*DISCONTINUED* Rares List Guide (1 March 2019)

[nickjr]

last edited 20 25 minutes after post time

As for why the pets that are on the List are on the List: I know that when this list was first created, the pets that were put on were agreed upon by the active trading community that they were really darn hard to find compared to all other pets at the time. The List was (and still is) mostly made up of pets from 2008.

The user base was ridiculously small in 2008 compared to 2009 onwards. While we didn't have adoption limits until the middle of November 2008, we also didn't have any form of trading or even proper pet ownership (as in: all pets were off-account) until late September 2008 (at which point we were allowed to get our off-account pets added to our accounts, but only for a short while; if you go through the member list, you'll find that there was a flood of created accounts during the last week of September 2008 haha this is why!).

Pet adoptions in July 2008, August 2008, and most of September 2008 were therefore very few in number. People almost always adopted just for themselves to show off, and since there was no point in having duplicates, very few people went out of their way to get duplicates.

People in 2008 also actively deleted pets, especially duplicate pets, in order to put less strain on the server (or if they just didn't like the pet), because the CS server was tiny back then. I think we got this feature in September 2008.

October 2008 was... fun... because we had no adoption limits and we finally had trading and we also had a litter with 9 outcomes so people kinda went ham and not enough people chose to delete their pets. That's why no one considered putting the October 2008 dogs onto the List.

November 2008 was similarly fun but we finally got adoption limits in the middle of the month. It wasn't early enough to prevent someone from adopting a whole flood of card dogs (aiming for the Joker) that were apparently never deleted lol and people were still adopting a lot in general like they were in October. So that's why no one considered putting anything but the Joker from November 2008 onto the List.

Starting Advent 2008 (we had no regular monthly December 2008 pets), we had adoption limits that have been roughly the same all these years: generally roughly the number of outcomes plus or minus a couple, not a whole lot more or a whole lot less.

Fun fact #1: the snowflake scarf dogs' original adoption limit was mistakenly set to 15, and although people deleted their extras, not enough people did that + the adoption limit wasn't fixed for quite a while and so that significantly impacted their rarity, as we later found out through the adults' very, very late change to VR compared to all the other List pets

Fun fact #2: the first December 18th came as a surprise, and people who got October 2008 or November 2008 pets were very unhappy because they were still so easy to get from other players during December 2008

Fun fact #3: The List originally started out with just the July 2008 and August 2008 pets + URs + some other hard-to-find buggers like the Nick Unicorn

Also, back during late 2008, July 2008 and August 2008 pets were already really, really difficult to get (I would throw in a curse as an adjective for emphasis, but I'm on CS). So even with the first December 18th, they were really, really, really difficult to get later on.

In 2009 there were a few pets that were noticeably difficult to find, and so these were considered for the List as well.

I can't speak about what happened later on. But that's how the List started, I think. It was just supposed to be a guide that reflected what people were already doing in the trade market. (Note that I wasn't a participant in the List creation and barely knew about it. I wasn't even an active List trader, although I was an active forum poster and a fairly active non-List trader. This information is from what I remember as an average under-the-radar user in 2008 and 2009 as well as what I read in the original discussion. I was also inactive for most of 2010 and 2011; by the time I came back, the List resembled its current form more than its original form.)

This has been nickjr's crash course on the origins of the List thank you for viewing

You can go to the first pages of this thread (the original Rares List thread) if you'd like to see the discussion for yourself from all the way back in early 2010. (Note that some post owners were changed as the Rares List thread got bigger and needed more posts after a few years. But there's just pure discussion starting from page 5. Note that you can tell rats totally fell off the radar) Standard disclaimer: don't harass those users plz especially as a lot of them are no longer active CS players

Edit: As for the long-neglected October 2008 and November 2008 pets and 2008 rats: Some of the dogs actually didn't turn VR for a long time, which likely resulted from the lack of adoption limits + ability to trade (technically it was a gifting system. Honor system. Absolutely terrible). But the ones that turned VR early enough + the rats are on the list of pets to be counted for the rarity list!

last edited 20 25 minutes after post time

[gallifrey falls.]

I have to say not using trades to evaluate worth makes voting a bit harder. Isn't what pets are going for a good idea of what they're worth? It does take in demand, but demand does affect worth whether people like it or not. As it stands I can't say where the foal should be placed based on when it and other pets went omg so rare/dropped to vr.

I might be alone in thinking this since I'm sure there are discussions and reasons why trades aren't used anymore, but I just wanted to share my thoughts! I'm going to be voting 'I just wanted to vote' in the poll since I'm not sure.

Edit: After seeing the results, if anyone who voted for the UR Aussie tier would be willing to share their reasoning that would be great! Just to help understand how to tell value without trades. Maybe it's obvious to some but I'm just clueless haha

[King Andre]

I second the question asking any of the 65 people who voted aussie tier to explain why?

[Loowa]

Make that 66

[lil rascal]

@ ElementalInsanity
Thanks for adding those pets to the discussion list

@ gallifrey falls.
My concern with using trades with placing pets, especially pets already on the list, is that unless the pet has unusually high demand they're mostly going to just show it going for around it's current list placement or whatever the fair trade thread has decided it should go for, it doesn't indicate what it is worth rarity wise or what it could go for if it hadn't been so undervalued originally.

I didn't vote UR Aussie tier but I suspect some people voted it simply because it's the lowest option available. People have been told for years that the foal is worth a purple toxic, it's a big jump for some people to suddenly value it so much higher.

The beauty of this system is that you can vote for whatever you think or prefer and no matter what your vote is you can't be wrong. The poll options ensure no OMGSR will be extremely undervalued again and until we get the numbers for the rarity list exactly where they're valued in that range just comes down to personal opinion and preference

[sinpai]

@andreas I believe people vote that because it is still a newer OMGSR and may go with their own personal values much better than the other tiers. Plus Aussie tier isn't exactly a bad placement, the option is there for a reason

[Ironic Equation]

I personally voted for UR Aussie because it's the lowest available tier with a pet that's been OMG so rare since release [the UR phoenix], but I also seriously considered coontail tier. It just seemed a bit excessive to me to go much higher and I think most of the OMG so rare newer URs should be around UR Aussie to UR banana tier anyway, since without the rarity list available it's impossible to know which are rarer, and it seems a good starting point.

[I--Quit]

I voted on the aussie tier because it is a newer UR and I don't think it's worth too much more. I see it for trade a lot more often than the other older URs. Could be just me, though. I also don't usually see people willing to pay too much for it.

Granted, it could be rarer, but there's really no way to know that yet.

[King Andre]

@emerald eclipse

i suppose thats fair, but in all honesty i would rather the phoenix and foal be higher than the aussie just for the fact that they've both been omgsr since release, but thats a discussion for another time.

[myth;]

I voted aussie teir because the foal is incredibly hard to trade, when I had one I was hard pressed to get 2 sorbets for it, and even then a lot of people said they'd only value it at one. Some of these traders being well known and well aware of the lists and the foals true value. I'm aware that, given it's tag, it could go higher, but at the end of the day it doesn't trade well and the placement it would be given would prove most disappointing and deceiving to those who pay full price for it, and aren't aware of places to go to check for demand etc. then learn that it in fact is very hard to trade on again.
When I was new and didn't even know what a forum was, I was misled into paying full price for loads of list pets with high list placement but awful demand, trading them really was impossible to someone with no list experience and I ended up giving them away for art etc. I'd hate for someobe else to go through what I had to.