[300+ SUPPORT!] Make rereleases better/more rereleases

[Hollypaws]

support wholeheartedly, the way trading is getting is ridiculous and i can't see new players staying for long when it gets harder and harder every year to get older pets, especially store pets from older years. even newer urs are tough to get considering how sought after most of them are, and quite frankly most people are not going to be interested in collecting hundreds of 09/08 rares or spend hundreds of dollars on c$ just to get one pet they want, let alone multiple if they collect casually or simply like the designs and want one of the pets for themselves.

i don't think keeping store pets from rereleasing in any capacity helps much. i know that if my dreamies were this unreachable as a kid as they are now i probably would've given up trying for my dreamies, and honestly? i kind of have already for a LOT of pets i like, because unless i get some miracle pulls on dec. 18th it's just not happening for a lot of them. and even with dec 18, i've noticed that people will often state in trading rules that they don't want rereleases at all, which can be pretty demoralizing if they're all you have, especially if you're struggling to find a trading partner. and feeling hopeless about getting the pet you've always wanted, or even just started to appreciate recently isn't at all the feeling i'd like to have when im on a 2000s sparklepet collecting game. surely there's a way to "preserve" the rarity of original store pets, whether it's not assigning a rarity tag to reproductions and/or making a unique "reproduction" rarity tag so it's easy to distinguish a 2010 marionette dog from a 2023 marionette dog, making them untradeable once purchased, only allowing X amount of a store pet reproduction to be bought, or even just drawing the same pet in a unique pose like i've seen suggested on not zinnia's suggestion board about store pets so it's something fresh without changing too much about what people enjoyed about it designwise. but honestly? having nearly unattainable items/pets can make people quit as much as it can be a motivating factor to keep playing. getting an unconverted pet on neopets is infamous for a reason (although neopets is implementing a way for you to make unconverted pets sometime in the future), and i quit animal jam for a reason - the trading economy got to be so difficult to trade in that i gave up entirely...well that and wildworks announcing nfts so lets hope cs never does THAT lol

[SpindleSpice]

I do think that older pets in general should be rereleased more often. The economy for players, especially new players, with trading is ridiculous and feels unsustainable.
I also think that reselling sets of store pets would be helpful. You could do a limited time resell of store pets for holiday events.

[senku]

support, there is almost no way for new players to get something of value before december 18 unless they were gifted since most people are very tentative about trading down their rares or trading their older rares for newer ones

most of them wouldnt even stay till december 18 because they 1. dont know it exists or 2. forgot there was an event on that day
(ive been a player since 2015, but ive completely lost my old account )

[Hollypaws]

support, there is almost no way for new players to get something of value before december 18 unless they were gifted since most people are very tentative about trading down their rares or trading their older rares for newer ones

most of them wouldnt even stay till december 18 because they 1. dont know it exists or 2. forgot there was an event on that day
(ive been a player since 2015, but ive completely lost my old account )

yes exactly, or if they managed to get lucky adopting in the pound (which would be difficult since the more valuable pets empty out in seconds these days). even if they join IN december, from what i've heard newer accounts made around this time can't adopt dec. 18th pets to prevent cheating- which y'know, i can respect the logic and all, but not everyone would be motivated to wait a year when the trading economy is incredibly hard to break into now, even for oldies like us

[CHINARIZING]

I feel like a lot of people generally agree that rereleases should be more often, and I'm happy to see that (but I also would be glad to see and talk with other opinions!)

Thanks for the discussion fellers. I also want to talk about how apparently the Dec 18 boxes changed? Before you were guaranteed an older rare, now you're only guaranteed a rare? This is my first Dec 18 after 2015, so forgive me if I'm not caught up. But I heard that this style of boxes just made people have even worse luck. And I can see that, only rares from maybe 2011 and before are really valuable and obviously there's more rares from 2012+ so a player's luck decreases immensely.

[KHMT]

I feel like a lot of people generally agree that rereleases should be more often, and I'm happy to see that (but I also would be glad to see and talk with other opinions!)

Thanks for the discussion fellers. I also want to talk about how apparently the Dec 18 boxes changed? Before you were guaranteed an older rare, now you're only guaranteed a rare? This is my first Dec 18 after 2015, so forgive me if I'm not caught up. But I heard that this style of boxes just made people have even worse luck. And I can see that, only rares from maybe 2011 and before are really valuable and obviously there's more rares from 2012+ so a player's luck decreases immensely.

yeah, i've heard it got worse too!! i was only active AFTER the change, and want to know more about what it was like before?

[Lanayru]

You were never guaranteed an older rare with the old system, in fact you weren't guaranteed anything but 3 rares. A lot of lucky players want the old system back but I'll put it this way: I've been here what, 12 years? And the only time I've gotten something worthwhile was the current system's actual guaranteed VR box. It's all about luck, always have been - while super lucky players will be limited by the 2 rare boxes (to an extent, you could still get the new URs) it helps those of us that are less lucky.

[Flox]

I really don't understand the issue with some pets being very hard to obtain - that's the point. Not every person is going to have every pet. The point of the re-release is that generally every pet maintains their value, so that they don't end up completely unobtainable. They're still going to be hard to get, and they should be hard to get.

I think the issue is that it isnt so much a case of something being "very hard" to obtain but actually impossible for everyone to obtain because there are a finite number of them and since there were less users on the site when most of these pets were released that number is pretty small. There are way less of these pets than there are users who want them which means that at some point those pets will eventually all be on accounts with people who are either 1.) inactive or 2.) unwilling to trade them so even with limited december 18ths "chances" at release they will become impossible to obtain not "very hard".

Also if you have to give up basically every pet you own for a singular pet that is a problem and when a single pet is worth 100s of other pets it becomes a very overwhelming and unfun goal that likely leads to people scamming others and doing unfair trades to accumulate enough fodder to maybe be able to eventually find someone willing to trade for that ONE pet. I dont really see how trading 100s of pets for one older one is healthy for the game economy. People who think otherwise are likely sitting in a position of relative "Wealth" on the site and are probably looking at things through a totally different lens.

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I do agree that re-releases should happen more often, maybe like one re-release event per season (spring/summer/fall/winter). Not for store pets but def for pets and items.
I also think the december 18th pets should have a number of boxes equal to the number of years CS has been open to be the most fair chance of actually getting something valuable.

[BlueEyedKite]

My birthday is in July so I might be bias in saying I'd love a "Christmas in July". Like the advent event, pick a day for re-releases during the summer event! From a writing standpoint it would be fun to incorporate the rereleases in the event lore. Take for instance our internet event imagine if they said someone raided Nick's servers and released old pets for everyone (too much? Lol). Inflation is so wild we need more more more more of those ex-list pets in circulation!

[tetrahedron]

I don't have much to add that hasn't already been said; it's unfortunate, but I feel like CS isn't very welcoming to new users. I have multiple friends and acquaintances that play other pet games, but none of them want to join CS, because they don't want to have to work and wait multiple years to be able to break into the higher-rarity trading world. (Of course, site culture also contributes to the somewhat hostile aura around trading, and I don't think that's something that could be changed easily.) I don't think this is good for the sites long-term health.

I think it's really great that there are contact forms for COPPA players so they can ask staff for trade help, and posting help threads and an in-depth explanation of what the 18th entails has also been something I've appreciated. But I also think that more frequent re-releases would be in the sites benefit. It seems like many of the older "classic" petsites have dried up because of their inability to evolve, and I'd like CS to be able to avoid that! Because I like it here. :- )