I completely and wholeheartedly agree with Vely on every point he made with regards to cost. There are so many things to buy on MC and the games are… unpleasant at best to play every day (and vaguely insulting, when an hour of my time in the best-case scenario translates to less than one US dollar of site currency). I can very comfortably say that almost everything I have on MC is from either spending my own money on gems/PP or from trading offsite things from games that aren’t as painful to grind out.

...yeah I was going to try to cushion that a bit more, but I really can’t. I could get in the car, drive 15 minutes down the highway to downtown Cleveland OH, find a few quarters on the ground within a couple of minutes and go home, and it’d be less painful and less time-consuming than spending an hour struggling through Echolocation boards or bashing my two braincells together to spell out things-that-might-be-words in Spellstones for the same amount of ‘money’.

I understand that you can’t just address virtual economy issues in a day but this has been a more and more pronounced problem of people clinging desperately to the nuggets they have unless they’re trying to buy PP without spending cash out of pocket since interest was removed several years ago. The site has stagnated. No amount of encouraging the same 200 increasingly more burnt-out people to do creative things will fix that on its own. Assuming (based on the numbers of orders picked up out of queues recently/currently in queue) that there are about a quarter of those people who either actively spend money or actively seek to buy PP on a regular basis, soliciting the same few people for more and more money isn’t the answer either.

It seems, based on the “site events are a net loss for Mycena Cave” logic that brought us buying-event-points-with-gems in the last couple of events (which, don’t get me wrong, I deeply appreciate!) that MC is hurting for money, especially with how scarcely nuggets have been awarded. If that’s the case… can something like Dappervolk’s ad theater be implemented, or even some kind of unobtrusive footer ad? MC is one of the only sites that I would actually willingly turn my adblock off for because I’ve been sure that staff has good intentions. I know other people feel the same. It might be worth capitalizing on that.

I’m frustrated with the carrots-on-sticks that keep being dangled in front of the playerbase. The recolor shop was discussed four years ago, there are assets (items) prepared for it, but the last we heard about it was “it’ll come after the marketplace revamp” and that’s been like a year now. There are a lot of vague “we’ll take your feedback into account” posts any time someone posts feedback but it never feels like things actually change.

Yes I realize the staff team is small, I realize there’s one coder and he’s got a full-time job. I am not by any means criticizing that. People have lives! I get that. That being said, it’s frustrating to see something you feel strongly about (the item recolor shop is my biggest example) keep getting delayed or ignored while more new shiny features keep getting trotted out - the Adventure system is cool, but when was the last time anyone started writing anything new in it? When was the last time someone set out on an adventure? I feel like the vast majority of new adventures-in-progress and adventure roleplays have been abandoned by this point. It honestly seems like a lot of development/testing/coding/whatever hours went into something that, even on a very small very secular site, has gone pretty much untouched.

Or what about the item tagging interface that’s supposed to help improve item searches that hasn’t been activated since the marketplace/item list revamp rolled out?

I just. At some point Mycena Cave started feeling a lot less like a community and a lot more like a place a bunch of people who’ve been on here for years stay out of habit. And while in theory I think this is a great idea to address the problem of queue burnout and/or general business that most of the site artists seem to be dealing with, I don’t really know if this is the bandaid MC actually needs right now.

I love the idea of more customization. I think it’s a great idea. And I am very frustrated with how things continue to be addressed onsite and I would really like if Things Could Be Addressed in a meaningful way that wasn’t just comforting platitudes meant to calm down people who are rightly upset.

I am burnt out from trying to deal with one of the worst years of both my and many other people’s lives, and I am tired, and I don’t have the energy to grind out an hour of “””games””” every day for an insulting amount of nuggets. It’s been hard enough for me to manage any creative collective stuff over the course of a month. And it’s hard to sit on a site that I’ve spent half of a decade on, met some incredible people on, and be frustrated with the stagnation along with Everything Going On In The World.

I’m going to stop myself here before I continue talking in circles, but I genuinely hope that someone on staff actually reads this and takes it into account. If anyone has feedback/thoughts on this, feel free to bounce off this.

First- A VERY CONDENSED tl;dr if you don’t know what CS are- Closed Species are essentially Custom-Only Pet/Species Designs with Art+RP communities around them. (So, imagine if Mycena only had Custom/Unique designs, no Site-Colors. Or remember things like the old Gaia Online Breedable/Changable Adoptables)

I am seeing an increasing similarity between CS and Mycena Cave, as more and more emphasis is put onto Customs and Sprouts (aka: Unique Designs) by the community. This is actually not something I approve of, and I am saying this as someone who has quite a number of Closed Species Characters from various Groups.

That’s because Mycena at its core is a petsite. While the community is RP-Centric, it’s expected you have a collection of the Site Colors or Items. It’s expected that you have more than just a couple pets and to Dress them Up. But, it doesn’t seem like you’re actually expected to Roleplay them. Meanwhile, in most Closed Species, I’ve found that having a Collection is..actually kind of Frowned Upon. You’re more expected to have Characters, Commission Art of them, etc. instead.
I believe the fact that every single design of a CS is Unique is a contributing factor to this expectation.

Thus, Mycena’s setup requires there to be a balance between the value of Unique Designs and Site-Colors since it has both. A balance that I believe is shakey at best at the moment. Site colors seem to either be Highly Prized, or Worthless. The same goes for the items used to dress them up (effectively adding edits). Specific Pets might be worth something inherently, Low ID#s and such. Rare/Limited items are worth more too. But, people in the Trading Threads seem to either be trading for PP, Customs, Sprouts, and Gems, or they are Offsite Trading. Then as a sub category, people often feel pressured to get the higher-cost Sprouts because they have more edits, so they’ll be worth more.

This is also where the similarities to CS spring back up. Closed Species on Deviantart are effectively Pay-to-Join. 98% of designs sell for IRL. A few communities have “currencies” you can get by participating in monthly mini-events and such, or free holiday giveaways, etc. There’s a few that lean heavy on those Monthly events, and there are a very small number where you design your starter/basic design and then add edits/make it fancier by doing similar events.

However, besides the Giveaways there are also other balancing factors like things that are referred to as MYO Slots. Which are kinda what they say on the tin. You make a design and the art. Then, as long as it follows all of the Species’ guidelines, it just gets added to the Masterlist (in Mycena’s Case, this’d be the equivalent of getting uploaded) and as such it is much cheaper. Furthermore, your MYO is still a unique design, you can commission someone to do the art for you. But it is not required. (This makes the art of the species rather inconsistent, but there are very few species where there is any sort of official style-requirement. Furthermore, there are often Bases that can be used for simple designs)
Another ‘but’ is that it is very up-front about the whole pay-to-join aspect. Meanwhile, on Mycena, it’s more of a social pressure and status symbol, more akin to Phonegame Purchases than an actual Mechanic.

So, yeah, I see a lot of similarities between CS Designs, Mycena Customs/Sprouts, and MYO Slots as being a sort of in-between, and the idea of this New Feature.

They have a lot of good points in relation to Mycena’s apparent stagnation, and how that is affecting the Userbase.

I want to chime in that all I’ve really been doing is signing in, grabbing my daily sign-in bonus, and possibly checking the announcements. Then just… kind of letting the Mycena tab in my browser just…sit there. I vaguely participate in some events, and I doodle my characters. (Heck, I have an attempt to draw lip-synch frames for The Twins. I’ll let you know right now, animating a muzzle-mouth made of teeth is hard.) But, I don’t participate in the Monthly creative things, or similar, and I don’t play the games. They’re just too grind-ey, and the nuggets just don’t seem like they’re worth it.

Heck, the site pets don’t even really seem worth it anymore. Nuggets are in this weird nebulous area of simultaneously being worth a lot, and worthless. People get OotS with them, or site items/seasonal colors. But, are also constantly saving them specifically for that purpose, so they aren’t spending them in the User Market. Also, there are more people in the User Market looking for PP and Gems than Nuggets anyway, so they aren’t really worth anything there either. So, their only purpose in that regard is to just be traded for Gems, another currency. Which…seems kind of bizarre.
(As for Pets, Pets usually trade for Pets, and their value is all over the place. Mentioned it in my CS Opinions, but any particular color could be Extremely Prized, or Worthless, with no real indicator as to why or which ones just by looking at the designs.)

Like Purr mentioned and it’s something that needs to be said and emphasized: virtual economies (heck, any economy) can’t be fixed in a day and all of the staff have lives outside of Mycena, including jobs, health, and family. That’s important. Especially over this last year.

But, this Community Stagnation is definitely a problem. People need reasons to stick around. Users are getting bored and exhausted by the games, finding things monotonous. They need reasons to be active besides a possible feeling of Obligation: And new users can’t be scared off by the social expectations and push towards PP and Gems (IRL Currencies) and the pressure that exists to calculate out every literal every nugget of currency to make sure you can buy the next OotS/Limited item, or extra Event items, and Seasonals. This is then just multiplied by participating in the community as a whole, posting in the threads, roleplaying, participating in the monthly prompts. Mycena practically turns into another job at this point.

It can be fun! Petsites are fun! That’s obviously why people are here in the first place! But the effort needs to match the return, and it can’t be too overwhelming at first. Otherwise it’s not fun.

Purr also importantly pointed out that Mycena could be hurting for money: and gave the suggestion of watching ads, etc. for users to get these currencies, while still making a bit of money. That’s a pretty good compromise for that particular point, and is something that has been proven to work for other places as well. (Purr mentioned Dappervolk, but heck- look at almost any Phone Game) Advertisements in particular would be useful the more active users Mycena has.

As a related/similar suggestion:
This actually happened a long time ago: But, have Pre-Made customs. Heck, maybe you could even combine this with other things too. Have this be the way you test artists out, could even have just a special 1 time artists or something. You could make these prizes for the Creative Prompts, or in either mini or Major events!
Could even just have them as a occasionally available cheaper option to Pure Customs.
Heck- the Edit Queue is a thing, so even if they’re given out for free, Mycena might make money that way too.

Purr (followed up by Sapphy and Hoax) mentioned introducing ads to the site - I also personally wouldn’t mind them. Especially if they were unobtrusive and it could open up opportunities where staff feels more free to offer nuggets as prizes in things and don’t feel they take such a loss during events. It’s nice having a petsite that isn’t flashing ads at me, but the concept of ads on a site doesn’t bother me - However, I do know ads can greatly disrupt someone’s game, so I like the “ad theater” option if something were ever done with ads. That way it could be a feature that you can chose to look at or completely avoid and it shouldn’t interfere with any gameplay.

1) Purr mentioned ad theater on Dappervolk - I don’t play there, so I’m not entirely familiar with it, but it sounds like something I was going to mention before I googled what it was haha. Watching an add for some nugget reward would 100% for sure be something I personally would go for, as I never tend to play games on here to cap out. I love echolocation, but getting 20-80 nuggets for a game depending on how well I can mange it at the time kills any interest I have in trying to play it more/trying to take the time to be strategic with it haha. It could even be factored into the daily nugget cap/added into it with a nugget cap increase as an alternative way to cap out aside from grinding games, or just have a separate cap so there isn’t any competition between the two ways to earn nuggets? Since I don’t know if this would effectively kill games on site if their competition is “just watch 5-10 minutes of ads for the same effect” if that is any worry. Other idea rambles: There could be a random chance that you get a gem instead of a nugget reward for an ad too? Or it could be “watch an ad, grab from a bag” and an NPC digs into a bag and gives you one of several pre-set prizes. Maybe just 100 nuggets, 1K, 1 gem, there could even be small items at rare chances. (That would add to art team though and eventually would become flooded and not as valuable, but I always liked that I could get items from games on Digis like Bingo or Go-Fish-Go, even if just to hoard for fun or sell back to the site for little nugget amounts like fishies on here.) Making some nugget cap easier to get to for all users would likely make it easier for them to save up for OotS and other things, and perhaps it could even give them extra spending nuggets if they don’t normally manage to cap out rn on just games alone.

2) I’m not sure what kind of ads MC would utilize, but I’ve seen sites allow users to submit their own ads if they were selling commissions, had a web comic, or perhaps to their Etsy shops or something like that. It could even be to on-site art/raffle/game threads. If it wouldn’t already be an option/something that can happen with ads set up on site, it could be a way for users who are able and have a need for ad space to contribute without directly getting any site-based perk over other users. I don’t know how popular user ads are on those sites that allow them though, or how well received they are by the userbase.

Anyways, sorry, very off topic and not helpful to semi-customs eep ^_^;;;;;;

I like the idea of semi-custom pets, I think it’s a nice option to have more creativity and customization options. I already feel like I see so many pets that look unique and are just site coats other’s have spruced up with items, but I’m sure there are those that run into limitations still with making their character stand out/match just what they’re looking for. I feel like an easier-to-make “custom” type would allow more users to have an option other than only site coats, and just to throw it out there - if they put less stress on MC to throw out, they could be something occasionally raffled off too? I haven’t been actively around for long to know how often MC does raffles anymore, so I don’t know when the last one was, but I like the idea of doing raffles especially if everyone gets one free ticket to start/there are ticket caps. That was a feature before, right? I thought they used to happen pretty commonly. It might make it feel a little less “one more thing to pay/hoard $/gems for to have a chance at getting”. I think that’s a nice thing to throw in between events and such.

I like the idea of player created items and elements! I think that is a great way to involve the community, and may give users interested in becoming future site artists a reason to practice MC’s art style and see if they can get things submitted for semi customs. You could even allow users to make some of the Semi-customs like I think Sapphy mentioned even if it’s just coloring in a pre-made base with pre-made edits (that may be user submitted edits too), those could also be something to consider for raffles like I mentioned above? I don’t know if this would start to alienate non-artist users though or not. (You could even throw a bone to some of the fantastic writers we have on site, semi-custom pets could come with descriptions submitted by users as well, so they are similar to what sprouts get? If they were pre-made to be sold/raffled off.)

I would lean more to the side of using current bases and still allowing items to be equitable, just for the sake of customization. I love items and being able to use them so, so much. You may make a semi-custom with one idea in mind, but if you want to change up that idea later or add “memento items” that mark their journey through RP/geness partners that on site items work for, I think it would be nice to add/take away items as you go. A new pet base would require a lot of work from site artists to redraw items onto it, or have the majority of items on site never fit that pet. And not being able to equip items at all regardless of base would just be… No fun imo. If I couldn’t add items to my custom pets, I would be very sad! I love that I can quickly change items if they fit the pet, even if they are already “unique” as a coat color. Sure you could just enter the edit queue again, but someone might not be able to pay for an edit(s) on top of the pet, and I think that would add to the problem mentioned of how much things can tend to cost on MC - plus if you have to edit in all your items, it could make site items less valuable.

i agree that it’s very tedious to make nuggets here. when vely said “I would love to see this feature, but there’s also things I want that are already on the site, which individually have reasonable prices but, as a whole, feel impossible to obtain. It leaves me feeling burnt out.” i REALLY felt that haha. i really think that nails it on the head. the introduction of a way to make nuggets with the new profile drive feature is great! i love it and will be participating. and i love you guys are working so hard!! i see that and i think we all do! and i love that about mycena how many ways there are to make nugs through creative means.

but imo the solution the TRUE solution is more in the lines of increasing the daily nugget cap, increasing payout on games (not in ratio with the nugget cap increase, i mean that it should be quicker and easier to cap out per day. if you have a cap its ok if its easy to reach it!! nobody can go over anyway!!), adding a few more options (i know its a meme that i keep asking for snake but im asking for snake because as far as i know its easy to code and relaxing and mindless to play which can make it FUN im literally asking for snake for mc’s benefit not mine haha. it doesnt have to be snake though! we just need a new game that is easy to code for glitch’s benefit, MINDLESS it needs to NOT take thinking, and i think a game that uses the lil arrow keys is very important too bcus we have none. thats why i keep saying snake!), bringing back bank interest, and for goodness sake just introduce ads! i agree with ads! we’ll watch them i promise! we like you guys! to me its clear that mc is strongly incentivized to minimize use of nuggets to encourage gem and pp purchases, which to me says mc is struggling to make ends meet. ads have gotta help with that! and there are SO many ways to do them, ways that other pet sites utilize successfully! if you pay me nuggets to watch ads i PROMISE you i will watch my fill every day! i’ll leave the browser active! i’ll even do the lil clicky thing some of them have! i’ll whitelist mycena! when i first joined i was so shocked mycena didnt have ads and honestly i still am haha (also im literally obsessed w the dappervolk ad theatre. sometimes i leave it up when im done with it just for support. i can EASILY do that for mycena too!)

personally i don’t even think that these changes need to be paired with bigger economy structure changes. i personally feel that pricing reconsiderations or that kind of stuff like…. doesnt actually need to happen at all! and CERTAINLY not in tandem with these initial changes, as its probably impossible to know where pricing will go in response. that’s a good and normal thing! i literally think that increasing nugget flow through these methods i suggested and then introducing ads to help mc recoup money from the alleged loss in gem sales they might lead to would fix…. a lot hahaha obviously im no expert but thats my two cents. at the very least i think it’s worth a try. if the site goes up in flames you can use it as my funeral pyre.

anyway again im only saying this bcus it’s been so long that these problems have been discussed and i feel like people are offering earnest, good intentioned suggestions that i agree with so im echoing that to give yall a better idea of where the community is at by adding another voice. but i dont ever post in this kind of discussion because im literally terrified of getting into arguments or stuff like that so like….. lets be collaborative and nice about it!

I’ve been on the site for about a year and for perhaps nearly every day since I joined I’ve been grinding the game cap in order to afford the pets I want. As a newcomer, I saw the abundance of coats and clothes and I was bubbling with excitement because I wanted to buy a whole bunch of clothes and pets and coats…but I soon found out that a maximum of ~3100 nuggets could be earned per day, and that wasn’t worth very much. All I could do onsite was play some minigames that gave me money and once i couldn’t get any more I could stare longingly at all the things I wanted and feel frustrated. I almost deleted my fledgling account out of disappointment, I only stayed because I planned to max out the game cap for a month or two and then delete. But after a…newbie incident I was politely informed I could get more nuggets from the creative collective instead of spamming the forums, and now here I still am.

What I’m getting at here is that I would prefer more accessibility to the items already on site instead of being offered new things to buy. I don’t hate new things, but as an example I’ve been trying to save up for a Floral Mist mushroom for a good while now but derailed myself over and over just to buy Oots stuff because the monthlies will be gone but the marketplace mush won’t move.

I’d like it if there was an option available for users to customize their own pets without staff involvement, but I don’t think it would go well with the rest of the site’s structure. Others have said it’ll probably end up looking cookiecutter and samey and I agree, it’s the site artists’ personal touches that give custom pets their charm. Personally, I have not gone anywhere near the custom pet system because 1) I have so many other things I’m trying to afford, and 2) on top of the wait to save up the nuggets to trade for PP I’d have to wait for the artists to finish all the work already on their plate before they even look at what I’m asking of them. If staff artists are going to be involved in this new feature I don’t know if I’d want to brave Custom Pet Queue 2 for a partially unique pet when I could just commission a whole design.

I’d really just prefer to be able to buy a coat that’s close enough to the pet I want, and also to be able to afford to drift their colors and dress them up to my liking, and I think that’s a sentiment other players share.

Players commented that this system is already common on other petsites, it tends to make pets look very same-y, and that the nice thing about Mycena Cave site coats is that they have specific site artist’s touches. It’s true that many petsites incorporate this model, and it’s a successful model on many petsites because players can create a fairly unique pet using assets that only need to be made one time (as opposed to customs/sprouts where the artist creates something new for each pet). It does have the potential to look same-y and remove some of the charm, though players are coming up with ideas on mitigating some of the causes of this.

Is this feature creep? Potentially, particularly if players don’t use it enough because it isn’t filling a need, and thus it ends up not adding any value to the site (this survey has been released in part to help us determine if this is the case). At that point a feature like this would just add additional burden to build, grow, and maintain for little/no benefit. However, we do think this feature would help fill an area where we are weak: Mycena has a strong focus on customizability of pets, but there are limitations on site coats and what items can do to modify them. This system would allow greater customization of faces/expressions, markings, color combinations, and other types of body modifications. Our item system can’t do this. For example, we can’t just make a frowny mouth item since the lineart and color of the ineki wouldn’t be reflected by the item. A frowny mouth would need to be drawn with new lineart to account for the new mouth/jaw position and color matched to every existing coat, then redrawn and colored to match any and all future coats. We can have a large grinning mouth as an item because we can hide the pet’s existing expression under it, but more subtle expressions and changes aren’t possible. Just because we think there is a need for something between a site coat and unique coat doesn’t mean our players feel the same though—that’s why it’s critical to get a feel for how players would receive a feature like this before we invest our time and resources.

Someone wasn’t sure what flappy/swimmy/hooves-y entails. Flappy would be some sort of creature that spends a lot of time in the air/flies around and thus their design would reflect something that evolved to fly. Swimmy would be the same except the creature would spend a lot of time in the water much like kelph. Hooves would just be some sort of creature with hooves—typically hooved creatures are terrestrial and are primarily herbivores. Beyond those basic themes, we don’t have a clear idea as to what each category would entail at this time - this is more of an interest check for a general category of species!

There were some misgivings about us hosting a survey as the main method of gathering feedback. We have found surveys to be very valuable in the past, and decided it would be a good route to go here too: surveys allow a much larger portion of our community to participate than many other forms of feedback—we already have over 100 responses to this survey which is a good portion of our active players. It’s also an easier and more reliable way to sort through data. Forum discussion is valuable for bouncing around ideas and building ideas off of community members, and staff does read and take into account forum discussion, but for many players, posting is a much larger commitment of time and energy than a survey, and more public than many are comfortable with. Because it’s a small subset of our community participating in discussions, topics and concerns brought up may not necessarily represent how the majority of the community is feeling. That isn’t to say we should disregard forum discussions—we absolutely give serious consideration to the points raised in them, and it’s why this thread is here—but having the survey results ensures we’re making an informed decision using feedback from the whole community.

While we do summarize results rather than providing raw data, we don’t throw away any feedback collected or skew data. It’s understandable that players may feel that their feedback was thrown away if it goes unaddressed in our summaries: more niche suggestions aren’t mentioned in our summaries because it is likely that if a player’s feedback is in the minority, our adjustments won’t reflect their feedback. We can provide the pie charts and graphs google surveys spits out for us to give players a more direct view of the aggregate data, though we think it’s important to keep player’s personal comments private as they typically aren’t written with general viewing in mind.

A few of you brought up that one of your major hesitations about implementing this feature is that it would just be additional stress as something else you need to save up for, and you’re already burnt out on grinding. This is valid, and we do understand and agree with the sentiment. One of you mentioned that recalibrating nugget payouts and creating a wider variety of games would be helpful. We plan to address some of these issues regardless of whether or not we move forward with this feature, and have been considering some potential solutions to help mitigate the problem. We will be elaborating on this further once we have completed our initial discussions and have something more concrete to offer.

The decision on whether or not to run ads is always a balance weighing the benefits against the costs. There are a lot of misconceptions about online advertising, so a few thoughts are worth bringing up in this discussion. “Traditional” online advertising (e.g. Google Adwords, etc.) bring in a whole host of both ethical and privacy issues. For a site such as this one, traditional advertising can be expected to bring in somewhere between $2 and $4 per month. A much more effective form of advertising we could use is a partnership agreement, where we make an agreement with another website to e.g. show their banner ad in exchange for a monthly fee. In the best case scenario, we could expect to bring in somewhere around $20 per month, if we manage to have a buyer at all times.  We’re also aware of Brave and the BAT cryptocurrency, but the EULA for this program is relatively hostile and the earnings potential for Mycena Cave via this avenue is similarly in the single-digits order of magnitude, most likely much less. These sums are negligible compared to our monthly expenses, which are typically on the order of about $2,000 in a normal month, up to about $4,000 when hosting a large event.

Mycena Cave is not designed to be a profit-maximizing venture. This is in part due to choices that we knowingly and very intentionally make, and also in a large part due to ensuring that our artists are compensated proportionately to the time and complexity involved in their work. We also make a point to avoid the kinds of tactics most “freemium” organizations put in place to induce their players to spend more money than they would like to, or can easily afford. We’d love to see MC grow into something more financially self-sustaining through ethical decision making, and our opinion is that our long term goals should focus on changes and additions that make it easier for new players to join and stick around, for our old players to continue to stay, and that tap into our players’ creativity.

Mycena Cave operates under a “freemium” model. This means that where at all possible, everything we sell for money can also be acquired without having to pay money for it. This puts “fun vs grinding” into a difficult position: obviously there has to be some reason to spend money for the site to actually sell anything, and generally the idea behind spending money is buying the ability to avoid the inconvenience of grinding. Over the years, buying gems for dollars has fallen drastically in favor of PP (a relatively low-margin offering for Mycena Cave), with the many players choosing to grind nuggets for their gems instead — which is, of course, inconvenient for the players and unprofitable for Mycena Cave. A true “fixing the grind” in a setting where players consistently choose grinding over spending means moving Mycena Cave away from a freemium model, but completely restructuring an organization’s business model is not a step that can be taken lightly, without a solid business plan, or without significant risk of failure.

In the more tangible here-and-now, the best way to support Mycena Cave financially is by buying a few gems every month. It’s to this end that we have been implementing different ways to spend them, such as on event prizes, etc. Like some of you mentioned, there is no quick fix and we just have to keep moving in the right direction. Given that we do implement changes and new features very* slowly, it’s not an easy road and there is a chance we’ll fall short, but I’m optimistic that we’ll get to a more sustainable place!

I think what I like most about this idea is the potential to create a pet with a unique combination of traits. (Most important to me: feet, ears and coat color.) However I do think the handcrafted nature of each coat in Mycena is really cool and I could just as easily agree that this would go counter to that.
The question of whether I would have the nuggets/gems/PP to afford to use this feature is not something I had thought of when I did the survey, but I suppose it would be a toss-up whether I would allocate my resources to a semi-custom or not. Currently, I have a long list of coats I eventually want to acquire and I’m still working to get items for the coats I do have. Because I only buy items for pets I have and don’t use many items anyways I’m still making progress on my list even though I might go for weeks without grinding. That said, my brain doesn’t like the idea of getting a unique coat when there are still so many site coats I want and don’t have.