Zero Dragon Dragonvale

[Sourn Sanneh]

Likemost Apocalypse element dragons, zero dragons are a force to be reckoned with. Zero dragons possess immense physical strength, strong enough to shatter rocks or ice with a punch. Their many horns, claws, and spikes are extremely sharp, and the horns on their tail and head in particular could easily impale someone. If all else fails, the mix of their sharp teeth and horrifically strong bite force is sure to bring their enemies down.

Zero dragons are so large compared to most other dragons that most attackers just can't get a hit on them. Even if an attacker does manage to land a hit, their hides are thick and leathery beneath all the fur, so most physical attacks wouldn't do much damage. The spikes and horns adorning their body aren't just for offense, too, as if an attacker isn't careful enough, they can easily injure or even kill themselves with those spikes.

While zero dragons may seem mighty and unbeatable, they possess a glaring Achilles' heel; their weakness to the cold. For whatever reason, when zero dragons become even slightly cold, they instantly freeze solid. As a result, they are heavily susceptible to the attacks of Cold element dragons and Cryomancy-using wizards, as they literally cannot fight back when cold, since they're too busy being frozen solid. Zero dragons also possess very poor eyesight, although this isn't as easily exploitable as their cold weakness.

In the ancient times, zero dragons roamed the island of Seebear, back when it was sunny and tropical. Now that they've been unearthed from the icebergs they were frozen in for centuries, the wizards are still trying to figure out what to do with them since their homeland is no longer suitable for them, although plans are being made to relocate them somewhere warmer.

Since they freeze solid when made even slightly cold, zero dragons not only prefer, but can only live in extremely warm climates. In particular, zero dragons have a preference for sunny, tropical locals, even though the inevitable heavy rains usually freezes them solid.

Zero dragons were apex predators of the ancient world they once lived in. While very little is known of the zero dragon's diet, since they were only awakened recently and their old habitat has completely changed over the years, it is known that mostly hunt large animals and will only eat smaller creatures when starving.

Nogard once said that the zero dragons were "pretty chill" (much to the chagrin of the Preternatural Parliament for the Prevention of Painful Puns), and, pun aside, this description is fairly accurate. Zero dragons are, for the most part, very calm and collected. They are gentle with humans, as they consider them too small to be prey, and won't even mind if you use the ice they break off for a slushy. That being said, they are brutal and unrelenting predators towards their prey. Zero dragons are rather sorrowful and downtrodden, as they feel a constant longing for the ancient home that has long since changed to the point of unrecognizability, as well as the dragons and animals that once lived there. Zero dragons possess a strong affection for their fellow Ornamental and Apocalypse element dragons, that many wizards have compared to "a person discovering they have kids they never knew about."

When I asked this question it seemed to cause a bit of a stir which I believe has been simmering for a while. Clearly some folks are of the opinion that some/all Dragonvale "How to I breed dragon X" questions are bad questions on the grounds that they are too easy to answer.

Previously, Fluttershy brought up the topic of how to address the monthly Gem Dragons, and I believe the consensus was with BenBrocka's response to the effect that these questions are valuable, even though they are tied to a limited time event. Gem Dragon questions are a special sub-segment though, because the breeding pairs are non-intuitive, and there is a sense of urgency since the dragons are only available for a limited time.

It's been about four months since this was originally asked, and in that time I've gotten a shiny new phone that is actually capable of playing this game. So I got it, and I loaded this game up, and I checked out what all the fuss was about.

This is a complicated game with very little user feedback. It is probably one of the most impenetrable "casual" experiences I've had to date, and I feel lost a lot. If you've never played it, and your assumption is that the game is trivial or easy or simplified for a casual audience, there is nothing further from the truth. It's simplified in that there is virtually no documentation on hardly any feature, and what there is is often either contradictory or useless.

The fallout from this discussion was that we're against questions where the information is ostensibly given in-game. We also believe that the Wikia site is a good source of information. Let's test that theory and see if the community at large can be a good judge of these questions, shall we?

The Frostfire Dragon seems easy enough from the store data. Breed Fire + Cold, bam, Frostfire. Only, the game won't let you do that. Turns out there are opposites in the game that can't be bred together, and Fire + Cold is one set of those. The game doesn't mention this, it just grays out one when you select the other. For all intents and purposes, it looks like a bug.

You can breed hybrids that feature both elements together, and knowing this you might assume that any hybrid Fire + hybrid Cold combination would work, given that you're going for Fire + Cold. You'd be wrong, enjoy your hours of wasted time as you wait for these combos to yield things you don't want.

The Wikia is slightly more helpful, in that it tells you you must breed a Fire Hybrid with a Cold Dragon. This narrows the field a bit, but still leaves you with 20 possible combinations. Again, every time you fail, you're looking at hours of waiting until you can try again.

This sounds an awful lot like the kind of expert we are supposed to be cultivating here, doesn't it? The kind of question that yields intelligent answer that SE is in a unique position to provide? That cuts through the "this worked for me" anecdotal answers you find elsewhere? Hmm.

I won't go into the derivation as deeply as I did for Frostfire, but suffice it to say that only a subset of the dragons that feature the three elements are actually valid. Wikia here tells us that to get the Plant and Fire, you must use a Plant/Fire hybrid, specifically Flower, (even though Poison is also a Plant/Fire hybrid). You might now think "OK, well, then that means that I can just breed Flower + Lightning and that's the only way." Except, no.

In this case, you can breed Plant + Lightning or any Lightning Hybrid. There are 19 possible combinations. This is also a limited time dragon, so there's a maximum amount of times you can try given the long delays you experience on failure. If you're in this situation, you want to know what the statistically "best" pairing is - the one that optimizes the breeding time curve for fewest possible failures AND shortest failures when they do occur. This is a complicated function, but it's solvable if you've got the math background and Dragonvale experience to figure it out.

Wikia doesn't provide this information, and googling it turns up a bunch of unsourced info on sites that seem more concerned with ad revenue than informative content, and shudder Yahoo Answers is in the top results.

The gold olympus seems like the worst of the bunch, and there you'd be correct. Not only do you need to know the pairing, you've also got the problem that the pairings can produce "junk" dragons (like the other two, not the one you're looking for) as well as "lesser" Olympus dragons. Your chances are so slim at getting one that it is easy to lose hope, or break down and just pay Backflip so that you can own one.

Advancement in this game is a complex problem tuned to get you to spend money - and lots of money. Some of these dragons cost $80 or more if you don't know how to breed them. However, you can make progress in the game without spending money if you are patient, and you can get a leg up by having an expert in your corner who knows how to game the system.

Meanwhile, we created a hostile environment for question askers who must be able to prove that their question is sufficiently non-trivial to avoid downvotes and votes to close. We did this even though most of us don't play this game and can't judge these questions.

In a community that is supposed to be open to newcomers and provide expert advice, shouldn't we embrace the easy questions? Shouldn't we embrace the ones that require a bit more work to communicate with new users and edit to bring up to our high standards? Aren't we introducing these people to new concepts and encouraging them to participate, teaching them that gamers are a welcoming crowd and always ready to help, and this is the premiere site to get that help?

In my opinion, making decisions like this makes us look elitist, gives us chances to look down on people without completely understanding their problems, and causes arguments and strife where it shouldn't. To me, this is a capital-B Bad Thing.

This comment in particular makes me think that the reason for at least some of these downvotes is that people feel like this is some sort of blatant "badge grab" question. (See another similar comment here)

If I look at a cross section of similar Dragonvale dragon breeding questions, I don't see this pattern of downvoting and accusatory comments. If people feel like these are bad, poorly researched questions, then I would expect to have seen downvotes on far more of them. (Of course now, I'm opening the floodgates for people to go downvote ALL THE THINGS on that tag :P)

The rewards for asking these questions appear to be minimal - the rep is abysmal, and the badges count for very little. Of the more than 7,000 rep this user in particular has, a whopping 330 (4.5%) has come from asking dragonvale questions.

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