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.
I don't like the idea of using breeding potions simply because they can only be made with Quetzal Palace seeds. Actually they are the only reason I'm in QP atm and I plan on moving at some point. I like all the other ideas though!
I hate the limiting stables idea!!! because I am one of the few that doesn't keep all my animals in storage, I have 4 Animal husbandry Villages but 1 is out because the workers cap is to small to work with so I have hundreds of stables that I have crafted and as well bought for FD that I buy that it seems unfair to limit my stables to a measly 50!!! So I would have to say number 3 because I hate number one so much.
Or, reduce the chance of an animal breeding successfully to result in less than 100% offspring return. Maybe even exclusively on common x commons? Or common x any rarity? So it doesn't effect uncommon+ rarity percentages? *tosses out idea*
literally when i started out i thought the breeding potion was needed to breed animals, and it should be
right now im thinking of lioden's breeding system, and how we could adapt their system to fit out stables, or a mix of lioden's breeding and furvilla's herbalism: not every breeding is succesfull, like how not every furvilla harvesting is successful til you git gud, except maybe that fail % only falls as time goes on, stopping at maybe about 20% failfor common breeds, and stopping at about 2-5% for rare breeds? i dunno bro im spitballing
i think a combo of 1# 2# and 3# would be good, if they were supported by less successful breeding rates
Not only that, but adding on to what I stated... since we have breeding cooldowns, it would be EASY for someone to sit down and plot out a schedule to breed things each week and have the limits not really effect them in correlation to breeding cooldowns. I kind of think that account breeding limits are redundant.
How about we use comon animals for alchemy. Doggo and Birb Soup (y)
I dump my common pets into the giving tree because it takes too long to click on each one by one and auto sell them. And of course nothing is gonna sell in the stall :P
Whitesnowpaw At the numbers the contest pets have, you will on average get at least 2 of the same rarity or higher animal as your stud before it runs out of charges, except in the case of super rare color studs, who on average produce 1 super rare per 2 breeding lifespans (but also produce on average 2.5 rare animals and 5 uncommon animals in that time).
These, of course, are just averages and don't account for strings of particularly good or bad RNG.
I still feel like none of these options really address that common pets will STILL be around en masse. Breeding charges just = a ton of zero'd out breeders in shops etc.... Limiting stables just makes me want to change over more villagers to animal husbandry to get around that. And finally, breeding limits would still produce tons of commons, albeit at a slightly slower pace? I could still farm the "50-100" pets a day thing for ALL doges for example... which is still a ton entering the economy.
I always thought that some kind of alchemy mixing thing would be neat.... getting rid of common pets in large groups = the possibility at getting a rarer version or a brand new limited color? I don't know. Just a thought.
Whitesnowpaw statistically, you have a 1 in 20 shot of getting an uncommon color, so 100 breeding charges would actually be more than enough in most cases! of course RNG is RNG, you are going to have unlucky times, but so will everyone. (and rare is 1 in 40 animals, so you should even get yourself a few more studs out of the first stud!)