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 agree with koben and OkamiWhitewings - the thing to do is give people an incentive to release animals.
That's what I was getting at with my idea that if you release an animal, there should be a very small probability of it attracting a "better" animal that you catch when you release it.
Functionally, that would be the equivalent of breeding it one last time, except you don't get to keep the parent or child unless the child is better than the parent.
With the breeding probabilities as they are, this wouldn't increase the number of higher scarcity colors significantly (since you'd get more if you kept the animal and bred it... but it's a pain keeping the common animals), but it would give people an incentive to release animals rather than hoarding them, selling them to the NPCs, or putting them under the tree.
This wouldn't require a lot of new game infrastructure, like new items or new careers, and would also justify adding something like a stable limit.
So there's several issues I have with these but I have some alternative options if anyone's interested.
1) breeding charges. the idea of having a pet that can only breed so many times is stressful, especially to individuals with rare and super rare pets who want to get as many rare and super rare pets as they can and may end up expending all the charges on them and still have a good chance of not getting a single one. like others have mentioned it would also flood the markets with these chargeless pets, as well as the giving tree. it would be one thing if pets of that rarity level had a much higher chance of producing pets of the same rarity level, however that would also lower the price of said species as well.
what about instead altering it so that all pets, female and male, have a breeding cooldown, and that the cooldowns last longer. the longer the cooldowns, the less breeding that can occur. common animals have the fastest cooldowns, while super rare have the longest.
there could also be the possibility of a breeding failure, similar to the domestication or catching failure in the animal husbandry. To make things a bit fairer, common animals would have a higher chance to fail in breeding, about 50/50. The higher the rarity, the less likely they would be to fail in breeding.
2) considering the vast amount of pets that exist and the fact that more animals will exist overtime, it may be best to keep stable unlimited or to at least have a very large limit on them, far bigger than the 100 on herbalists. One can easily just say to just swap the animals out when you're finished breeding, but if you have 100+ animals that can be a nightmare.
I think a better option would be to make it work similarly to houses, where you not only have to make the stable, you also have to pay for the extra slot. 1000 for the first one and an extra 1000 for everything else. This does not have to be for all stables placed down: like maybe the first 10-50 stables are free to place, but then afterwards you have to pay. It becomes an extra money sink for players who want something extra to do, but also gives players the extra stables they want.
3) This one I pretty much agree with, just not sure about the daily thing. While I do agree that breeding limits are needed, wouldn't hourly limits work pretty well as well? They're less strict yes, but it also requires you to check back into the game every hour on the hour if you want to keep doing it, just like with most of the other tasks in the game. If its hourly I would suggest the 50-100 breedings, if its daily I would go 200 at least.
-I don't believe potions of any kind should be required to breed animals ever. I would just give up on Animal Husbandry for good. I wouldn't mind new potions in regard to animal husbandry like potions that increase the odds for rarer species when breeding or even change your pet's species, but nothing that makes you need them for breeding.
Besides these main things there are a few things I'd like to see:
-Ok not really interested in seeing this, but someone's gotta throw it out: Butcher Career. It would get rid of a lot of the animals in circulation. Plus it would mean a new way to collect materials and lots of people want to cook on here anyway... No? Yeah I'm not into it either. I guess we can just toss them into the Alchemist's cauldron instead.
-A Pet Shelter. Or we could call it something else like a Pet Sanctuary, Pet Kennel... Pet Zoo, lol. But either way, similar to others it would work like a combination shop/donation area. You can choose to have you pets released so that no one can ever get it again for points or you can give it up for donation, allowing others to pick it up and take it home. The rarer the pet, the more points you earn, which might make releasing it into the wild a little more tempting. The points you earn can be used to buy stuff in the shop. As an extra bonus there's days where certain species will give you more points than others when releasing them because of some issue in the environment. We can even implement some other stuff revolving around the pet shelter: some days the shelter might ask for medicine because they don't have enough to tend to all the sick pets. Or they'll have a furcash donation drive to keep the shelter going. Just little events that will pop up from time to time that give you extra points as well as more stuff.
-Villagers having more than one pet? Like maybe they have to do something before they can unlock an extra pet but maybe that can be something to consider?
-Expansion of the Pet Explorer Career (unless this has already been said I haven't read everything on here) Pets that have explored enough can go for more specific items? (certain pets can only explore certain areas? for example only oceandome pets can actually explore in Oceandome? that way you'll be encouraged to collect different pets and domesticate them.)
-Explorers and Warriors have extra pet slots on their career page. When given domesticated pets, Explorers will find more stuff while exploring. Warriors will be able to do more damage, and sometimes the pets will take damage in exchange for the Warriors (pets run away after taking hits?).
These sound like good ideas, but I'm not sure which is best.
After sleeping over it I think the only real good solution would be to have some way to remove the animals from the system entirely, so either a new career or a new site feature that acts as bin for all the unused animals, along with raising their resell price (it's seriously too low right now).
Any of the three options (not even considering the potions as an option) you gave doesn't stop overpopulation from happening, so it'll only end up making the game even less fun, especially for those that stick around just to collect pets. I've already been releasing tons of newly bred pets for the past 2-3 months because selling them in the market or from the inventory is more trouble than anything, so the only real solution would be to have an alternative method.
The new career could be tied to bringing the animals back to their natural habitats (sort of repopulation program) and you'd have the villager setting on a journey to bring a certain amount back to where they belong (alternatively, it could just go and sell them to far away villages), then bring back stuff it finds on said journey (money and items) depending on the quantity and rarity of said animals. I suggest making them able to bring more than a single animal with them (maybe with the limit of them being the same species) at the time, so that it doesn't get annoying. The journey might change in lenght depending on where the animal has to be brought to and on experience (doing the same path over and over will become easier and quicker), plus various % could be changed also by the items you equip your villager with (creating ties with other careers).
In general is a much better option that should make everyone happier.
I think option #1 would just result in a bunch of unbreedable common pets flooding the market.
Option #2 could help some, but I think players would find a work-around for it
Option #3 could work, but again there would still be a bunch of unwanted pets in the market/giving tree.
Ok, I just had a thought. What if you created a new NPC for each village. An Ecologist. They could take the unwanted pets and repopulate the 'wild pets' giving an FC reward that increases with the pet rarity and color rarity. The Ecologist could also take some of those extra plants or seeds that the Explorers find and do the same with them.
I personally like ideas #1 ,#2 and #3 but I would like to see an increase probability of the colors. I would like to see the increase specially when you breed 2 of the same rarity.
I also like @DunkTheBuscuit idea too of environmental repopulation.
i think a better thing to do is add more ways to REMOVE animals form the /system/(not just passing them around) instead of just limiting the flow in.
all in all i think option 3 ()i vote for 100 breedings), and a modified version of 1 would work
Modified #1: a /Weekly/ each MALE only breeding charge, these charges reset every Friday. - say 10 charges
(also a male weekly charge would actually give male pets a small value boost cause one would need to get more males to match the new limit)
would be a good limitation IF enough sinks get added
And then also maybe a very large account breeding restriction of like 300 breedings per day.
Here's one of those 4am random ass ideas that no one is going to see, but bear with me.
What if Breeding Charges were Daily? And common critters had more breeding charges and rarer critters had fewer charges, but the odds of receiving a rarer pet were upped just a tiny bit like 1%? Something as common as a birb could have some 100 charges, if male, per day and the kitsune bun could have 60 and the emerald bun could have 30 and the forest bun could have 15, and this could be scaled for the even rarer pets like the contest prizes of Chihuahuas who would have say 40 for the common and 20 for the uncommon and 10 for the rare and 5 for the super rare...
Plus a stable limit, but also be able to sell some of those excessive pets back to the site for a price. maybe up the amount of FD you can get for selling one of those FD pets back to the server a bit from the same 10 that everything else gets. Very unfortunately the sell back price becomes the usual price to sell things in the market place for, but if the common animals are worth a bit more to sell back to the server, say 50 from 10, then people would gladly sell them to the server. Yes people will be selling a lot of mini pets back and getting a lot of money back, but that's not the part that ends up broken for the system, it's the lack of being able to dump the mini pets for a decent profit for the work done to anywhere for those common monstrosities.