How can we fix the trading pool? [Constructive Chat]

[ACat]

Disclaimer: This thread is intended as a constructive space, please don't use it to be hateful to the staff, community, or players.

I started playing CS back in 2010 when my sister made an account for me and I didn't really know what I was doing and didn't play much. I tried picking it up again in about 2021 however it didn't last long again. Finally in November of 2023 I returned properly and have been trying to build up my collection since.

Something I've noticed while doing so is there's certain pets that are difficult to come across, even with lower rarities, and I've seen others discuss this too. Most notably of recent there's been an issue with trading for monthly pet outcomes to the point of needing to offer rares at minimum to even be considered by many players. This is obviously due to the results of the poll that concluded to include rares in monthly litters from time to time, however I believe this has left a negative impact instead. It seems near impossible for newer players to trade for even monthly pets at the moment as they don't have the fodder a lot of players ask for, and it just seems unfair and needlessly stressful. Instead of the joy of waiting to see what each pet becomes a lot of players now are anxious to try and trade for something missing.

This carries on to my next point of hoarding these monthlies for profit. Hoarding in general has mixed opinions, I personally don't mind it and have two or three little ones myself, but it undoubtably accounts for many of the issues in the trading pool. Due to players having X amount of one pet, there's less in circulation and thus prices for them skyrocket. Prime examples of this are the 2013 Slumber Party event pets and the 2021 golden gacha dog. Whilst it's impossible to ban hoarding as it'd be highly unfair to players who have established hoards already, and they're free to do so if they have the means, it may be wise to have ways to brings pets like this into circulation again.

Lastly the trading values can be confusing to new players as they're technically not official from the CS team, they're made by us as a community. For some it's the 3 month rule, others use the 2:1, and majority rely on Horror's List/Guide (myself included). This has its downsides since pet values fluctuate and the list doesn't always account for that, but that's where the VR - OMGSR Trading thread does come in handy, however it also doesn't account for values of pets below Very Rare. (I have a separate thread for discussing those! Shameless plug here it is: Pets with Confusing Worth Chat)
It's difficult to say how this can be fixed as just changing the worth of every pet VR+ would be unfair to those who traded for them previously, but it could be a possibility.

After discussing with some CS friends we came up with the following suggestions:
- A second version of December 18th, perhaps in summer, to bring more pets into circulation
- A summer 18th with exclusively event pet re-releases
- Establish some rules regarding hoarding pets (difficult to work around for many reasons)
- Monitor players needlessly bumping up monthly pets and maybe give light punishment for doing so to discourage it
- Have an admin posted official trading guide / trading values

And I ask you all the following questions:
- How do you think the trading pool can be fixed?
- Do you have any personal experiences of note?
- How do you feel about this issue as a whole?

Thanks for reading!! I hope this doesn't come across as hateful to the CS team as that's certainly not the intention, I just want to see if we as a community can think of ways around this issue :>

[Thank you to ToPathosMathos for helping me draft this and come up with ideas!]

[daybreak.]

I think it's true that CS is a hard game to start. Older players have a clear advantage given how the game's economy works, and a single chance of getting older pets a year does maintain the value of certain pets at pretty newbie-unattainable proportions.

I myself, despite having the overwhelming advantage of starting the game in 2008, have been trying to achieve a complete pet collection since without success... during my bouts of increased trading activity, I've turned to other games like Flight Rising and Dappervolk to trade for CS pets or fodder, and I don't think I could have gotten as far as I have in my goals if I hadn't. I think this is a pretty damning indicator of how broken the CS economy is... if you're trying to collect every pet on the site.

The thing is, I think your post is making a presumption over what the "right" way to play CS is ^^' Obviously given many of the site's functions (e.g. trading, archive tracking, the "show completed months" button), many users default to the gota-catch-'em-all collect-a-thon (guilty as charged!), but in actuality many of these features were kind of haphazardly added and built upon per user suggestions, and collecting every pet on the site is only one of many ways to play CS.

CS started as a site to simply adopt some pets, watch them grow, and appreciate the cool art designs. Not saying it needs to go back to that, collecting be damned, but I am trying to widen the perspective that the trading pool is the end-all, be-all.

Heck, even the trading feature was originally added to the site from a user suggestion (fun fact)! And there are many other features that inform the ways people play CS: dressups, oekaki challenges, (less and less) chatting in the forums, role playing. My point being, there are plenty of users around who don't play CS with the goal of collecting every pet.

I think this all feeds into my personal opinion that the controversy hoarding generates is... undeserved (hoarding monthlies for profit excluded as a different beast). There are threads where this discussion has been more detailed and nuanced than I care to make it here (since it's not the main point), but I think hoarding is just a way of playing the game. In fact, collectors and hoarders are probably the two kinds of CS player that have the most in common: they focus on trading pets and gaming the trading pool. Hoarding is a kind of collecting, in my opinion, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. The main reason hoarding is maligned... is that it makes collecting harder, and this presumes that collecting is a more "valid" way of playing CS, which I fundamentally disagree with ^^' Different people will have different collecting goals (and I say this as someone who has only actively hoarded common or below pets, and only rarely, not as an avid hoarder myself).

All this on hoarding to say, I heavily disagree with the proposal to establish rules regarding hoarding.

That hoarding creates demand for a pet or makes it harder to get is incidental; it's part of the demand side of the CS economy. Certain pets are naturally harder to come by because they are more popular and sought-after. Collecting does the same thing with the rarest pets on the site, taking them out of circulation from people who are looking for just a handful of dreamies or such.

Incidentally, I think this is why rarer monthly outcomes are great for new users, who may not be far along in their collection or may be seeking out a handful of favorite pets and not actively collecting: getting one of these outcomes allows them to trade for rarer and older pets in the collector frenzy that often follows the release of one of these outcomes. Not to mention releasing one rare outcome in certain litters used to be more common in the early days of CS than I think it is now. (I still remember the scramble for the Joker when the playing cards litter was released all the way back on 2008). Also, many times (though not always) demand and value tends to settle down for these rarer outcomes after the initial collector frenzy begins to lull. These are the quirks of a user-run economy, I think.

On the subject of a user-run economy: site staff has historically had a very lassiez faire attitude toward the CS trading economy—they are happy to let users work things out—and I doubt this will change, so I wouldn't consider the following suggestions viable:

- Monitor players needlessly bumping up monthly pets and maybe give light punishment for doing so to discourage it
- Have an admin posted official trading guide / trading values

Ultimately (regardless of what I think of hoarding, for example XD), in CS the community gets to collectively decide what's healthy for the trading pool, what's unhealthy, and what to do about it. The best ways to mitigate "harmful" trading practices we have access to as a community, I think, are to:

• create and participate in topics like this one!
• create user guides to trading and quirks in the CS economy
  (I am a big fan of your "pets with confusing worth" topic c:)
  
• discourage disagreeable trading practices
  (many users won't trade pets to hoarders, for example, so don't trade to and from users who are hoarding monthlies for profit, for example)
  
• encourage agreeable trading practices
  (let newbies know about the free adoptions board! post your good trades and received gifts in the good trade thread, too c:)

TL;DR, I don't have a ready-made solution to "fix" the trading pool... and I think your post showed a very collector-centric perspective. However, I vehemently agree with you in one, I think, very important point: that the CS economy heavily favors older users and that this can discourage new users who are interested in the collect-a-thon aspect of the game.

I, for one, think the following suggestions would go a long way in easing that disparity:

• Giving new users access to a newbie welcome package:
  Perhaps a box you can adopt from only once if you joined the site after a certain date, and it gives you a handful of rare pets and items, similar to how a Dec. 18th gift box would. There could be some complaints from older users who didn't get access to this box, but I think the goal is to make the economy healthier going forward.
  Perhaps the box can include a handful of pets exclusive to new users, so that older users have to trade for them (this may get messy if the site isn't getting a lot of new users compared to the number of active users, though).
  
• Implement a site feature that allows users to reorganize pets within groups by something other than date.
  I think this would flatten the higher demand for TD pets compared to RRs and flatten their comparative value. I think one of the main reasons users favor TDs over RRs is because of how they organize in groups. At least I am perpetually annoyed by this and it's one of the main reasons I won't usually date swap my pets away.

[Wired]

Isn’t it funny how this one almost feels way rarer than a Shima does