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

[Lex.]

My main concern was already brought up; people not trading by rarities to begin with for rare+.
I did have another concern and I had an entire thought process about it, but I'll just be blunt. No rarities will help if we do not know how they are weighted. We still don't know how many of a pet needs to exist to be rare compared to the amount of active users. We don't know how many of a pet there is compared to another to make the rarity difference. I think this is important information that is needed to be shared so people are not left in the dark about how many of one pet would equal another.

I feel that this transparency will greatly help lower end trading. For higher end trading, the varying rarities can be determined when something turned rare or very rare. We already have this information, it's just really up to users to actually go by it.

Maybe this is just the first step. It'll be really cool in general to have more info to the point of subcategories in a pet's information; there could be a section for personal stuff (name + adoption info + pet ID), rarity stuff (rarity, # of people who have it WL'ed, and last time the rarity changed.)

-snip-

I think the other sections that you mentioned make sense!

My main concern was already brought up; people not trading by rarities to begin with for rare+.
I did have another concern and I had an entire thought process about it, but I'll just be blunt. No rarities will help if we do not know how they are weighted. We still don't know how many of a pet needs to exist to be rare compared to the amount of active users. We don't know how many of a pet there is compared to another to make the rarity difference. I think this is important information that is needed to be shared so people are not left in the dark about how many of one pet would equal another.

I feel that this transparency will greatly help lower end trading. For higher end trading, the varying rarities can be determined when something turned rare or very rare. We already have this information, it's just really up to users to actually go by it.

-snip-

And to quote you directly, this is exactly my thought process. It is definitely very important information! Lower end trading can be made extremely easy with just the rarity bars, but things get complicated with rares+.

[depressedanonymous,]

I’d love one day for the exact # of pets to active accs be released but I understand why staff are so hesitant to release that information. Theres been 15 years of trading majorly based off a rarity “system” (referring things like the discontinued list, horrors list, and just general user based demand/preference) and if people were to see pets that are valued much lower than others are actually worth much more, there would be massive upset. I know personally i’d be mad to find out if a ur pickle has 1/3 the amount of active accounts than a ur tiger id be mad ive been undervaluing the pickle. If that makes sense?

Id rather live in blissful ignorance and continue to trade the way i have for the past almost 10 years ive been on the site lol

[Lex.]

I’d love one day for the exact # of pets to active accs be released but I understand why staff are so hesitant to release that information. Theres been 15 years of trading majorly based off a rarity “system” (referring things like the discontinued list, horrors list, and just general user based demand/preference) and if people were to see pets that are valued much lower than others are actually worth much more, there would be massive upset. I know personally i’d be mad to find out if a ur pickle has 1/3 the amount of active accounts than a ur tiger id be mad ive been undervaluing the pickle. If that makes sense?

I also really understand this. But I feel like even if it is an upset, we will move on from it. At least after the fact, we will all be trading much more accurately according to rarity.
I just hope that the majority of users don't freak out. If anything, it will really show just how ridiculous demand can be. Comparing the current values of pets to the actual value of pets based on the numbers would be very interesting to see :)

Edit: TYSM Concept below for linking that page! I knew that it had been said somewhere, I just had no idea where lol.
Even if it's very simple like in that thread, I think updating those numbers asap would be great, even if it's not detailed at first.

[Concept]

Ah one thing I noticed was that a lot of people seem to be chatting about not knowing what the rarities are based off from! I found a thread that has that information that I remembered coming across a few months back:

Forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=784157

it might be able to help people understand where the rarities are coming from here since it does give some basic statistics on numbers (a bit out of date, but still) for people to look at! I'm not an authority on any of this information so I can't perfectly verify anything in this thread, so please, as always, do your own research too!

[laika.]

I've always been confused at why 'common' is such a larger category than 'omg so common'. Shouldn't the most common pet be 'omg so common' instead of common? It's always confused me.

[alma]

i really like this idea! the current rarities are super vague so this will make it way less confusing

[Lex.]

I've always been confused at why 'common' is such a larger category than 'omg so common'. Shouldn't the most common pet be 'omg so common' instead of common? It's always confused me.

Someone else explained it [don't recall where] but there are few unique pet designs that come out as OMGSC, so that's why they seem "rarer"!
There are more in quantity than commons, but there are less individual pet designs with that rarity.

[Concept]

I've always been confused at why 'common' is such a larger category than 'omg so common'. Shouldn't the most common pet be 'omg so common' instead of common? It's always confused me.

I might be able to help with that! It's just graph stuff.

Basically, the graph is using the numbers of pets that have a certain amount in circulation. So the pets that have an overwhelming amount of those pets, enough to have, say, five or so per user (not the actual numbers, I'm just pulling that as an example) is actually a pretty small amount. If we had a site consisting of mostly pets that had a bunch per active user, we would be FLOODED in those pets and have almost nothing else! It would be an incredible amount!

So the largest category is the middle grounds, where there are things like one or so pet per active user. The graph itself makes the information feel like super common pets are rare, when it's actually just saying that overwhelmingly common pets don't pop up as much as the ones that are more balanced out and even between site members.

I hope that helps a little!

[UnfathomableDreams]

In my opinion, the ideal way to "fix" CS trading is the following:
-More rarities!

-Shift to calculating rarities based on population of a species directly, not translated into a secondary vs users formula. Have an official, easily accessible explanation on how the formula works. There's no reason to extrapolate / obscure it, just don't relate the number to user count.

-Re-calculate rarities quarterly. Ideally, this would be done on "off" months, and would only count users who have been active within the quarter. Honestly, I would almost say monthly, but I realize this would be a huge resource strain, especially as the site continues to grow. Once a year is just not often enough, especially for species that waffle in and out of favor or who have users with large hoards of the same species that go inactive frequently. Another benefit to this is that it can give players more incentive to trade. Part of the reason that trading is so hard right now, specifically for older pets, is that people are not willing to let even pets they don't like that much go if they're rare because they want that rarity to grow. Making it so that rarities are slightly more flexible, adding a slight pressure to trade off pets you might not really want to keep because rarities fluctuate would actually put really good pressure on the trading "economy," in my opinion. Keeping pets you don't want just in the hopes they'll be rare someday could be disincentivized by that rarity being slightly more fluid more often.

[Arlecchino ♡]

Adding more rarities is likely to cause people (myself included) to quit, as someone who is autistic, it's already had to keep track of the ones that exist.