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.
The first option is just bad .. But a combination of option 2 and 3 is a good idea, I keep only 2 extra stables per AH villager anyway but still produce a number of common animals at each breeding cycle in my overall breeding goals (a pair of everything, lol)
Also, the Breeding Potion idea is horrible on so many levels. It'd become another "wood" in the market, reaching too high amounts to be used by newbies and even beta players.
Only due to the amount of time and money I've spent acquiring my animals (which is nowhere near other players,) I'd suggest number 3.
Some players have spent their entire time on Furvilla collecting as many animals as they have. The stable limit would hurt them so much.
The first option is, in my opinion, out of the question since there's no way to get rid of 'limited' classed animals like a butchery job or selling them back to the server. Half the breeds that end up in the Giving tree are impossible to sell back to the servers. Before the Giving tree and Quests, people would sell their excess to the server to clear out the extras which helped keep them scarce. Since that's not possible for a large number of animals now... Well it's caused a large section of the problem. If possible I'd suggest a blacklist based on item rarity be made for the Quest system instead of the current change to specific animals of being 'limited' and as such 'not able to sell to the server'
About the time that the Giving Tree popped up there was also a drop in sales of Breeding Potions, meaning that fewer people felt the need for them. Likely because pets they wanted were available for free to start in both genders they needed.
Otherwise the second and third options aren't so bad, as long as they aren't both used. Too many modifications to control the 'problem' and it'll be way too restrictive for new players to feel like they want to even try starting the career.
Animal husbandry is intimidating as it was with an almost unlimited amount of villagers/stables/charges, and keeping track of all the animals is hard. it'd be nice to be able to just sell them back to the server when I have 100 of those 'limited' animals instead of throwing them around the giving tree.
1) Not a good idea, in my opinion. What would animals with no more charges do? Do we sell them? Do they disappear? I'm afraid people could sell those animals to other players (especially newbies), scamming them.
2) I kinda like this idea, but I still feel like those who want to focus their gameplay on animal breeding won't be on the same level as those who focus on exploring or other careers, especially now that there's no more limits to some of them. I mean, I could have 10 explorers and have them farm items like crazy, but I wouldn't be able to have 10 animal husbanders. (I still think the 10 workers thing is a very wrong change, as many said)
3) Still the same problem as above, with the addition of it being even more crippling to those who want to focus on it (newbies would be mostly hit by this, since beta players would have better chances due to the rarer animals obtained during the beta).
Another suggestion could be making breeding even more challenging by adding that not all breedings end up with a cub. Whether common or rare animals get higher chances of successful breeding it should be discussed, as rarer animals have longer waiting times yet should remain rare.
My best suggestion (taken from an old game similar to this) would be to implement some sort of merchant that exchanges animals for various rewards. The rewards would be low amounts of money and common stuff (seeds, wood, basic materials, etc) for commons and then rarer and rarer stuff (high value materials and items, FD, maybe plushies, etc) as you climb the ladder, so that people would feel compelled to trade their animals to the merchant instead of cluttering the shop.
I don't know which would work best, but I do know limiting villagers to only 50 stables is going to really be harsh. Thats only 4 pages +2 stables. Since we had to go down to only 10 villagers, that is a huge reduction in animals, considering each village has 10 types. And with the Rares and SR having long cool downs, you have to hang on to all you get and you would run out of room for anything else very quickly I think.
The breeding charges sounds like it could work better as long as the Rares and Super Rares had enough tries to be able to actually get a SR bred.
The breeding potion idea sounds terrible to me. How would that work? What would it be made of and would it be readily available to everyone on the site?
Honestly, the only reason I play FV is for the pet collecting, so please consider that whatever changes you make to remember that this is a game and should be a fun way to spend my extra time, not a place full of frustration.
Also not really liking the breeding potion idea since they're QP-exclusive and every other village will either have to move or pay out of their nose for one EVERY TIME they breed something.
#1 seems like it would cause more problems rather than fix them, since the pet population would quickly become overrun with animals with no charges left.
#2 would reduce the need to build new stables after a point, allowing the wood to go towards repairs of houses and pots.
#3 will simply reduce the number of animals being churned out each day, although whatever isn't bred one day can just be bred the next.
As for the Breeding Potion idea, needing a potion for every breeding would require users to stock up on huge quantities of them even if they have a limit of 50 breedings a day, and are invested enough in the career that they will likely meet the limit consistently.
Why couldn't every village have their own variant of the breeding potion?? Im not a fan of tossing away 2 animals for 1 potion but what if instead each village had a potion for their group of animals to craft with items/fauna from the respected town,I live in Tigereye Peak so my alchemy breeding potions would be for the animals I could gather here. It would make trading with other villages a lot more fun too!
I would personally vote for a combo of #2 and #3. These seem reasonable and I've been kind of surprised #3 wasn't implemented already considering the limits on collecting and other professions.
#1 would be so absolutely frustrating that I'd likely stop breeding altogether if it was implemented on non-prize animals where it makes sense to keep the population very low. When breeding for rare colors, having a finite amount of time to beat the odds would be maddening and nerve-wracking considering how low the chances are already.