Ethulai wrote:Please help me gain insight because I'm really quite frustrated (because I do a lot of C$ trading and now I feel cheated)
2012 Summer Event pet;
Is now uncommon (was rare)
2013 Summer Event pet;
Was rare, is still rare.
These were roughly the same difficulty to obtain.
I. Do. Not. Understand.
The rarity system can't measure "difficulty to obtain", it just counts pets on accounts. There are nearly twice as many of that first pet on accounts compared to the second pet, so it is marked as more common. Actually, that first pet is at the top end of the "uncommon" range, so it has only just barely now dropped down from being marked "rare".
The only real way for the rarity of pets to fall is for the number of "active players" to drop, since this is used to work out how many people are competing to collect pets. That's the number of accounts that have logged in within the last year. In 2013, we had a huge number of accounts sign up and then not do anything in May, June and July (possibly caused by spambots, about 2-3x as many as normal). So when the rarities were updated in the last couple of months, the number of new people who had joined the site in those months this year was about 50% less than the number of accounts that had gone inactive in those months in the previous year, so the count of the number of "active players" over the past 12 months fell for three months in a row. This meant that the "rarity" displayed on all pets fell slightly in those months.
It's been over 10 years since 
