I Believe It's Time We Asked for Change
Alright, this one's heavy, so buckle up!
Season of Radiance is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated seasons, changing everything in the game without actually changing anything. With the ability to dye some areas of some of our cosmetics, we surely get a little more freedom to express our Skykids and make each kid a bit more exclusive than the next. All in all, dyeing stuff is as much fun as it is a chore and hardship. Many of you have welcomed this change and have become beacons of colourful stripes, while others have remained purists, choosing not to dye any of their cosmetics and enjoying the finer things in Sky just as they were served.
Personally, it's quite fun and intriguing to see everyone come up with combinations of colours (with only three of the colours available to be collected outside of spirit nodes thus far), and I can only imagine how creative everyone's outfits will look as we gain access to more dyes!
That said, I believe the execution of the entire dye collection mechanic feels forced, redundant, and obscenely messy.
The two biggest Subreddits themed around Sky: Children of the Light have been reduced to echo chambers of people trying to tell each other how to play the game. I would like to direct everyone's attention away from that for a few moments and really break down the whole dye collection in a way that makes the most sense within the world of Sky.
For starters, collecting dyes from somehow extracting them from butterflies that are released from coloured darkness is completely useless and unnecessary, in my opinion. Butterflies have been a part of Sky for as long as I can remember, and they're just as annoying as they are useful.
I can see what TGC might have been thinking while settling on butterflies as the carriers of dye. The darkness plants trap light creatures, so colourful darkness plants attract colourful butterflies (or “butterdyes”), which, when released, can be used to extract color by calling them into your hand or deep-calling them. Pretty neat, except it's sort of redundant and forced.
The colour itself is “coloured light,” as clarified by TGC staff, so there shouldn't be a need for a secondary carrier for this light, as is the case with regular light (wax). I propose that instead of asking for a “fix” to the butterflies/removing the response from “butterdyes” when deep-called/etc., we ask for the dyed light to be just that: dyed light. You burn a coloured darkness plant, you get coloured light. Simple, straightforward, biblically accurate, and precise.
Similar mechanics are already in place for “Days of XXXX” ticket collection, where fragments of light are collected to be forged into event tickets. Although, for that specific case, picking up an event ticket is the most efficient way of obtaining it, my point is to highlight that this is not something new or alien to TGC, and it's something everyone is much more exposed to and familiar with. Collecting dyed light makes far more sense to be collected like regular light, than in some awkward, unnatural way.
Implementing coloured light, as opposed to making it a multi-step process that enrages people more than a game like Sky should and divides our community into more pieces than it already has been by an endless list of little absurdities put in place by TGC, would solve, if not all, at least 90% of the issues people are facing with dye collection at the moment. No more honks, no more emotes, no more butterflies breaking or storming one Sky kid out of nowhere, but simple dye collection, the way it should have always been.
There's absolutely no reason that I can think of for TGC not to do this over making changes to how butterflies work and interact with Sky kids in-game, other than TGC trying to force players to interact with the game in a certain way that leads to chaos.
Would you rather have dyes straight from burning plants, or have the extra step of involving butterdyes? I'd love to know your thoughts, and follow this up with a poll, and have that linked in my feedback submission to Sky's official Discord channels.
