intended as a plave for Mycena Cave users to discuss whatever was on their mind in a more free setting, not as a replacement for live chat or the forums, and so far I’ve felt it hasn’t really deviated from that.

In regards to the streak, I…honestly like it as it is. If you miss a day, it only takes a few days to catch up, and it’s only a couple dozen nuggets you lose out on. I am not a fan of implementing something like Furvilla’s login streak thing, because the sense of loss you get when you miss a day is horrible like Cosmo pointed out.

I’m sad that I missed the confetti; June was very difficult to manage for me ;-; but I’m excited about the Summer event!

Edit: Oh my gosh, thank you anon ;w; <3! <3!

Yea, I missed the confetti too T.T But for me I just missed the fact that it was available. I never saw a button to click for it and only found out about it when this post came out

Interested to see what kind of response the staff will make toward this constructive feedback they’re receiving! I’m sure the only reason Glitch has posted multiple times in this thread without addressing any of it is because they’re currently working on a response that will address everyone’s concerns. :)