Breeding Limits Discussion
Posted by 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.
And then also maybe a very large account breeding restriction of like 300 breedings per day.
Here's one of those 4am random ass ideas that no one is going to see, but bear with me.
What if Breeding Charges were Daily? And common critters had more breeding charges and rarer critters had fewer charges, but the odds of receiving a rarer pet were upped just a tiny bit like 1%? Something as common as a birb could have some 100 charges, if male, per day and the kitsune bun could have 60 and the emerald bun could have 30 and the forest bun could have 15, and this could be scaled for the even rarer pets like the contest prizes of Chihuahuas who would have say 40 for the common and 20 for the uncommon and 10 for the rare and 5 for the super rare...
Plus a stable limit, but also be able to sell some of those excessive pets back to the site for a price. maybe up the amount of FD you can get for selling one of those FD pets back to the server a bit from the same 10 that everything else gets. Very unfortunately the sell back price becomes the usual price to sell things in the market place for, but if the common animals are worth a bit more to sell back to the server, say 50 from 10, then people would gladly sell them to the server. Yes people will be selling a lot of mini pets back and getting a lot of money back, but that's not the part that ends up broken for the system, it's the lack of being able to dump the mini pets for a decent profit for the work done to anywhere for those common monstrosities.
Argent Kitsunes are a limited animal. As I suggested they would start with 25 charges and each color rarity would double the charges they have.
I feel option 3 would be best. I wouldn't want the use of a breeding potion unless it was available for all villages, and not just one.
Alexstrasia - It feels really broken to have a 40 breeding limit on a pet that's taken hundreds or thousands of breedings to get (I've bred over a thousand kitsune - which has taken me months - and have yet to get a super-rare kitsune). And even rares are a one-in-40 chance, so less than 40 times the breeding charges of a common seems like a burn.
DunkTheBiscuit - Seems like a more complicated version of my "accidental catch" idea.
I think 1 or 3 would help, but on 2 people could swap out animals, and the breeding potion thing would give Quetzal an advantage over the other villages, so it's probably not ideal.
Those are wonderful ideas! But I very much agree with DunkTheBiscuit, too. "Helping to repopulate" would be an amazing way to help cut back on the extravagant surplus while still goofing off while breeding the animals.
Glad I never got invested in animal breeding.
The potions sound like a horrible idea, but the limited breeding charges sounds doable to me.
Create a rewards system for releasing animals. Call it an environmental repopulation achievement or similar. For every X number of common or uncommon etc animals released, players get a tiny potion to increase the chance of a rare colour during breeding. The potion increases in potency depending on if you claim it for releasing (for example) 50 common, 30 uncommon, 15 rare animals. This wipes excess pets from the site, while helping breeders to achieve the colours they're after with less breeding.
Having just gotten into AH and seeing the crap ton of commons being thrown around. (which I buy if they are lower than their sell from inventory price and sell just to get rid of them) I suggest a combination of 1, 2, and 3.
Throw 5 charges on a common animal and add 5 for each higher rarity of animal. Make referral/limited animal 25 charges. Then as color rarity goes up double the charges. So a common animal with a common color would start with 5 charges. The uncommon color would have 10 charges. The rare color would have 20 charges and the super rare color would have 40.
Combine the charges with a 100 stable limit and a 100 breed limit an hour or whatever the limit was put on herbalists.
This should curb some of the worst puppy milling going on right now. It will take a while to bleed off the excess animals but things should settle out. The biggest problem is that we're in a vacuum as far as a closed Beta goes so it will be a slower fix than if there was open enrollment.
While a breeding potion could help bleed off excess animals faster it would cause more problems in the long run. It would add a complication that would make the game much harder for new players but not put much of a dent into established players. While it's somewhat nice to have a bit of a leg up given that we're all beta testers there's no reason to create an elite that everyone is going to hate for making it nearly impossible to play the game.