Holiday Items

[mysticmess]

I'm loving the Saint Patrick's Day pets and items but I'm a bit confused about them. Do people really like the special holiday pets? Everywhere I've looked they're being given away. Are there any rare ones?

[Shinryu]

I'm loving the Saint Patrick's Day pets and items but I'm a bit confused about them. Do people really like the special holiday pets? Everywhere I've looked they're being given away. Are there any rare ones?

Whether or not a pet is rare depends on how many of it exist compared to the amount of active accounts on the site.
Due to this, pets that were up for adoption for free don't usually tend to go rare right away. It's not impossible - there are monthly pets that turn rare every once in a while - but it just doesn't happen often. Freebie pets are very easy for everyone to pick up, so a lot tend to get adopted, and in order to make them rare, the chance to get a particular outcome has to be lowered a lot.
Pets do slowly get rarer as time goes on though - this explains it a bit^^ Additionally, this guide gives you a basic rundown on how rarity and value work.

Just because people are willing to give pets away doesn't mean nobody likes them^^ A lot of people ended up with doubles of some of the pets, and often just don't have a use for them - so they're giving them to people who still need them. CS is based around trading in order to complete your collection goals, so most people don't keep every pet they get.

The St. Patrick's pets just got released this month, so they're currently very abundant. As with every pet, their value will slowly increase over time, but they are unlikely to turn rare any time soon.
From my observations, the selkie rats are the most popular ones this year. The others not so much.

The holiday pets most likely to turn rare are the ones from our token hunt events - Easter, Summer Event, Halloween.
Getting some of the pets from those events requires you to collect and trade in items that can be found hidden around the site (don't worry, the event page explains it to help newcomers understand it). This takes time and effort, so the pets you get that way are adopted less often, and are pretty much guaranteed to be at least uncommon, often rare.

Rarity and popularity are unrelated; a common pet can turn out very popular due to having a design many people love, whereas there are rare pets that barely anyone really looks for, other than to complete their collection.
For example, there are rats from 2008 that are very rare, even some omg so rare, but people still find it difficult to trade them off, because they're just not that popular.
Meanwhile, there are some pets that are often traded for pets way above their rarity, simply because people love them.

The same goes for items, but with the added problem that item values can be very difficult to determine due to a lack of visible rarities. We were all given doubles of each St. Patrick's Day item, so similar to the pets, a lot of users give their extras away.^^