Our current problem is that we have too many pets, right? And many of them are priced at 1g or something similar, but even at the lowest price possible, no one's buying them.

This is inspired by the way they deal with economy at Flight Rising, though that is more of a central pillar to the game. This will be more small scale, an added bonus to releasing pets so you don't have them sitting in your lair for forever priced at 1g because no one will buy them but you're still too hesitant to release them.

Anyway, how about this? For every stat point a pet has total (assigned, born with, mana, etc.) with health divided by 20 & rounded up, you get 5g for releasing it into the wild. Every known carried trait along with whether it was a fabled or not would be 5x the level of the pet, and every visible would be 10x the level of the pet - that was it's more of an incentive to train the pets first instead of breeding/releasing them as hatchlings. If it were a special pet in some way - themed, exclusive, wheel, (but not a purebred - that would make things too easy) - then a flat bonus of 10,000.

So, lets say I have this girl that I wanted to release after the festival because I no longer needed a vorpa in my battle party for the contests. But, you know, it's hard to release a level 60 pet.

(71+116+81+136+80+(10,707-:- 20 rounded up))5= 5050
(can't find the divide symbol, so I'm using -:- instead.)
Since it has no known carried traits, nor any visible traits, isn't fabled, and isn't a themed or anything, it would just be left at 5,050g if I were to release it.

That isn't much for a level 60 pet, especially if you trained that high since it was a hatchling, but it's also a bit generous for people who caught them at level 58 or something. But, then again, training something from a hatching is more likely to have carried/visible traits and higher base stats than something you caught, so I suppose it could balance out a bit that way.

I believe this would get rid of all the sales for 1g, and without any of those 1g pets, people will need to start earning gold to get the pets they really want - how better to do that than selling diamonds on the exchange? - which would also bring in more real currency to Sylestia. Or, if they can't afford that, then they use the above method of leveling their pets so they get more gold for releasing them instead of just parading around one or two sets of battle parties, a handful of mission pets, and not bothering with doing anything but look at the rest.

Support!! :D

I remember talking about this in the other pet economy thread lol

Just avoided saying Flight Rising explicitly LOL

anyways, I always felt like Sylestia was supposed to be a little similar but a little different to Pokemon.
The release feature is similar to Pokemon's: there's no added benefit of releasing a pet. You just release it if you feel inclined to, or if you're running out of space, or if it's no use to you.
in this case, having the pets accumulate is a negative thing, and releasing them is a positive benefit

Flight Rising has an entire mechanic that makes their exalting feature work. It fuels their contests while giving a bottom priceline for the pets.
It also helps that lair expansion, similar to stables, requires treasure. You can only collect so many pets until you need to release to breed more.
in this case, pet accumulation is also negative, but releasing offers more positives than Pokemon

It's easy to compare these to sylestia imo because there's a breeding mechanic. All 3 games encourage development by breeding (as one way to play the game), which ultimately increases population, but offers different pros or cons for keeping the pets you no longer need.

Judging from Krin's message on his idea of adding adoptions that cycle out pets, I want to think that it's gonna be similar to Neopets and Pokemon.
Neopets (back when I played it), while it doesn't encourage breeding, it doesn't necessarily want to have a bottom line for pet purchasing. Pokemon didn't either. There is no way to sell pets, only trade them for different ones, or catch new ones.

And the admins did try to do an approach similar to flight rising. There was a single release contest, where the top 4 releasers of a certain species got an exclusive pet. There were restrictions to limit abuse, and it alleviated the prices temporarily. Having those contests as often as Flight Rising does would encourage lots of breeding for the sake of releasing, maybe even pre-hoarding. So the admins won't really say when the next release contest is, if they choose to have one, because that isn't their intended effect.

All in all, I like this idea, though through the years, I always thought scales would be the payout currency (since scales have an indirect effect on economy via scale shop items).
I wish it would happen, but I think it's likely that they won't incentivize releases (like Pokemon and Neopets), but go about it a different way. :( only time tells, I guess.



/sorry for longpost

I support this - as mentioned in the other post Flute linked. Myself and a few others spent some pretty major money and kept the lowest pet prices above 300 gold for a time but it's an unrealistic expectation to have it constantly and some people just loooove pricing 100+ pets at 1g to clog up the search instead of just releasing them themselves. There's a commentary in that thread about why this isn't remotely helpful to newbies, too, I suggest everyone read it if they currently think that pricing a pet super low is helping anyone, including themselves.

The other thing I would add is that a reward system is a great idea - but please, please don't let it be scales. We don't need a crash in scale item value as well as a crash in pet value. Small amounts of gold go a long way over time, especially with multiple releases. It would also mean selling pets for 1g would cease to be a thing as they'd be worth more released - even if it's only 19g more. I'm already meticulous about how many scale items I'm buying and parting with at a time - as if I spent my full scale hoard and put them all on the broker I could single-handedly cause chaos. I have a totally irregular number of scales compared to the average person, but I could see everyone making this many scales purely through the releases that come with breeding projects.

Plus, honestly, scales are nice and all but small amounts of gold can go towards a future goal. This is far more incentive than being able to work towards anything in the scale shop. It doesn't even have to be a large amount ala Flight Rising - but I agree that we need something to stimulate people releasing rather than hoarding, crashing pet value and us having to deal with newbies that are begging people to buy their pets/help them out gold wise because they have too many mouths to feed or not enough room in their stables at all.

This whole idea sounds amazing and I fully support it!

There could be an exclusive themed pet that can be found only via releasing. With an extremely low percentage chance of it being gotten, since it would have the possibility of being gotten all year round versus just during festivals.

Not sure how much more gold we want floating around.

The only problem I see with this is the math on the example you used. Not that your math is wrong, but that the end result (5k for a no viz no carry common pet) is significantly less than what you would get if you simply went into the zone and caught one. The green trap price for that pet is only 1k, so potentially this would make catching and releasing wild caught pets a simple way to make gold in a hurry. This would in turn devalue everything you buy in gold, as gold would then be so easy to get it would be less valuable.


I do think we need some mechanism to encourage people to get rid of extra pets, and this is an intriguing and well thought out idea for the most part. But there is a very difficult balance here, and I think this proposal as is would have unintended consequences.

@Green

Didn't think about that. I'll have to re-think the equation so at most you'll only be getting 250 gold extra or something so it isn't worth the time to go through and do that over and over and over again, but other stuff isn't too terribly undervalued (slightly undervalued is good, so it discourages releasing just for gold). It's hard to find a balance.

It is hard to find a balance. Honestly, it is often rare to trap a pet in one tra, so it doesn't necessarily have to be quite so cheap to make it attractive enough of a gamble to do, but overall more often than not insufficient to make it worth while. again, it's a delicate balance, and one that might need to be implemented first, then tweaked along the way to get the balance right. Being able to make a small amount of gold this way might be a good thing for the economy, but being able to triple or quadruple your gold by trapping commons I think should not be the goal of this.

On the other hand, I could see trapping blue star and better pets as a good incentive to battle in the zones, with a higher payout. This would also encourage more participation in the raid events, since the sylesti that generates are often at least carrying, often showing traits. Again, you would have to balance it being enough of an incentive for people to do, without being so much that it makes the generation of gold lopsided. This is still a supply and demand economy.

This all would probably work better too, if all the traps were tradeable, but that is another question entirely, lol.

Supporting this 100%