I think most people would be happy with the system we have now for basic accounts and an auto-explore feature for premium.

What's wrong with our idea which reduces the amount of grind for both types of accounts and doesn't require additional coding, while your suggestions give benefits only for premiums and require a lot of coding? 

Because if people are paying for premium, its sort of a given that they get benefits for it.

If I plan to stay here, which I'm still 50/50 about, I will be paying for premium because I have the ability to do so*. But in return for paying for something, I would like to get something in return. If you're making it easier for everyone, there's no incentive to buy premium, and anyone who does would stop very soon once they realise they're not getting anything special for it.

*keeping in mind whatever the exchange rate will be, since if it's something close to £50 then er. No, I will not be paying for premium.

Autobattle is this benefit. At the same time the reduced amount of explore allows basic users to live without it.

close to £50

Sorry, where did you take this price? Premium won't cost more than 10 USD.

The reason I don't like increasing the cost to explore to 10 energy and increasing the payout is because it doesn't give me as much flexibility; If I'm raising money to build something I can use the pet that will build, to explore once or twice while I sell things to get the money and usually by the time I've got the money together I can then direct him/her to build. If I used him/her at full cost I have a ten hour wait before I can use him/her to build.

Removing the premium items is an option, but it doesn't really give the premium accounts a benefit, while the auto explore does

I only said close to £50 because the gold coin price for it in the store currently says 50 XD I deal with pounds, and my brain instantly went "oh obviously 1GC = £1" - but that is reassuring! I think I thought that because GPs are 1 = $1 and my mind mistranslated the two.

I didn't mean to say you had said it would be £50. My brain just had a derp moment of conversion.

because if someone wants to spend money they are going to want somthing thing extra.

in the lunch room you get a free : milk, apple, a protien source, and a veg. thats every thing you really need.

for $ extra (the premium) you get a straw with that milk and a Peeled apple.
 is that really an incentive to pay money.

an incentive would be a desert, maybe a sligltly large portion of food.

but here is the thing your apples were peels so long that now you dislike the taste of the peeling. - maybe during testing the premiums could be turned on and turn off (or earned) so no one gets dependant on them.

or autobattle should be droped to basic, cause there is no stradgy in battling on islands anyway, its just rock paper sisors and luck. if there was actuall stadgy to battling THEN autobattle could potentilay stay a prem feature.

(this monster always uses  this move, this move conters it - not the current systems battle tip of just use your best ablitly and hope that the monster doesnt dodge the entire time while hitting you

and on most sites its about 5$ so 10$ for ease of acces is kinda redundant.

I wonder if it would be a good idea for Angel and the coders to make and post a complete a list as possible of the things they already propose to keep or take away for premium and basic users.

That way we know what sort of things we might want to suggest. Then, as things are accepted as good or bad ideas, they can be edited onto the list and move onto the next thing.

I think one of the issues is at the moment there are a lot of 'premium perks' threads going around and its hard to keep up with whats been agreed in which thread.

Now I just want apples what the hell?

I'd be okay with auto battle for everyone and auto explore for premium, if auto-explore took some time per pet (so the pet would be unusable to sort of simulate at least some of the time spent grinding. Not long, just something.)

I would be completely fine with getting fewer explorations per pet, I would still like auto battle but it wouldn't be basically necessary like it is now.
5 energy per trip would feel alright to me but I think a lot of people with fewer pets would probably complain about nothing to do. 2 trips on full energy per pet though gives some flexibility. Like you said though, balance would need redone. Items, experience, building spawn and rewards, everything.

Frankly I'd be fine with both. That way auto explore wouldn't be so over powered since we can only explore twice anyway but still useful enough.

This may even give people more incentive to battle too, instead of exploring to spend a couple energy while you wait for whatever, do a couple battles instead. (Though I do think battle experience needs a bump too, it should be around 40-50% of what you can get on one island or have some other benefit.)

As time goes on, maybe other small features that use less energy, and less of our time, can be added to fill the "void" left by removing the grind. Simple pet-based games or something.

I still suggest a possible premium-only feature of a Hunt/Harvest option that lets you send out your pets to gather food and nothing else, and is treated like a quest. Success could be based on levels. But if you want actual valuable items, you should have to work for that.

As for auto-battle, I understand why they want to keep it premium, but I feel Angel's stubborness on the issue is harmful and short-sighted. What is it going to help you to have it be an incentive if everyone just leaves anyway? Sometimes you have to make some concessions, and it's not like there aren't plenty of ideas that you could take to make up for it. Why not just make an official thread asking for premium suggestions, specifically, instead of glancing at the forums and peeking at the ideas?

That said, I kind of wish you were this responsive to non-premium suggestions. You seem to rarely reply to any of those, even if they're really good ideas. Don't mistake this for an attack or anything, and I'm sure you  have limited time, but it's frustrating to feel like there's no point suggesting anything if money can't be made off of it. You have to make sure people enjoy your site BEFORE asking them to pay for it.

Let us help you! We have lots of ideas and I'm sure we could come up with plenty that people would be willing to pay for.

I'm in support of autobattle for basic users and auto-explore for premium users.

I'm against upping the amount of energy it takes to explore and doubling the resources. I have two big reasons, one from a player standpoint, one from an administrative one.

Player standpoint: As a player, it's exciting to open up a new island and to wander around and see what's here. Whether there's a market, or an experience giving building, a gene lab, or so on. What resources I can find on the new island. It's the experience of opening up a new presence and finding what's inside. Take it from a psychological perspective: I click the button, I get a reward. The more I click this button, the more rewards I get. The better I feel about the site because I'm getting something for clicking around. The more I want to come back and click that button, because I know there will be more rewards. The current system allows this process to happen every two hours or so, so I'm more likely to visit the site more often and become invested in what i'm doing because the rewards are tangible and spaced closely enough together that I still have the surge of excitement from the previous click. If this comes down to doing it twice a day at most, I start forgetting how nice it feels to click that button and see what's there, then I start forgetting why I like the site and my attention drifts elsewhere on the internet. Places that I get a more immediate reward for my attention. 

Without autobattle, the players spend a lot of time clicking through the battle and not being rewarded for their clicks. It's tedious, there's no immediate gratification, thus there's no interest. 

From the administrative standpoint, it's a lot of the same thing. Your goal as a site owner should be to make us, as players, spend as much time as possible on this website doing /something/. Even if it's just mindlessly clicking the forum while we wait. Decreasing the amount of explore time will decrease the overall time spent on the site and our investment in the site. You want us here - you don't want to make it too easy.

As things stand, with autobattle, the explore system takes about the perfect amount of time per pet that it isn't frustrating or tedious to complete a pet. It also gives the player the option of just how much time they want to spend exploring with the option of a number of pets. 

@Sen

I think part of the problem is that that excitement has waned for most of us as we've gone on, gotten more pets, done more leveling, etc. It stops being exciting because you know what's there, and you just want to get it over with. When I first came, I went 'Exploring is my favourite thing!', and now I treat it as a necessary evil. A chore.

This could be solved in several ways, but I don't think it would be wise to ignore that it's a problem because there are still people who find it exciting. Hopefully we can all find a nice compromise!

@ Kayla-La

Oh yes, it is definitely a chore. But there also needs to be a balance struck between the new and old users. Back when the userbase had access to only 2-3 pets, there were constant cries for more energy so there could be more exploring done. Imagine if you had just joined the site and were told, "Okay, you can explore with three pets once." 

Because it's easier for older players to scale down ("I want to prioritize this set of pets for leveling and resource gathering and ignore the rest of them") than new players to find ways to maintain their interest, it's probably best not to cut down what people can do for the first 3-4 days while their captured pets are being tamed and first babies are being born. Which is the other part I forgot to mention above.

Basically, I think basic users should have to go through some chores - chores that are essential to the game but still have some amount of interest. Premium users should have the ability to completely skip over these chores and do what they want. Hence, autobattle for basic users -- they still have to do these little chores and work for what they want to do -- while auto-explore is for Premium, so they don't have to do these chores.

Or even, another thought, if there's worry about this making things unbalanced -- premium gets to auto-explore something like 20 pets a day, or 10% of their max stable size. Though I wouldn't know anything about the coding aspect.

I don't believe we should be able to level our pets / get our building materials without work. I have played MMoRPGs for years and if that has taught me anything it is that you have to put some work into getting where you want.

I am in no way suggesting a free pass for everyone. I do however think taking the option of auto battle away for ALL is a big mistake. I can tell you while the novelty of manual battles may have short term appeal, it can't last. Manual battle cannot keep up with auto battles for one thing. Beyond the time it takes it is simply too tedious if you want to explore with several pets.I tried today to see if I could adjust and simply put, no way.

I wouldn't say I've been spoiled with auto battle because to be quite honest I'm not sure I would have stuck with this and really fallen in love with this game (and talked it up to so many people) if I had had to use manual battle from the start. I would probably already be gone.

You can say when this goes live and people have the option to buy manual battle they won't know the difference but the fact of the matter is if they are already disgrunteled and have no idea how auto battle will pan out I am not sure they would be that motivated.

I think there are several options out there that will give the premium players a good perk for paying for premium while still maintaining the auto battle for all.

Personally I feel (and others may disagree) the auto explore feels more like a perk than auto battle. Setting my pets to explore and walking away ... what a bonus!

Please keep in mind I *DO* intend to purchase premium. I started this thread because I really really really enjoy this game and was concerned after hearing from several folks that they would not continue if auto battle went away. I want this site to suceed and I stated this discussion based on that fact, not worrying about what I will lose when this is out of beta.

I propose auto battle for everyone, and waiting to see if enough people pay for in game money and premium items before deciding if features must be taken away to get more people to pay to play.

Although I am not exactly opposed to auto battle (though I agree auto explore is a more worthwhile perk) and pedigrees for premium members only, as hopefully there will be a healthy amount of people paying to upgrade others (ie selling gold coins).

I also think pets should die/retire eventually, which would make speed ups like scrolls of insight and energy potions even more valuable. If pets die, you can also add things like sperm/egg storage as premium items so people can breed their pets a bit even after retirement.

I play another game where pets start to die after more than one real life year, which even for big stables here with no speed ups I imagine would be enough time for most people to breed and level their pets to 50 if they wanted to. (Although I have to admit, on that game it never seems like a year! The pets always seem to die too young and you never really want to see them go, unless you need the stable space haha.) So please no one think I'm suggesting lifespans be short and require speed ups; that would be a bad idea.