#fer.al critical

[vitl]

clark stacey addressed the end of fer.al. this is the first actual apology thats been given since it ended and a big change from the erratic and dismissive behavior shown towards the communtiy at the time of the games end. if anyone misses fer.al and hasnt done so yet, please check out emuferal.

"... I owe more than one apology to the players of Feral... I hope it provides some closure for those who were hurt by our failure to deliver on the vision we offered them. It’s too glib by far to say, “well, that stuff happens in the games business.” It does, and usually not because of any fraudulent intent on the part of the creators. But it happens as the result of decisions made by people in charge, and as one of those people, I acknowledge that Feral players never got the explanations they should have in the moment. They might fairly criticize this now as coming far too late... better it be told now than not at all."

[vaalkiree]

HEY!!! YOU!!!! Yeah, YOU!!!!!!!!

Have you ever heard of the flop of a game called

FER.AL?

Probably not….

ANYWAY,

I’m re-writing the game in webcomic form!!!!

I’m working out small things at the moment, like characters and stuff.

Can you tell I never made a webcomic before?

I’m not the best at art or writing, soooooo….

FEEL FREE TO GIVE ME TIPS!!! CRITICISM!!!! SUGGESTIONS!!! Anything helps!

If you’d like, feel free to follow, even if you never played fer.al!

[green-jackdaw]

Hey guys! I have a request! Can everyone who has a Reddit account go and down vote all the Cinder posts?

You can find them easily by searching for “Cinder” than going to “posts” and than changing the settings from “relevant” to “new”

Like this!

Don’t bother commenting, they will block it!

If WW wants to play dirty, than we will play dirty too! 😈

[green-jackdaw]

Time to get the pitchforks people!

what did they do this time ? this blog is the only way i consume aj / feral anymore tbh

Clark Stacey is about to make a blockchain based game... as if it doesn't go against literally everything AJ stood for... and it's also pretty likely that money and resources that were supposed to go toward developing fer.al actually went toward this new project which is why the game has been so fucking dead for the past god knows how long

also I'm just generally angry at WW/AJHQ for how little they protect their younger players and let creeps roam free in their games lmfao

[spectrumspace]

If you thought Neopets NFTs were bad, check this out.

Since 2019, WildWorks (WW; they made Animal Jam) had been working on a fantasy MMO targeting older players called Fer.al (which I will refer to as just Feral for simplicity’s sake).

In 2020, Feral entered open beta (meaning it was made available as a playable demo) and was met with positivity for the most part, though gradually, development slowed as 2021 drew to a close, and players were getting ansty. The game is still in open beta right now in 2022, despite having monetization implemented.

In late November 2021, WildWorks announced Cinder, a “metaverse” where people could buy access through the sale of NFTs.

Understandably, the community of people raised on a game that told them to save the environment did not handle this well.

In an attempt to save some of their image, the CEO (Clark Stacey) hosted a Discord AMA during which he and an assistant assured that Cinder relied on Solana, allegedly less of a polluter than most other blockchain platforms. Allegedly.

They also argued that even if Solana was bad, you using Discord right now is just as bad (maybe even worse! you’re such hypocrites, kids). And even if it isn’t, well, you aren’t our target demographic anyway so just ignore it lol

What made it even worse was that all the content for Cinder was being recycled from Feral. Cinder’s procedurally-generated avatars are Fae, the newest avatar species to be added to Feral. In addition, the locations from Feral are the exact same ones as in Cinder. (CW: cartoon blood) A promo on Instagram shows off “Blood Tundra”, a location that exists in Feral.

(CW: cartoon blood again) However, you’ll notice that the actual post on Instagram has been edited ever since the Feral Discord (FD) pointed it out, though the image is very clearly still the same place.

Even though FD has been abandoned since the announcement of Cinder, there are several cases of things being changed/deleted on Cinder’s end as soon as they are mentioned and criticized on FD, implying that someone at WW is consistently lurking on FD and changing things to avoid criticism, but won’t actually address them in an announcement or something.

In fact, there have been no new announcements since December 2, 2021, not even when the game bugged out and automatically made available content some players paid for with IRL money before realizing it unplayable.

So FD is just festering with vengeful older teens spamming corn emojis, dissing on Cinder, and asking for other game recommendations. No action is being taken against these people.

The poor volunteer not-employed-by-WW mods are just as lost and confused as the users. They didn’t know this would happen and were left to fend for themselves with no guidance from the company they’d trusted, though all of them seem to be sympathetic with the Feral users overall. Some have resigned in protest of Cinder.

AMAs on the Cinder Discord (CD) were originally in text format, though they have since moved to audio livestreams. People using the Feral Discord assume this was done to make recording their answers and sharing them on FD/holding WW accountable more of a hassle.

A user named “CinderSpire” was presented as just some random WW employee on the Cinder Discord using an account separate from known admins like Stacey, but apparently after moving all their AMAs to livestreams, it became very apparent that CinderSpire has the exact same voice as Stacey. In fact, in a live AMA, he seemingly slips up and refers to himself as the CEO (“No, I’m-- Clark Stacey has been. . .”). (So this guy has a sockpuppet. There is no good reason to have a sockpuppet.)

Cinder has been spammed about on Reddit and its Twitter floats at about 5k followers, give or take, most of which appear to be bots (especially in the replies). As you can see, it isn’t getting much traction or engagement on any social media.

Those who join CD say engagement is low there, too, and the community is toxic/full of red flags (Pepe memes, jokes about people’s dead parents), and they refer to the teenagers playing Feral and getting mad as immature children, which doesn’t address their concerns. . . Anyone who brings up Feral or asks too many questions/criticizes the project is often banned. Mods are open in saying that all ban appeals are rejected.

WW apparently made an announcement on CD asking people to drop their wallet addresses for a giveaway, and people began posting exactly that out in the open until they set up a Google Form in a later post/edit. Which, in case you didn’t know, is extremely unsafe. Anyone can put anything they want in your wallet with or without your approval as long as they know your address, and this includes crypto with a smart contract (bit of code that can do things) that’s been written to run a malicious script if you interact with it, potentially stealing everything in your wallet.

Now is a good time to remember WW had a massive data breach a couple years back.

Someone sent Clark Stacey a picture of corn and got blocked, so now everyone sends him corn. Sending corn memes gets you banned from the Cinder Discord. 🌽

Today (2/16/22), the first NFTs are being minted. People who actually bought Fae are complaining that the graphics suck and there’s nothing to do, and are already demanding rarity charts/etc. so they can flip their tokens to an even bigger loser for more money. . . but they can’t just yet, because they haven’t sold out, which tells you a lot about the community and the way a project like this is run.

Instead of posting an update to the Feral Discord, or literally saying anything to address the existence of their community, the owners just bumped slow mode up from two minutes to ten, just before the mint, and now the server is a riot because clearly these idiots are lurking around and just really, really hope everyone playing Feral shuts up.

TL;DR: The guys who made Animal Jam tried to make an NFT game but they’re running it exactly like a scam.

[misterradio]

MAN... i'm never going to play all the fer.al quests lol i hope there's a wiki i can read somewhere. man. (complaining under the keep reading button)

i havent played it lately at all so when i tried to see what people are posting about it, it goes way over my head cuz i miss out on a lot of character details. (i think i read a post that said luka was a cult leader???) so i haven't bothered getting into it again cuz it's a lot of catching up, and a lot of little quests for those season passes too... it takes a lot of time and effort to get back into (and it really has my computer chugging too).

what personally pisses me off is that it was something so cool, with a lot of world-building and characters, that they seriously could have done more with. the visuals of this game are breathtaking. there is so much effort that goes into the music, layouts, characters, lore, etc... and, at some point at least, i was so excited to see more of it all. (not that i did not have any criticisms.)

but no. just give a word of warning a day in advance that they're closing their game, in favour of, and i can't stress this enough, *their crappy crypto-currency driven game that is a literal copy of the same world with the same assets*.

like they weren't satisfied enough getting money from the pockets of teens and young adults, now they gotta shove off with all that money and then dive into something even worse and more of a scam with their fake money. f-k off. the whole thing makes me so mad.

SO much potential wasted on greed.

[feralfeed]

JULY UPDATE - Premium Currency, Season Passes, and ANOTHER Premium Shop... oh god why

Hello all, this is an overall rundown and analysis of the July update, and first impressions of it’s features. Please note, that I’m going to be a tad bit hypercritical of the whole thing- I’ll be honest about the pros and cons, because I genuinely want to see this game become amazing. There will be a TL;DR at the bottom - I encourage you to read that if nothing else, because I want to make an important point there.

Season Passes

Okay, this feature struck me as a bit... strange. When I first saw the name, I immediately thought of the way Fortnite and Epic Games make money, which didn’t exactly leave a good taste in my mouth. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this is a free feature... and once again disappointed to see the premium version. 

Rundown:

By completing tasks assigned to the player in a challenge board, you unlock points to earn a wide variety of prizes, from items, to likes, to avatars, and even customization options for said avatar. However, the bulk of these items are under a 900 star fragment paywall, which translates to about $10. 

My Breakdown:

Not gonna lie, this ain’t great. It does throw some new items at the players, which is nice and all, but honestly, there really isn’t much incentive to actually complete the challenges if you aren’t buying the premium pass. How “good” the items you can earn for free strongly remind me of how “good” the nonmember items back in Animal Jam were. And they are RARE - when you get to later in the list, there are very few items marked as “free”. Wildworks may as well have just dropped the concept of a premium pass, and just made the entire season pass cost money. Plus, while the update claims that you can earn points for the challenges “just by playing the game”, this really isn’t true. Most of them are such oddly specific tasks, I would need to go out of my way to complete nearly every single one of them. And the ones that are “normal gameplay” challenges have OUTRAGEOUSLY HIGH numbers. For example, crafting 15 common clothing items. I would need to waste a LOT of materials to do that, since most players pretty carefully plan which items to craft for which looks.

Star Fragments and the Astral Shop

I’m not gonna pretend that this wasn’t coming. Most free games require premium currency. But while the game is still in beta?

Rundown:

Fer.al’s new premium currency. It appears that buying sanctuaries and avatars with straight money was more of a placeholder - the royal boutique now serves the exclusive role of selling star fragments, which you will now spend at the astral shop. On average, 1 star fragment costs anywhere from 1.25 cents - 1.1 cents, depending upon which bundle you buy. This means that a 300 star fragment sanctuary in the astral shop costs about $3.53. 

My Breakdown:

I don’t really have too much to say about this, to be honest. I’ve expressed my fears about monetizing an unfinished game in previous posts. After the dragon, there was no going back.

The Notification Tab

A nifty new tool that notifies you on challenge progress, and your friends getting on and offline. There may be other things it notifies you of as well that I haven’t seen yet. Overall, a useful new feature. 

Selfie Camera

Another feature on the better side of things. Although, it is a little mundane, it does one-up just taking a screenshot - you have the ability to zoom in and out, and turn nametags on and off. It creates a “gallery” folder on your computer that opens with an in-game button. 

Undying

You can also now undye your items. Someone will need this after a regretful decision, I’m sure. 

TL;DR and Final Concerns

The reason that I took such a critical tone in this post is that Fer.al, in my opinion, is heading down a negative path. Currently, the game has no real substance - which is fine in itself, given that it’s a work in progress. However, they’re already introducing a LOT of paid content, and not only paywalls, but do-hours-of-pointless-miscellaneous-tasks-walls. In a way, the game is becoming pay-to-win. So long as “winning” the game is having the best items and the best avatar, winning is no longer free. Fer.al is such a beautiful game, and beautiful concept, and I hate to see it turning out this way. Wildworks needs to give the game more substance- more goals- more reward- more story- SOMETHING, before they start to introduce such steep in-game purchases. They’re going after a teen/adult audience, and most of us can’t dish out money to play dress up anymore. 

[hallofharmony]

holy shit really??? that's a whole nother level of absurd.i will give tgc the benefit of the doubt bc they started as an indie company but they really should've taken into account how big their playerbase got and adjust things to that.it's fine if you wanna have a discord server for a place of community and so fans can talk with each otherand stuff but to make it your own source of communication with such a big playerbase?yikes.as of reaching out to devs isnt hard enough you gotta connect your phone number and shit too this is wack

does anyone else think it's kinda unprofessional that tgc uses discord as their biggest communication method.like i tried reporting a bug a bit ago and it redirected me to their discord server which is annoying bc i don't wanna join the official server for reasons.im sure other ppl wanting to report bugs or communicate with them feel the same or don't even have discord which is an issue like they're making it harder to contact them.idk i think they should use their site for stuff like this or communicate with emails

[vandagyreapologist]

Fer.al Cosplays I Want to Try

Jon Archivist (The Magnus Archives)

Jester Lavorre (Critical Role Season 2)

Caduceus Clay (Critical Role Season 2)

Nepeta Leojin (Homestuck)

Feferi Peixes (Homestuck)

[shattered-bay]

YOOO a feral critical blog... omg it kills me becuase the game looks so pretty and I qctually REALLY like the customization. Honestly if they added fighting to the level up system id be sold. But no... more paywalls 😔

God it's so weird to see someone call this blog fer.al critical because that's just not a term I've ever seen used in circles I frequent. I'm used to warrior cats and flight rising tumblr where being critical of the thing in question is like, expected. With flight rising especially because the devs are on tumblr and giving honest feedback is genuinely important (with warrior cats everyone just dunks on the authors lol).

I feel like a lot of people have this unhealthy relationship with media (in this case games specifically) where they're "all or nothing" with it. Either it's the best thing ever made and the devs can do no wrong or it's absolute shit and no one should even perceive it.

And there's often this weird sense of like, guilt, for liking something other people criticize, like those people are criticizing you for liking it, when that's not how anyone should be thinking about it at all! I saw this when the first season pass came out and people were being critical of it, and some people were really desperate to defend wildworks as if doing so would justify their own love of the game.

But you don't need to justify your enjoyment of fer.al! We're all on ferablr because we enjoy it! Someone being negative or critical about an update shouldn't make you feel bad! A game doesn't have to be perfect to justify your love of playing it!

Honestly fer.al is gorgeous. The artists are doing an amazing job with it. But the game is hollow. The only thing you can consistently do is grind for materials. Like you said, if they just added some sort of combat system the game would improve so much. I thought that was what they were planning on, with the mugmyre daily quest, but it's been so long that I can't really justify them not releasing even an early version of it yet (I mean the game is in early access, not having to polish features before releasing them is like, the whole point).

It really feels like wildworks gave us a glimpse of what fer.al could be, then when they saw how many people liked it and were willing to pay for the dragon already in early access, they went "fuck it" and put all their effort into monetizing it instead of fixing bugs or adding actual content and not just paywalled cosmetics. But I really hope they sober up and change their strategy soon.

Oh and of course I'm gonna be critical of wildworks, I've been playing animal jam since like early 2015 and I've never had a membership :///

[green-jackdaw]

And now, a collection of low effort Fer.al memes I made in the past few months

[green-jackdaw]

So I asked around about Cinder’s release date,

and someone told me that according to the website that they are going to release it some whare this month, but the thing is, that I just have to believe that person because I still can’t find Cinder’s website! (I think it has something to do with that I live in the Nederlands) And not only that! Reddit a lot of crypto bro activity…

I simply can’t find anything!

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that blowing your entire marketing budget on a crappie screen in Time square is an terrible idea (I mean, duh) but it can also mean that crypto bros have even less interest in it than I expected!!

All this combined with the fact that we are at the top of the bubble. That people now either love blockchain, or hate it with a deep passion, with no in between anymore. AND that some crypto skeptics on Reddit found out, that the crypto currency market has been heavily manipulated by one or more parties for long time, and tricks the used to do so, are slowly stopping to be effective, but as result of that, what once was just the crypto bubble, has now become A TICKING TIME BOMB!!!

So there is no happy ending for Cinder…

Welp. They can’t say we didn’t warn them!

[green-jackdaw]

[green-jackdaw]

[green-jackdaw]

There is “news”

We'd like to let you know that Feral's next update is going to be combined with our next release as we continue to polish the game. Check out my prior announcement to see what we're working on. This means that we won't have much to report until the start of the next Season!

In the meantime, new items will continue to arrive in shops, and you'll still be able to play your way through this Season's Challenges!

We will also be extending the end date of Season Six with an exact end date TBD. More on that soon. Hopefully that'll allow you all to wrap up what you're still working on without having to feel rushed!

If you missed out on the beginning of the Season, here's a recap:

-You can now earn FREE Star Fragments by playing through the Season Pass!

-Take on Feral's newest Creature form: the mysterious Fae!

-Unlock wings at Level 42 (or by becoming a Phoenix) and fish the sky for skyjellies!

-Exchange their Pigment for exclusive items at the traveling Feral Air Mail Airship!

We hope you're having a great summer, and thank you for your understanding as we work to improve the Feral experience!

-Fero

[green-jackdaw]

YES! I'M READY FOR BATTLE!

I'M SO

READY FOR

PVE!

... please WildWorks?

Im so bored :(