venerablelair - Tumblr blog

[venerablelair]

I feel like when it comes to the Dusthide debate, a lot of people seem to misinterpret the main point of Ancients as both a game element and a product.

A big part of Flight Rising is dress-up. While users can argue on what the sole draw of FR is (dragons themselves, breeding, the Dominance system, etc), it's generally agreed that the dress-up aspect is one with a lot of care and resources put into it, and is therefore very important to site gameplay. Dress-up keeps getting updated with new apparel, and if there is to be a new dragon breed, it needs every piece of apparel re-drawn on it. This takes time. A lot of time. Gaps between dragons (now known as Moderns) stretch for years at a time.

Ancients were initially created as a way to fill in these time gaps between Moderns, and the easiest way to do that was to release dragons without apparel. However, this is a game that puts a lot of emphasis on dragon dress-up. Imagine if Obelisks were released without any coded apparel. You'd just have a naked dragon missing a huge element of the game, and for most players, there's no fun in that.

This is where the second point of Ancients comes in: because the appeal of clothing is gone, there has to be some kind of compromise. So... if Ancients can't wear apparel, then they are no longer restrained by the requirements for apparel (1 head/4 legs/2 wings)...

which means that they can break the modern mold freely! You can have a dragon with no legs, or six. Or with two heads, or no head. And now that you don't have to worry about apparel clipping, the tertiary genes can go wild! There is room for customization that apparel can't fulfill - you could give it extra wings, or a jellyfish head, or giant tree horns, or you could give it nothing at all as tertiary genes are optional, and it wouldn't matter because there's no apparel to be drawn around it!

Ancients are supposed to be a trade-off. There's no selling point to a dragon without clothing on the Dragons With Clothing Game, but there is a selling point to a dragon with, say, 13 legs, no wings and no tail. It doesn't wear apparel, because it physically can't, and it makes use of this function in creative ways. The inability to wear apparel is justified by the Ancient's unique proportions.

And this is where the criticisms for Dusthides and other 'basic' Ancients stems from: if your Ancient dragon is just the 1 head/4 legs/2 wings setup, then is it really an Ancient or a Modern you can't dress up? You could have the wildest, gaudiest, 15-limb tertiary gene on a Dusthide and it wouldn't matter, because tertiaries are optional and aren't a permanent part of the dragon that would inhibit the usage of apparel.

If a dragon doesn't have a justifiable reason to not wear apparel, then there's no reason for it being an Ancient.

No amount of linebreaking tertiaries will be able to hide the fact that some dragons seem to be created only for the first, initial purpose: just to tide people over until a better, 'real' dragon is created.

And that's just disappointing.

[venerablelair]

me: well earth isn’t going to get an ancient before wind or light, they got a modern dragon just a couple of years ago

[venerablelair]

castor wishes you a happy mistjam !

[venerablelair]

i log onto fr. it is fest day. i check out everything. i then go to work

i return from work

i drown in fest reject GASP pings

[venerablelair]

when the flight is rising... (warmup)

[venerablelair]

you know what?

we have enough dragons with short snouts. Enough dragons with moderate snouts.

we have ONE super snoot guy and it’s only one pose.

I was a dragon breed that has a super long snout! A super tall snout! Maybe a trunk! Maybe a snorkel nose!

make them CHONKY too!

make them look like they have seen the gods and were not impressed!

[venerablelair]

This month, all of dragonkind come together to celebrate the Mistral Jamboree. This festival celebrates the Wind Flight.

[venerablelair]

I've spent so long messing with June and Morpho's dynamic. They might as well be comfort OCs at this point. I love my socially awkward progenitors

[venerablelair]

off-model design for Mythdancer's Ilaeria!

[venerablelair]

final commission from my batch! Don for XXVeil. this one was a doozy

[venerablelair]

after notn i hit a burnout fugue state of popping on to melt down all the familiars and extra apparel and do nothing else...

[venerablelair]

Zincy in the DDAY thread. I finally found that forum thread so I've found my art block outlet

[venerablelair]

when you see how your custom skin looks when you size size it down to 350x350 for the game

[venerablelair]

I signal you closer. No, closer still.

Once you are close, I lean in.

Big FlightRising doesn't want you to know this, but the way to get a gen1 you love, is to sell all eggs you find, and buy off the Auction House with the money.

[venerablelair]

the problem with egg hatch posts is that ppl only post the good ones so then you go ohohoh well maybe I should hatch an egg but no. there are so many bad noct hatches today. please be strong.

[venerablelair]

yeah basically,,

[venerablelair]

a fae dragon is a 15 year old setting up a 'realistic' wolf roleplay forum with an elaborate backstory and millions of rules and lore history and an aether dragon is the 12 year old who joins and their character application form is for a #000000 black wolf with red eyes and wings and a devil tail