We need your feedback on an update to the rarity system!

[Potema]

Team 4 new rarities.

I believe there are quite some pets that could benefit from some finetuning. There absolutely are pets that were put in the same rarity category, yet some of them are harder to find than others. Some new rarity categories would help with making a finer distinction.

[Frœyjɑ]

Although I hate that it will probably result in extra work for you guys, I have to vote for the 4 new rarities. It will make trading pets so much easier, especially for newcomers and returning users. After I took a break, I traded away quite a few pets that I shouldn't have because I simply did not know that VR did not always equal VR.

[piepinkpony]

I feel like, if anything, this will help the issue of date when trading pets up or down. Isn’t the entire idea of older pets being worth more the fact that since they are older they might be harder to find? I always figured the reason people cares about date so much was because an old uncommon is more scarce than a recent uncommon. With more rarities and therefor more distinction on how hard to come by a pet is, wont this remove some of the emphasis on matching up dates?

For example, I would assume that the numbers of a certain pet in circulation would determine accurately what the pet is worth. If there are 5k of certain old UC rat in circulation and also 5k of a certain newer UC rat in circulation, doesn’t that just make them worth the exact same? People just assume if a pet is older there are less of them around. However, with an updated system, All of the newer UC rats that have a bit more than 5k in circulation would then be moved to a lower rarity since they are a bit more common that the ones with 5k out there exactly. Same can be said for those older UC rats that have a bit less than 5k in circulation.

Is this making sense, or am I on a strange thought train?

I actually don't think this'll help with that no matter how it's implemented; while the logic should add up on paper (like you said, both a newer and an older uncommon have similar numbers of active pets on site) it doesn't factor in how many of those pets are actually in circulation (aka not locked up in someone's collection/hoard/favorites group) which is a big reason why older pets seem to overall be harder to find. The idea that older pets are worth more is also SO ingrained into the overall trading culture it'll be hard to shift away from it imo

Be warned this isn't perfect and is mostly me thinking/spit balling while I type.

This links to what was mentioned earlier with all pets held in an active account (inactive account pets at least aren't counted) count towards the pets rarity. The problem here is it assumes that all pets held in active accounts are for available for trade, and whilst technically true, in practice this isn't the case and I think that's where complications come in. Very rare pets are sitting in perfectly active account but are for all intents and purposes will never be traded and may as well be sitting in a deactive account when it comes to rarity stats. I was thinking of a way of solving this that wouldn't overload the system, involve an awful lot of maths, or over complicate things and I did come up with a potential solution to this. What there needs to be is some way of removing pets from rarity counts whilst allowing them to remain in active accounts.

The first solution I thought off was:
Don't count pets in groups which are locked from trading (not locked to friends only or to WL only) but specifically pets in groups where trading is disabled.

Now obviously this isn't a flawless suggestion, particularly because pets are a lot more likely to be moved between groups than they are to be permanently deleted (mass deleting a hoard for example would mess with the rarity stats). And rarities shouldn't need to be recalculated more than once a month. Not all people know how to lock groups either. But it would add a little bit of extra nuance, particularly in the cases of older pets which are a lot less likely to be traded and more likely to be locked in groups.

You could add a warning when moving pets to these groups along the lines of "this group is locked for trading and means this pet will no longer be included in rarity" but this does open it up as a system to abuse, with someone placing loads of pets in a locked group to increase their rarity value. What I'm counting on though is that no-one person could hoard enough pets to skew the stats, or if they did so deliberately would have enough pets to be an obvious outlier and easier to ban.
I want to make it clear here I don't think stopping hoards is the answer though, there are a lot of people who really enjoy doing so and for a site which is essentially pet collecting limiting how you can do this would not be a good idea.

Another variant of this idea, albeit one which I think would be a more radical change, is giving people the option to permanently remove their pets from the rarity calculation at the expense of making them untradable and locked to that individual account forever. Very rare pets locked to an account is not unheard of in pet collection games, indeed in CS special staff members get untradable custom pets just for them. I do think this option could cause problems, particularly with people changing their minds, although mind changing is something you live with when trading away a pet. If this became a feature I definitely think it should be one which is limited to only a certain amount of pets a month, and as such change would be a lot slower and smoother. There would also be less risk of randomly doing this to pets on a whim.

Like I said not exactly a perfect idea but one that maybe the staff can explore during their rarity change discussions.

Finally on a slightly different note, whatever change is implemented it will be big, and as such it could be useful to have a mini-event to bring it in and bring awareness to the rarity change. Wouldn't need new pets or anything but maybe a mass advertised trade event or similar just to get people to see what's changed.

[not zinnia]

With new rarity being added would it be possible to get a new sorting system? Right now, everything is sorted by date, but a lot of us, if not a majority, sort by rarity. So, would it be possible to make that an option? Especially since many of us will likely need to reorganize a LOT if the "4 new rarities" option is chosen. It would just make sorting into groups a lot easier if we could. Since we can sort like that, select all, and move them instead of clicking on individuals. :)

I think the best way to do this would be to implement a drop-down list on the "My pets" page or maybe an account setting that lets you select the default sorting. That's something I'd like to see that I'm surprised doesn't exist. Ways to sort by species, rarity, date, and maybe even event would be SO nice

This is actually a long-standing suggestion that's been around since like 2014! Here and Here

I am a HUGE advocate for either of those suggestions I linked above, and I know plenty of other users feel the same way. With the introduction of more parsed rarities, this honestly needs to be given a bit more thought/priority by staff.

My two cents on updating the rarity system:

Sure, let's have 4 more categories! At first when the site introduced OMGSC and OMGSR I thought it was a bit overkill, but OMGSR grew on me and I ended up finding it pretty useful.I think the Very Uncommon & Extremely Rare distinctions are the most useful!

Personally I still don't think the distinction between OMGSC and Extremely Common and Very Common is needed, and I wouldn't mind if the site decided to get rid of at least one of them, especially OMGSC. OMGSC just feels like the site is telling you, "ha ha this is the most worthless pet ever", you know? Lol

[BlueEyedKite]

-snip-

Yeah I think allowing for players to determine which pets count towards rarity would be abused. Sorry faith in humanity lol.

You do bring up a valid point. I know myself, I have very old pets might as well not be considered tradable because these pets will die on my account with the servers shutting down, if that ever happened. If I could take some pets "off the market" I know just the ones I would. Interesting points.

[piepinkpony]

-snip-

Yeah I think allowing for players to determine which pets count towards rarity would be abused. Sorry faith in humanity lol.

You do bring up a valid point. I know myself, I have very old pets might as well not be considered tradable because these pets will die on my account with the servers shutting down, if that ever happened. If I could take some pets "off the market" I know just the ones I would. Interesting points.

The more I think about it the more I feel the option to take pets of the market as you put it is the better idea in terms of solving the problem of pets being included in rarity counts when they aren't strictly in circulation. I'm sure every player has at least a handful of pets they know will stay with them till the end.

[Skyykkeli]

I myself find the four more overwhelming, I would prefer either one more or none more.

[samiam52900]

Adding so many more rarities will only create more inflation and make it more difficult to trade up. We need an in game currency and a way to decrease the numebr of pets instead of only adding them. Like all the other game websites have.

It actually would create MORE issues, because demand won’t just go away. There is ALWAYs demand with regards to type of pets, and looks. Some people favor specific artists, some favor specific breeds. You can’t change that.

- it would be best to spread out the ratio in rarities like they have done 1-2 times before, and add one more category between uncommon and rare. Many people already do 4 ucs for 1 rare anyways

- Taking away dates will solve nothing because pets still have IDs, at least the dates keep a clear cut bracket in pets. (Take a look at the store pets that run one month in dec and 1 in Jan, their value is confused because they don’t adhere to this year by year guideline)

Honestly, adding 4 more rarities would basically throw out the system entirely. I know I would abandon it, just like abandoning the list system or changing it so drastically sparked it’s downfall and part of this chaos now

P.s. I don’t understand these graphs? Why would omgsc be just as few in number as omgsr? Shouldn’t there be more omgsc pets > VC > C > UC > and so on?

Sam

[Finsterstern]

Hey Guys,
i really enjoy the Idea of the new labels.
Just dont like the extremly. Dont know why it just sounds strange for me.
Is there maybe an alternative name?

[Kittymonic]

I am saddened that the addition for 4 new rarities is winning by a long shot. It's just way to many and complicates things when it would be way easier to add 1 or just redistrubute pet rarity..
If anything, I think the system shoud stay the way it is!