Unfortunately, we have been receiving a lot of complaints as of late of players harassing other players regarding the sale of pets. This thread will serve to outline what buyers and sellers should expect and explain why it is considered harassment to try and tell other players how to play the game.

Most importantly, when you sell a pet, you sell the pet at 100% of your own risk. You have no right to tell a buyer what they can, or can't, do with a pet that they purchase from you. Are there exceptions to this? Yes, and I will explain below. But regarding any general sale, this is how it is. So what does this explicitly mean?


-If you accidentally sell a pet to the wrong person, it is not the buyer's fault and they do not have to return it to you. However, I would always suggest that you politely contact the buyer and see if the buyer and seller can work out some sort of deal to remedy the mistake. But again, the buyer does not have to do anything. It is not their fault.

-If you sell a pet and the buyer releases the pet (or does any other thing with the pet that you did not want, such as dying it, mutating it, nullifying it, changing its gender, etc.), there is nothing that you should ever say to the buyer about it. When they purchase your pet, it becomes 100% their own pet. You have zero say over what happens to the pet. You should not request the buyer to not buy more of your pets, you should not request the buyer to return the pet, you should not request the buyer to not do whatever it is that they did again to any other pet. This is inappropriate and this is harassment. As a seller, you would not want buyers messaging you and asking you not to sell pets the way that you're selling them or not to breed pets the way that you're breeding them, would you? So please give buyers the same respect.


Now, as mentioned above, there is an exception to this. The exception is when, prior to the sale of the pet, the buyer and seller come to some sort of written agreement (that takes place somewhere on Sylestia) where a certain set of conditions will take place before/after the sale. The number one example of this would be "selling" pets to a specific buyer so that they can Genetically Test the pet and then "sell" the pet back to the original seller. Under these circumstances, the buyer is "under contract" and must oblige to whatever it is that they agreed to do before the sale in a timely manner. Doing anything but would be considered scamming on behalf of the buyer (or the seller in some circumstances).




So what can be done on the seller's part to somewhat control the sale of their pets? At this time, the only real option is to sell the pets to a specific player. Either create a thread advertising your pets for "adoption" and sell to interested players or (since this seems to usually be directed towards giving pets to new players), kindly contact new players and ask if they would like any of your pets. If so, then directly sell them those pets.

However, using the public sale of pets is 100% at your own risk and I would like to ask everyone, right here and now, to stop sending messages to buyers asking them to do or not to do specific things with the pets that they purchased from you. If players continue to do this, we will have to begin handing out account suspensions to those who cannot follow the rules. Telling other players how to play the game is 100% harassment. Again, you would not want players sending you messages telling you that you should breed less or to stop putting pets up for sale - so respect buyers and stop telling them what to do with the pets that they buy. It goes both ways.




Lastly, I would like to conclude with what we can do on our end to provide more permanent solutions to these issues. Firstly, I think the addition of a Pet Pound feature would greatly help prevent these circumstances from coming about. A simple functionality would be that you can either sell pets or put them in the pound for adoption. If someone adopts a pet from the pound, they cannot release the pet. Alternatively, they can return the pet to the pound if they no longer want it. Pets are then cycled out of the pound if not adopted for a certain period of time.

We also have other features in mind that apply to Breeding that would help reduce the overall amount of unwanted pets. At this time, there are way more players who want to breed pets and give them away than there are players who are looking to use free pets. We need to do things on our end to help balance this discrepancy.

Unfortunately, at this time, we are focused on the upcoming Fall and Winter Festivals as well as working on the MegaZone inbetween (and the Aurleon revamp prior). So these new features most likely won't come into fruition until we revamp Sylestia. So in the meantime, please just be kind and respectful towards your other players and this includes respecting their own method of playing Sylestia. Just because you may disagree with how they play the game does not mean that they are playing incorrectly or doing something wrong.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and we hope that you understand our stance.