Lacuna wrote:I posted something minimal on this thread years ago and it keeps coming up in my posts as a result and frustrating me, because I don’t think it’s as much of a problem as people make it out to be. So, here are my thoughts.
I’m totally in support of a second yearly rerelease of normal pets or upping the rerelease adoption limit slightly. That is a concrete thing CS can do to combat originally free pets going out of circulation by users quitting, etc. and keep things at the current rarity level they are. Store pets are a write-off to me, they’re super exclusive things that don’t count towards a complete collection in the archive and I don’t see any need to “fix” them or a way to do so that is legal/moral based on the agreement people entered buying them in the first place (and any kind of gacha/gambling/loot box for money is an instant no). CS has already implemented a lot of things like raising store pet prices, adding new items (especially my favorite, permanent items) to the store, etc. and I feel completely neutral on other new purchase concepts like profile decoration, badges, stamps, etc. and wouldn’t mind if those were added.
The main problem is and will always be users. An artificial extra value has been added to a lot of pets by users. If it keeps going up, that is driven by users. In fact, it used to be significantly worse, where some OMG so rare! pets were valued as worth even more than they are now over other OMG so rare! pets, and it was the users that fixed that (end of the original Rares List, etc.). I honestly think it can be “fixed” even more, and bring the values even closer to make more sense with the rarity system (some things like UR pets being a potential exception because it’s harder to determine their rarity on release). Personally, I own and want to trade quite a few OMG so rare! pets I got from rereleases for the last few things that are important to me in my collection, but the values users have imposed on them make it very difficult and confusing.
CS cannot fix the inflation created by users without imposing penalties on how much people are charging for their pets in a free market, and I don’t think anyone wants that. Even if they did release a ton of extra older pets, people would still have to agree to charge less for them. I’ve asked myself a lot what games like Magic the Gathering get from releasing very rare things and then watching them go for hundreds of dollars on a secondary market they don’t benefit from, and I think it’s just engagement with the game/property. People are on CS actively trading and playing, and that is valuable to the game even if they’re not getting a direct financial benefit from a thing.
At the end of the day the point of a collection game isn’t for every person to be able to achieve a complete collection. It’s just not possible and never will be unless there’s just a button that says “adopt every pet ever released.” The point isn’t even to achieve the rarest thing, unless that truly is what one user values and then it’s likely they’re setting themselves up for a lot of disappointment, even if they’ve been playing the game since 2008. The game isn’t “fair” and I don’t want it to be, because then there wouldn’t be a way to actually play it, but I do want users who possess these rarest things that are being discussed to look at themselves and not the site to fix some of these problems (myself potentially included).
I agree that trying to collect every pet on the site is not a realistic goal to have but it can be so difficult just to get ONE pet. And we can even leave store pets or URS out of the conversation for a minute here. Let's say you just joined this year and you just absolutely fell in love with the sunback and decided that was your ultimate dreamie. The sunback is valued between 40-50 MA, but I'm pretty sure it almost always goes for 50 due to it's popularity so we'll just say it's worth 50 MA. That would be equal to 500 2010 or 2011 rares which would take quite some time to get. Not even acknowledging the fact that you would have a VERY (dare I say impossible) time finding someone who would even trade it to you for 500 "regular" rares. And selling pets for chicken dollars and using the chicken dollars to buy it probably won't work either because you won't easily find a trading partner willing to sell a very valuable, very popular pet like that for pure chicken dollars (I checked the successful C$ trades thread and only 7 sunback sales had been posted since in inception in 2020).
A new CS user could be active on this site for a whole year and their entire account MAY only be worth half of that sunback if they aren't either extremely lucky or to quote Sunfang, have that "sigma grindset late stage capitalism" mindset. I do recognize how a lot of this is the problem of CS users themselves because we set these prices ourselves and decided that they were absolute law. But it's not like we can just ask people nicely to stop overvaluing their pets and be gentler with trading. CS themselves needs to step in because if you're a big time hustler, you aren't going to change anything because you can already get whatever you want and don't need to worry about those who can't.
I just can't imagine how hard it must be to be a new user right now. I quit for nearly 4 years before I came back long-term in late 2023 so in a way I felt new, except I had quite a few "riches" on my account. But if I was truly new and starting from nothing....I honestly don't know if I would have stuck around for long after seeing how difficult it would be to get the pets I actually wanted.
If absolutely nothing else can be done then either 2 rerelease days a year or adding more boxes to December 18th would definitely be helpful. You could set up a thread with a poll to see if users would support it which I'm sure they overwhelmingly would. You can see in this thread that 88% of people voted for options 3 and 4 that say that this inflation is an issue, that was over 800 people. The people have spoken and they aren't happy, it can't stay this way.
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