Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=57948&page=2#17 Author: Savynn Time Posted: 2/22/2018 at 10:02 AM I kinda wonder if it'd been better to give 24 hours notice. "Males now have 3 individual "cooldowns", however, an actual recovery time does not trigger until all 3 cooldowns are used. Each cooldown refreshes after 36 hours." This is the point where I stopped reading for a moment and scrambled to take my males down from public breeding. Like I already see one of my males has a cooldown of "2". There could be people who aren't currently on and can't see this that could have their males completely used before they can take them down from breeding and won't be able to use them themselves for three days. I'm assuming with the "2" on mine that one of the breedings is already locked? Though I haven't bred him yet today and the last time I saw him bred was yesterday at about 8pm? At least I don't remember breeding him after that. https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=3801615

Fair point.

I have postponed the Male Ferrikki's Breeding Cooldown to begin applying at 2/25 at 12 AM (aka, start of the day of 2/25). This is a little over 36 hours from now.

At that point for all future breedings, it will calculate. If you breed it at 12:01 on 2/25 and had bred it 3 times in the past 36 hours, a recovery time will be applied. But it won't be applied until it breeds. This is probably confusing, but I am tired and I don't know how else to word it lol.

Thank you!

Ok, I am going to reserve judgement on the total breeding changes. I want to see how they affect my breeding of the Enchanted Explorer 'Rikki. I have already put lots of diamonds, gold and philters trying to get traits I want Arcanist traits).

I consider myself a dedicated breeder, I spend so much time collecting data on each project. Ex: Breed, Sex, Trait Types, Number of traits etc. All in hopes to get my project to the next level. A 6vis project can easily take a year to complete. Then to add on max stats, another 6 months or more. How much do I plan? My Excel file for Sylestia has over 50 sheets of current projects, finished projects, possible projects and more.

But I would like to voice some concerns.
1. Most dedicated breeders may not share their breeding stock anymore. Which would mean less tagged and "wanted" pets open for public breeding. I will probably not put up any of my 'EE Rikkis up for breeding. Maybe this is one of the things you are looking to slowdown?

2. A 6vis/max stat project may take slightly longer or a lot, still not absolutely sure how much. I have been looking at a past project to see what average breedings were on females. Are people going to lose interest in breeding if it takes over a year to achieve the desired results.

3. The reason we have to keep breeding more and more, is that traits don't pass down easily. For instance, a G1 carried Female bred to a G2 carried Male could easily have no traits, 1 trait carried or 2 traits carried. If I don't get those 2 traits carried.... I have to breed again till it comes out. In other words, having this breeding restriction can slow down my programs, which are already pretty long to begin with. Truthfully, I already put so much time into breeding.... not sure I want to keep breeding if it is going to take longer to get a project done. So, I would possibly suggest that something change on this.

I have other concerns, but can't figure out how to word them yet. So let me start with these.

I do not like this restriction idea for several reasons...

For females, the only reason is for finished project breeders.
I have project pets. Not random dishwater pets, but hard-earned, high-investment PROJECT pets. And some of these are extremely popular. As soon as I announced my Frost Wraith Vulnyxes, I soon found myself with a list of 3-5 people at a time. I can barely keep up with the orders! 10/11 offspring, all snapped up almost as soon as they hatched and most of them bred by request with a reservation line trailing behind them. I only have one currently, and that's because it's an egg and can't be made infertile yet. Check the mother's lineage of offspring and see for yourself!

Her future? She'll be just like my Winter Wonderland Aeri who, after 30+ offspring, I STILL have orders that need filling for specific trait requests.

If there was a cooldown on my project females, I'd have people waiting for WEEKS, probably even MONTHS on my high-demand project breeders. I feel bad enough making people wait 3 days for an egg to hatch! What would I do with a list of 5 reservations that take 12 DAYS each to clear!? I'll have 5 more people on the list by the time I clear ONE.

No, Krin. So. Much. No. I do not want myself and my buyers to be punished because some players like to breed tons of dishwater pets that never sell. Not all of us churn out random run-of-the-mill useless space-wasters and cry when no one wants to buy them; those of us who actually do something of worth being crippled because of those people is so not fair. And yes, that comment is harsh. But that's the problem you're trying to address and punishing the responsible players like me and so many other project breeders is not the answer.

For the males, I have three reasons to not like this.
1: Breeding is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're going to get.
2: Stable Space and organization.
3: Having eggs hatch at the same time, and in the same generation.


Stats projects are a major, long-term investment in the game. The longest, actually, and setting this format up will greatly hinder the progress there.

Currently my method is to keep only my top 2-3 non-related best statted males for each generation of breeding (unless I'm going for all-traits, in which case I may have some traits that are individually stuck on one male and it keeps not passing because recessive and the stats are too low to waste a philter...) This means that one male will likely be bred to 5-10 females each depending on individual breedability and the size of the project. The parents will likely have mixed tiers of stats (meaning one parent may be about 2-3 generations behind the other, but be required for the breeding gap or a certain trait so I can even continue the project) which means that the offspring results will likely be too low to really matter. Of the offspring I breed each generation, I only keep about 25-50% with the highest stats for philtering, and the rest are released.

I'll actually breed my pets just to show this. Enter the Parrot Tulip Draeyl, which is one of my smallest projects.

Male 1 (bred to the lowest females to get their specific traits up to the rest):
Acceptable, failure, acceptable, acceptable (Four breedings required to get my goal of 3)

Male 2: (Trying to get his own specific trait raised to the rest)
Failure, failure, failure, acceptable since it's a chance on raising the stats for two different pets (meaning I can release the parents if the offspring gets what I needed from them.

Now add a male cooldown to that...

Male 2 never gave me an acceptable offspring at all because the first three failed, and only the fourth succeeded. The pet IDs will prove that I did not orchestrate this - Sylestia itself just proved my point.


And even if the male cooldown is a quick one... DUDE! Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep all of these projects organized? Even a DAY of a difference would leave a hatchery completely mangled! I like clearing my species ONE at a time. Straight line of nothing but Aeris one day, straight line of nothing but Luffs for the next, straight line of nothing but Ny'vene for the third day. If they're BRED at the same time, I can get it all done in one sitting, and in three days I can HATCH THEM in just one sitting.

Real Life has been pressing lately; I don't have a chance to get on and breed a species one day, then have to get on and breed the same species AGAIN tomorrow because some evil male cooldown got in the way, and then do the exact same thing when they hatch. It will double, if not triple the demand of when I have to be here since I have to be online to philter my eggs.

If I want my projects to be able to be cleared in one day, I'll have to hold on to 3x the number of males for every project to make sure I can breed everything in one sitting. And that means more FAILED results since I'll have less quality, and more quantity.


Edit for more comments of note:

Unless you intend to have this Ferrikki-only trial last about 1-2 full years, your data on it won't even be valid for most of the concerns I'm referring to. ( Long term, hard work, project-based breeding, not "let me see how many random pets I can breed in a day <:D " mass-breeding.)

As for another comment made on players having to nurture pets to get items to lower the cooldowns... I'm a veteran, and I don't have time for nurturing even now. And I definitely won't if I have to keep popping up to work with the 3-breedings-only male cooldown for my breeders which will already be demanding 3x more of the time I already have to spend organizing, breeding, and booting the pets I don't need. (Sorting and booting takes anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes per species, and in the past I've gone with about two whole hours while going through multiple projects to purge.)

So yeah... Those of us working on major projects will likely have little time to nurture on the side.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=57948&page=3#23 Author: GoldGryphon Time Posted: 2/22/2018 at 10:48 AM Ok, I am going to reserve judgement on the total breeding changes. I want to see how they affect my breeding of the Enchanted Explorer 'Rikki. I have already put lots of diamonds, gold and philters trying to get traits I want Arcanist traits). I consider myself a dedicated breeder, I spend so much time collecting data on each project. Ex: Breed, Sex, Trait Types, Number of traits etc. All in hopes to get my project to the next level. A 6vis project can easily take a year to complete. Then to add on max stats, another 6 months or more. How much do I plan? My Excel file for Sylestia has over 50 sheets of current projects, finished projects, possible projects and more. But I would like to voice some concerns. 1. Most dedicated breeders may not share their breeding stock anymore. Which would mean less tagged and "wanted" pets open for public breeding. I will probably not put up any of my 'EE Rikkis up for breeding. Maybe this is one of the things you are looking to slowdown? 2. A 6vis/max stat project may take slightly longer or a lot, still not absolutely sure how much. I have been looking at a past project to see what average breedings were on females. Are people going to lose interest in breeding if it takes over a year to achieve the desired results. 3. The reason we have to keep breeding more and more, is that traits don't pass down easily. For instance, a G1 carried Female bred to a G2 carried Male could easily have no traits, 1 trait carried or 2 traits carried. If I don't get those 2 traits carried.... I have to breed again till it comes out. In other words, having this breeding restriction can slow down my programs, which are already pretty long to begin with. Truthfully, I already put so much time into breeding.... not sure I want to keep breeding if it is going to take longer to get a project done. So, I would possibly suggest that something change on this. I have other concerns, but can't figure out how to word them yet. So let me start with these.

I'll mention what we were tossing around in Region Chat a little bit ago.

One thing that this could open the door for is items/features to reduce said cooldowns. These items would be targeted for the Scale Shop (to help make Scales/Nurturing more valuable) with Diamond Shop alternatives (for those not wanting to nurture but still wanting the items). This would put the control into the hands of the more experienced/veteran players who, for the most part, don't flood the markets with a billion pets and have better understanding of pricing and worth.

Whereas newer players would have a barrier to work towards and progress towards to eventually pass through (advance their account, nurture, etc).

In general, Sylestia has a massive lack of just "items". It's one of the major focuses of content changes for the revamp. We want to add a lot more to do, collect, and customize. Things like this would definitely fall into that category.


So, that's another possibility here as well.

And again, just to stress and why I mentioned it a few times in the original post and the title, this is testing the feature out. It's locked to one species that we can get very good results from because it's untainted so far as it's been available for like 4 or 5 days and it's something we are specifically looking to test and get feedback on. So I would strongly advise to everyone not to dramatically change their plans, etc, over this announcement. All this implementation does for now is just add some extra time to males who breed more than once every 12 hours and to females who end up harboring a dozen+ children. And in both cases, it's just a bit more time involved to get desired results or an extra male or so to skip that extra time.

I like this feature, but for goodness sake PLEASE do not make the same mistake Mweor did. They had age limits on breeding for your pets for not only too young (which is fine) but for too old! I left for a week to go on vacation and all of my pets were unbreedable. So please. Don't make a too old limit .___.

Wow. Just wow.

I'm still new here, but it seems to me that breeding pets is sort of the focal point of the site. Now you want to make that harder for people to do.

If there are economical problems that are stemming from the pet breeding, perhaps the solution isn't to make attempting to breed a particular look that you actually like even more difficult, but to instead impose some sort of limit on how much people can charge for things?

As it is, it's very difficult to earn up gold just to keep grinding through the areas, much less try to afford things like new essences without having to open one's wallet and buy diamonds.

Are you attempting to kill your own site? This is what is the likely result of your changes. You are going to end up with a lot of players who are already happy with the pets they do have, and more money than they know what to do with. Everyone else, will find somewhere else to play.

The solution to any form of problem in a game site, is NEVER going to be punishing your players by making one of your core attractions even more difficult to accomplish.

If it is pet sales that are the problem, find a way to limit those. Either impose a maximum limit on price, possibly based off of amount of non/hidden/visible traits, or limit the number of pets one can sell in a particular time frame. Both of these unfortunately also punish people who run breeding farms for requested pets.

If its amount of cash in the economy, versus how much things are costing on the broker, perhaps you should instead consider upping the amount of cash you can gain from adventuring, as many, many many battles end in zero reward, and when you do find cash drops, it rarely makes any sense when you consider the level of the opponents you have been facing.

Consider all aspects of the economy, and seek the very heart of the problem. Increasing breeding times will only delay the problem, and may in fact, inflate prices even further, while driving away your player base in sheer frustration.

just because this is a bit confusing to me, so if I had a male Ferri up for public breeding, one single person could immediately snatch up his 3 breedings?
will there be some option to like, limit public breeding per each 3 cooldown period to one breeding per person/period, to make it more fair for everyone?

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=57948&page=3#25 Author: Krinadon Time Posted: 2/22/2018 at 10:59 AM [quote=1173681] I'll mention what we were tossing around in Region Chat a little bit ago. One thing that this could open the door for is items/features to reduce said cooldowns. These items would be targeted for the Scale Shop (to help make Scales/Nurturing more valuable) with Diamond Shop alternatives (for those not wanting to nurture but still wanting the items). This would put the control into the hands of the more experienced/veteran players who, for the most part, don't flood the markets with a billion pets and have better understanding of pricing and worth. Whereas newer players would have a barrier to work towards and progress towards to eventually pass through (advance their account, nurture, etc). In general, Sylestia has a massive lack of just "items". It's one of the major focuses of content changes for the revamp. We want to add a lot more to do, collect, and customize. Things like this would definitely fall into that category. So, that's another possibility here as well. And again, just to stress and why I mentioned it a few times in the original post and the title, this is testing the feature out. It's locked to one species that we can get very good results from because it's untainted so far as it's been available for like 4 or 5 days and it's something we are specifically looking to test and get feedback on. So I would strongly advise to everyone not to dramatically change their plans, etc, over this announcement. All this implementation does for now is just add some extra time to males who breed more than once every 12 hours and to females who end up harboring a dozen+ children. And in both cases, it's just a bit more time involved to get desired results or an extra male or so to skip that extra time.

...you do know that the lifeblood for any sort of game site is attracting new players right?

Its already insane here at the bottom, and requires more grinding than your average flour mill; and you want us to do more?

I want to quit now.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=57948&page=3#28 Author: Sageturtle Time Posted: 2/22/2018 at 11:07 AM just because this is a bit confusing to me, so if I had a male Ferri up for public breeding, one single person could immediately snatch up his 3 breedings? will there be some option to like, limit public breeding per each 3 cooldown period to one breeding per person/period, to make it more fair for everyone?

There will not be those types of options at this point in time because that would require kinda larger coding changes to implement that I don't have time for atm.

But I suppose such options could be offered if this were to become a permanent feature.