As with everything, we will monitor and make adjustments as needed.

Additionally, if you haven't heard yet, we do plan on adding a method of selling unwanted pets to an NPC vendor in cities. This will help to set a baseline price for pets and make catching pets and breeding pets a viable means of earning gold.

We have been making and are planning to make a lot of changes to try and balance out some economical issues that we are unhappy with 8 months in and the new rarity/trap system is part of that.

But as I said, we always appreciate the feedback and monitor stuff like this. We don't want to make a knee-jerk decision so we'll see how things go and adjust if needed.

It heartens me that you have taken the time to read my not-quite-complaint and acknowledge it. I would very much like to see the economy balanced, and that will obviously take time.

((I still totally miss seeing pets with visible traits in my travels, but you know. I'm patient.))

I just want to add to this that I REALLY HATE the new genotype and rarity system as well ( I love the new way to explore though). The exponential increase in difficulty of simply finding anything I would be interested in catching makes me not even want to explore in this zone so much, since I only view it right now as a boring, grinding time sink. The main reason I explore a zone is to find interesting looking pets with traits that I currently don't have (or just seriously pretty ones with 1 vis 1 carry that I can mutate so that they're more viable for breeding purposes), but with this new set up, the probability of me finding a vis with a newly released trait are so astronomically unlikely that it removes the enjoyment of the hunt. Even for the new species, I'm not enjoying hunting them since the probability of actually (miracle of miracles) finding anything I would be interested in spending expensive traps on catching is so negligible that it hardly seems worth the investment. And if this update remains during the release of new traits, then I'm just tossing in the towel on finding anything with a new trait now, since it will take about 350 hours to find one (assuming equivalent rarity of species, 13 species, roughly 18 traits per species, and a rare sylestie being generated every 1.5 hours). That means that if you dedicate a fifth of your day to grinding, you'll probably find what you're looking for in 2 months (if you play about 2-3 hours a day, this will take you about half a year), just to find a single 1 vis pet with a particular trait. I can't comment on the rarity of epics since I have yet to locate one with the new system.

In my opinion as a breeder who normally prefers using captured pets to generated ones (since I like the pleasant surprises I get with randomly found pets), this puts me in a real bind. I understand that you want to find a way to decrease our gold, but, if anything, this current system is going to INCREASE the amount of gold in a grinders coffers. As the grinder spends hours searching for a single trait, she will accumulate armor, which she can sell at a profit, even if she just uses the inventory sell, and gold, which could be gathered from merely battling a gazillion commons/uncommons that she has next to no reason to catch. Not to mention all the gold and armor she will accumulate from opening chests/crates. If too much gold is the problem, this is going to exacerbate rather than solve that.

If you thought that making this traits so difficult to obtain would increase pet prices, yes, they probably will, because users will be able to sell previously less desirable pets for a song. However, all that does is change who has the money- ultimately it will do nothing to decrease the problem you observe as users having too much gold. I know what I spend the most gold on are specific pet designs that I find pleasing, artwork, traps for catching rares/epics, and feeding all my stables. Dear Lord, do I spend a lot of gold feeding my stables. If you want to decrease gold in our coffers, make starving pets unable to breed. Or make it take more traps to catch a pet (but decrease the probability of running away as more traps are used. For example, a pet will have a higher probability of running away after 1 trap than it will after 5 traps). If you increased the probability of epics, even if it's just 1/2 a day a week, the gold will just pass right through our grabby little hands as we use it all on strong snares to catch the difficult to obtain epics. With this method, you allow us to see our carrot and lyse our gold stores trying to obtain it without the gold increase that grinding inevitably results in. Right now, I see no carrot and no necessity to spend any of my gold .

@Bella1988,

The gold sink part of the traps refers to how we will now have scaling traps in each region. Atm, a Lesser Trap costs the same gold at lvl 0 as it does at lvl 250. If we want it to be affordable to new players, it's chump change to those who have amassed lots of money.

So we're changing traps to be level based so that we can increases their costs through each region and have a gold sink that way.


The rarity change was for two main reasons. One, we needed a new system b/c the current one could not function with how we wanted to change mob spawns. The second was b/c we felt that it's too easy to get double or triple visible pets from the wild currently. While yes, you can't choose the colors (unless you use dyes which many users do), the genotype points equate to the same as enhanced generated pets.

Atm, you can probably find a few dozen double visible wild pets in the dungeon of the forsaken before you find an enhanced essence. That is not balanced to us.

So part of the reasoning for the new system was to address that. And like I said, we are paying attention and will watch it over the next few days and make adjustments if we feel that we reduced the amount by too much.

The genotype point spread is set in stone. It also will be meaningless anyway once the new trap system is implemented because we'll be removing the titles of "uncommon", "rare", "epic", etc. All pets will just be pets with varying amounts of genotype points.

But we may increase the frequency of finding pets with more genotype points.

I hope that helps to make our decision thus far more clear and thank you for the feedback.

Mmhm, okay, then, if I understand correctly, the change with the genotype points is more about making enhanced essences more special rather than anything to do with the amount of gold users have. Well, all I can say then is that is is most certainly going to accomplish that!

If the frequency increases, that will definitely make me less antagonistic about the change in genotype points.

Will the pets sold to NPC's be available to other players for adoption? If so will it cost gold to adopt them? Im worried about this system. On a previous adoptable site I played, mywarriorcats (doesn't count as advertising as it no longer works well X3), the creator put in a pound that, at first, gave players a lot of gold then put them up for adoption for more gold (needless to say, they never got adopted because it just wasn't worth it) and a lot of baby pets were simply released after a week of being there. A LOT of people took advantage of this system and bred pets simply to abandon them for gold. This won't happen here will it? I hope not it REALLY saddened me how over-crowded the pound was on that site (the creator eventually fixed this and made it so you don't get as much gold for pounding pets but still) because of this system. I just wanted to say something and know how selling pets to NPCs for gold will work.

I'm glad you'll be looking at this. Honestly, I'm starting to feel miserable looking for new species pets that I'd consider catching. The initial excitement of the day has sort of just drained away. I think it might be in part that it's coupled with a new release. I do understand not wanting to make knee jerk reactions and the need to balance the economy though. I could also just be taking things too seriously.

Has the run away chance been increased?

I have an issue, and I'm not sure if it's been discussed (or even encountered) I've been going through the Sweet Blossom Orchard missions and I've gotten stuck on the "collect saphryn shadows" section. I've wandered around everywhere I can go, but I can't / encounter any of them. I know the farmer said they were flowers but are they obtained when battling or an encountered on the map itself? There's a section of the map that's blocked off by "a strange tree" I can't do anything about, but I figured that would be resolved in a later mission... please help! I'd like to continue!

@Amirell,

You should be more likely to run away now than in the demo zone/summer zone because the those zones scaled to your level. Your chance to run away increases as the level difference between your pets and the enemies levels increases.