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.
All of the options have their good points, but given the worker limit enacted in the last site update, I think it would be better to avoid stable limits. That way, a player can still invest workers in animal husbandry while not dealing a serious blow to the other professions. This is of course assuming that a player would desire to be mostly self-sustained.
I feel that account daily breeding limits and individual creatures' breeding charges are the better route to go. I'd say go no fewer than five breeding charges, even for common and uncommon animals. And worst case scenario, the amount of breeding charges can be lowered in a different update.
I like the potion idea but I agree that the ingredients would need to be more accessible to all villages.
Limiting stables won't do much. Many people already use storage and inventory for all their breeding stock.
None of these are really appealing to me since AH is basically the only thing I focus on in this game and I don't want the career to be restricted but if I had to choose, I'd go for breeding limits/day or week or whatever. I absolutely do not want number one. I feel like people would just mass dump pets once they're useless for breeding, and I don't like the idea of having to calculate which pets to breed this time and which pets to save, etc. Too much math for a game I prefer to relax with.
Additionally, my vote is for #2, limiting the amount of stables each villager can have. With the painfully low chance to breed uncommon or higher color pets, limiting the number of times each pet or user can breed would just make the process much more painful and tedious.
Looking again at your options I want to point out 2 and 3 don't solve common/uncommon animals having almost no value. If you can only have so many stables/breed so many animals that means you only have a limited amount of space/use for so many breeders meaning once you reach that small cap the commons/uncommons are utterly useless. Sure people are breeding less of them, but they are also using less of them. Meanwhile as I mentioned before option 1 just changes useless animals to those who have used their breeding charges. I really think you guys are looking from this from the wrong angle.
I dislike the breeding potion idea greatly to be honest, they are expensive and an QP exclusive potion...
Idea 1, 2 and 3 are good ideas though, they can actually help with the overpopulation situation without making the whole Animal Husbandry career unnecessarily difficult.
Firstly and foremostly; Thank you so much for asking all of us about this before just putting in a change! It means a lot to me and other users here!
I think Stable limits is a good way to still be able to breed, but have it be less so.
But honestly I think that the percentages for some colors should be tweaked a little bit. Like when breeding higher colors together a better chance of getting a higher color is added. Also, I propose perhaps also making pet sell-back prices based on both color AND species rarity; instead of just species rarity as it currently is. So rarer species would sell back more that common species and rarer colors within a species would sell back for more than the common colors. Thank you for your time! ^ w ^
If #1 by some crazy Dr. Strange method ends up the winning course, I do hope you finally make animals stackable, because it's hard enough juggling inventory during breeding as is. Someone on the forums even said how it could be done to stack items that are currently unstackable (I wouldn't know what lines of code that would be).
Also... why does everything always have to be profitable? I breed for fun, because I want a full menagerie, not because I wanna make a fortune in this job. And if, like herbs for example, Animals had another purpose, the flooding would be easily remedied. Even if it's something crazy like "Deliver 100 Black Wuff to make X happen". It's because the animals have nowhere to go that this has become a problem. You don't see this with any other item generated on site because they all have a purpose that uses them up.
Breeding charges would just be more rage inducing. They're acceptable on contest critters because those are meant to feel special and rewarding.
A mixture of 2 and 3, and also another item sink in order to trade pets (also bringing back inventory sell for limited pets!) for points/tokens that can maybe be used to trade for rarer pets.
It would be like this: Trading a common pet gives you 1 point, and uncommon is 5 points, a limited is 10 (they're basically flooding the market), a rare is 25, and a super rare is 50. Starting at 100 points are limited pets that go up in value at a max of 10 000 points. This gives incentive to take pets off the market, and can be further aided by a mass trade in feature. We saw a small boost from the similar quest feature, but even implementing this w/out prizes and bringing back limited hoard sell would definitely help.
If you do implement number 1, I think it should only apply to "limited" pets, as it corresponds with the name. I would separate the value of limited (prize and referral pets) and create a new value for Furdollar pets which would retain regular breeding. Regular limited pets could have a max of say 20 breedings, keeping value high for them.
Also just read the breeding potion thing, it would be kinda unfair to the villages that aren't (QP i think??) maybe if you allow it to be unique/special to each village? (Like 100 Common plant, 50 uncommon, 10 Rare, 5 super rare but it doesn't matter the village, like wood...)