Talk to Me About Hatcheries/Ping Lists

[chomiji]

So I've been wondering whether it's possible to ensure that each hatchie is a wanted hatchie. The answer would seem to be to actually use the hatcheries I've set up, and take requests for pings.

Do any of you run hatcheries? Does it work? Do random people like to sign up for it? Or is mainly just friends, as we essentially already do here? Do you set prices ahead of time per breed/gene combo?

How about being a hatchery customer? Do you all do this? How does it work for you?

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I don't use hatcheries, I've yet to come across any selling EXACTLY what I want so just rely on the AH search and lucky finds. Though I always keep my eye out I'm not sure I've ever gotten any dragons from here or any of my friends either except for a few gifts from an early adopter when I was just starting out. I have somewhat unusual tastes :) And I'm too lazy/shy to put in the effort into promoting my dragons that a hatchery would require.

But even if I had more popular tastes I don't think it would ever be possible to ensure EVERY hatched dragon was wanted. Maybe for the first few nests, but after a while everyone who wanted what you had to sell would have them AND be able to sell their own (though you'll always have the odd new person stumble onto your hatchery and buy a dragon every now and then). There's just too many dragons produced per player. Even once we have open registration and a steady stream of people coming in, buying a few dragons, then getting bored and leaving again the vast majority of players are going to be in the long-term-player position of having a packed lair and only buying new dragons very occaisionally. Similarly with new genes: early adopters will have an enthusiastic market for a while but eventually the market will become saturated.

Most of the time the vast majority of dragons are going to end up exalted.

And personally, I don't have a problem with that. When I joined a year and a bit ago Imperials were these massively expensive status symbols you had to save up for, now you can get really pretty Imperials for 5K. Yes, I probably won't get more than 5K for the babies and that means they'll likely get exalted, but I get babies with the same colours every 30 days and every now and then one gets bought and loved. Which is good enough for me.

[chomiji]

Thanks for the input.

Quite frankly, part of my problem was that despite advice from people both here and in the forums I really didn't understand how to level up Exalt dragons. I kept building my teams like tabletop RPG teams, always with a healer. You'd think that the experience of sometimes leveling up a spellcaster/healer dragons with two veteran combat dragons would have pointed out to me what was wrong, but somehow it never clicked. I still tried to level up novice dragons by going through the lower-level Coli venues

So leveling them up was tedious in the extreme.

This weekend, while trying to grind for festival favors, I FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT.

*facepalm.*

[alias_sqbr]

Meanwhile I have a good setup for levelling to exalt...but am too softhearted to manage it much. I can only comfortably exalt dragons I haven't had a chance to get attached to.

[oyceter]

Oooo, hope you had fun with it! I love bringing along level 1 dragons with my highest level Coli duo and watching them jump all the way to level 3 after one battle. So satisfying!

[oracne]

I haven't really gotten the point of hatcheries. Maybe because there are so very many of them, and I get tired and frustrated even trying to go through a couple of pages of dragon sales in the forums.

Also, I'm wondering how the new search-by-color thing in the AH will affect them.

[chomiji]

Good point about the search by color option! Yeah, I just used it to find a mater for my circuit neon wings wildclaw male. She has a slate secondary, but the majority of the time it should be "pulled" by his brightly colored secondary to make some really gorgeous babies. Shiny neon circuit wildclaws, oh my!

[lovepeaceohana]

I don't run any hatcheries, but I am on two pinglists, mostly because the babies are ADORABLE and I have a huge weakness for them. They're expensive, though - and prices are iirc listed up-front with the parents, except for the few pairs that could produce wildly differing ranges, so it's not exactly a surprise - but it still means that I can basically only afford hatchlings once a month or so.

[chomiji]

Yeah, I'm on the Neon Wings hub, and people are always offering gorgeous perfect advanced Neon Wing babies — obsidian primary, matching secondary and tertiary, often matching eyes, iri-shim plus cool terts — and OMG, the prices!

I almost always sigh and go back to my bargain-hunting on AH, which has been greatly assisted by the recent search-by-color feature.