I am a real life animal lover as well, have four cats, one of whom constantly complains I am starving him (hint: I'm not) and have had others in the past. However, I realize that the online pets are not real, and people not feeding their online pets have no correlation to them not feeding real pets.
That is why I feel that there doesn't need to be any sort of measure to try to force players to feed online pets.
Ideas about Items that could be used as 'releasing incentives'
Themed pet Eggs - One idea that I personally would love is that you could get a retired theme, but think, now that I have actually experienced one, that it would be detrimental to Black Friday, where you can get retired themes through the wheel. So instead, unique themes to releasing. Perhaps these themes can cycle, so we could have general 'seasonal' ones, that have nothing to do with the fests or anything like that. We could also have ones that will stay in year round, and are just general 'sylestian themed' (would anyone else like themes based upon NPC sylestis?). IE, Krin/Fai give some sort of sylestian image or imagery (sort of like was done for the cave themes) and players must come up with themes based upon that particular image.
Random Dye - There could be two/three versions of this. First would be one that would just randomly dye a pet, all colors slots. You could get some very weird combos, but then again, perhaps you would hit upon a combo that simply works. (sort of like endlessly rerolling a wild pet). Next would be one that would randomly dye a color slot you chose. So if you happen to like all but say one color, but you don't know what color would look best there, you can dye that color and it would just randomly pick one. Third, and I don't know whether this would be worth coding or not, is a dye that would randomly pick one color slot to dye, and then randomly choose a color.
Random Trait Shuffler - Somewhat like the themed disruptors, this one would take a pet and randomly shuffle the traits. It could be used on any unbred pet that is 6 visible. (or just any unbred - unthemed pet though I think six vis is best). This would be fun for players like me who like buying random six visible pets and dying them. Sometimes I would love to have a specific trait (I just saw Galaxy Sprite for Aurls today and fell in love. Sadly one one person has bred and is selling six vis aurls with galaxy sprite) and this would help me get it, at the cost of the other traits would be shuffled and might be ones I dislike. There are also times when I don't want a specific trait ,and every pet I find has it (tri tails on Nixis.... I don't mind the trait, I just would like the challenge of working with a different trait every once in a while :D) Naturally it wouldn't include any restricted traits, and if a pet with restricted traits is shuffled, they end up losing those traits (I don't know how many six vis pets are out there that have restricted traits, or are a restricted theme, so I don't know if this is an issue or not)
Would 'Joke' items be a draw? I am thinking of something that would temporarily say invert your pet, so the line art is bright etc... Perhaps even items that can be used on other player pets (that can be undone by said player and wouldn't actually affect anything about the pet, including breeding). Mainly affecting one trait or the entire pet. So like the inverter above, perhaps there could be a 'Qitari Rainbow Love' potion that would give the pet rainbow scales and rainbow mane, because everyone loves those two traits (I am being sarcastic). I just am not sure they are a good idea because I could see them being used to harass people or people who have them used on their pets getting upset, even if they could easily hit a button to revert the pet back to normal (sort of like the themed reversion button, but obviously different and in a different place to prevent accidents with people who have dyed their pets and don't want to revert to the themes original colors) and it doesn't affect anything else. (the effects would also only last say an hour or at most a day)
Perhaps one use specialty items. I am thinking of genetic testers, scanners and infertility potions. I would be afraid that this might cut into diamond sales, if there were a semi-reliable way to obtain one use versions of these items.
As I have said in the past, I don't think Avvie items are a good choice for something like this, because my idea is to try to prevent a flood of useless items (and every player only needs one instance of any avvie item) But maybe if they were either rare, or in a shop type feature where players could choose to buy them or not, it wouldn't be too bad.
Anything else? Perhaps, though this might be counter to the staff's vision of the LG, bundles of LG materials? If so, they should be very expensive (ie require a lot of pets being released) and the cost should scale depending on the item. |
