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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Kindryte on 2025-01-27 19:47:27+00:00.
Flight rising is a pet sim website where you grow your clan of dragons, breed them, dress them, give them pets and make them fight. It's a site where staff has claimed they want 'everyone to be able to get their ultimate, dream dragon someday'. There's many diffrent breeds of dragon one can obtain, in many shapes and sizes.
This is the story of the time the community asked for something, and staff complied.
"Can we have more dragons?"
Flight rising is a pet sim where you get MULTIPLE updates each month, and...not a whole lot of those involve lore developments or new dragon breeds. In 2019, staff came up with a solution: ancient breeds.
Ancient dragons were dragon breeds that in lore have either been completely seperated from their more modern counterparts, forgotten, almost completely wiped out or a combination of all three of those. They came with a neat little bit of lore to add some flair to the site and made it so that staff could create new dragons more often.
How are ancient dragons more easy to create than moderns? Well for starters the artists don't have to draw all that pesky apparel on them. Flight rising has THOUSANDS of pieces of apparel, so it saves a lot of time to just have dragons that can't wear any. It also creates an interesting opportunity for staff; they don't have to follow the rules set in place by the modern dragons.
Modern dragons NEED to have a single pair of legs, a single pair of arms, a single pair of wings and a single head and tail. They need that so that they can wear every single piece of apparel possible without any complications. Ancients, however, do not get to wear apparel, so they don't need to follow those rules. You can have a two-headed dragon, a sea-serpent, a dragon with EXTRA limbs; the sky was supposedly the limit!
Sure, the first ancient released still followed the 'one pair of arms, one pair of legs, one pair of wings and one head and tail' rule, but surely this isn't foreshadowing anything, right?
"Can we have ancients that actually LOOK like ancients?"
To staff's credit, the next ancient released was a wyvern; no arms, so it broke the rules modern dragons had to follow~! The community let out a sigh of relief; seems like the first ancient release had just followed the rules by coincidence.
Except it wouldn't be the last time it happened.
From the 10 current ancient breeds, half follow the rules of modern dragons- six if you count the one where the extra body part is not even noticeable due to the poses staff put those dragons in. Sure, we got a wyvern, sure, we got a really neat 2-headed dragon and SURE we got a sea serpent, but most ancients still look like they could've been modern dragons. It got so bad that when a new modern breed was released people occasionally forgot it wasn't an ancient because it had 'ancient vibes'.
Due to this, more and more people began to post in the forums about how they hoped for more ancients that would actually LOOK like ancients and clearly break the rules modern breeds had to follow.
"Can we have more breeds that aren't slender?"
As people began to pay closer attention to the dragons released, they also noticed that most of them had a very similar build, with slender bodies and longer faces. There were really only three breeds that were more bulky or fat. People began to wonder if staff ever would release a new 'fat' or 'bulky' dragon, but there clearly were people who wanted it- the many forum topics about it were proof of that.
"Can we have new dragons for these neglected flights?"
Flight rising has 11 flights, each with their own territory, god and native dragon breeds. Of those flights, two of them have not gotten new breeds since the launch of the site in 2013. The flight we're going to focus on in this post is the light flight.
Light is canonically the flight that focuses on knowledge, uncovering the truth and learning more about the world. They have two native breeds, which were there since the launch of the site. So obviously, players who chose that flight have been a little salty about how literally everyone else got a new breed or two and some more lore while they got nothing. Staff announced that the next new ancient would be either the other neglected flight or light, and after some teasers it became very clear it would be light.
Wish granted
When the announcement post was made, it was revealed that staff had listened to what the community had wanted from a new ancient: The Everlux
It was a fat little bookwyrm-like creature, with many legs and lore that fit in very nicely with the light flight's hunger for knowledge, the dragons in question essentially serving as ancient librarians that were driven out of their homes by a rampaging beast, desperate to protect the tomes they had been guarding for centuries.
People rejoiced, hugs were given and everyone seemed to generally speaking be happy that they got everything the community had been asking for for years.
...Well... everyone except for...
Clutching pearls
Remember how I said the light flight had two breeds before the introduction of the Everlux? Well, I want to touch on pearlcatchers, who in lore generally act as entitled, elitist snobs and walk around clutching a giant pearl.
Turns out, a lot of users have a LOT in common with pearlcatchers, as many were genuinly angry at how Everlux looked. Threads expressing dissapointment or anger popped up left and right, the most popular one gaining tens of pages worth of discussion, which ranged from genuine criticism to fatphobia, entitlement and even arguments rooted in real life religion. It got to a point that a staff member had to jump in, remind everyone that flight rising was a fantasy game without any ties to ANY real life religion and to be respectful. When that still wasn't enough to get people to behave and follow TOS the thread was eventually locked.
Careful what you wish for...?
All of this drama has concluded fairly recently, but things have calmed down, as they tend to do. Everlux are now just another part of the game, and if you didn't know about the drama, you would've never guessed they had the user base so divided. Many users were genuinly surprised by how many users reacted. It had seemed like EVERYONE had been asking for a bulky or fat breed, and now it suddenly wasn't what they wanted at all? It left a little bit of a sour taste in some people's mouth;
Staff had given us exactly what the userbase had wanted, and in return they got a lot of drama to deal with, with some users claiming that it's unlikely that staff will listen this closely to the userbase again, which is a real shame.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to put two Everlux on a nest to make more of those fat little bookwyrms. I actually love them.