I am VERY excited for a breeding grounds update, especially the ability to set breeding pairs and see the traits of my pets when breeding! It will certainly be very helpful when I'm breeding and make it much easier to find pets that carry the only instance of a trait! :D

Although a breeding fee wouldn't hurt me very much personally, the most it would do was make me a little more conscious about which pets I choose to breed which is probably not a bad thing, I do worry that it would deter a lot of current players from completing their breeding projects and new players from ever beginning them.

Would there be any consideration put towards implementing a function similar to how 'Nurture Boosting' currently works, and I don't mean scaling the price of breeding pets to match the current amount of egglings when breeding, but rather players being able to breed a certain amount of egglings without paying the breeding fee? I was initially thinking a smaller number like 20 pets, but maybe something like 50-100 would be a better number. It would allow players to continue their breeding projects, but still deter large-scale breeding of pets that just get auto-released.

Regardless, lovely work as always Krin! Very excited! <3

I dont usually chime in but I wanted to expand/agree with something that Volinolona mentioned! While Im a little unfamiliar with the term dishwasher pet, breeding is one of the most fun aspects of the game. I only recently started a project, but prior to that breeding was just fun to see how colors and traits mix together. Hatching eggs and having hatchlings is what brought me to the game as a 14 year old.

They dont always turn out the prettiest, but sometimes that doesnt really matter to a player. I agree with Volinolona that a breeding fee is likely to just punish smaller/younger players for their playstyle, and be a hassle to those who already have a lot to manage project wise. I only just started one and most of what hatches cant be used (granted, Im no expert so user error is likely) but for the more advanced project people with several projects going on, I imagine itll add up very quickly.

But the rest of it looks awesome ^ ^ !!

I read the post and I am not 100% sure if it was said or not because my brain is on auto-pilot. But did the enhanced information include limiting to specific themes? Will it exclude pets that are unable to breed due to being related? I keep trying to breed siblings by accident because I uhh.. Don't have the mental bandwidth most of the time to set the breeders in a way that makes sense even to me. Not really your problem, but would help a bit to be able to exclude unbreedable and pets of a different theme.

I get the inspiration for the breeding fee, but it mostly seems like it is a small number of players that breed the excessive amounts of dishwater pets. Some do it in such a way that it kind of seems like they use a program, is it possible you could look into that or speak to those players about it directly to find out more about what they are doing and see if you could reason with them or something? Breeding projects do require a ton of offspring in order to get the desired results and it would likely make it prohibitive for newer players.

That other person (sorry I forgot the username by now) mentioning the option for permanent deletion does make sense, but it should be optional. I do not like naming most of my pets and while I could manually move them to stables, I do rely often on them automatically going into my stables. I know you can change the settings on your hatchery to release un-named and whatnot, so if it was able to be set as an option that makes sense. I do the mass release from the hatchery for bad offspring, but the earlier offspring that were previously useful, I am holding onto for release boards and it is going to be a struggle to find and delete those older ones. It took thousands of pets to get the first 6v of my project. That adds up really quickly for cost and most of them were released but I would have been okay with permanent deletion of those offspring. The 7 day waiting period for those is nice, because I have accidentally released one or two I didn't mean to and had to recover (oops!)

This is just my 2 cents.

Obviously anyone who breeds a lot will dislike the fee existing, myself included, but I do see the point of giving a baseline value to offspring by doing this.
If the plan is to have a stablehand that offsets the breeding fee to help people doing projects, that probably needs to be implemented at the same time as the breeding fee itself. If it's a reasonably expensive gold cost per week but reduces the breeding fee down to almost or literally nothing, then it'd function like a soft cap on how much the breeding fee costs people doing projects. Like if it became better to hire the stablehand when breeding 50+ pets per week, then I imagine everyone doing a project would be taking it, at least on days or weeks when doing a round of breeding, and that would be as much as breeding your own pets can really cost.

Since project breeding is the way a lot of people mass breed, and breeding with care to create a controlled valuable outcome is the opposite of random breeding flooding the market, there does need to be more specific accomodations than the assumption that people doing projects will find a breeding fee negligible. For hundreds or thousands of project duds to add up to a negligible cost without something like a stablehand reduction, the fee would have to be too negligible to work for its intended purpose.

So yeah, my issue with the cost idea is basically that linear cost scaling will inevitably punish people who are being selective about what offspring they keep, because released duds could be hugely expensive. Stablehand acting as a cost ceiling might be a way to deal with that. A gold payout for releasing that acts as a partial refund might also work.

breeding is the whole point of this game, it already cost us to much to expand our stables to keep our hard worked on projects, now you want to charge us to breed ontop of that? i already buy premium currency to help me out, if this gets implemented ill be deleting mine and my daughters accounts and you will be loosing atleast 2 paying users. We already have found a few pet sites that have been up longer, who dont charge you money to breed or even for "pet slots" and allow you to have unlimited pets. if your real concern is server space, do like the other big name sites that came in the 90s, released pets get deleted from the system completly.

I am so excited that we are getting closer to this happening. All the new features look awesome and being able to set pairs for breeding will help so much. Will it show what theme the pet belongs to as well as the traits/colors? Some themes look similar in base colors for me and it would be nice if theme name showing was possible but it's not a deal breaker or anything. Would we have a link to the pet if theme can't be shown or maybe just for ease of going to their page to double check things? I know I'm not the only one who gets paranoid that I might have the wrong pet lol.

Personally I'm not bothered by the breeding fee and am actually in agreement with it. I have probably around 100 projects, with more being added each fest, that I slowly trudge along with to keep myself busy. I'm not bothered if I have to pay for breeding my own pets since it makes sense to give them some sort of base price and the market isn't flooded with thousands of 1g pets that nobody wants. Though gold is kinda easy to get so I, and probably many others, would still have some pets for "free". I also since it would mean more thought going into any breeding since people would be doing. A low enough fee that people won't riot over but also high enough so that those out there breeding crazily and causing data inflation would maybe think before they do so.

I'm not bothered by the gold fee idea because gold is easy to get. Spend a few minutes in Esior's Haven in one of the areas and get a bunch of gold. I also don't understand the need some have to hoard gold? It's not even real? Or maybe it's just the idea of spending gold to breed when the pet may just end up useless. I'm just not bothered. I'll shrug and just put the pet in my release stable for when it's old enough. That will be its use and so it won't be a waste of time. I guess it may also be because I don't breed to sell to other people. I have no care to make projects for profit since I would then be disappointed in the end or come to hate the project. I breed for my enjoyment and don't care if I pay a small fee to do it.

Anyways, I got a bit off track there but wanted to explain my thoughts on the fee everyone seems to dislike. I'm really liking how things are coming along and can't wait to see it finished Krin. Thank for always keeping us updated on how things are going with the site! <3 ^-^