Big Rarity Update - read for details!

[loulou800]

Intriguing! thanks for letting us know!

[/trainwreck/]

I think it's really cool the rarities changed. For example, a sunback is now listed as OMG SO RARE which makes WAY more sense than saying it's a very rare, considering how much it's worth without demand to begin with. We would be trading lots of very rares for a single very rare. Now, you're trading very rares for an OMG so rare.

[/trainwreck/]

Just checking, but the years pets were released has no effect on rarity whatsoever, right? So according to this, a rare is a rare regardless of the year due to having close to equal amounts of pets.

It does. A rare from '09 is nowhere close to a rare from, let's say, '13. Most go off the double for a year type thing. So an '09 would be worth 2 '10 rares, 4 '11, 6 '12, or 8 '13, depending on what the players value a pet at. If you're trading closer in years and the other player is okay with trading a '12 rare for a '13 or even '14 and you both think it is fair then that's all on you, but the older a pet is really gives it more value. So a lot of the new rare pets might take a lot of older players or trade savy players a hard time to get use to due to them not really having been worth much to start with.

If this makes any sense? I really hope it helps.

Issue: I'm fairly certain CS's playerbase did NOT grow exponentially after 2011 or so... so I really do not understand how that 2-for-1 rule is commonly accepted

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A problem with if they announced this in advance is that more unscrupulous players could try to find players who don't seem to be aware of the news and try to ninja them that way in anticipation of certain changes--or they could go down the blatant attempted scamming route and try to spread the opposite of their educated guesses and simply use "It was just a prediction!" as an excuse

It makes 0 sense to me.
We know the pets get their rarity due to the amount of pets there are in circulation. Let's say, for example, for a pet to be rare, it needs to hit a total of 25 in population. With this, a 2009 rare will have 25 in circulation and a 2018 rare will have 25 in circulation. How is one more valuable than the other if there is the same amount in circultion? Saying there would be less released of the 2009 rare isn't very accurate as the pets have to hit a threshold for its rarity to be determined. If there were less of it released, it wouldn't hit the rare threshold and would be a very rare instead.

[Zphynnx]

honestly im kinda disappointed, so many of my pets went down in rarity its not even funny, trading was already hard now its going to be 1000 times harder on me at least really even more so with pets I do want going OMGSR :,) here goes to a lot of pet sorting and hard trading and understanding new rarties.

Same thing for me. I was saving up rare pets and most of them turned uncommon. I don't really like this.

[Ricoro]

I love this update. Sure, there are a bunch of OMGSR pets, but, seriously, this game isn't about rarity. Rarity is just supposed to help you estimate the worth of a pet when trading. I have a lot of favorite pets listed as the most common pets - BUT THEY'RE BEAUTIFUL, and that's what counts.
This really helps with trading though, I was always unsure about a bunch of uncommons.
Thank you, CS!

[Michael's Fan.]

^ exactly~!

[Shinryu]

It makes 0 sense to me.
We know the pets get their rarity due to the amount of pets there are in circulation. Let's say, for example, for a pet to be rare, it needs to hit a total of 25 in population. With this, a 2009 rare will have 25 in circulation and a 2018 rare will have 25 in circulation. How is one more valuable than the other if there is the same amount in circultion? Saying there would be less released of the 2009 rare isn't very accurate as the pets have to hit a threshold for its rarity to be determined. If there were less of it released, it wouldn't hit the rare threshold and would be a very rare instead.

The idea that older pets = worth more has some sense to it, but is far from infallible.

The main thing to note here is that a pet's rarity is an indicator, not an exact number.
Let's go with your example and say a pet is rare if there's 25 of them per 200 users. And to be very rare, there would need to be, say, 10 per 200 users. When looking at a rare pet, you won't know if there's 25 of them, or 11. It could just barely be above an uncommon, but it could also nearly be a very rare.
Now, with actual pets, this number is gonna be much broader than a difference of 15. And we don't know how close to which side of the spectrum any given pet is, unless we know when it last changed rarity.

To go with our numbers again - if a pet turns rare just next month and was previously uncommon, we would know that their total number would be close to 25. Else it'd have turned rare sooner. So we would know that a pet that already turned rare last year, and still is rare, is likely to exist in smaller numbers than our new rare here.
Keeping track of rarities is a hassle, but it's one method we use to figure out pet values.

However, there's plenty of pets who start out as a certain rarity, so we don't really know where on the rarity spectrum they lie, until they finally do change. And this is where it gets tricky.
A newly released pet that started out rare could be a "low value" rare that just barely made the cut. Or it could sit safely in the middle of the 'rare' segment, and thus be rarer than an older pet that just turned rare the same month.
So no, the "older pets are worth more" statement isn't 100% true and never was, even before this update.

So why do people use this "rule"? Because the older a pet is, the further it will move towards the next highest rarity, It's inevitable: old users stop playing and take their pets out of circulation, new users join who don't have those old pets.
So it was deemed that the older a pet is, the more likely it is to be rarer than a new pet of the same rarity.
With our rarity system prior to the update, this was important because the thresholds between certain rarities were so far apart. People just didn't wanna take the risk of trading their old uncommons for new uncommons because it was more likely that the older ones were actually much rarer. If you look at the rarity changes from yesterday, you can actually see that reflected, too - it's largely pets from newer years that dropped, and the older uncommons either dropped less severely, or not at all, or thy even turned rare.

With the update, the value differences between pets from different years will be much less severe, but at the end of the day these rarities still are a spectrum, and an uncommon from 2010 is still more likely to turn rare sooner than an uncommon from 2018.

But again - "older pets are rarer" was never 100% accurate. The only way to say for sure which of two pets is rarer is to see which one changes rarity first.
Though I will say this is something that was easily overlooked in the past. Two pets that turned from uncommon -> rare in the same month really ought to be valued the same. The issue is just that, well, you can hardly expect people to keep track of the rarity changes of every single pet on the site. So people will try to come up with ways to determine values that are easier, even if they're not always as accurate.

[Inigo.]

wow this helps me a much! As someone who has playing since 2013 more or less, I have many older pets, so many of those became rarer!! I've been very inactive for the past year but now im more inclined to continue playing!

[alphias]

I just realized my dreamie Cloudtail has gone up to VR.
But since a lot of my older Sitting Cats and pets have gone to rare and VR! I think I have a better chance than before!

[gamorasass]

So many people seemed to have gotten lucky on their rarities increasing but I certainly have not gotten that lucky streak xD Almost ALL my uncommons moved down, which sucks, but it's going to make trading so much easier. I'm so glad for this update!

@ZEL - thanks for that explanation! I was hoping someone was going to comment on those concerns shared here.