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 would personally vote for a combo of #2 and #3. These seem reasonable and I've been kind of surprised #3 wasn't implemented already considering the limits on collecting and other professions.
#1 would be so absolutely frustrating that I'd likely stop breeding altogether if it was implemented on non-prize animals where it makes sense to keep the population very low. When breeding for rare colors, having a finite amount of time to beat the odds would be maddening and nerve-wracking considering how low the chances are already.
My vote would be #3
Animal Breeding is the one thing that kept me interested in FV in the first place, at least for a while. And then it was the thing that brought me back.
Probably I will always be just a casual player on FV. Breeding charges, especially with the way breeding works right now, would make me loose interest again at all.
*Breeding as it works right now: I bred two Brown Rays, and thought, since both parents were brown, the offspring would be brown too. That is how I always understood it. But then I learnt I misunderstood.
Now, if they had only a few breeding charges, and all of them resulted in lower-rarity-colored offspring again, and I needed to start over again completely, it would just tire and annoy me to start over again and again from step one.
I could definitely deal with daily breeding limits, however.
I like the Breeding Potion requirement idea, since breeding potions are my main moneymaker right now, haha.
Yes, Calixita brings up a great point--part of why it's such a pain and WHY people breed so many animals in the first place is because of the percentages.
There is less than a 10% chance to get anything that isn't Common. Even with Rare and Super Rare pets, it's still only 5% to even get an Uncommon. Less commons would be thrown away like this if the percentage wasn't 1/200 to even get a Super Rare because people wouldn't feel the need to have to be breeding several hundred pets.
Any limits to how many pets can breed a day or with charges just makes it all more frustrating and as I mentioned before, the market would be filled with pets without charges which is even worse than the current situation.
I like a combination of #1 and #2.
While it does target one of the key issues of animals not being consumed by anything other than the occasional quest and one-time collector items, I don't think #1 would be extremely effective at stemming the flow of common animals. However, it does keep value in uncommon and rarer colored "stud" animals, and adds some value to uncommon females due to their longer breeding lifespans. If coupled with the introduction of a "Breeding Charges Potion" to mitigate the occasional string of terrible RNG causing a player to lose all of their valuable studs.
#2 is sensible, and forces players who want to focus on Animal Husbandry dedicating multiple villagers to it, again reinforcing the idea put into play with the Worker system that people should be specializing their villages to some degree. With the long cooldowns on breeding comparative to the 24-hour cooldown on switching Worker status, it is possible to rotate a number of villagers around a single Worker slot, but that requires a large investment in getting all of those excess villagers in the first place.
I don't think #3 targets the core issues that created the problem, but I think it could remain on the table as an option if #2 doesn't prove to be effective at forcing specialization.
But the more I think about it, the more I think some of the problem (and player frustration) comes from the lack of depth; Suceeding at AH is all about RNG, so you just get more stables and more animals so that the RNG works in your favor. After some thought and some of the discussion in the thread I started in Idea Development, I think what would really help is giving the career a little more depth. Allowing other careers to craft items to improve individual stables or animals increases interactivity, helps people feel less like they have to fight against RNG with huge numbers of animals, and facilitates focusing on a favorite set of animals and making them really matter, instead of dealing with hordes of useless fodder animals. Combined with a low stable limit, players are encouraged to invest in each breeding, instead of in more chances to breed.
Alternatively, if the goal is to get players to focus on a small set of animals, perhaps a secondary "mastery" could be introduced for breeding, increasing the chance of rare animals by a few percentage points through some kind of interaction that isn't merely breeding that species en-masse (perhaps by having the villager interact with an animal in their stables once per day).
Not going to lie, I immediately read the part about breeding potions and went into a money-making mindset (being from QP). As others have said, breeding potions have remained stable in value so far, compared to other recipes. Modifying them, even to make it easier would still give QP a better leg up as far as monopolies go as well as profit. However, if you introduce a new breeding potion (an addition to the current breeding potion), a completely different item that EVERYONE can have access to making, I don't see that as being unfair.
As popularly stated, I don't like option 1. But, I'm okay with 2 and 3 (especially 3). There may even be some room for a different kind of limit like say; only species outside of your village's species are limited. Those inside, stay unlimited OR have increased limits to those outside of town.... etc... however the site would implement that.
while I would be happy with any of the presented methods (though... admittedly I wouldn't be super stoked about the breeding potion one), 2 and 3 work in a way that makes getting into animal husbandry less daunting for a new player. At the same time, it puts a cap on the players overbreeding (....I will also admit that I think a 50 stable limit is a bit low, but I also understand it would greatly help with the overall goal in mind).
I would be VERY interested in seeing how #1 would play out in the grand scheme of things though. I don't think the month left in beta is enough to get a big enough picture of how it would impact AH in the long run.
#2 works to deter harems in the sense that you don't have the ROOM for them. but it would still allow users to shuffle animals from their inventory/storage/stall etc to breed more than 50. if anything, it just makes things more of a pain, which will be enough to stop some users from breeding so much, but certainly not all.
#3 is definitely a harder cap than #2. When paired with #2, you basically have the set up for herbalism, which I enjoy! #2 still encourages users to set several villagers as AH (assuming a 50 stable cap), rather than my current set up of having 1200 stables on one villager.
However, even these two working together do nothing to force a player to release a harem or seek new studs over time. Once you have what you need, you are good to go forever for that animal. #1 is definitely the most interesting gameplay change because it requires users to constantly buy both common and rare animals to have the greatest chances of success!
It's not necessarily going to 100% solve the giving tree flooded with commons problem though, because eventually the giving tree will be filled with animals with no breeding charges left, but at least at that point they really did serve their purpose and are probably ready to just be sold back via the inventory feature.
Number two would probably be the least effective of the three. Especially with the new mass management system put in, it'd be trivial to just shuffle animals through those fifty stables. I think the only limit that would put on breeders is reduce their storage slots, and that can be fixed by buying slots.
Number one is a great idea, and would giving a boost in value to male animals especially, since you'd no longer be relying on a single male to breed a harem of females.
Not too sure about number three. It's pretty easy to burn through a hundred breedings even with only one or two species to focus on, but it is a nice idea to encourage people to focus on a few animals instead of ALL THE ANIMALS EVERYWHERE.
Maybe put a breed cooldown on the males, too? Even if it's something short like one or two days. Real animals can't breed into perpetuity; they have to "reload" after a while, too.
(((#3 is still my favourite option but Imagine trying to hunt for a shiny Pokemon and only being allowed 100 random encounters or hatched eggs per day lmao XD Maybe we need to do what Pokemon Go does and grind the excess into candy...)))
I feel like #1 and 2 are good ideas! limiting the number of animals you can breed in a day would be confusing for me personally, since i would still have to manage when my animals were ready to breed as well. I already don't have a lot of stables for my AH villagers, and i think that's part of why i haven't been able to mass produce quite as much as some others. I also feel like breeding charges would be useful, so male animals wouldn't be as disposable as they are currently, and females wouldn't be kept in ever growing harems. My only question for #1 is: what would happen to an animal that runs out of breeding charges? does it just disappear or can you choose to release it or keep it in your menagerie for looks?