Ask the Staff!

[Trin]

i have a quick question.
How come on mobile we dont have the squiddy smoothie or blue background but on the computer it is?
I have the setting to sea on mobile as well. Just curious(:

[Ashki]

i have a quick question.
How come on mobile we dont have the squiddy smoothie or blue background but on the computer it is?
I have the setting to sea on mobile as well. Just curious(:

Mobile CS only has the one background, because the layout is different :)
You can always view the full site on mobile by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking "view full site"!

[steve rogers.]

to any staff - has anyone tried to scam you?

[calculator]

dear any,
if you hoard a pet and then delete them all, could this eventually affect the rarity of the pet?

[Shinryu]

dear any,
if you hoard a pet and then delete them all, could this eventually affect the rarity of the pet?

(I'll assume you're talking about changing the rarity label, as obviously any deleted pet will affect rarity a tiny bit.)
In theory, you could. The rarity of a pet is determined by how many of them exist on active accounts, compared to the number of said accounts.
In practise, however, it's not nearly as simple as it sounds.

Rarity can be imagined like a spectrum, with OMGSC on one end and OMGSR on the other. A pet can fall anywhere on that spectrum. Not all pets on CS that share a rarity label are actually equally rare - the exact number that exists of them still differs.
To go with the spectrum visual: one pet could be in the 'middle' of the common segment, but another could be very close to the border to uncommon. So you would need to delete a lot more of the first pet to turn it uncommon, than you would have to of the second.
And here is where it gets tricky: none of us bar the admins know the exact number for each pet.
This information is not shared with the userbase, and is not intended to.

Why does it matter? Because without any idea how many of a pet exist, or at what number they receive a rarity change, you are pretty much guessing blindly how many you would need to delete in order to affect rarity.
Here is an interesting post from several years back that gives possible numbers for four certain uncommon butterfly wolves. It estimates that at the release of those pets, each outcome existed 20,461 times. That's a lot of pets. And those are uncommon.

I've seen rarity change projects in the past, several times, and they always targeted common or lower pets. Which means that there are bound to be a ton more of them than of those uncommons (and we don't even know if these bwolves are 'common' or 'rare' uncommons!). If you go for an omgsc/vc, you could be dealing with hundred thousands of pets.
Pets that you have no idea how many to delete of. Maybe you got lucky and picked one that's already close to a change. Maybe you got unlucky and picked one that's still solidly in the middle.

Personally, I do not believe that user-run rarity change projects will be successful any time soon.
Over the years I've seen a lot of people with really impressive hoards. We've got an entire thread dedicated to records, with users having thousands of the same outcome or litter. But when you're dealing with common pets, thousands may not be enough to affect rarity. And even if you gather multiple participants, not everyone is going to be able to get such a huge number of pets in the first place. (Records are records for a reason.)
I think people tend to underestimate just how high the number of pets is that would need to be deleted. You might feel accomplished if you've deleted a hundred or two, but in the bigger picture, 100 won't make a dent in the average common pet's total number. neither might 1000.

And with that, let me address the elephant in the room: How do you know that the rarity changed due to deletion? How do you know that users' efforts caused the change, and that it wasn't simply a pet that was already due for a change? How do you know how big your impact was when the pet finally changes?

Trying to change pets' rarities is basically a guessing game on two levels. You don't know how many to delete, and you don't know how to prove you really caused the change.^^

[cats_in_october]

If you could change any one thing about this site, what would it be, and why?

[Inigo.]

For artists, what's your favorite pet you've ever made?

[The Worst Username]

I have a stupid, specific question for anyone who'd like to answer:
Which are your favorite geological eras, periods, and epochs to study?

[✧ strawberry ✧]

To anyone who could answer this:

If a staff has some custom pet made for them, and eventually they quit, what would h a pp Ed b to their custom pet? Would it go to the pound where someone could get it, or is it sent to a specific player, or is it sent back to the person who made it?

[Pandle]

I have a stupid, specific question for anyone who'd like to answer:
Which are your favorite geological eras, periods, and epochs to study?

The permian era!
As a geographer, the plate tectonics in this period are super exciting, and the climatic variations are equally fascinating. Not to mention all the wildlife, and the mass extension is just the cherry on top :>