We need your feedback on an update to the rarity system!

[Gionori]

I've seen some people be confused about the graph distribution, so this is about how I understand it:
Keep in mind this is a vast oversimplification lol. I'm not huge on trading or the CS economy myself, so there's definitely more nuance, disparity per year, big gaps in amount of pet, etc.
Also I wanted an excuse to draw some little guys.

[conarcoin]

In my opinion, the ideal way to "fix" CS trading is the following:
-More rarities!

-Shift to calculating rarities based on population of a species directly, not translated into a secondary vs users formula. Have an official, easily accessible explanation on how the formula works. There's no reason to extrapolate / obscure it, just don't relate the number to user count.

-Re-calculate rarities quarterly. Ideally, this would be done on "off" months, and would only count users who have been active within the quarter. Honestly, I would almost say monthly, but I realize this would be a huge resource strain, especially as the site continues to grow. Once a year is just not often enough, especially for species that waffle in and out of favor or who have users with large hoards of the same species that go inactive frequently. Another benefit to this is that it can give players more incentive to trade. Part of the reason that trading is so hard right now, specifically for older pets, is that people are not willing to let even pets they don't like that much go if they're rare because they want that rarity to grow. Making it so that rarities are slightly more flexible, adding a slight pressure to trade off pets you might not really want to keep because rarities fluctuate would actually put really good pressure on the trading "economy," in my opinion. Keeping pets you don't want just in the hopes they'll be rare someday could be disincentivized by that rarity being slightly more fluid more often.

Rarities are recalculated bi-monthly already?

Adding more rarities is likely to cause people (myself included) to quit, as someone who is autistic, it's already had to keep track of the ones that exist.

I disagree as an autistic person myself. I'm actually more confused by how vague and unhelpful the current categories are.

[Liminal]

I don't really have any deep thoughts besides I love the idea of more variety!
instead of saying higher demand uncommons we can finally have the just below rare status!
love, love, LOVE this!

[Lex.]

I've seen some people be confused about the graph distribution, so this is about how I understand it:
Keep in mind this is a vast oversimplification lol. I'm not huge on trading or the CS economy myself, so there's definitely more nuance, disparity per year, big gaps in amount of pet, etc.
Also I wanted an excuse to draw some little guys.

THIS IS SO CUTE!
And this does explain it well, it confirms what I thought and I believe what Concept mentioned previously!

[Oraanu]

I agree with adding more rarity categories, but I think it would be most beneficial for only rares and up. Designating a new category for commons and two new categories for uncommons just seems unnecessarily complicated. Very commons and commons are already pretty much interchangable and most people value them same, so I'm very apprehensive of adding even more low-mid rarity categories if they aren't really needed right now.

The biggest problem I see with the current rarity display system is that it portrays rarity as a linear scale even though it's not. This is why rarity math (ex. 2 commons = 1 uncommon) doesn't realistically hold up once you start getting into the really rare pets. The rarest pets are exponentially more rare than others and I think we need a scale to reflect that more accurately. I believe the simpliest way to do this while still adhering to the proposal to add more groups would be to only add more categories to the rarer side of the scale. I would more readily support a new system with 2 or 3 more categories for rares only.

Example| ... Rare >> [Extra Rare] >> Very Rare >> [Ultra Rare] >> OMGsoRare >> [Legendary]

This system would could have the benefit of potentially assisting users with trades involving more rare pets, while also not overcomplicating lower value trades.

[Spaceinmyhead]

I've seen some people be confused about the graph distribution, so this is about how I understand it:
Keep in mind this is a vast oversimplification lol. I'm not huge on trading or the CS economy myself, so there's definitely more nuance, disparity per year, big gaps in amount of pet, etc.
Also I wanted an excuse to draw some little guys.

That is an amazing diagram and is basically how it works. Rarity shouldn't be thought as a huge over-arcing thing, its just something that impacts individual pet designs. Say you adopt a dog litter, that came with 20 puppies with 5 being one pattern, 5 being another pattern, 9 being a further pattern, and 1 being a different one too. The puppies with 5 to each pattern common, since you were likely to get one of those outcomes. The 1 that was different would be uncommon, since you had less of a chance to get it, and the ones with 9 would be very common. Thats their base rarities. But, you have one out come that's uncommon, 2 outcomes that are common, and 1 out come that is very common. Thus, there are more common pets than very commons because there were more outcomes that became common.

Hope that makes sense to everyone!

[leopia]

Adding more rarities is likely to cause people (myself included) to quit, as someone who is autistic, it's already had to keep track of the ones that exist.

I disagree as an autistic person myself. I'm actually more confused by how vague and unhelpful the current categories are.

agreed!

also i just want to say i'm really grateful to the
admins and mods for listening to the community,
especially to lacuna for being the go-between!! ♡
i think adding 4 new rarity tags is great,
and i love the star suggestion!

gonna go delete my 100+ groups tonight,
can't wait to reorder! c':

[Froggieee]

I’ve read through this thread more and more and I’m really hyped for four new rarities now. I also hope they use the suggested star system idea!

My only question now is when this could all take effect?

[Electric~Lime~Zebra]

For an alternative to the ticks, what about stars that fill up depending on the rarity?
OMG so common - 0 stars
Extremely common - 1/2
Very common - 1
Common - 1 1/2
Uncommon - 2
Very uncommon - 2 1/2
Extremely uncommon - 3
Rare - 3 1/2
Very rare - 4
Extremely rare - 4 1/2
OMG so rare - the full 5 stars!

Forgive me for my lack of artistic skill, but here's a very rough mockup!

I really really like this idea. I'm all for the extremely rare and extremely uncommon being added in. The uncommons and rares need more specification in my opinion. I think adding more to the uncommon and rare groups would sort out the large arc between the uncommon to the rare to the vr, I'm afraid if we just added to the common side, some people would force even higher trading values for rares/vrs when experienced players find that some uncommons & rares have different levels of obtaining. (for example take the shima longtail vs a rare from the 21 summer event) I think the star system would make it easier for players to understand who are newer or who just trade based on rarity vs demand lists.

[Resplendent]

I made a mockup of the "star" rarity bar system using colors and graphics similar to the current rarity bars, plus a potential proposition for colors - though I'll admit I worked this up before seeing Fellefan's colors a few pages ago, and mine are fairly different & a little rough around the edges. More of a proof of concept / general visualization than anything, though at least with the star system if the colors are more similar it matters somewhat less. (There can also be an argument for similar colors suggesting that the different rarity categories are closer to each other than the old/current ones, and encouraging more trading up/down/between tiers.)

This looks very good, but I use the CSDark board theme and there are two problems:
- the black names are very hard to read,
- the half-stars in "common" and "very common" rarities are also rather hard to see, even with other, lighter themes.
So I tried to edit it and the edited version looks like this:

OO, this is great! I also use CS dark mode and noticed these things. Your edited version is definitely easier to see!

I want to sort of bump this because I really, really like this mock-up/idea. I think it's better than the mock-ups proposed on the initial post. I can distinguish all 11 rarities easily and the colors and the amount of color filled up are distinct enough that I can easily tell which is which without them being too similar to one another. I really hope staff will consider this option (or at least incorporate aspects of this idea into the final design of the rarity bars)

I'll also say I also prefer the word "extremely" over "super" because I agree with some folks that "very" and "super" mean virtually the same thing and would get easily confused. "Extremely" is a better word because the word itself is clearly a superlative of "very" rather than "super"