Does hoarding affect rarity?

[rats <3]

Hey guys! I know there's some posts around here about how rarity is determined but I'm still a little confused. If somebody hoards a ton of the same pet, would it make that pet more rare since less people have it? Or is it more just based on the total amount of that pet on the site?

Thank you in advance for anybody who can help:)

[Jaskiest]

The rarity tag of a pet is determined by how many of that pet there are per active user (so pets on inactive accounts are not counted).

An active user hoarding a pet won't affect its rarity tag, although if there are fewer of a certain pet in circulation (because most are sitting in hoards) then people might start asking more for it as demand increases, even though the rarity tag remains the same.

However, since rarity tags are determined by how many of a pet are on active accounts, if a user with a large hoard of a certain pet were to stop logging on to CS then the rarity tag of that pet might increase.

Hope that made sense? :)

[Guest]

No, but if they refuse to trade said hoard pets, and the pet is something like say a Raven dog and they have a whole bunch of them, if they gather enough Ravens that might make Ravens a bit harder to trade for. They won’t be rarer, just harder to find.

[Shinryu]

Theodosia already explained the rarity tag part, but I do wanna note about demand/availability that most pets are far too common to, in my experience, have their availability diminished enough to make people notice.

There have been projects, past and present, that tried to test how much hoarding could affect availability and demand. But amid the ones I was aware of, I've never actually seen any impact happening, other than the fact that some of them caused more people to hoard those pets to save them from being deleted (some projects did do that, some didn't) - but ultimately those pets kept being easy to find.

As an interesting example, though:
There was an "incident" some years ago where a user auctioned off a Sunjewel for Vixen Advents, and this did briefly cause Vixens to become much more sought after. People went more out of their way to find Vixen owners to ask for trades, and they willingly paid quite a bit for them.
It didn't last, though, and from what I can tell, after this auction ended, things just went back to normal. (Although the vixen had bouts of popularity all on its own, of course.)

However, for contrast, when years later someone auctioned off a Clockwork Bunny for PPS Bunnies, and the leading bids had amassed thousands of PPS buns, it was still very easy to find and trade for PPS bunnies, because most of them are common enough.

Now, you can take my words with a grain of salt because everyone's trading experience is different, and I've seen people claim before that a mass-hoarded pet became harder to find, so in the end we gotta take people's perception into account.
But I think it's safe to say I got a good impression of both of the above cases, at least. Being the hoarder who received the vixens, I got a lot of offers on the ones I already owned, so I know the amount and quality of offers that were going around. And I helped one of the leading bidders with the PPS bunnies, so I know that I, for one, had zero problems finding and acquiring the bunnies.

I generally don't think it's likely for a single hoarder to be able to affect a pet's demand unless it's for temporary phenomena like auctioning a super popular pet for hoardies.
Most effects of hoarding that you'll see will be happening when a pet is so popular that a lot of users hoard it - but at the same time this usually also means there are gonna be a lot of non-hoarders trying to trade for it.
(And even then, low rarities often stay easy to find IME. Take the starry german shepherds from February, for example. Lotsa people hoarded them, but they're so super common that I completed my hoard in the blink of an eye anyway.)

[rats <3]

Okay that makes sense, thanks so much guys!

[Lacuna]

Just wanted to add, I am the PPS bunny hoarder mentioned (hi) and I have over 27,000 of them at this point. I still have no issue at all finding people to trade me more. There are just soooo many it doesn't matter.

[Yakster]

I know this was a long time ago, but if you were to hypothetically delete all those pps bunnies, would it affect the rarity tag?