First off, just wanted to say that I'm glad a good number of people have come together on this post and started to discuss the topic of premium and for Angel to come and spend time talking to us about it. I know as a game dev you also have an entire life you have to live with work and family and all other responsibilities in life so any time you can spend on the site coding or talking to the community is time donated to us to make it a better game. Right now you aren't making any money off this site because you don't want to sell an incomplete product (because we're in beta so you don't want to take our money and give us things that may change in price, function, or be removed all together even later).
So, kudos to you for being so awesome!
Anyways, so my 2 cents on the subject: Premium needs to be something that all players will want to have for convenience not for necessity. So far you've definately stuck to the mantra of keeping this game balance for both playing and non-paying players. All items are obtainable without paying and that speaks leagues about the game. I do feel like there are small things that could be added to premium to make it a better package and have been giving this a lot of thought.
So my ideas:
Crafting queue - what the crafting queue will allow you to do is to set an item to be crafted with a pet that doesn't have enough energy. Say for example, I just explored one of my pets that I need to craft something, so they have 0 energy. But I really want to craft some item as soon as the pet has enough energy. So, crafting queue lets you start the crafting without the pet having enough energy. So, obviously a pet needs 10 energy to start crafting, so that's 10 hours, and crafting takes 4 hours. So it would pet the pet up as "waiting to craft" or something, and then automatically as soon as 10 hours is up, it will take the items out of your inventory and start crafting the queued item without any further player interaction. This will mostly be useful because you can start stuff crafting before you go to bed or work or whatever and it will get done while you are away from the game.
Capture Wild Pet Queue - This one will be a little bit more of a complex feature. What this will allow you to do is send out exploration parties weeks in advance (maybe say, up to 4 weeks ahead of time?). This will be along the lines of the same benefit of the crafting queue because, say for example you really want to catch reptiles -- well, you know that all pets must pass through the watering spots or the fields... so you can schedule for parties to go out each week to the same spots. Again, mostly useful when you're away from the game.
Auto-auto-battle/breed - Essentially this is just an extension of the battling system and the breeding system. You put a pet up for auto-auto-battle or auto-breed, both actions which require energy. As we know, when the pets energy hits 0 it is taken down from the battle/breed list. This feature would automatically put them back up when they gained energy.
Those are all the new ideas I've come up with so far. They're all kinda along the same line of being able to have the game do things while you're away/not actively playing. I don't really think they'd be unbalanced because they don't do anything that someone playing the game can't do for themselves anyways. It would make it (very slightly) easier to keep a pet up on the high scores board but not really any easier than someone else that logs onto the game twice a day could accomplish (since it takes 10 hours for energy to hit maximum).
Furthermore, I think it'd be nice if the energy cost of exploring is raised to 5 energy per explore that the energy cap would be raised to accomodate people that only want to log on once a day. So I'd recommend 24 (so that someone could literally be on once every 24 hours and still not fall behind). Although, this has nothing to do with premium or not, it is relevant to some of the discussion going on, so.
