W: 3-Headed Draft Horse PPS H: Lots, come trade!

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How The Pound Works

The Pound is a long-standing tradition on CS. Have you ever wondered what pets are in the pound? Or why there never seem to be any rares left after a few minutes? This thread has everything we know (and some things we don't) about how the pound works!

? Most info in this thread are backed up by official site sources, such as links to posts from mods and admins. However, some times we don't have official answers to questions. In this case, I've used my best estimates to figure out what's going on, based on what we do know. Like this box, these speculative sections are marked with a red question mark at the start!

+- We can let loose some math to better understand how the pound works. The main text will take you through everything you need to know, but these boxes marked with a green +- contain more detail for people who are interested. You can skip these if you want.

Use this index to navigate:

[url=BLANK]What is the pound? What pets are in the pound?[/url]
Donating • Pets • Adoption • Rarity • Rarity Distributions

[url=BLANK]How does adopting from the pound work?[/url]
Adoption • Pound Groups • Pound Timer • First Minute •

[url=BLANK]What pets are up for adoption?[/url]
Pound Groups • Rarity Distributions • Community Resources

[url=BLANK]What are my chances of getting a rare? What does this depend on?[/url]
Random Numbers • Rarity Distributions • Opening Sizes • Other Players • Community Resources

[url=BLANK]What other info do we have about the pound?[/url]

What is the pound? What pets are in the pound?

The pound is Chicken Smoothie's way of returning unwanted or confiscated pets back to active players. Pets in the pound are either kindly donated by other players or confiscated from banned players. All sorts of pets are in the pound, from common to OMGSR!

You can donate pets to the pound if you no longer want to keep them! They'll eventually automatically be adopted again by other players.

What pets are in the pound?
Anyone can donate pets to the pound, so there are all sorts of pets in there. Players used to be allowed to adopt from the pound only once per 24 hours, so the pound amassed a huge hoard of pets. To decrease the pound's hoard, the limit was lowered to once per 3 hours in 2016.

There are pets from all years of the site and all rarities. Because the pound has so many pets, it's pretty likely that the distribution of outcomes in the pound is similar to those in the site overall! This means that the pound will have lots of common pets, and much fewer rare pets. For example, if 50% of all pets on the site are Extremely Common, Very Common, or common, then 50% of the pets in the pound will be EC, VC, or C.

+- ? The reason that the distribution of pets in the pounds is likely to be similar to the "global" CS distribution is due to the law of large numbers, so long as there are no differences between how pound pets are selected and how CS pets are selected.

Specifically, the law of large numbers states that the average result obtained from a large number of independent random samples will converge to the true value, if it exists.

This means that if you repeat a process with a 20% (20 in 100, or 1 in 5) chance of one outcome and an 80% (80 in 100, or 4 in 5) chance of another outcome 100,000 times, you'd expect to see the first outcome about 10,000 times and the second outcome about 80,000 times.

You can check this by grabbing a six-sided dice and rolling it a bunch of times. Record the total number of rolls you make, and the number of sixes you roll. You have a 1/6 chance of rolling a six, so even though the dice roll itself is random, after many rolls (more than 100!) you should find that the number of sixes you roll divided by the number of rolls gets pretty close to 1/6.

Knowing this law, we can see that if an outcome makes up x% of the pets on CS, and the pound has a large number of pets, and we assume that there isn't a bias to the pets in the pound, the outcome will probably make up x% of the pets in the pound. You can think about this as the outcome being a face on a very, very large die, determined by how rare it is in the global CS distribution. The pound just rolls that die to a bunch to see what pets it has, so a pet should have the same rarity in the pound as on the global CS distribution.

There are several factors that complicate this. One is that global rarities are calculated as a function of active players (CITE), whereas the pound includes pets from inactive users. Additionally, part of the pound's stock comes from pets confiscated from cheaters. Both of these factors might over-represent the number of old or rare pets in the pound when compared to the global distribution. However, active players donating to the pound are likely to donate only common and new pets, which might over-represent these pets. We have no data on how or whether these factors balance; my instinct is that the combination of the law of large numbers and the counterbalancing nature of these forces will leave us with a distribution close enough to the global.

I want more info! What pets are on the site?

[discussion of how rarity works here!!]

I'll use pets to refer to individual pets, and outcomes to the outcomes in the archive. A pet will always have an outcome, but one outcome could have many different pets that grew to that outcome!

There are lots of different pets on CS! Talking about all of them individually would be impossible, so let's group them together in some way so that we can talk about groups of pets. We'll use the rarity of its outcome. When we ask what pets are in the pound, we then really want to know what the outcomes of the pets in the pound are.

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ALWAYS put your Dec. 18 pets in a locked group immediately. NEVER trade them until you know what they're worth.

Did I Get A List Pet? • Horror's List • Pets With Confusing Values • Successful VR, ER, OMGSR Trade Thread • How Much Would You Value This Pet in C$? • Trading Advice Thread

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