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

[Panne]

I think it's important to note that this change isn't necessarily aimed at changing demand and the trading economy - imo it's aimed to provide more data and clearer distribution of pet rarities so that it's easier to see the estimated numerical rarity of a pet, as close as we can get to having exact numbers (which was stated will not happen).

Nothing that the admins do will change the economy; it was created by users and would need to be changed by users. I'd hazard a guess and say that even if exact data was released, certain pets would still trade over-value because of the demand and users wanting to maximize their chances of trading for it. Admins have long said that they don't want official trading values for various reasons like being impossible to moderate, as well as wanting players to decide how they want to trade, without worrying about official trade rules.

Edit: Definitely fat fingered and posted this prematurely, oops!
I do also want to add to the list of ideas for colorblind solutions - I have posted this on the spectrum rarity suggestion thread, but it'd fit in to the current discussion. This is a pretty extensive writeup for ways to visualize different kinds of data with colorblind viewers in mind. I'm not colorblind myself, so I'm not sure how effective this data really is ( I would love some colorblind users to chime in!), but it shows a lot of different color schemes that take contrast into mind to still make the colors distinguishable to colorblind people! I don't know if changing the color schemes of the rarity labels dramatically is something that would be considered, but nevertheless it is still something I wanted to share!

[odi]

four new rarities sounds nice in theory in some ways, but i feel like it'd get a bit hard to keep track of? kinda like a title that's too long. it just doesn't easily come to mind.

that being said, it would be very helpful in more accurately depicting rarities for pets that are near the borders of their rarity group. looking at the recent event pets, i honestly couldn't believe how many UCs there were. it seemed like i was trying so hard to get some of those, and people were asking for them constantly, and yet somehow a bunch of them ended up in the same exact rarity group.

just for that, i'm going to say the more groups, the better... but i don't know how i like the titles. they make sense so far, don't get me wrong, it's just.. very long. maybe beside their titles could be a number?

OMGSC = 1
EC = 2
VC = 3
and so on...
so the rarity of a common pet would be listed as COMMON | 4 for example.

because i really don't feel like typing out all these acronyms every time i talk about trading. numbers would simplify it to be more palatable.

[frnkenstein]

I seem to be in the minority here, but I really dislike the idea of adding four new rarities. It would probably help with trading for high demand/ex-list pets, but I feel that overall it would majorly devalue commons and uncommons and make trading up extremely difficult, especially for newer players. It would also make it harder for players who are focused on getting pets they personally like, rather than pets considered valuable, since making rarity so specific would mean people can't really decide what they personally value their low-demand pets at, and trading between commons would be much more fiddly for no real reason.

[Bonsai]

4 new rarities for the win , wanna see how what results my pets get <3

[conarcoin]

- There was some discussion about a more gradual change, but my personal opinion is that it's best to rip the band-aid off, so to speak; the change in 2019 was just a redistribution and it didn't truly help in the long run the way I feel adding 4 new categories will. Personally, I don't think that more categories will or really could be added after this point based on the current symmetry and complexity achieved by them, so I don't really think I would propose another expansion in the future. I saw several posts from users who (like myself) went through the bigger change over 10 years ago and I'd like to echo that it was not as hard as expected to adapt.

I agree with this 100% and it's something I've been reiterating in this thread because I think it's very important. I do not think gradual change will do anything because it was tried before and it did nothing. It will become an endless cycle of redistribute rarities/add a new rarity every few years while the problem just continues to bubble under the surface.

[finest desperation]

Absolutely team +4 here.
I really think the rarities have needed more distinction for far too long and I'm super excited that it's finally being looked into.

[everestwhite]

ive seen some people talking about how this update would do nothing to change the real problem (demand pushing) and while at face value i can see that being the case, my hope is with more accurate data on how much a pet is ACTUALLY worth, people might reconsider artificially valuing a pet way over what it should be worth. again, i HOPE this will be the case. but it will take effort from the community to change, the admins cant change the way players view and collect pets without doing things that would punish everyone on the site (i saw some people ask for limiting the amount of copies a player can have of one pet for example. which sounds like a nightmare to implement and would be far too punishing)

in its current state i find the values just arent appropriate anymore. something ive been thinking about is how a 2023 uncommon is not really worth the same as a 2011 uncommon. but theyre both uncommon and should, by that definition, be worth exactly the same. it doesnt really make sense. same with new rares and old rares, and so on. this is just my personal experience as a lot of older uncommon pets are some of my favorites and theyve been a bit difficult for me to trade for even though theyre supposed to just be uncommon. so maybe having a bit more granularity would help with this kind of thing, because im sure those older uncommons are actually more sparse than new uncommons and they shouldnt really be in the same category. there are a LOT of pets on cs now, and i think a rarity expansion is needed for that reason!

im not an expert though, and im not super active in trading anymore. just sharing my thoughts.

also, i really like having different shapes to reflect rarity in place of the stars! would be helpful for accessibility and also very cute :3

[foxcloud19]

ive seen some people talking about how this update would do nothing to change the real problem (demand pushing) and while at face value i can see that being the case, my hope is with more accurate data on how much a pet is ACTUALLY worth, people might reconsider artificially valuing a pet way over what it should be worth. again, i HOPE this will be the case. but it will take effort from the community to change, the admins cant change the way players view and collect pets without doing things that would punish everyone on the site (i saw some people ask for limiting the amount of copies a player can have of one pet for example. which sounds like a nightmare to implement and would be far too punishing)

in its current state i find the values just arent appropriate anymore. something ive been thinking about is how a 2023 uncommon is not really worth the same as a 2011 uncommon. but theyre both uncommon and should, by that definition, be worth exactly the same. it doesnt really make sense. same with new rares and old rares, and so on. this is just my personal experience as a lot of older uncommon pets are some of my favorites and theyve been a bit difficult for me to trade for even though theyre supposed to just be uncommon. so maybe having a bit more granularity would help with this kind of thing, because im sure those older uncommons are actually more sparse than new uncommons and they shouldnt really be in the same category. there are a LOT of pets on cs now, and i think a rarity expansion is needed for that reason!

im not an expert though, and im not super active in trading anymore. just sharing my thoughts.

also, i really like having different shapes to reflect rarity in place of the stars! would be helpful for accessibility and also very cute :3

Yes! Could not agree more with this! If we have a more accurate standing of what a pet is worth, we don't have to deal with as many complications to figure out its "true worth". If we are able to get the 4 new rarities, I will absolutely be adding in my trade rules that dates don't matter at all, only rarity (which I was already pretty leniant on). Hopefully, more people will take these steps. Staff can only do so much for the economy of this site and it is up to the users to fix the rest.

[Mycomni]

On one hand, new categories can clog up stuff, but on the other hand CS has had so many pets it could do with a fine-tuned system, so adding at least "very uncommon" will help (and would complement the other "very" categories), if not the new four ones. Also love the notches idea!

[Kitty&Cats]

It sounds nice in theory to have a more 'balanced' rarity scale, but I don't think that it would help with the difficulties users have with trading. I think that the root of the problem is that the rarity tags are pretty arbitrary, and not that pets aren't spread evenly across the spectrum. CS members have no real basis of how much each rarity is worth relative to the other rarities.

I know that the actual number of each pet has always been kept a secret, but I think some sort of numerical announcement would make the trading system clearer and more beginner friendly. This could be Implemented several ways. There could be an 'official' post that says something like 'x% of players have very common pets' or 'There are twice as many of a rare pet as a very rare.' Just something that grounds the rarity system in real value.

This might be community based rather than the rarity system itself, but I think there should be a shift that pets from any year of a particular rarity are valued the same. This would mean that a 2009 rare would be equivalent to a 2018 rare, rather than the '2 pets for one pet from the prior year' rule that the community currently seems to trade based on.