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.
@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.
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!