Hey Xav, wasn't sure if you saw this, but Eim created a post in general discussion on the same topic last night. Not sure where it would be better to consolidate all the ideas, but just so all ideas can be considered together, thought I'd mention it ^.^

Nope, totally didn't see it; I figured the suggestion box would be better for... well, suggestions. >.>;

Suggestion: To tag off the idea of a an NPC market to sell pets to--maybe there can be daily/weekly quests attached to these. For example, one week the king is trying to scout out a new underwater territory, and wants lots of Sylvorpas to do it. So Sylvorpas temporarily sell for more than the other pets during that week. Another example might be an NPC breeder (!) is trying to find a Qitari with the Leopard trait, so the player can accept a task to give them one Qitari with a Hidden or Visible Leopard trait (more for the Vis).

Cons:Albeit this might encourage more "trash breeding" as players try to meet the demands...

Pros: ...but I figure it would also provide a little flavor, and make pets "released" in this manner seem like they might be going to a home that wants them.

Suggestion:My other suggestion is to make the inbred stat count for something! Perhaps severely inbred may lead to a decrease in stats, or may incur longer cooldowns in breeding.

Cons: Currently project pets tend to be very inbred, so this might "nerf" a lot of current pets out there. Long breeding projects would also become exponentially more complicated as you try to find that perfect match that doesn't lead to inbreeding, though IMO, this part of the challenge of the game.

Pros: This would encourage the sale of wild-caught Sylesties as breeders look for fresh gene pools. This means new players would have something to contribute to the market right away. It may also encourage more cooperative breeding, as the sheer number of Sylesties needed to make a stable breed is pretty large, and maybe more than most owners could handle. So, there would be more use for the "stud fee" feature. I can just see a bunch of players teaming up to comb through certain zones looking for the right pet for a project.

EDIT: Oh, woops, there was another post for this. Oh well.

I came up with another that I'll cross-post here....

Suggestion: Set up an NPC selling agency that values pets based on pet voting contests. I'll explain how this works... in a pet voting contest, the player could navigate to a page that the server randomly picks two (or possibly more) for-sale sylesties and displays them. The player could choose to buy one of them if they wanted, or they could just click on whichever pet they like best. The more positive ratings the pets then get, the higher the NPCs buy them for at the end of a, say, two month period. The page also only displays random pets so that no one can do any sort of "vote-buying".

Cons: Doing this two by two would take a really long time to get through all the pets that are on sale. You might want to consider something like 5 pets, and the player orders them how they like them. I think ordering them in relation to each other instead of just providing a straight 1-10 scale is important though--it gives less-than-perfect pets more of a chance to compete.

Pros: This gives pet sellers a little free advertisement. This can also give players a steady income for breeding, but in ways that encourage good breeding, because how much their pets sell for is a direct measure of how much the playerbase approves of them. Also, Petopia for World of Warcraft Hunter Pets had a similar voting mechanic that I found incredibly addictive even though it had nothing to do with the economy, so this could become a fun part of the game in and of itself, without looking like a maintenance measure..

Suggestion :

Keep a prise minimal depending on traits ( number of trait / restricted or not) and type of pet for public sale.
And give a time limit for any sylesti set in sale at 1000 g or less be relassed or 'give to an npc in nead' after a set amont of time.

Pro :

It will get ride of a part of the no trait / dishwater pets. Will not impact breeding project or tagged.

Con :

People may reset the sale before the pet get relass. A lot of dishwater do have some traits.

Suggession :

Give a maximum of sale possible for a player in public breeding that would increace with relass achivement. ( maby start with 10 and then increace by one evrytime a set amount of pet that the player relass.)

Pro :
Don't affect the breeding directely. People will have to think about it before setting a pet for sale.

Con :
May lead to some mass breeding only to relass the pets afterward.
( maby have a set amount of breeding a player can do in one day to fix that issue)

Suggestion:

Make a philter that can only be used by the original trainer of a pet on an infertile pet to make it fertile again. This could be useful if someone wants to trade back a max stat pet that they no longer want/need, but they want the cash. The breeder that sold them the pet can then make the pet they bred fertile again, without risking fertile max stat pets getting out to other players.

I'm not sure there'd be much demand for this, but I thought it might be useful.

Both ideas are very good. You should ping Krin if you haven't already.

I completely agree that dyes being more accessible would help with the hoards of pets nobody wants because they have bad colours. I think that the pet dye mini-economy's destruction would probably be a small sacrifice for people being able to more easily clean up the 'dishwasher pets' in existence instead of trying to breed for better colours.
At the moment, to dye a pet and resell it isn't worth the effort because of how much effort has to go into getting a single dye. If this was changed then the overall quality of the pet market would drastically increase and more of the free pets that are passed back and forth could find permanent homes.

One simple idea to stop the influx of mass cheap pets is to have a high floor for public breeding (say 10,000k). However, still keeping an unrestricted sale price for private sales (so ppl can still trade/giveaway/gen test/etc).

Combined with incentives for releasing, these should work well together. Right now, even with release incentives, there are still masses of cheap pets. A public price floor would help, while unrestricted private pricing keeps flexibility.