I support this idea, but I don't think it'll do much more than discourage beginning users from buying a bunch of pets they won't use. Other than that, you can't fight the laws of economics.

When I first joined, I tried pricing pets at what I thought they were worth based on their colors and traits, but they didn't move. They weren't ugly and they had vis, but users still didn't want them. Apparently, 1k per vis was unreasonable, and I could either release my pets and gain nothing or drop the prices drastically and maybe break even on the cost of feeding them. Expecting users in general to forgo potential profits (or, in most cases, making up the cost of stable upkeep) is unrealistic at best, especially if they're new to the community. There's no incentive for doing it, and manually releasing multiple pets takes the same amount of effort as setting them up for sale.

Speaking as buyer, when I'm looking for a pet, I'm either looking for a specific trait to add to the breeding pool for a project or I want it because it looks cool and has high enough stats that I would use it for battling. Most pets as they're used on this site are merely base materials for projects, so the value isn't in the pet itself but the dyes and mutators used to customize it. Hence, average pet values are in the toilet and lesser pet dyes run from 80k-120k on the broker.

The pets being sold in the auction forum, however, still have high value because they're finished projects. Again, speaking as a buyer, if I had the choice between owning a lovely finished project pet or owning some random 6-vis with washed-out colors and clashing mutations that I found using advanced search, there is no contest. I'd shell out 100k for a project pet before I'd spend 1g on an ugly pet just because omg 6-vis.

An automatic base price of 1k sounds good, but how long before the community determines that 1k is too low for certain pets? It could be argued that a 6-vis anything is still vastly underpriced at 1k, but it'll happen for the same reason that 6-vis at 1g happens now. And then what? The only pets for sale are 6-vis at 1k? 1k isn't hard to earn at all, even as a beginner. 1k is the price of a lesser trap. If you're a newbie looking for pets, why bother catching wilds when you can buy a 6-vis for the same price?

That being said, that doesn't mean that pet values can't be increased. Values increase with an increase in demand, and the only way to increase demand is to change the rules of breeding. If more pets are actually needed to finish a project, people will buy more of them to increase their gene pool. Have pets become sterile after a certain percentage of inbreeding (50% maybe?) and make it so that relatives require another degree of separation in order to breed. First cousins can't breed, aunts/uncles and nieces/nephews can't breed, grandparents and grandchildren can't breed. That way, somebody couldn't theoretically just fire off another 6-vis from a single bought pet after only 2 generations.

so what I got from the first post is:
-minimum price for setting up pets on public sale is 1000g
-barring anyone to set public sales of 1g-999g
-the exception is adding a User ID to each sale, which lets someone set a public sale at the minimum of 1g

And if the coding for this isn't that tough, I'd totally like it.

Alternatively, plopping my suggestions here because the ideas popped in my head:

1. Bringing back the whole release-for-scales idea:
-add a random generator that gives random number of scales (between 1-30 scales?) when releasing a pet
-it would work like:
1. player released this pet!
2. player gets 15 scales for releasing this pet to the wild!
-this does make the minimum floor "shaky" and tricky...but it gives way for players to buy scale shop items, which can be sold later on (as dyes, mutators, nullification philters, and so on are lucrative)
-have a tiny tutorial on what can be done with scales (which is probably published somewhere on site by a user)

2. Just having the system return 1k (or a random number between 1-1000g) per pet released:
-drawback is that it's the reverse of a gold sink, and gives incentive to have more pets to release (whereas now, there's no reward to releasing pets)
-1k or less isn't really a lot of gold
-just tack a generator of gold to the release feature:
1. player released this pet!
2. player gets 20 gold for releasing this pet to the wild!

I can honestly say it's just the bias in me that's been playing another game where they give incentive to "releasing" pets that likes this lol.
But I really am a fan of receiving back compensation (however big or small it is) for releasing pets, and doing so does provide a floor to build on.

Hi, newbie here.

Just wanted to say that I think this all is a great idea, seeing as it's already hard not to just go onto the market and snatch up as many pets as I want because it's so easy.
I'll come back when I have a little more time and try to sum up everything that's being said here for anyone who wants to skim through to get the gist of it- but I've seen from experience (in other games,) prices plummeting as pets got cheaper and cheaper because of an overabundance. It was not pretty.

So, yes, I'll be back in a little bit to help sort this out. Till then.

Just going to say: I came in here the first time expecting to be like 'omg, no' and then... was pleasantly surprised lol. I'm totally in support of this idea. Something that gives pets some kind of decent value! (I'd even agree that the base could be higher, something like 2k or 3k, or even 5k.)

I'd also be happy with getting that scale dealer, or even a small gold compensation in return for releasing (releasing is so tedious, especially when you're breeding toward project goals >.< Would be nice to even get one scale, like nurturing, or 20 gold...)

Barring any of this... maybe some kind of leader board that gives a prize at the end of the month for releasing the most of a species? Nothing huge like a themed pet. Just something like a greater pet dye, or a greater mutator? (I know, this could be a dangerous one as it got super crazy during the fest where we had a release board.... but for a while, the lowest price for a lot of species raised to 30k or more, and that was kind of nice to see >>)

Anyway, my two cents lol.

Apropos of nothing else in this thread, I would love a mass-release feature; I usually just shunt stuff I don't want into one of my holding stables because it's too much of a bother to go through and release everything.

I cannot support any forced base price for pets, I'm sorry.

I don't want to be told what my pets should be worth/should sell for by anyone. The idea of having that freedom taken away bothered me enough to post my opinion.

@Flute, just wanted to point out the suggestion is as an Until then kind of deally or an 'and' sort of thing, as far as I know the Release for Scale idea didn't get nixed, it just got mentioned that it won't happen until the Sylestia revamp is done, so it may be kind of low on the list of upcoming features.

It's more a suggestion that might not take as much coding, hopefully, since the Release for Scales thing apparently takes a fair bit of coding so it's being pushed back til the new system is in place last I heard it mentioned.

I do have to say that I know which other site you speak of, and they do have the fortune to have their pets move pretty frequently at the 'floor' price because of that feature. Especially certain things like pets with X (Gene/Mutation) get released for X more today type feature going on over there.

@SparklingGanymede, I recognize this in itself will not solve the entire economy situation, because yes, we do have a problem where there isn't demand for pets. I think the Scales for Release thing will do more towards that in the eventual, and that's the admin's listed solution for the future. Just it can't be done right away. This really is mostly the curb-the-newbie-flooding bandaid suggestion for the time being in many ways. :)

I personally wouldn't mind seeing pregnancy times increased, either, as I feel every 3 days is quite short, and even the time for Fabled isn't terribly long.

@Mikazukichan, A smaller leaderboard, with mid-sized prizes, is an interesting idea. I think that could be something pretty cool to test out as well. :)

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=30117&page=2#16 Author: Absoluteinsanity Time Posted: 10/28/2015 at 5:50 AM I cannot support any forced base price for pets, I'm sorry. I don't want to be told what my pets should be worth/should sell for by anyone. The idea of having that freedom taken away bothered me enough to post my opinion.

I quite agree with this... I am sorry, but I don't think setting a "minimum price" is going to help at all, except maybe on the issue of newbies picking up too many pets and not being able to feed them. But then, they can be taught to release those pets as well, no? Why is it only older players that have the onus to do that?


As far as "gifting" for one gold, that has always bugged me. A gift should be free to the one you gift to, it shouldn't require even ONE measly gold. Whether it's pets or avatar items or whatever, a gift should be a gift, no gold required.


The economy here is a supply and demand economy. If there is more supply and not enough demand, prices will plummet. Setting a base price but leaving it open for "gifts" to be 1 gold only makes it so we'll get more newbies begging in chat or possibly in the forums for "free" one gold pets. I'd really rather not see more of that, thank you all the same. If you want to raise prices to something more reasonable, you have to drop the supply somehow, or increase the demand. The NPC that would buy back pets would work both of these over time, but there would still end up being a kind of artificial floor because of it. The Pound idea frankly to me sounds like a red herring. I don't think it will help the economy at all, though I don't think it will hurt it either. Over time though, the pound will fill up with unwanted pets. Unless Krin codes into it some way of dropping pets that aren't picked up after a week or something, the pound is just going to end up full of undesirables with a few nicer pets that rarely are seen.

I will say though, I would definitely support any pet going into the pound getting automatically sterilized. I think that makes more sense than the suggestions that you can only get one or two or whatever per certain number of days. I would also say that it should be set that if you drop off pet X, you can't come back and pick up that same pet. Once it's in the pound, someone else has to pick it up. I also think you should only be able to drop off one pet at a time, and a time limit placed on when you can drop off another, maybe an hour or a day, whatever. The last thing a working pound needs is an auto-drop off where you can dump 100 pets at a time and flood the poor thing with your breeding extras.


But to really truly address the glut of pets on the market, what really needs to be done is address how blinking easy it is to breed 500 pets in an hour. I have seen hatcheries with 30, 40, even 50 pages of eggs to adolescents. No one has that many stables to house an ongoing output like that. Making the breeding time longer may help with that, but it would only slow the problem. There is one way that breeders (myself included) will hate, but that would actually help slow the glut- make it so that instead of always getting an egg when you breed, that there is a 50/50 chance the egg won't be produced, and maybe even less of a chance with the legendaries. If you suddenly can't produce an egg with each female in your stable every time you breed, for one thing the females you have will be more valuable, so you will be less likely to want to sell them, and you won't be producing tens of thousands of eggs a month "just 'cause".

As much as I hate to say it, if the NPC that would be the best option isn't coming any time soon, we NEED something like this before the pet economy gets any worse.