Staff Litter Discussion 2018

[Alyssa99]

Any chance it’s because of how many people are hoarding all these pets and putting them in locked groups so they aren’t as much in circulation?

Ooh yeah, that makes sense


I don’t think the staff litter has been uncommon since 2010

[Raire]

Any chance it’s because of how many people are hoarding all these pets and putting them in locked groups so they aren’t as much in circulation?

Ooh yeah, that makes sense


I don’t think the staff litter has been uncommon since 2010

No, that has exactly nothing to with how rarity is calculated!
As long as it's an active account, all pets are counted - whether they are in locked or unlocked groups.

[22tabby]

Oh! That’s interesting then. Wouldn’t know why then

[Dragonswan]

I'm actually not surprised they're uncommon. The General Helper litter in June all turned out to be uncommon and it feels like there have been a lot more uncommon monthly outcomes recently. Not sure why, less players in general or more people going inactive?

[22tabby]

I'm actually not surprised they're uncommon. The General Helper litter in June all turned out to be uncommon and it feels like there have been a lot more uncommon monthly outcomes recently. Not sure why, less players in general or more people going inactive?

If this is the case, the site is due for another one of the big shutdowns and recounts of accounts and rarity and such. I remember the last time it happened it was a huge thing

[catmother456]

I'm actually not surprised they're uncommon. The General Helper litter in June all turned out to be uncommon and it feels like there have been a lot more uncommon monthly outcomes recently. Not sure why, less players in general or more people going inactive?

If this is the case, the site is due for another one of the big shutdowns and recounts of accounts and rarity and such. I remember the last time it happened it was a huge thing

Do you remember when it happened and how long the site was down?

[Vampiric]

I solemnly swear that my dog next year will not be wearing shoes.

[Shinryu]

If this is the case, the site is due for another one of the big shutdowns and recounts of accounts and rarity and such. I remember the last time it happened it was a huge thing

Do you remember when it happened and how long the site was down?

It wasn't actually a shutdown, it was just an overhaul of our rarity system c:
Our old, first rarity system worked similar to our current one - meaning it would compare how many pets there are, and how many users are on the site.
The important difference, however, was that it would count all pets and all accounts. This included accounts that hadn't been logged into for a very long time and all the pets sitting on them.
Obviously that ended up being a problem, because those abandoned accounts wouldn't be competing to trade for pets, and the pets that they already owned couldn't be traded for.
So in 2012, Nick decided to tweak things to make the rarity calculations more accurate. You can read the old announcement thread with the explanations here c:

If a lot of pets are going uncommon lately, then my guess would be that quite simply, not enough pets get adopted.
Keep in mind that the rarities are meant to show you how rare a pet is compared to every single other pet on the site, not just the rest of their own litter.
So while the probability to get each of the outcomes was the same, the total number of each single outcome puts it in the uncommon range compared to the number of other pets from other litters.

And I'd actually assume that this can happen much more easily with the staff litter than with other litters. After all, there are a lot of users who don't adopt the maximum amount of newborns. A lot of people just pick up one, two, a handful maybe. So when a litter has 32 outcomes instead of the usual 3-6? That's a lot of missed outcomes per user.
And those of us who do adopt as many as possible may just not have been enough to "cover" that with our doubles.

I'd assume that increasing the adoption limit would help somewhat - if the total amount of adoptions really has gone down recently, letting each of us adopt slightly more pets could make up for it.
But there's a lot of factors to be taken into account besides that. For example, there may be users with a lot of missing outcomes now that eventually go inactive again, since some people just don't keep playing for all that long.
Pets go down in rarity due to shifts in our user population all the time. The 2013 staff litter used to be uncommon for a while and has now been stable at common for years. We've even had store pets dropping back to rare for a while.

That's just my guess, though - so take that hypothesis with a grain of salt, haha.
tl;dr: Our rarity system works exactly as it's intended to, so there's no reason to change it^^. It's the adoption numbers that cause the "issue".

[JK341]

I'm with Zel on this one, less people adopting would definitely make a little more sense, of course it could just be something as simple as lots of users that happen to be on a temporary hiatus, or something and ended up missing the staff litter entirely.

[DrinaLestrange]

Theres quite a lot of uncommons in general for the month if you look at all the other pets too, so I'm guessing just not a lot of people adopted.