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.
Oh, riffing off Savannah 's suggestion: how about if you release an animal, it's possible that someone else will catch it. So every 20-30 times there's a chance of catching something partly domesticated or from another village, because someone released it.
Here's what I'd do:
1. Increase the odds of special colors. Maybe make the odds better if both parents are special colors... that'll increase the demand for female specials which are, frankly, pretty much useless except for display (pets, menageries, ...).
2. Do some statistical analysis on your random number generator. If you're using the default PRNG, switch to a Permuted linear congruential generator, or add a permutation stage to your current generator. Seriously, there seems to be major problems with it.
3. If you're deliberately crocking the odds for limited species, that's just making the problem worse.
4. Add an intermediate level between rare and super-rare. Going from 2.5% to 0.5% is too big a jump. And adding more animals will automatically increase demand.
5. Speaking of which, add more animal species on an ongoing basis, I don't mean limited edition animals, I mean new species you can catch. You can sunset older species, stop them showing up in collections, and perhaps using those breeding charges for species you are eliminating.
One more thing. Nerf the giving tree. When it started you couldn't pick stuff that often, so you went after good stuff, and people were putting up good stuff. You want to encourage people to post competitive donations, not use it as a spot to toss junk. Limit how much people can donate each day, make things that aren't picked up vanish after 24 hours, and reduce how often people can pick.
I'm not sure I like any of the above options. But I do have a question.
Why not encourage breeders to 'Release' more pets back into the wild?
Personally, I'm fond of the 3rd idea. I could see that working better than the others.
Forgot to add, and apparently can't edit: Making breeding potions a universal explorer/herbalist sink for all villages equally would also potentially benefit the medicine market (because all villages are having some of those resources sucked up to make breeding potions, cutting down on medicine overcrafting). And it would make alchemists more relevant to have in your active worker pool again, which currently for more than a few villages they kind of aren't.
I would let the normal growth of the game after it's opened up for more users create a demand.
You have already nerfed the heck out of breeding, and made what's basically the only mini-game in Furvilla that allows long-term progress and ongoing rewards immeasurably harder. And now you want to nerf it further? You haven't given the existing changes long enough time to have an effect.
The amount of breeding that is needed to get super-rare animals means that people _have_ to be able to breed lots of common animals to even have a chance.
And the breeding percentages seem to be crocked.
I've built up to about a hundred Kitsune and I have yet to breed a single Foxfire after months of trying. That's thousands of breeding events. I've had three blue doges, though, as well as multiple super-ares in other common species with a much smaller population. Sure you can breed doges slightly more often, but I started with the same population of both and the difference between 5 and 7 days isn't that big a deal.
And speaking of Kitsune, the only reason I dump limited species on the tree rather than selling them back is that you made it impossible to sell them back. Why would you turn off a sink like that when you're complaining about extra animals?
If you're going to nerf breeding to create an artificial scarcity of commons, then you need to give people a new path to progress in breeding, otherwise it becomes just another hopeless dead-end grind like everything else in FurVilla. Or else do something to make exploring, warriors, and so on more interesting.
#1 - breeding limits. 2-5 for common species seems way too low. So does 100 for super-rare, given that it theoretically takes 200 tries to get one and in practice, as I've observed, it takes much much more than that.
#2 - A limit of 50 stables per villager? That ... might actually be survivable. I'm not sure it would have the effect you want, though, and I suspect you'd be back to make it lower.
#3 - A limit of 100 breedings a day? You've already made it so I can't practically breed more than one species a day with all the shuffling I need to do, it's actually starting to physically *hurt* to run a species. So I'm not sure that would cut into my breeding that much.
Requiring a resource to breed? Even if you made it something that used ingredients available in every village and cost less than 50FC in materials per dose, that would still be a whole bunch more clicking ... and it's already hurting.
If the breeding potion isn't made universal, it'd probably be the single worst possible thing that could be done to AH - and to the balance of villages. If everyone is equally able to gather, grow, and craft for them, and it becomes an exploration/herbalist sink for all villages equally, that's fine.
Not a huge fan of #1, at least not being applied to every color. Because breeding % chance rates drop so very sharply past the first two tiers of colors, I would say those first two are the ones with the serious overpopulation problem. The rarer colors don't need it, especially if other limits are also put in place. Otherwise you potentially have someone breed a rare/super rare color that uses up all its charges without ever being able to breed another, which seems like a huge waste..
Would not mind #2. I "only" have 26 pages of stables and even a lot of those are species I could probably go without. #3 also seems harmless. I think these two would be enough to encourage focusing on your favorite species without sucking the fun out of it like "breeding charges for all colors" frustration would.
This is personally the worst ideas I've seen on the announcements. We breed to try and get those cool animals that are over 2000 fd that we cannot afford. It's all chance for us. Also, the breeding charges are AWEFUL. I don't have the money to do that. Also, the breeding potion thing is a definate no. Those are way too expensive and would take too much time. The mods need to think it as if they were in the players shoes.
I'm pretty sure the reason there is so much overbreeding is because it is IMMENSELY HARD to get rare and super rare animals. Sure a lot of thees limitations aren't bad But I don't like number two and the potion one though. The main reason why threes so many common and uncommon animals in the stall and in the giving tree is because they are too common to really get and the rare and super rare ones are too uncommon to get. perhaps balancing them like I get 100 common animals for like every 10 to 20 uncommon the percentage for getting thees uncommon, rare, super rare animals is much to large compared to uncommon. Since really the main reason people to Animal husbandry is to get more rare animals but since there so hard to get. Is one of the biggest reason as to why the stalls and giving tree is flooded with common animals. Sure those options are good but I think making the chance of getting more rare animals higher will help a lot. And stop all the flood with thees common pets. Since everyone wants to get rid of them because there trying to get a rare one.
Maybe give males a cooldown? I dunno, I haven't much used breeding (yet).
Is it bad that I LIKE the fact that people are dropping excess animals in the Giving Tree? >_> Without that, I probably wouldn't even have any animals (aside from those native to my village)