Along those lines, but a different idea is that it would be interesting to have a random event happened that sent you on a random mini-quest. Example: “A slobbering buffalo runs past into a tunnel! You see the owner running after it. Do you offer to help catch it?” And if you say yes, then you hit a fork in the tunnel have the option to go right or left, and then you hit another fork and can go up or down. If you find the buffalo, yay, a prize. If not too bad, or maybe you’ll find something else?

I like random events in other games, the only problem I have is that if you have random events that are positive, they have to be balanced out by ones that are negative. And I don’t want to go losing things to random events…

Well, that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it?

If you can get random items without any balance of said items being taken away, said items start to flood the economy and become pretty much worthless. If you argue that since you can sell out of your inventory for a set price, they won’t become “worthless” - consider, then, if you expect to have one random event every 3 days. in a month with 30 days you’d get 10 items, and now let’s apply that to about 100 users, since that seems to be the average “online” count at any given moment. For the purposes of illustration, the event only gives one item, worth 100 nuggets selling out of the inventory (an easy number to work with and somewhere in the middle of the range of prices of most fishing items) with no other uses. 10 items for 100 users is 10,000 items, worth 100 nuggets each, nets us an influx of 1,000,000 nuggets in the economy every month without any counterbalance. You can see how this alone would inflate nuggets and lower their worth, if it’s unchecked.

Naturally, if this item happens to be rare or useful, it’ll lower the price of it in the usershops, which I’m sure will make other users rather unhappy.

(See - aywas economy. Recently the site’s been taking to letting you spin a random event box for like 4$ but it has a chance of spitting out items worth $100, which have become progressively cheaper and easier to get. See also - neopets; every time they release an event that gives you a “random chance” of something very valuable, said item’s price lowers before too long.)

If random events are to give out incredibly cheap items (like, say, the rock), then I feel that they aren’t really worth programming. If they are to give out incredibly rare items, then they’d have to happen less often than moon landings.

And, of course, they’re super easy to abuse.

TL;DR I think random events would be fun, but they’re something that can’t just be “thrown in” because they could potentially have really far-reaching consequences, especially on a site this small, with this few items. Maybe when it’s bigger it’ll be more feasible, laugh.

But what if the item didn’t have a pawn value? What if you only had the option to ‘throw it away’ but not to sell it? Similar to the OotS Items which can be ‘tossed’ and not sold to the site for nuggets. Also, what if the item(s) you could get from the random events were something simple but useful - like say a little necklace or bracelet or flower or mushroom or… something? that could be equipped to pets. Then it isn’t something with only the intent to sell, but rather something that a person can equip to their pets - and if the item doesn’t appeal to the person they can either toss it for no nugget gain, so no gain no loss, or sell it to a different user via the forums or bazaar.

If it was something where you got the event once every 3 days, if it’s a random chance event who’s to say you’d get the item each time? So if you happen to get the event and click the button, there’s only a set percent chance you’d actually get the item from the event. Some items could be more rare than others, etc.

I’m not saying it’s a super essential concept that needs to be added or anything, just that it doesn’t need to be solely about getting the random events to turn around and pawn off the items for a profit. Plus it could be a cute way to add new little equips to the site besides just putting them in shops, or even if you found say.. more recipes from random events that you could use for crafting? I know Myla was asking for crafting suggestions awhile back.
Just some ideas :) _{*slides out*}

edit//
_{Little event where you run into Hopper and give ‘em a pat and have a chance of getting a tiny leeetle mouse companion. *u*}

I like what Kiwi suggested with items you can’t sell,  little trinkets to add to pets. I also like crafting ingredients to maybe stock up, wherein maybe X pet of yours stumbles across a [thing] and picks it up, then you can use it later in crafting or wear it,  etc.

omg mystery sprout o3o /grabby hands

I can’t wait for the spring event. 8D

The random event thing can easily be fixed by:
a) not having the items won pawnable for nuggets
b) not having the items be pre-existing / attainable in any other way
c) no negative events (why have negative events anyway? let’s keep things happy, real life can keep its monopoly on sadness yeah?)

And if we’re worried about flooding the market / site with the same items throughout the year, we could make the items attainable through random events seasonal. :D

I just strolled by this thread to see what was up and skimmed through the last page or so. I just want to throw my personal opinion in the thread and say that I am against random events of any kind. I don’t like things being taken away from me because I browse the site, I don’t like the thought of random event exclusive rewards because those things will frustrate me til the ends of the earth. I don’t even like browsing sites where random events are just messages at the top of my screen. They’re distracting and I don’t like them.

If it happens then I guess it happens, I’m just one person with one opinion. But getting a reward from a random event is never going to be worth everything else that comes with it. To me, anyway.

We have raffles and we have seasonal events, so I don’t really see a need for random events with rewards.

On the other hand, Wajas, when mining, has little events where you can wander off to see a Waja or someone’s Cave. I wouldn’t mind events like “You see an ineki/drasillis/kelph walking by—Where are they going?” and you click to follow it either to the user’s page or the pet’s page. Maybe with an additional “The ineki/drasillis/kelph catches your eye and leaves (1-20) nuggets behind.” It would be a “random pet” function (which I would love, I always love seeing random pets), possibly with a tiny reward (equivalent to a brief post in a paid forum—negligible enough for people to ignore it without feeling like they’re losing out, but still a little something for those who like it). Could also give people the option to toggle random events on or off. The random pet part of it would keep the function feeling fresh, considering there’s over 13k pets to be directed to.

It’s a fun feature on Wajas that I would find enjoyable here.

People seemed to really hate the random events that dropped the Halloween bags during the Harvest event.

Personally I kind of dislike random events because I am a weak person and they waste my time. I was on another pet site where the way to gain pets was through a SHH (‘something has happened’ - pet site jargon for a random event), and I would do things like click aimlessly around the site for ages or post in chit-chat or RP threads (being sure to click “reply” instead of using the quickreply box because that meant another refresh). I posted not because I had something to say, but because i wanted to trigger the event. I don’t like feeling manipulated in that way, as a player, despite fully acknowledging its my own choice to act that way in response to the site.

I’d much prefer something player-controlled (thing Wheel of Excitement or pinkerton’s plundered pile or like the fishing game). But then it just becomes another daily, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Because, from a site standpoint, the purpose of random events is that stickiness I described above, right? You want to encourage players to click on lots of pages and explore the site, because that ultimately means more traffic, which means more ad impressions, which means more $$. Since there aren’t any ads on Mycena, there’s no reason to encourage users to click more.

.... I think this got away from me somewhere. I just… The point of the site, last time I checked in, was that it was an immersive community. I know most people hole off in their own secret cavern of the site and do gods-know what, and that’s fine. This is a site that facilitates that. I, myself, only talk with a sparse handful of people on the regular as it is, and have posted in the actual forums even less frequently as that. This is for various reasons, though reasons that aren’t applicable to this topic, so I’ll move on. Note: When I quote, I’m not replying to the person in question, merely trying to tie my thoughts together.

Along those lines, but a different idea is that it would be interesting to have a random event happened that sent you on a random mini-quest. Example: “A slobbering buffalo runs past into a tunnel! You see the owner running after it. Do you offer to help catch it?” And if you say yes, then you hit a fork in the tunnel have the option to go right or left, and then you hit another fork and can go up or down. If you find the buffalo, yay, a prize. If not too bad, or maybe you’ll find something else?Arintol

I didn’t mean for… physical or tangible things to be found, I don’t think… or maybe I did, but I can see how that could shift the economy one way or another. I was thinking something more along the lines of What Vely suggested. Just… something minimal and text based.

My reasoning is just that… this is a community. The site is meant to be this… network of townships and colonies with boundless potential and full of travelers and adventurers seeking out new and unknown things, or finding someplace to settle down and call home. The site lately just feels… lacking in that regard to me. There’s nothing to tie everything together, to really make you feel… a part of the site, I guess. I was just thinking (when I posted the original thought) that it’d be…. nice to poke around and just have a little message or alert. Even if it was something as simple as… “You see Seebly and Mont (two of MC’s NPCs) walking through town… I wonder what they’re doing today?” Just as an idle thought from your character’s perspective… and then maybe sometimes they have a trigger that lets you ‘follow’ them and it leads you to more text or, “Looks like they’re stepping into the Fungimental Magic shop! Let’s see what Bruc has in store for us today.” And it would just be a little link to the shop… but cute, too, if the shopkeepers could have rotating text.

I don’t know. It would just… feel more… community-like if there was something to tie the user in from the normal sort of… overlord viewer position.

^{*slinks back out, wondering what they’ve started.*}

i tend to like random events as long as theyre not like the pant devil on neopets or just a bit of text for no reason at the top of the page, since those get repetitive once you’ve seen them all.

as for re-exclusive items(with no inherent sell value of course), i dont think ones coming from those events would frustrate me any more than the ones that come from daily fishing already do…for example i haven’t fished up a teal pondshroom in over a year despite multiple of the other sort, but thats not game breaking for me. sometimes you cant have it all and im very familiar with being unlucky with the rng on different sites. i can see that still becoming a thing that causes people to refresh the page a lot or post in hopes of seeing another random event though i guess….i dont have the patience to do that but maybe itd become a habit for someone else, idk. that particular kind of re existing doesnt matter to me either way.

but i do like the idea of a random event that encourages you to visit a petpage or another part of the site…it’s nice to see other people’s pets, and being reminded to check fungimental magic could lead to somebody catching a changingshroom they might’ve otherwise missed. i’m not as sure about being linked to a random recent thread or forum in general because i am a lurker and i block certain things on the recent posts for a reason, but i suppose that could encourage posting too. maybe certain events could be toggleable.

there isnt a whole lot happening on mycenacave to me that isn’t the forums when there is no event going on. im not inclined to read through the lore unless it is relevant to said events because its a lot of text for some characters that i dont relate to/am not invested in. random events could be a way to draw my short attention span if done correctly, and i think this might be the kind of thing lady hawkwing is suggesting.

one way to do this is have page-specific random events…have the npcs visit each other’s shops. give them a little bit of drama or rumors or plans. enough of these short interactions won’t make it repetitive, and it not being everywhere makes it less intrusive. perhaps a little picture of the npc on the side of the text so that i know who it’s talking about, cause i cannot keep track of the npcs right now so sitewide events are often “hey its some random ineki, you’ve seen me mentioned before but don’t remember who i am”. maybe also they will show up on the fishing page to meet at the pond or visiting the cave entrance will trigger a funny scene with the bone monster.
idk! just throwing ideas out and this isn’t a planned feature so what could it hurt talking about it?

Oo, I like Kiwi’s idea, but balancing items like that between dirt cheap and crazy rare (on the user marketplace, I mean) is really really hard lOL

and if they can’t be sold in any way, then they do encourage that sort of “stickiness” mentioned before, which isn’t…great?

The idea of a random link is also super cute, though leaving nuggets behind would still have to be balanced, but if it gave no monetary/item reward whatsoever then I think it might be good to make them toggleable, but overall seems kind of a lot of work for something ultimately useless.

Laugh but there isn’t any harm in discussion, im just playing grumpy old nitpicker who hates fun and enjoying things >:C (jk jk jk hahahahaha)

what if maybe the items you got from random events you could use for stuff like crafting? that way instead of a nugget sink, you could have a sink where they just disappear hahaha! and then whatever items you could craft wouldn’t inundate the market all at once! and if you get multiples of a crafting item, im sure those would be fairly liquid on the market since other people would want to get all the crafty things together to craft their own stuff no?

and maybe the things you craft could also be things like transformatives, which would disappear completely but make your pet look cool! and the random events for those items would be a bit more rare. (honestly i dont see how thats any different than fishing for pondshrooms and teal pondshrooms like Phage said haha) like the immatureshroom could be implemented that way? or something else similar to the driftshroom. something that changes saturation i think would be super fun, so that pets go from BURNING NEON to black and white. that would be fun!! i just like more and more ways to make even widely available site coats more and more personal, i think thats really conducive to the character-building emphasis of mc.

also i really like all those ideas about visiting random pets’ profiles and snooping on the NPCs!! being nosy is my guilty pleasure and anything that feeds that is great by me hahaha

Aw man, I wish you could get a perma sprout for a reduced price.
The Kelph baby is so freaking cute 6.6
The Kelph flower is my favorite of the three as well!

King
CAN I HAVE 2000 PLS?! THEY GOT BOOTY! ; o ;
And can they all be permababies?! *Hugs them*
SO BEAUTIFUL ; ____ ;