Breeding Limits Discussion
Posted by Admin-Mat on 2 Nov 2016, 6:08 pm
It's no mystery from looking at the Giving Tree and the User Shops that many common and uncommon animals have lost their value due to overbreeding. In animal husbandry, players should still be able to sell their common animals and make money from their breeding. It appears that exponential growth of animals, overbreeding, and unlimited breeding charges have devastated the value of animals, and will continue to do so as more players join animal husbandry and continue breeding.
So, the question is, how do we curb overbreeding to reduce the amount of animals entering the economy? There are a couple of good suggestions that have popped up over the last weeks and months which can be boiled down into the following:
1) Using the breeding charges. Some may have already noticed that the contest prize animals have breeding charges. This feature is built into all animals, and limited breeding charges ensure that animals cycle out of the economy and do not continue to produce more animals indefinitely. Common animals should have low breeding charges (say, 2-5) so they cycle out fast, while rarer animals should have more (upwards of 100 for Super Rare animals) so they can be used for a long time, as they took a while to be earned.
2) Stable Limits. It's been suggested that stable limits would help with the economy as players would no longer be able to farm animals of every type, and instead would be encouraged to focus on their favorite animals. This encourages trading as players focusing on one type of animal would trade with another player focusing on another, as both players cannot focus on all animals. Disrupting the massive breeding farms ensures that there isn't a large amount of commons being born and devaluing animals as well. One common suggestion has been limiting each villager to 50 Stables.
3) Account-wide breeding limits. Another suggestion has been simply to limit the amount of breedings a single account can perform per day. One common number has been 50-100 breedings per day. Similar to stable limits, this helps disrupt large breeding farms and limits the amount of animals entering the economy, while also encouraging players to focus on their favorite animals.
Our opinion is that some combination of #1 #2 and #3 would help the value of animals immensely. What would you change to ensure that common/uncommon animals retain their value?
Another idea: revamp the Breeding Potion to be required to breed a pair of animals. This would give Alchemy a good new kick in value. The Breeding Potion could use some adjustments like making the ingredient list simpler, but it would add a dimension of complexity to breeding and connect Animal Husbandry to Alchemy.
Just a few more additions:
-Stables being limited to 50 in two would be too small when the chance to get a Super Rare is 1/200. I would say ~250 stables (or 252 exactly to keep it divisible by 12) would help keep it so people can at least try for why they'd even have that many in the first place.
-If #3 gets put into place, it'd be better if it was a number of breedings per species versus overall. Most people doing Animal Husbandry are doing it to fill their Menagerie and collect--it's not really a situation of favorite.
I do feel lowering the breeding rarity percentages paired with the stable lowering would help a lot with the mass breeding though.
Personally, I like option 3 best, with a limit of 100 per day. Option 2, limiting stables, can easily be bypassed by using storage and swapping animals. The breeding potion is a very, very bad idea. It'd be too OP for QP, and it'd make breeding too much of a hassle if you need to create and use a potion for every single breeding.
1 sounds horrible, but I think breeding charges could definitely work! Though I do agree with people saying 2-5 for common is a bit too low, I think 10 would be better. However, just adding breeding charges would be a bad idea. The thought of your precious rare and super rare pets becoming useless is very disheartening, plus breeding charges would flood the market with useless pets no one wants. I think the solution here would indeed be to add a potion to the mix, though not the suggested change to the breeding potion. Instead, a new potion that's available to all villages should be added, a potion thst can restore an animals breeding charges. To help circulate pets out, I think the potion should require no less than 10 pets to brew. All pets in any combination would do, as long as it's 10 pets. It'd mean that for every restored pet, 10 are removed from the game. It would give pets an additional purpose, even the ones with no breeding charges left. It'd remove pets from circulation, just any pets, it's completely up to the player which pets, so it's not necessarily solely a common pet sink. It'd add the mentioned dimension of complexity with alchemy. It would leave the breeding potion intact, thus not adding an unfair advantage to QP.
Actually, reading back, I think 1 with the suggested potion to restore breeding charges would be my favourite solution. Otherwise, I'd vote for option 3.
And that's my two cents. Thoughts/feedback on the potion suggestion are most welcome! ^^
Out of the options presented here, I think the third option would be the best solution, I think.
The breeding potion idea sounds like the worst one, imo.
not fond of option 2 because i have hundreds of stables... can we get a warning beforehand if that's what ends up being implemented? also, the main thing i use my construction workers for is making/repairing stables
i wouldn't mind discarding more animals though, like using them for something else like some other people suggested. or if breeding didn't always produce a new animal, though that'd be frustrating too.. dunno, mainly just want a heads up whatever happens
50 stables should be the max for any player. Their should be no need foe 100, 200, 300 or more.
I am strongly against account wide breeding limits as a lot of players may have a lot of pets on have already as breeding stock. It's incredibly hard to get the much rarer pets as it is. Some people seem to have no problems getting the much rarer pets and others never see them no matter how many times they breed the pets they have. By limiting their breeding sessions you handicap them so that a person can't even try to find that rare or super rare pet that many have never found.
Pets should be able to stack. If you have 1 clouddog, it's the same as another. If you have 20 cloudogs. It should not be 20 single cloud dogs. But 1 single pile of them. Showing 20 in the pile. It's incredibly frustrating and one of the main reasons why many may release pets. Since they don't stack and take up too much space accordingly....they keep what they need and release what they need to the giving tree so others can enjoy it or sell it back to the site. Easiest way to solve it for the pets to stack and limit the stalls to 50, nothing else would be necessary at that point. Thank you. :)
I'm against option 1, but am ok with 2 and 3. I also support the idea of raising the sellback price of pets so that excessive pets are removed quickly. 1000FC for common, 2500FC for uncommon, 5000FC for rare, 10000FC for very rare. Please tweak the prices as needed, but I feel such numbers make it appealing to use sellback AND it'd boost the prices in the user stalls.
I like all of these but the breeding potion idea. The breeding charges would seem annoying at first but think about how many common color common species animals end up dumped into the giving tree and all? As long as it didn't retroactively affect everyone's current animals (meaning everyone would likely lose... well most of the animals in the stables probably) I think it would help the value immensely.
My thoughts on how to make such work.
#1 - I think is okay depending on if rarer animals = color too, like you have a stardust uni, would if have more breeding charges than a White uni? If that is the case I think that is sort of fair-ish. There may be some issues with it considering RNG. But would the animals be able to recharge breedings? So we don't have to toss our Super rare colored animal for when it's all out and wait for it to recharge. If not, just give males a breeding cooldown after some breedings.
#2 - I don't like the sound of that. It honestly sounds like it would clash against with your #1 suggestion there if you were focusing on 1 specific animal to breed and run out of space to breed such. Plus it would make some stables less valuable because a lot of people would have to get rid of them to fit the limit.
#3 - Second worst idea I have heard on this announcement. Granted it would help with the animal value, but at the same time damage breedings altogether.
Revamp Breeding Potion Idea - The worst idea in this announcement. Because the plants would still be in another village with different plants, along with a slew of many other breeding problems. It would potentially make breeding anything impossible if it's say "Oh my unis are ready to breed, aw man a potion is required, I don't have that kind of money" issue. ESPECIALLY TO NEW PLAYERS! You should make it a universal potion instead of a village exclusive at that point.
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To sum up. Over breeding is impossible to fix (especially when there is a lack in demand), just look at Flight Rising and other breed animals games. It's impossible to fix.
You can however think about these tidbits of thought to slow things down a bit
-Breeding Cooldowns on males.
-Mess with the RNG chances on colors.
-Make other uses for the animals like say a Butcher class or ingredients to a potion (which would make them a bit valuable tbh).
-Add more features to the AH instead of Catch/Release/Breed/Domesticate. Like add more things to the Catch part and make the Village pet store more useful. Like baits and such.
Giving males cooldowns, even if shorter than females, would make it pointless to even have more than one or two per pair and would just make it even more frustrating with the low chances :/ Like that would limit it way too much.
Thank you so, so much for actually asking us for our opinions first. This is very much a step in the right direction and it helps us feel as if we actually have a voice in things.
I'm inclined to agree that a combination of al 3 discussed ideas would be the most helpful. Keep people from having massive breeding harems that churn out mostly common and uncommon colors by limiting the amount of stables people can have and breeding limits per day. I'm a bit less inclined towards the breeding charges per animal, because I feel that some people who aren't so interested in breeding (like myself) might get and keep a pair of animals just for the sake of collection and not breed them and this would quickly lead to a Flight Rising style situation where because only a limited amount of items were introduced and then ended up in dead accounts that aren't being cleared so those items aren't being cycled back in and with a growing user base wanting these items they're becoming more and more expensive as fewer and fewer people are willing to sell and it's nearly impossible to get them.
I also like the idea of revamping the breeding potions to actually be required. It would make alchemists much more useful as well, since I don't use mine at all right now.