Hello, I'd like to address this to the game developers, if one of the community managers can bring this to their attention then I'd be quite grateful.

I'd like to bring forth the issues with methods of acquiring food for dragons in the game, namely growing food, the dragon market, buying it from the resource shop and drops from events and tournaments. I will go over each of them one by one but first of all I'd like to state that I'm not ranting off about non-issues and I'm not being an entitled jerk that's wants more out of a 'free-to-play mobile game', I simply putting forth my problems with the game model currently implemented.

Firstly of all I'd like to address the unfair conversion of gold to food in food farms, with the options ranging from 50 gold to 5 food in 30 sec, to 20,000,000 gold to 150,000 in 24 hours, first of all I'd like to point out that with each option going up it cost more than it should and gives less, e.g for 50 gold you get 5 food in 30 sec, then for 250 gold you should get 25 food in 2 mins and 30 sec, instead the time taken is 5 mins, what is this inconsistent conversion ratio, the option after this is 1000 gold, which is 4 times more than 250, so we should get 4 times more gold right? No, for 1000 gold you get 75 food, can someone from the dev team please explain this? Was someone just randomly punching in numbers with no semblance of a proper plan? As it stands, if we were to use a bot to grow and collect the Backyard Gardener option for 24 hours it would convert 144,000 gold to 14,400 food, a conversion ratio of 10:1 (closest offering in food farm would be the Mass Harvester with 1,000,000 gold to 10,000 in 12 hours), which by contrast is a much better deal. But as using a bot would be considered cheating let us put that aside and consider the options that are given to us. Which is for 20,000,000 gold we get 150,000 food, a conversion ratio of 400:3, with 14 food farms you would be able to grow 2,100,000 food for 280,000,000 gold, which would take around 1 month to collect from approximately 100 habitats (I didn't bother to calculate the specifics as they would be meaningless as the gold gathering rates for dragons are very inconsistent), and 2,100,000 food would barely manage to get a dragon from lvl1 to lvl25. Using this estimate, and considering that it costs 24,364,973 food to get a dragon from lvl1 to lvl40, with 2,100,000 food for 280,000,000 gold roughly every month, it would take 2 years and 6,720,000,000 gold for a high level player to get 1 dragon from lvl1 to lvl40. Take a good look at how absurd this is, I understand that this not a problem for new players( as what you focus on till level 80 or 90 is getting the dragons to lvl7 ) , but this game is 6 years old you have a lot of players who have long since passed the lvl100 mark. Let's not bring up how long it would take someone to gather enough food for them to get their dragons to lvl70, seeing as how it costs almost 100,000,000 food to do so. And I know that someone is going to call me out to explain how some people have managed to get multiple dragons to lvl70, and their is a simple explanation for that which is that they used the dragon market exploit back in the day and managed to fill up their stores to the brim or used other exploits that most of you never found about, none of them collected that much food using the food farms.

Moving on to the dragon market case, back in 2014-2015 this was the only reliable way to get food, but with the recent updates, I feel like the dev team is spitting on us by setting the cap to 16,510 food and 1 gem. I know that many cheaters exploited the dragon market to stock up on food, but those of us that didn't cheat got screwed over more than the cheaters. What the dev team should have done instead of spitting on us with 1 gem in the dragon market was to set a hard limit of approximately 5-10 million food and increased the wait time to a week, and keep that 1 gem, it's basically worthless in the current game model anyway.

Now onto buying food from the resource shop, which can be considered an unfunny joke if nothing else, 1,260,000 food for 150 gems, is asking to much, firstly you can't buy 150 gems outright, the closest is 140 gems at $10, so you are pretty much going to get 300 gems for $15 (which is basically forcing people to pay for more than what they want) so let's take the average of $15 for 300 gems getting you 2,520,000 food, as it costs 24,364,973 food to get a dragon from lvl1 to lvl40, it would cost you $150 for 25,200,000 food, and keep in mind this is for 1 dragon, if you have $100 to give right away then you can choose the 1700 gems option with which you would get enough gems for 25,200,000 food and still have 200 gems for another 1,260,000 food.

And finally onto the drops from events and tournaments, which you can basically ignore when once you are above lvl90, as they will hardly amount to anything you are in need of. They might be exciting for new players until they find out that it costs almost 95,124 food to get a dragon to lvl15.

On an ending note I'd like to point out that I'm not saying that it's impossible for high level players to get enough food to level up their dragons, what I'm simply pointing out why the time and effort to do are not worth and the upfront of cost of it through micro transactions is not justified.

Hmm I suggest you also send in a ticket with this info.

There are two flaws in your analysis.

The first missing factor is the fact the the most expensive options provide more food per unit TIME, rather than per unit gold. And once you reach a sufficient level of gold production, food is all you can meaningfully spend it on.

The second is that you GROSSLY underestimate the levels gold income reaches. I can do the 12h/3M (Producer) nonstop, mixed with some 24h/20M (Super Producer), with 572 dragons. In other words, the aforementioned level of gold production is perfectly reachable. 280M gold does not take anywhere NEAR a month to collect. Just a couple of days at my current level (though over that time I’ve spent 168M of it on Producer so can’t do Super Producer quite so often). And that’s just what’s in excess of what I need to buy L1/2 habitats to accommodate my new dragons AND run the Ancient World mines (just evolving them all to 5 for kicks, even though I’ve completed the Ancient collection, because it’s a rounding error on my overall gold income). Other than those and meaningless decorations, I literally have nothing else to do with my gold. And there are MANY players well past that point who can correspondingly Super Produce a larger fraction of the time.

In conjunction, these mean that you are simply failing to account for the transition from gold being the limited resource, to time. At that point the food:gold conversion ratio becomes irrelevant, and the food:time ratio is what matters.

Basically at low levels (where gold is in short supply) you face a tradeoff between food:gold efficiency and how much time you can invest in managing your farms. That works fine. Once you get to the level of gold income where you can support the 3h/150K option (Harvester?) nonstop, the more gold you have, the more food you can produce per day. That also works fine, until you can do Super Producer nonstop. Then your food production is maxed, and that’s not such a great thing. But that’s only at a very high level - probably close to the maximum currently possible, if at all, extrapolating from my current state. As they keep adding more dragons and raising the habitat cap though, eventually they’ll need to add even more expensive farming options to keep things working right.

You are however correct that the non-farm food production options are laughable.

@scott-clark In my ending note I specifically said that I do think it can be done, however the time and effort put into achieving it is not worth it.

@mutaher-mohammad-khan The time and effort involved is precisely zero, it happens completely naturally as you develop. And, it involves no microtransactions whatsoever.

The bottom line is that you underestimate the difficulty and natural gold production by MULTIPLE orders of magnitude. Which completely undermines the rest of your analysis.

If you want to claim that my analysis is incorrect, please actually engage with the points I made.

Put another way, your conclusions are entirely based on the presumption that 280M takes a month to amass. In reality it takes a day or two, if that. That completely destroys the entire argument.

@scott-clark, "The time and effort involved is precisely zero, it happens completely naturally as you develop. And, it involves no microtransactions whatsoever."

The time being the multiple months it would take and effort being the consistent need to launch the game regardless of what you are doing and taking a minute or two to collect all the gold repeatedly.

That does not amount to nothing, in fact lets calculate how much it amounts that amounts to: "I can do the 12h/3M (Producer) nonstop, mixed with some 24h/20M (Super Producer), with 572 dragons.", I myself have 300 dragons currently, and an average of 9.5M gold production every 6 hours, (I won't be taking in to account that I have dozens of dragons at and above level40, while the majority of the rest being 20 and above, and no dragon below lvl15), for lets be generous and double that amount, therefore you should have (through extrapolation) 19M gold production every 6 hours, i.e if you diligently sit and wait to collect it at the right time, going by this the least possible amount of time you would need is 4 days to collect 280M gold.

So I agree I exaggerated the required amount of time to amass that quantity of gold, but as it stands this is no better, as you won't playing like a bot with the sole purpose of collecting and spending on food, you will be spending your gold on other things, with those things in mind I think a week is a more than reasonable time frame to be able to amass 280M solely for spending on food production. With that your counter argument is incorrect.

"The first missing factor is the fact the the most expensive options provide more food per unit TIME, rather than per unit gold", this argument is just wrong.

1. Backyard Gardener: 30s - 5 food - 50 gold (10:1 gold to food ratio, in 30s)
2. Gardener: 5min - 25 food - 250 gold (10:1 gold to food ratio, in 300s)
3. Grower: 30min - 75 food - 1,000 gold (40:3 gold to food ratio, in 1800s)
4. Farmer: 2hrs - 200 food - 5,000 gold (50:2 gold to food ratio, in 7200s)
5. Cultivator: 6hrs - 500 food - 15,000 gold (30:1 gold to food ratio, in 21,600s)
6. Harvester: 3hrs - 2,250 food - 150,000 gold (1000:15 gold to food ratio, in 9000s)
7. Mass Harvester: 9hrs - 10,000 food - 1,000,000 gold (100:1 gold to food ratio, in 32,400s)
8. Producer: 12hrs - 25,000 food - 3,000,000 gold (120:1 gold to food ratio, in 43,200s)
9. Mass Producer: 24hrs - 150,000 food - 20,000,000 gold (400:3 gold to food ratio, 86,400s)

There you go, that's all the options in the food farm along with their efficiencies, now I expect that you can do some calculation you, if you do that you would be able to clearly see that each of the option is designed to cost you more and give you less in such a way that you can not use the more efficient ways to generate more food for lesser gold in the same time frame, that is a very scummy thing to do, it's basically designed to hinder people's progression. How can you in your right mind justify this?

On my second ending note, @Scott-Clark hope you don't fail to read it this time, is that the main argument is that the current food system is not balanced, feeding dragons costs multitudes more than what can be acquired in a sensible amount of time (this is a mobile game now, it's not supposed to require you to put in hundreds or thousands of hours to achieve something, it's only supposed to help to waste time while you have nothing to do), I don't mind the opening the game every now and then and collecting resources and participating in events and tournaments, but I do mind when the payback is mediocre.

What I propose is to either buff the food production system to make the maximum food growth option to be about 5M, with a conversion ratio less than 50:1, or nerf the cost to level-up dragons to a 6th of its current cost (24,364,973 food to 4,060,829 food for lvl1 to lvl40), and if you are not going to do either of those than change the food cap on dragon market to 10-15M for recruiting over 500 friends.

@mutaher-mohammad-khan

First off, you've still got the gold numbers BADLY off. Like I said, in a typical week I do 12 Producers and 1 Super Producer per farm, so I'm spending an average of 114M gold/day on food. Actually I think I do Super Producer more often than 1/week (and the rate is rising over time), so it's higher than that - hence 280M is more like two days than a week. And that's AFTER all my other gold needs, and with an average dragon level a lot lower than yours. (I have mostly L10s, because that's the point where their gold production increase per level drops off, 29 at L30 or above, only six L40, none higher than that.)

Second, the food-per-time argument is definitively correct. Do the math:

Backyard Gardener: 14.4k food/day
Gardener: 7.2k food/day
Grower: 3.6k food/day
Farmer: 2.4k food/day
Cultivator: 2k food/day
but then...
Harvester: 18k food/day
Mass Harvester: 26.7k food/day
Producer: 50k food/day
Super Producer: 150k food/day

So once you reach a level of gold income where you can do Harvester non-stop, while still having enough for your other gold needs, you are genuinely best off to use the most expensive options you can afford. Gold efficiency becomes irrelevant once there's nothing else to spend it on - there ceases to be any opportunity cost of expending the additional gold less efficiently. Far from "scummy," having a tradeoff between time-efficiency and gold-efficiency is a perfectly reasonable way to balance things.

Thirdly, the way you propose to change the food system would result in excessive production. Let's take the 1/6 cost proposal specifically. The production schedule I cited above (the one I actually do as a not-top-tier player) generates 6.3M food/week. So, I would be able to take about 1.5 dragons per week to L40. A more advanced player capable of continuous Super Producer would generate 14.7M food/week, thereby taking more than 3.5 dragons/week to L40 - faster than they are released. That's just too much - it'd be trivial to ensure that every fighting dragon was max level.

Finally, it sounds to me like your real gripe is about the GOLD production system, not food - specifically the fact that the relationship between habitat gold capacity and dragon gold production means that how often a player checks in has a very strong effect on their actual net income. Increasing habitat gold capacities would be a much better way to deal with that, without rendering L40 a triviality to achieve as your proposed food system changes would.

Once you have 4 billion gold. Food accumulates pretty fast. And you should also take adavantage of food sales at 400 %. It’s harder in the beginning. But once you have unlocked most of the islands your paradise pays for itself. I noticed from many different users that some people always have a nest egg of food gold and gems. And others are always broke. If you are always broke maybe you need to re-evaluate the way I’m which you play the game. I think it is rather easy to feed each dragon to 15. Once at fifteen you can compare and contrast their trained moves and decide for yourself who to put your food behind. Sometimes an arena will dictate who to feed. And sometimes you feed dragons because it’s easier to come across orbs for that dragon. It’s always wise to feed heroics. And then legendary dragons with a good array of elements or more powerful moves. You just shouldn’t feed a dragon to level 40 because it looks pretty. I hope this helps.

@jimmbo-slice said in The current broken state of the food system:

Once you have 4 billion gold. Food accumulates pretty fast. And you should also take adavantage of food sales at 400 %. It’s harder in the beginning. But once you have unlocked most of the islands your paradise pays for itself. I noticed from many different users that some people always have a nest egg of food gold and gems. And others are always broke. If you are always broke maybe you need to re-evaluate the way I’m which you play the game. I think it is rather easy to feed each dragon to 15. Once at fifteen you can compare and contrast their trained moves and decide for yourself who to put your food behind. Sometimes an arena will dictate who to feed. And sometimes you feed dragons because it’s easier to come across orbs for that dragon. It’s always wise to feed heroics. And then legendary dragons with a good array of elements or more powerful moves. You just shouldn’t feed a dragon to level 40 because it looks pretty. I hope this helps.

Lol I follow this philosophy and am still always food broke..... but then I am trying to slowly feed up my main fighters...these arenas aren't helping but I try to avoid feeding anything that isn't already fed for them.