Help! What is the Paperclip challenge??

[mr.scamander]

Guys I got a trade asking to do the paperclip challenge but I don’t know what it is. They explained it, but I’m still confused. Can anyone help me out here?

[Celozon]

The paperclip challenge is basically when you start with a low value pet, then slowly trade it up with fair or slight underpay trades with little or nothing added to your paperclip pet. So you use a single pet and use only that pet to trade up to a might higher value pet through a series of trades. It can also be done with groups following the same principal.

For example, you might start with a common from last months adoptions. Maybe you want to trade up to a rare pet from 2009. The common is from November, so you could ask to swap it for a common pet from September. Since the pets would be within 3 months of one another and have the same rarity it would be considered a fair swap. You could then continue to swap it for earlier and earlier pets in the year. Once you get to a pet from the beginning of 2017, you can't make a fair swap for a 2016 December pet, since the 3 month rule doesn't carry over years, but a 2016 December common would only be slight overpay for a 2017 January common, so you can still see if someone is fine with slight overpay. Oftentimes you can use a pet's popularity in this case to help carry over years. Trade for a pet thats more popular that people would be more willing to overpay a bit for.

Eventually you can work your way back to earlier and earlier pets, and try to trade up in rarity as well when you can. Sometimes this might mean going back to 2017 pet, but having a rare now instead of a common, then trading for earlier years again. Its meant to be a challenging way to trade up a pet from lower value to higher value only using a single pet (or group of pets).

Unfortunately, some users will abuse this, such as trying to get you to overpay for their pet 'because its a paperclip you're supposed to' and that type of thing. That isn't what the paperclip challenge is about, and you definitely don't have to overpay them for their paperclip pets.

If you are still confused about it though, let us know if there is anything specific that you don't get ^^