Considering all the dead lairs on the site, some due to people being unable (or not wanting to) get on the internet every day to take care of their lairs, vacation mode is something we could really use. While some of them are surely from people leaving the site for one reason or another, I know of several cases with friends who had to go on vacation and leave their dragons to starve.
Enchanted Sleep would be an option under account settings, possibly down at the bottom between game socket and flight change. If you select the option (which is free) your dragons are put into enchanted sleep for a minimum of one week, no end date. While in enchanted sleep, you would be unable to interact with any portions of the site except your messages (you would not be allowed to retrieve items) and the forums. You could browse all other areas but they would NOT be available for action. No games, no coliseum, no crossroads. Vacation mode is meant to keep your dragons in the same state you left them in, social interactions aside.
If, for some reason, you wanted to cancel the Enchanted Sleep before the minimum time was up, you would have to pay a fee. The closer it was to the auto expire (so to speak) the less you would have to pay. I'm going to suggest a gem payment, same as name change or flight change, to both generate more revenue for Flight Rising and to prevent people from treating it casually. If you have to pay even 10,000 treasure for each day early you come back, that's not a lot. You can make 60,000 treasure in a day without issue just doing the fairgrounds for a few hours.
For a graphic, dragons could (potentially) be greyed out in the lair, or a new icon could be added to the bottom bar to indicate that the lair is asleep.
There are a lot of pros to this option and very few cons (mainly, whatever coding would be required to have you logged in and still treated as if you weren't, which is basically the restrictions that I think would ideally be attached to the mode. In fact, that's the ONLY con I can think of. You wouldn't be able to 'accidentally' enter enchanted sleep and even if someone DID use and it change their mind or plans a day later, a week without flight rising isn't a big deal if you don't want to or are unable to pay the fee to unlock your account.)
For better and more controlled use ie prevent people from using vacation mode to leave forever (and another source of potential revenue), you could even have an option to input the projected date you would be back, and a week after the projected 'end' date they could start charging a fee for the continued 'magic spell'. You would still be able to cancel it for free as long as it was at least a week after you started and before the week after your projected end date.
ETA: I named it Enchanted Sleep because I know some people are really into role playing. It fits with role playing seamlessly and the name fits better with the site and how things are named than calling it vacation mode.
ETA2: @weyrbound had the very good suggestion that you would lose your well fed bonus upon entering enchanted sleep, which I really like. The point of this suggestion was to keep people from having to shell out a ton of food to feed starving dragons. Spending three days when you come back with five less gathering turns isn't as big of deal as having to put out 50 food points per dragon in your lair when you leave for two weeks.
ETA3: @Pokemon pointed out that having it the second way (fee starting to incur a week after you were supposed to be back if an end date input was required) could be used to basically force people to buy gems, which was totally something I didn't think of. I personally prefer my first suggested way. The alternate suggestion obviously needs reworking, so I'm going to strike-through it for now, since I can't think of a way to rephrase. The second option is actually more like the inn/lodge/resort option someone said they would prefer, which I admittedly don't know much about.
Thoughts, (constructive) criticism, ideas?
Enchanted Sleep would be an option under account settings, possibly down at the bottom between game socket and flight change. If you select the option (which is free) your dragons are put into enchanted sleep for a minimum of one week, no end date. While in enchanted sleep, you would be unable to interact with any portions of the site except your messages (you would not be allowed to retrieve items) and the forums. You could browse all other areas but they would NOT be available for action. No games, no coliseum, no crossroads. Vacation mode is meant to keep your dragons in the same state you left them in, social interactions aside.
If, for some reason, you wanted to cancel the Enchanted Sleep before the minimum time was up, you would have to pay a fee. The closer it was to the auto expire (so to speak) the less you would have to pay. I'm going to suggest a gem payment, same as name change or flight change, to both generate more revenue for Flight Rising and to prevent people from treating it casually. If you have to pay even 10,000 treasure for each day early you come back, that's not a lot. You can make 60,000 treasure in a day without issue just doing the fairgrounds for a few hours.
For a graphic, dragons could (potentially) be greyed out in the lair, or a new icon could be added to the bottom bar to indicate that the lair is asleep.
There are a lot of pros to this option and very few cons (mainly, whatever coding would be required to have you logged in and still treated as if you weren't, which is basically the restrictions that I think would ideally be attached to the mode. In fact, that's the ONLY con I can think of. You wouldn't be able to 'accidentally' enter enchanted sleep and even if someone DID use and it change their mind or plans a day later, a week without flight rising isn't a big deal if you don't want to or are unable to pay the fee to unlock your account.)
ETA: I named it Enchanted Sleep because I know some people are really into role playing. It fits with role playing seamlessly and the name fits better with the site and how things are named than calling it vacation mode.
ETA2: @weyrbound had the very good suggestion that you would lose your well fed bonus upon entering enchanted sleep, which I really like. The point of this suggestion was to keep people from having to shell out a ton of food to feed starving dragons. Spending three days when you come back with five less gathering turns isn't as big of deal as having to put out 50 food points per dragon in your lair when you leave for two weeks.
ETA3: @Pokemon pointed out that having it the second way (fee starting to incur a week after you were supposed to be back if an end date input was required) could be used to basically force people to buy gems, which was totally something I didn't think of. I personally prefer my first suggested way. The alternate suggestion obviously needs reworking, so I'm going to strike-through it for now, since I can't think of a way to rephrase. The second option is actually more like the inn/lodge/resort option someone said they would prefer, which I admittedly don't know much about.
Thoughts, (constructive) criticism, ideas?
