Compilation of CS Historical Fun Facts

[nickjr]

UPDATES:
2019-04-15: added tidbit about CS saving trade messages in 2009
2019-02-17: added link to thread with the images of Solloby's book! Solloby found it
2019-02-16: fixed November 2008 information
2019-02-15: added when we got our rarity tags under the first system (inactive accounts and their pets were factored in) (October 2009)
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I guess this is a guide? Information sharing??

This is mostly copy-pasted mildly-cleaned word vomit. Not prettily formatted due to time, sorry.

Sources: there's actually a lot of history here, CS Announcements board, this baby (requires Flash) (or click here for links to all the pages as just images--viewable on mobile!), various WayBack Machine pages, old forum threads, other users' posts (especially for anything pertaining to stuff mid April 2010 through early August 2011), my own memories

Most of these info tidbits are about the site itself, but there are some quotes about The Rares List in the second post. It's very hard to ignore if you're a CS user who actively trades or uses the forums, so I figure they're fine.

Just to clarify: when I say "honor system", I'm not referring to a technical system; I'm referring to the abstract phenomenon of human trust

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April 2008 - June 2008

CS started, pets did not have individual IDs--the image URL of your Gray Border Collie was the same as the image URL of someone else's Gray Border Collie

The pets were the giant dog and giant rat litters under Advent 2008; now you know why not all of their designs seem like they're for the holidays

(As far as value goes, they should be valued based on being released in Advent 2008; the system has no records of anything before June 30, 2008)

Fun fact 1: no newborn dog images, not all dogs had puppy images, not all rats had newborn images

Fun fact 2: the BA was a user suggestion (not naming the user in the interest of privacy)


July 2008
(actually June 30, 2008 server time, but let's call it July 1 lol)

pets finally had individual adoption IDs; pets were put up and taken down manually by Tess (today, pets are put up and taken down on the dot at rollover by the system); pets could not be adopted on user accounts (all pets had to be adopted off-account!), but user accounts existed for the CS forums

No adoption limits, but people generally only adopted a few of each pet or only the pets they liked
The idea of having a complete collection wasn't quite as intense.
All pets were off-account and there was no way to change the adopter or pet names.
There were some adoption centers on non-CS boards, but not many. Honor system.

Four dog litters available July 1, 2008: coon/noncoon, moon, sun, white July
Taken down around the end of July 2008

Galaxy litter available no later than July 5, 2008
Taken down no earlier than August 27, 2008--yes, the galaxy litter was available for basically 2 months, not 1 month (likely due to popular demand--think about it: star dog! seriously look at it and imagine you stumbled upon a tiny, tiny CS in 2008)

Sorbets available July 23, 2008
Taken down around the end of August 2008, so despite being listed in July 2008, they're more like Augsut 2008 pets


August 2008

fun facts: got our first two second gen pairings, selected via user poll; the parents are from April 2008 and May 2008
available for a long time


Late September 2008

• pets could finally be adopted on user accounts, AND
• pets could be added to user accounts! Users posted on a thread asking for pets to be added. Honor system, but with most people it wasn't questionable because most people's adopter names matched their usernames in some way. Requests stopped being taken after a generous 6 months (well into 2009).
• Nick implemented a gifting feature (now gone) (no confirmation for gifts) (for the first time, users weren't limited to their own pets; they could trade on an honor system)
• Nick implemented the pet deletion feature, which users used to use in order to put less strain on the baby CS server
• saw our first user-run adoption centers, although they were mostly for fun because no adoption limits (yet)
• Nick implemented the renaming feature

October 2008

Pound started, first run by Tess and Nick as a forum thread, later (not sure when, will look later) became an automated but NOT randomized thing (all Pound pets for adoption were viewable in reverse chronological order--people rushed to the last page to get the oldest a.k.a. the most valuable pets)
Much, much later, we got our current Pound system 2009?

No adoption limits + being able to actually own pets + CS's steady natural increase in popularity = a lot of pets adopted!


November 6/7, 2008

The Joker.
Did we know there was a Joker?
Someone adopted literally 10k+ card pups trying to get it. (I think they were all card pups.)
(They later opened an adoption center to give them away)


November 9, 2008

Adoption limits introduced
(The November 2008 pets were released a week late, so this was after only a few days of no adoption limits)
The damage was already done, though. And the adoption limit for the card pups was 15.
The ratio for the Joker before the limits was something ridiculous like 1/132. After the limits were introduced, Tess put the ratio back to something much more reasonable.

We got our current trading system! No more reliance on the honor system. And no more people sending their unwanted pets to Tess without her permission. lol


December 2008

Everyone give a big round of applause to Tess and Nick for managing to put up the pets roughly every 24 hours for 25 days straight manually!

April 2008 - June 2008 pets released as pets with their own IDs that users could own, complete with all missing stages! They were often referred to as the "pre-July" pets.

Unlike the adoption limit for the card pups, the adoption limits for the Advent 2008 pets were pretty tight, tighter than what you're probably used to. They weren't too bad, but even if you did 1-for-1 swaps, you wouldn't be able to get all Advent 2008 pets. Just from the pre-July pets, you'd be missing like 3-5 of them. The adoption limits that you're probably used to started in January 2009 (with some exceptions).

Our first December 18th! Could get any pet from July 2008 to November 2008 or an Unreleased pet!
People who were active on the forums and received an October 2008 or November 2008 pup were not happy.
Some people weren't very happy with the UR Banana once it become rotten and, if they owned it, proceeded to delete it.

Our first items! Pocky, 2008 angel halo, others.
The pocky was previously an image on the CS site, just like the pre-July pets used to be.

Snowflake scarf dogs' original adoption limit was mistakenly set to 15; not enough people deleted their extras and the limit wasn't fixed for too long, so that impacted their rarity and we confirmed that when we saw the adults turn VR waaaay later than the rest of the Advent 2008 pets


Sometime in 2009 (August?)

• got the oekaki
• could purchase C$
• C$ store opened
• first store pets
• some extended release pets finally retired
• October 2009: got our rarity tags, Very Common to OMGSR, counted inactive accounts and their pets (CS was only a year and a half old =P)
• sometime in 2009: trade messages when accepting or canceling were saved
• December 2009: intermediate trade messages and trades were also saved

Other stuff

You know the "Already adopted!" sticker that shows up in the Pound? We used to be able to put those on our own pets see here (code no longer works) because the trading system used to be a gifting system

Grinners
outcomes: 6
adoption limit: 2
THE PAIN

Orange Cerberus and Skelebun were rereleased in 2009 and 2010 (my memory was very sketchy or nonexistent about this--going through my posts, someone had to correct me TWICE about this lol thank you!)

other pets with odd original adoption periods

Pets were not available on the dot at rollover until 2009 or so

December 24, 2011 is our only non-Dec18 rerelease day and it was due to a miscalculation about how many times the Dec 18 box would be adopted

A lot of December 18 cheaters weren't exactly subtle about it--Nick posted an image back in 2010 or so showing that CS suddenly got a lot (like 10x the normal) of new user registrations right around CS's rollover into December 18... lol

Pets that used to have super great demand: Spotted Tribal (2008) (everyone and their grandmother wanted one I swear to the gods above), Timberwolf/Hyena/Tan Sockdog/Green-fronted Holly (2008-2009?)

Up until around... 2011?? We would sometimes have Advent gifts that were put up to adopt on multiple days. Even though these came with blurbs saying that they would be released again later in the event, people still panicked, so I guess that's why we haven't had any of those gifts for quite a while

Off-account pets that were added to your account keep the original adopter name of the off-account adopter unless you change your username (too bad I don't have proof of this because I changed my username to... like... "nickjr (very inactive)" "nickjr (HIATUS)" "nickjr (VERY INACTIVE)" lol but there are a few examples still floating around)

-sweats profusely in fear of the reception of this thread
is this even okay
welp I guess I'm going ahead and posting it anyway
don't mind nickjr casually being reckless with all this accumulated reputation please be gentle with me senpais I'm trying to pass along intangible cultural heritage here-

[nickjr]

you might've noticed that the Main List has a lot of July 2008 and August 2008 pets, then we've got the September List with a lot of September 2008 pets, then... the next list is the Advent List with a lot of Advent 2008 pets. What happened with October 2008 and November 2008?

They used to be ridiculously common thanks to CS suddenly growing very popular (possibly due to finally being able to adopt pets on accounts in late September 2008) in October 2008 and the lack of adoption limits until the middle of November 2008 (at which point the damage had already been done--there was one user who adopted like 10,000 [not an exaggeration unless my memory is failing me] card dogs trying to get the Joker and they remained active for many years)

By 2010 they should've been rare enough to become included, and they were at least considered for an old, old project (the "add-on" list if anyone remembers that), but... I guess the lingering "oh my bloody god they're EVERYWHERE" sentiment held on too long and then they just faded into obscurity despite finally becoming rare enough.

We were only able to transfer pets to other users starting in LATE September 2008 ( viewtopic.php?p=10726#p10726 ). At first, it was one-way guaranteed gifting. We didn't get our current proper trading system until November 13, 2008, shortly after adoption limits were finally implemented.

So people in July and August 2008 and most of September 2008 just adopted the pets they liked and wanted only a few of each. What was the point of adopting more than a few, or even just more than ONE? You'd then potentially/probably have duplicates that would be redundant to show off. (When we first got the Delete pet feature, it was pretty common for people to outright delete duplicate pets, especially because the server back then got strained as more pets were adopted.) In late September people were adopting to send pets to other people (I did this), but it was mostly for fun because it wasn't needed (because no adoption limits yet). And people were still mostly just adopting the pets they wanted.

Only in October did we get a ton of pet adoptions, to the point where people were annoyed when they got them as rereleases on December 18, 2008 (and they weren't nearly as annoyed with getting the Septembers as rereleases)... and then it got so bad in November 2008 that adoption limits were implemented partway through the month. But it only got bad then.

CS was so tiny in September 2008 that I thought the site was ginormous by November 2008. Must've been even tinier before September 2008.

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 [snip]. 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 [later] 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

[snip]

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!

[nickjr]

I am now going into digital hibernation in favor of real life goodbye

[*HisPrincess*]

Very interesting read 😁

[JK341]

Oooh this was so neat to look through, especially for a semi-newbie such as myself, hehe! The early years definitely sound like they were interesting to say the least. ^^

How incredibly awesome that the sorbets were released on my birthday (well, apart from the year of course). Gives me all the more reason to try to get my hands on one some day! c:

[EmberzTale]

I really like this thread! I love digging up old information and this helps ton!

[cloven]

Mark this is awesome

[Panther202]

Marking this for later because I need to read up on CS a bit more <3

[ShadowWolf~]

I get so much nostalgia from this.

[Akele]

Trip back through memory lane...!