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.
You're not playing the same ticket day after day. You get a new batch of tickets each 5, 7, 10, 15, or 20 days.
And it's one of the few things in FV that *isn't* broken.
If there's too many common animals, then address that directly by creating an incentive to get rid of the commons. I suggested one that would work.
What about, say, making it that when you breed together two animals with color rarities (for both) higher than common, you don't have a chance of getting a common pet from them? That might just push the uncommon and up colors to be more overbred though
Argent If breeding is like the lottery than breed charges aren't a problem. You can't play the same lottery ticket day after day. You have to buy a new one for each drawing. Adding breed charges just makes your metaphor more accurate.
Anyway, opinions and views were asked for, so that's what I gave. I don't honestly care if the mods change AH. It's a broken and well past time to spay and neuter the pets.
First, that took *months*, with multiple days cool-down between sessions. That's a few days with explorers or warriors that cool down dozens or hundreds of times a day.
Breeding is more like playing the lottery. Every time you breed it's like getting a new lottery ticket.
And breeding charge limits are more of a problem for people who *aren't* milling out animals, because if you're milling you're generating lots of new animals to replace them as they wear out.
If they're going to have limits on AH, limits on breeding per day and limits on stables are least likely to limit the average player and most likely to hit people who have thousands of animals.
Argent So what you're saying is that breeding thousands upon thousands of times like you've claimed you've done isn't grinding. Gotcha.
Alexstrasia There are precisely two things in the game that do not quickly become pure grinding after a few weeks at most... some of them like making costumes have such high resource requirements that they're pure grinding right from the start.
If you're not into grinding, there's painties and mini-pets. If you're not into painties, this *is* a breeding game.
Argent The numbers were offered as s suggestion, but I really think they shouldn't be anywhere near that high. If this were a breeding game my opinion would be different. It'll suck for those people milling out animals, but there's more to the game than that.
Alexstrasia - That's still only 40 times the charges of the common color, even if the number of charges is higher. Rares should already be 40 times the charges of the common because rares are 40 times rarer than commons!
I agree with koben and OkamiWhitewings - the thing to do is give people an incentive to release animals.
That's what I was getting at with my idea that if you release an animal, there should be a very small probability of it attracting a "better" animal that you catch when you release it.
Functionally, that would be the equivalent of breeding it one last time, except you don't get to keep the parent or child unless the child is better than the parent.
With the breeding probabilities as they are, this wouldn't increase the number of higher scarcity colors significantly (since you'd get more if you kept the animal and bred it... but it's a pain keeping the common animals), but it would give people an incentive to release animals rather than hoarding them, selling them to the NPCs, or putting them under the tree.
This wouldn't require a lot of new game infrastructure, like new items or new careers, and would also justify adding something like a stable limit.