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.
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.
@MOD-Poltergeist I'm sorry about that! I was on mobile and I was trying to give a quick summary of what I thought, and wasn't able to put the long summary of my ideas and how i didn't necessarily like the update.
"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."
^Just wanted to add to my suggestion that I think this could be well combined with limited daily breeding. (Which I'd personally put on 100 breedings per day.)
Making a potion required for breeding is definitely not the way to go.... It doesn't make any sense and it would have the biggest demand this site has ever seen, Too big. Having breeding charges would only cause the system to flood with animals that could no longer be bred, solving nothing.
So that only leaves the breeding limit, Which I think could work honestly. I personally would be fine with a 50 breedings per day limit. I don't think I even do that many and I still make decent progress towards my menagerie.