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 just had a brilliant idea that would make people want to release animals.
What if, when you released an animal, you had a breeder's chance of catching the next level up of the same animal. Like, the common you released has a 5% of attracting an uncommon when you release it, and an uncommon has a 2.5% chance of attracting a rare, and a rare has a 0.5% chance of attracting a super-rare.
Of course people aren't likely to release rares for that small a chance of attracting super-rares, but the odds would be there just for the sake of consistency.
Honestly, if it was easier to breed rarer animals I wouldn't be mass breeding so much in the first place. I've gotten everything I wanted from one animal line and I've stopped breeding them for the most part so.
These are all pretty good ideas, but I think that last one would be better if it increased the chance of a rarer offspring, rather than be needed to breed at all. Like if you have the potion in your inventory, you can use it on a pet, then it would be in would be in a 'higher chance of rare' status similar to how it tells you that you used Miracle Grow on a seed. The status would go away either after a certain amount of time or once you breed them. I think with the Alchemist giving you a more likely chance of the next rarity, the Alchemist helps AH by giving you the luxury of not having to breed a crap ton of times just to get an uncommon.
I definitely agree with what Aelys has said along with a couple other users, the best option would be making a way to trade in animals for some sort of point currency to gain exclusive items.
As someone who is only really on for AH at this point in time, I believe the only option listed that would have a chance to cut down animal populations would be #3, otherwise people will still mass breed regardless of breeding charges, stable limits or even requiring a breeding potion, users will most likely resort to hording as many as possible to combat those potential options which will continue to push out large amounts of animals into the site (I only say this as it would be something I would personally do, and i'm certain I wouldn't be the only one).
Instead of discouraging us to use AH find a way to encourage it, get us involved and give purpose to breeding animals that isn't just completing a pretty collection for show.
I would also like to thank you guys for bringing up a discussion on possible changes, active communication is very refreshing and a great way to get the community involved.
I disagree with @Pippi - suggestion 1 is the WORST, but if you do that you absolutely need better stable management. You need sort by breeding status, and sort by breeding charge status.
You need to be able to display breeding status in all the views, especially including quick stock.
[aside: Speaking of quick-stock, that extra button on the bottom to click all the buttons at the same time is kind of useless if you can't filter the view.]
If you have a limit on the number of stables, you need to have some tool to breed an animal and then export the mother and child to inventory for sorting in one operation, or make the number of stables something that's only enforced once a day or something, because TOO MUCH CLICKING. Seriously. I'm an older player so maybe I'm a bit of a canary in the coal mine here, but the amount of clicking for AH is insane and you're going to give all your players RSI. This is not hyperbole. This is experience.
One thing you have to accept is that economics works. If you make it so hard to get "good" animals, you're creating an incentive to breed lots of animals, and if people breed lots of animals they're not going to be worth much.
You might as well complain that people aren't paying much for elegant feathers and brass and other common items without much demand.
I have 146 stables just so that I can breed the species from my town. I painstakingly transferred each pet 1 by 1 before mass exporting was added from all 5 of my villagers to 1. x.x I know this is a result of playing during beta test but it was extremely hard for me to breed and collect just what I have and I still only have 1 of each of the ultra rare pets so I am not even breeding them yet. (and colors are extremely hard to breed for.) The limiting of 10 villagers being active already made it harder for people who do animal husbandry (before I have 40 stalls from my other 4 villagers that I didn't need to manage because they were not the stables with durability)
I definitely think the real issues with AH balance lay within the rarity of colors and species. People need to mill pets because of how rare these things are.
Just some thoughts!
The problem with breeding is that Commons and Uncommons are all that realistically ever gets produced, meaning breeders have to breed insane quantities of pets to get even one Super Rare. Putting a breeding charge on those Super Rares would just be a slap in the face to every single breeder who earned one (because, even with 100 charges, the chance of a Super Rare breeding another Super Rare to just break even on ALL that effort is... slim). I am dead set against the potions because things are unbalanced enough as it is (being in certain locations is incredibly unfun because practically all the nice stuff is in Quetzal's Palace). We don't need to unbalance things further. They are bad enough already. (We need to make the balance *better*, not worse).
I do, however, find the idea of daily caps on breeding within an account (though this will likely lead to multi-accounting in the end) tolerable. I would like to see the percentages tweeked so people don't have to breed thousands of a pet before they get a Super Rare. I understand wanting them to be rare, but thousands? Come on. Be reasonable.
I would also offer some suggestions. I would like to see the Stable revamped so that males are just as essential as females for breeding (such as being matched and kept together)... however this would require revamping the whole messed-up breeding system entirely. As it is, breeding pets have to be stored in your inventory/storage because the barn system is utterly ridiculous and a waste of perfectly good wood. Without fixing this problem, I would *never* support such a change as matched pairs.
In short, Furvilla already has enough terrible gameplay problems driving players away. It does *not* need to be made any worse. Of course Common/Uncommon pets are devalued. Have you seen the spawn percentages?! What did you expect? With so many players leaving or rarely playing (I rarely play anymore because there's just no reason to bother - the game carries practically no reward for players so there's absolutely no point to playing it, and the site doesn't value donations either, so there's not even a point to buying the "pretty" stuff). Lovely graphics are great, but you've just got to have good game design to back it up. This is only one of the terrible gameplay issues plaguing Furvilla and fixing it won't be easy (if it's even possible).
I believe we should wait for the site to open up before we discuss changes to breeding. Right now, the site has the same active pool of players that have been playing since July. I don't feel we can adequately discuss balancing until we see how the new blood works, especially if registration is opened indefinitely instead of monthly.
Same with balancing for everything. Everyone has had time to build up everything. It's the same player base. There's no demand as everyone had time to level everything up. I feel this has been extremely detrimental for all the other recent balancing issues (to the point it pretty much killed the site enjoyment for me)
You need to have supply/demand, and without it, balancing is too difficult. These changes hurt old and new players a like.
Breeding potions already give only one village and one village alone a bunch of money, and honestly no one else has a potion that compares. I'm super against the idea of needing a potion to perform a breeding. If anything, a new potion somewhere else to recharge breeding charges would be great. Then have the breeding charges on and limit each villager to how many breedings they can do a day. Limiting by-account doesn't make sense when we're already in the strict confines of 10-workers-only.
However, with how low the inventory sell prices are, I don't really think this is a problem that needs a fix. Rares and Super Rares are already controlled fine and well by their low percentages alone. People just need to sell what they don't want. If players seem disinclined, I think the problem would be more in motivating them then locking even more cuffs on how they can play the game. Lately game play already feels like breathing through a straw.
There needs to be more enticing players to play the way you'd like them to by making it seem appealing and less widdling it down and forcing them to play in an extremely narrow way.