Suggestion: Release Total Number of Existing pets

[Strange_Atoms]

Support, but with limitations
I think trying to sort out what's on an inactive account from what's in the pound, permanently kept by someone vs what's up for trade sounds like a logistical nightmare. I believe just getting the raw data (ie. How many of each pet actually exists) would be the most helpful thing that could come from this suggestion.
If a user could see that their pet is 1/8000 and the person that's trying to trade them has a pet that's 1/230047, that would be a great indicator of rarity, and potentially help with the aforementioned scams exploiting people's lack of knowledge of other user's trading systems.
Of course, this couldn't be set in stone for some pets, as there there are rereleases every year- for as rare as the '08 dogs are, there's a small number of new ones that are created every year, so they ever so slightly become less rare compared to things like store pets, which won't be rerelased ever

I'd also caution against showing who owns what (ie. Ravendogs: billy has 1 ravendog. Susan has 1 ravendog, etc), as that feels like it could make it easier to target newer users and/or just lead to dogpiling and harassment

Eta: I picture this as being on the pet's page, with the rest of it's info like pet ID

[reaptherisk]

in theory, support.
but it would also be extremely difficult for both users and staff to navigate and figure out how many of those pets exist on active accounts or inactive accounts.

for example, in snowdrake's rules, they write about just how many ur bwolves are on inactive accounts.
me personally, i like going to the archive and clicking on old staff members profiles and seeing whos still around. when i go to the account of someone who hasn't logged on since 2012, i see like 10 red cerbs, 30 skelebuns, etc. imagine counting allll of those pets up on allll accounts ever made on chicken smoothie.

you could say "it'll only be counted on active accounts!" but then that brings up the question: what is deemed inactive and active? obviously, if you're on everyday, you're active. but what if i only log on once a month? every 6 months? once a year? even then, im still active in the trading scene. im still trading skelebuns and cerbs, so are my pets counted towards the amount of pets on site? and what if im a player who stopped playing in 2012, and recently came back for childhood nostalgia?

i think that, in theory, this is a great idea. i think if both staff and the user-base come up with a good solution to what i mentioned, this would be a great update. but i feel like counting up all of the pets on inactive and active accounts, and then coming up with an entire new list based around that number, would be difficult. not even including figuring out what is deemed an inactive account.

exactly this. horror's guide is a compilation of values based upon what's being traded now by active traders. i don't understand how a list of the abundance of pets that to be honest, likely won't be accurate to what is in circulation now, will help ANYTHING except to actually cause the chaos that this terminology rule is making people worry will happen. you guys make post after post about how a simple terminology switch will cause an upheaval of values, and then you try and make that upheaval happen yourselves, i really dont understand it

i was not playing when horror's guide was first written to replace dadwarf's, and then rewritten. i've read some threads from that time but i did not live it so i do not know what the adjustment was like. but i can't imagine it's fun. i don't get why we should disrupt the tranquility we have now with the most comprehensive established guide ever written. what happens if that likely inaccurate number makes things worse? i am ALL for transparency if this can be done right but i dont get the urgency to fix what isn't really broken

i am going to mention again that i am not a player who has been involved in the current state of things for years. i am extremely versed in trading right now, but admittedly i rejoined months ago after 8 years. so please, if im missing something, let me know. i have really enjoyed getting back into a site that was an important part of my childhood, and i just hate to see all of the doomposting and misinformation. i really just want what's right for the cs economy and if im misguided i will absolutely shift my attitude about things.


edit: i feel like this new post from seasonal corroborates what i was thinking about trying to go off of pet data for a new value system. it just doesn't sound like it'd actually bring about what the userbase wants to happen

Hey Winx! Thanks for answering everyone's questions c: Can I ask if you know why official pet numbers are not being released, and if the staff team is open to revisiting the decision to not release them? I know that years ago Nick said this wouldn't happen, but I can't remember why. I think this would go a long way to fixing the situation.

Thanks!

I knew this before I was staff based on posts Tess made back in the day, so I feel comfortable speaking on it. Litters are created with probabilities - for example, you might have a 1 in 8 chance to adopt X outcome, but it doesn’t mean that every 8th pet will be X outcome. So even if pets are given the same exact rarities on the backend, they will never be equal since there is a random element there. So technically, there probably aren’t two pets that have the same exact value.

Seeing the actual numbers would make trading even harder than it currently is. Say you have 12,000 Green Sorbets and 12,025 Blue Sorbets - now the Blue Sorbet is rarer and they can no longer be swapped equally.

I think people would also be very disappointed to see that certain pets are much rarer than the community has insisted they are - for example, the 2009 Easter buns changed rarities pretty early on, but no one cared because they were bunnies and the list had them low. I don’t know how rereleases have impacted the original values of those pets, but many of the original list placements were completely incorrect.

I have mixed feelings about this update. I see what you’re aiming for, but I think the execution is poor. It seems the onus is being put on the community to not be scammed rather than on the scammers who make others’ experiences unpleasant, and that is disappointing. I hope that ninjas truly will be cracked down on and it won’t only be something to protect new players, but to protect everyone.

[Pawesome]

i will admit i am incredibly nosy about those numbers because i'm veryyyy interested in data, but beyond that i don't think it's a good idea to release them. i think it would just cause chaos or make trading nearly impossible. what will actually happen if exact numbers are released? highlighting part of what seasonal said (@reaptherisk quoted the full post above me):

Seeing the actual numbers would make trading even harder than it currently is. Say you have 12,000 Green Sorbets and 12,025 Blue Sorbets - now the Blue Sorbet is rarer and they can no longer be swapped equally.

i definitely see where this suggestion is coming from! but to have this data and know EXACTLY how much rarer every pet is would make trading awful because of what i quoted above. we already have a rarity system implemented to give us an idea of a pet's "scarcity" onsite and there are users who catalog rarity changes so we can guess whether a pet is on the "higher" or "lower" end of their place within that rarity (by whether their rarity goes up or down over time compared to other pets that are in their litter or were released around the same time). not having an actual number is on purpose in any game or on any website that contains a rarity system. you may have certain percentages for how these rarities scale against one another overall, but seldom (if ever, really) have i seen exact numbers given.

Why should this help? Well it would help prevent fake scarcity.

it won't tell us much when it comes to trading. there are so many pets that rot on old user's accounts that may never be traded again, and even if these numbers could be released in accordance to active users (as this is how rarities are determined, if i remember correctly), it still doesn't tell us how many of these pets are in circulation i.e. how many of these pets are in active user's hoards and NFT groups. rarities tend to drop during events where there are more active users (especially during christmas and december 18 but also during token events as well) and then rise back up once those events are over. these numbers would be constantly fluctuating as we have events and as new/old users join/leave the site.

Currently CS’s biggest issue is the inflation and extreme value of some pets, making a core aspect of this game, trading and collecting, miserable. We as a community need to work together to improve this site but we cannot do this without valuable information like total pet counts to base value on

even with exact numbers, that still fails to give us a 100% concrete idea of a pet's value. there are already pets that are deemed to be worth more than pets of higher rarities, i can already see from the rarity bars that there are more scourge warrior cats (rare) on the site than any one of the regular VR pets, but the scourge is worth more.

so, it must be understood that rarity is not the only impact on a pet's value. it is also majorly a matter of demand, which depends on factors that can not be determined with a concrete answer because it's subjective and constantly changing. extreme inflation has waaaay more factors than just scarcity, but inflation can give us "artificial scarcity" in that people are just more hesitant to trade a certain pet because of the value assigned to it, which circles back to demand rather than actual rarity.

Think like on Flightrising with their rare genes.

this is an exception to what i stated above about sites never listing exact numbers, but that's because flight rising (along with other breeding games) has an entirely different system than chickensmoothie does. chickensmoothie releases multiple of a specific pet, whereas on sites like flight rising rely on breeding mechanics and genetics for a "pet" (dragon in this case) to exist.

coming back to this though,

you may have certain percentages for how these rarities scale against one another overall, but seldom (if ever, really) have i seen exact numbers given.

for what it's worth, i could maybe support something like this as an alternative. we've already had a glimpse into the distribution, so maybe it would help if we had something like this that updated when the rarities do? then again, like i said, i am just very interested in data LOL.

[Darni]

Support - THOUGH


If it's showing the total of ALL that pet on the site there are likely some cheater accounts that are completely locked down with some of the very sought after pets. I would be really curious though how often it would be updated or if it would be live updated at the end of every day. Would ALL pet data be shown or just like things older than a certain year? I would love some clarification on that in the first post if possible. I'm support though because I understand the sentiment and why this could be helpful for trading!

*I'm also nosy and wanna see how many of those new croissants are around @ w @*

[Galipaygo]

I think it may be best to have rather than a hard number of “this many pets in existence” or “this many pets on active accounts” it should be a range to help mitigate insane overinflation from finding out say there’s 1000 orange cerbs or something (arbitrary number). Even just saying the range for a rarity would be better in my eyes than a hard number per pets.
A) Easier on the site mods and admins
B) Doesn’t force inflation or deflation of certain pets because players know how many exist as a hard number

Just a personal suggestion

[ShorahNagi]

I think it may be best to have rather than a hard number of “this many pets in existence” or “this many pets on active accounts” it should be a range to help mitigate insane overinflation from finding out say there’s 1000 orange cerbs or something (arbitrary number). Even just saying the range for a rarity would be better in my eyes than a hard number per pets.
A) Easier on the site mods and admins
B) Doesn’t force inflation or deflation of certain pets because players know how many exist as a hard number

Just a personal suggestion

My thoughts exactly is that it should be a range, not a concrete to help keep things easier.

As Seasonal said:

Say you have 12,000 Green Sorbets and 12,025 Blue Sorbets - now the Blue Sorbet is rarer and they can no longer be swapped equally.

But if its a range:
Blue Sorbet - 11,000 to 13,000
Green Sorbet - 11,000 to 13,000

They can still be seen as equal even though in reality one is rarer than the other

As for where to put that information?
I would think it most useful either in the archive [under the rarity bar] and/or on the pets page [again, under the rarity bar]

Huh, there's another idea: Have an option to display the rarity as number of copies (ex. 100,000 to 200,000 = OMGSC, 10,000 to 25,000 = rare)