Does anyone else feel like Demand is killing CS?

['Possum]

I think people just need to stop trading on CS like it's the darn Stock Market.
I see so many people referring to "rares" "very rares" "omg so rares"
And commenting on pets being offered in bids and trades as "having low value" or "having high value"

Like they just see these pets as some sort of currency and want to brag about how rich or complain about how poor they are.

Instead of seeing pets and wanting them because they like them.

When I first started I desperately wanted a Blue and Purple Toxic and a BE Galaxy because I adored them.

Then items became more of a thing and the CS Store started growing and store pets etc.
Then we could trade CS$ itself instead of just buying items for people and sending them to them.

I wanted a complete collection simply because I saw people dressing a certain pet and wanted to dress my own up.

Now people see having pets as a status symbol...

Very sad for me...

[Liliette]

100% agree with darkwater.

But also...I honestly think it's more than just trading that's bringing CS down. One thing that definetly comes to mind is just site updates in general. That's one thing I do like with Flight Rising. I understand that a lot of work goes on behind the scenes as far as coding and running the website, but why is it that in the now 12 years CS has existed...theres still no way to mass organize pets/groups. Just small stuff like that, which has been suggested for years with a lot of people agreeing.

[ElementalInsanity]

100% agree with darkwater.

But also...I honestly think it's more than just trading that's bringing CS down. One thing that definetly comes to mind is just site updates in general. That's one thing I do like with Flight Rising. I understand that a lot of work goes on behind the scenes as far as coding and running the website, but why is it that in the now 12 years CS has existed...theres still no way to mass organize pets/groups. Just small stuff like that, which has been suggested for years with a lot of people agreeing.

I haven’t posted here because I stay away from debates anymore like this, but this.
This is the huge reason why I constantly bump suggestions and ask for QOL updates. CS would be so amazing if we could just have consistent updates and many of the suggestions implemented.
The time pound was a huge one. It was awesome.
But I have at least 15 suggestions bookmarked that we could really use that seem to be basic. (I know nothing of coding or how easy it would be, though.) Or suggestions that have been around for years.

I think Nick is our only site coding person and I know it’s a lot for just one person, especially given he has his own business and life. It could greatly benefit to have another person or two to help implement these little suggestions when they have time.

[Aurora Storm]

I'm not sure if this is entirely relevant to the conversation, or if it would impact anyone's opinions whatsoever; but I tried something out today after being at a loss with trading "fairly" across years.

darkwater and I were saying how it would be so much simpler if the community treated rarity as is and didn't try to apply so much math to it. We all know the rarity math of the Rares List was wildly unrealistic, it's been said many times by many people, but it's still demanded by majority. I've been trying to use a rarity math chart with way less intense numbers but I'd had zero luck. Like, zero luck. Then today I was like, okay, I've got about 2000 rares sitting in a trade folder, I don't need all of them and I only have about 60 rares left on my wishlist. Why don't I just swap 60 of those dang rares for the ones I'm missing?

So I did.

Rare for rare, any year. I knocked off 40 rare wishlist pets in 3 hours. Just sayin.

[XxFlamepoolxX]

[list] Agh, topics like these always fluster me!

On a side not: It doesn’t help that users hoard list pets.

Don’t get me wrong, if I could hoard the Patchwork, I would. However, I recognize that not only would it be unfair to other users who desperately want one, but also hoarding list pets causes DETRIMENTAL damage to the Chicken Smoothie economy. Sometimes I see users with dozens of a specific list. If they were to release just half of those pets into the market, the demand would drop significantly for said pet.

This. Just this year I saw someone with a hoard of 10 Shima Longtails.
I knew I didn’t really stand a chance, but it was one of my major dreamies and I hoped maybe, just MAYBE they would spare one if i sent a fair trade. They canceled the trade and blocked me.
I’ve never been a fan of hoarding for that reason. Especially for rare pets like that.

I had to restart from scratch on cs in 2018 after my old account was hacked in 2014. I remember getting valuable bets was so much easier back then. Now, I struggle to get even newer rares. Its crazy. How will I ever manage to collect the whole warrior cat set again? What about those zodiacs I had? Throw getting that ur tiger i worked hard for(which is probably what i got hacked for) out the window.

Getting a valuable pet as a newer player seems to be near impossible now unless its gifted to you, december 18 release, or its an event pet that becomes rare. Even then newer rares might as well be worthless for trading off the first year or so that they are out. Everyone has one even with the shiny “rare” tag

[Shinryu]

There's nothing to be done about demand existing in general, that's just how it'll always be. Some pets are popular, others aren't.
But what I wanna address is the fact that I genuinely do believe the list contributed to the exaggerated pet prices we see now, and that even now, the aftermath of all the years that list held a monopoly on pet values is one reason why it's still such an issue.

The list was originally not a bad concept at all.
Look at how rare and how popular pets are, then try to rank them based on a combination of both, so that less trade-savvy people could have a handy guide to look up their pets on.

However, the huge issue with it was that it wasn't updated anywhere near often enough to keep reflecting the current demand of the pets on it.
Another huge issue? Over the years there were fewer and fewer people who understood why each pet was placed where it sat. That means remembering which pets were placed mainly based on their demand, and which ones were placed mainly due to their rarity.
Some pets on the list would have been placed wildly differently without demand factored in.

This becomes a problem wherein very often, people doing list trades ended up adding demand twice to pets, exaggerating their value by miles.
To name a famous example: the Black Advent is not significantly rarer than others from its litter. Rarity-wise, it'd have been placd with the rest of the T7 Advent dogs. It was put on top of the September List purely because of demand.
But people stopped looking at the BA and going "ah, it's a T7, but with demand added it's a september list". Instead it became "it's a high september, with demand added it's worth even more", causing trades to go off a completely different base value.
Demand can increase naturally over time, but this issue accelerated it.

I genuinely think that the lack of awareness of the reasoning behind pet placements contributed to the continually increasing prices for certain pets.

What made it infinitely worse was the gap list / "list math". A lot of the pets from different list sections were never as far apart in value as the gaps made them out to be.
The Moonswirl Bunny was a T6 advent list pet. The CE Galaxy was a mid main list pet.
Wanna take a guess which one of them turned VR first?
Even with demand factored in, there should be no way in hell that a CE Galaxy is worth dozens of Moonswirl Bunnies, so to speak.
But that's what list math led up to.

As the years went on, people sort of just started accepting bigger and bigger value gaps between list pets (and list vs non-list pets). And that causes a whole lot of problems with trading, where people are limited to a very small pool of pets that they can potentially trade for the pets they want. Trading onto the advent list remained reasonably affordable, but any quantity "trade-up" trade to the mainlist ended up being painful to look at.

I supported retiring the list because I genuinely think that in the long run, the only way to get the exaggerated "demand" back to reasonable levels is to get people to re-assess pets' base rarities again.
Personally I'm a big fan of what Aurora Storm is doing with the rarity change guide - give people a resource to see which pets went VR/OMGSR at what points, to see how rare they are compared to each other. Then let them add demand onto the price as they see fit.
No outdated rankings that can't keep up with demand fluctuations, and no tier placements whose reasonings get lost in time.

Retiring the list wasn't gonna magically fix the economy overnight and erase demand, and none of us expected that. Change does take time.

[Asvoria]

@ ZEL
Yes. Especially the Moonswirl Bunny - CEG comparison hit me really hard.

The thing is, what do we do now?
There are many different opinions on what should be done and it all leads to different outcomes.

Leave it as it is now?
- well, if we're looking at trading higher value pets at the moment, it's just a real mess.
Few people that still understand what's going on (and have the fodder to get such high demand pets) are gathering the rarest pieces of pets to auction them off or even trade them down for even larger quantities of pets, whilst the demand rockets higher than the Burj Khalifa (I will never apologize for bad jokes).
We don't even know how we got there but the old list placements are so deeply engraved into CS's trading community, that even the last large rarity update couldn't manage to crumble the post it stands on.
It has now become impossible to actively trade pets that have "bad demand" without ridiculous underpay
(eg. I could rather swap my Dogtag for a Nontag than trade up for a Moonswirl, although rarity wise, the Dogtag and Moonswirl only turned OMGSR and back a month apart /thanks to Aurora Storm! )

Sort the mess aka. rebuild the list?
- many members of CS strongly rebel against this option, simply because it would mean a whole new turn of trading ecstasy once it's finished and accepted. It would take years anyway and who is to say that it will be accepted?
I remember that one major idea behind killing the list was to support newer and a larger variety of trading models, so that it would eventually even out and return to normal (if we even know what "normal" is). However everything is so unpredictable and ruthless at the moment, that non-list-traders are hopeless when it comes to trying to trade their new Dec. 18th pets. I would even say that the current situation helps ninja'ing and also impacts the friendliness of the trading community itself as so many are very reluctant to let go and are easier offended if they receive a "bad offer"(which could have been fair, but not an overpay). They could get a better offer after all.

Just by watching what kind of discussions arise and what new ideas come up, I still feel like there is a need to restructure the list?

- I mean, this thread here is a silent cry for help to finally manage demand as it is reducing the fun of trading quite alot at the moment.

- Aurora Storm's rarity project: link shows us the enormous misconception that some pets receive and what their actual worth based on rarity turns is. It actually shows us that our "non" and "sorb" currencies are completely off track as non's aren't worth the same rarity wise and sorbs are closer to nons than really being worth a half or a third of it... (think about the pink one, the other ones might be next).

- Loelya opened up two discussions to keep track of stuff, like the recent demand trades thread link, which kind of shows that nothing really changed, if you compare it to the old list and that there are some pets (which aren't shown there) that sit in a complete grey-zone and no one knows what to do with them. A good example are Grinners or Cake dogs, as no one really likes them and you can't seem to do anything with them at the moment, as they are neither high enough to trade up nor have too little value to be traded down for '09 rares.

- On the Loelya's other thread we debated if it would help to push down the non's value in terms of '09 rares, have a look here: link. It might just sweep the main-lists off their high throne if they were a bit more approachable by base values (if one manages to gather as many rares and find someone who'd like to trade down for quantity).

What do we do about this problem? Will we just patiently wait or try to start something?
I just think that at the moment, the waiting does more damange than good...
- for the records, my personal suggestion can be found here: link

[FriedApplePie]

Goodness I just stumbled across a pps dragon auction. The boosters are warrior cats, omgsr(im sorry what??), sorbs, and more. That stuff should be autos not simple boosters. What irritates me most is that I know some people will bid ridiculously on it and basically be getting ripped off because they are overpaying way too much.

I was around when the dragon pps first came out. I get its hella adorable and all that, but it is not, in any way, worth an omgsr. Demand for some pets is utterly ridiculous. I agree with someone who posted earlier that a pet should only be worth what their rarity is and not above that.

Sorry, I just had to rant about that for a second

I’ve seen that as well, I’ve even noticed people extremely overpaying for recent store pets too.
Not to mention the auctions with the corgis have had some crazy offers. I saw one here recently that was offered OMGSRs in the bid, the Ice Cat was one for example in one of the bids, and it didn’t have that good of a ranking.
The issue with this is that store pets are so limited, and there are some on accounts that are no longer active that have them, so they’ll never be in the trading pool again. So demand for those will continue to increase, which is understandable, but some people are taking advantage of it. I’ve always wanted the corgis, but I really can’t afford trading everything I have for a handful of pets.

[poison.wolf04]

Goodness I just stumbled across a pps dragon auction. The boosters are warrior cats, omgsr(im sorry what??), sorbs, and more. That stuff should be autos not simple boosters. What irritates me most is that I know some people will bid ridiculously on it and basically be getting ripped off because they are overpaying way too much.

I was around when the dragon pps first came out. I get its hella adorable and all that, but it is not, in any way, worth an omgsr. Demand for some pets is utterly ridiculous. I agree with someone who posted earlier that a pet should only be worth what their rarity is and not above that.

Sorry, I just had to rant about that for a second

I’ve seen that as well, I’ve even noticed people extremely overpaying for recent store pets too.
Not to mention the auctions with the corgis have had some crazy offers. I saw one here recently that was offered OMGSRs in the bid, the Ice Cat was one for example in one of the bids, and it didn’t have that good of a ranking.
The issue with this is that store pets are so limited, and there are some on accounts that are no longer active that have them, so they’ll never be in the trading pool again. So demand for those will continue to increase, which is understandable, but some people are taking advantage of it. I’ve always wanted the corgis, but I really can’t afford trading everything I have for a handful of pets.

I feel that, and this kind of demand on the lower value pets makes me scared to trade them away because it instills this thought 'what if i accept an unfair trade towards those pets and cant get them as easily back' and you just get this loop of scared to trade high demand pets for fear of being cheated out of their 'worth', but then you can't get the pets you want. its very frustrating.

[XxFlamepoolxX]

A lot of the store pet problems would be solved if they would just rerelease some in the store or on dec 18. Unlike normal rares, we have literally no other way to get them besides overpaying some jerk with a hoard of 30 that refuses to let even one go. Or get lucky with the pound which is basically never open now that we have the lost and found.

I wouldn’t mind paying a little extra for the old store sets it they were put back in the store for a limited time