Additional variant of breeding: setting pairs

Oh, major support! I play a lot of Flight Rising and I'm used to having a lair full of paired dragons, so coming here and finding out only one of my wolves could breed at all was really hard to adjust to. Being able to pair wolves up would make it so much easier to manage my lair, and it'd slow the explosion of wolf puppies on the market, too!

Full support!

I would love this, I feel like the one breeding male system is flawed.

I like the idea of allowing any two wolves within a pack to breed. It's a much more open gameplay style, and more intuitive because wolves don't exist in patriarchies. 

Not that WD is, or should be realistic, but it's an out of place mechanic that just... drifted over from Lioden.

A change would make males have equal value to females, and it'd make male NBW's, male pups, and male packmates valuable. 

Definitely support this. An "assign mate" mechanic linking two wolves in the pack would help a lot,  though it would certainly require a serious coding overhaul. It makes way more sense than the current lion pride harem play style and gives males a purpose. Bonded males could only breed that mated female while within the pack, and vice versa, just like a real wolf pair. Permanently connecting the two wolves would limit over saturating the stud market with many rare marking males as well.

To prevent pup market saturation, perhaps mated pairs could have a lower litter size norm with only a rare chance of getting more than 2 pups.

To alleviate mate swapping abuse, maybe there would be a re-mating cooldown on any wolf who lost a mate due to sale/chasing so that people aren't crazy with it. The abandoned mate could be in mourning as a flavor text and be unable to breed or take a new mate for 20 rollovers or something. 

@Raine, this is actually one of the reasons I support mating pairs less than a free for all mating. 1) It requires way more work and coding than just allowing all wolves to mate within the pack 2) mating pairs within a pack is already two restrictions, and it seems that everyone wants to continue to throw restrictions on top of those restrictions out of fear of abusing a system which honestly most people are asking for only for lore purposes. Every one of your added restrictions makes sense on their own, but put together they make the proposal seem clunky and undesirable.

And for this one "To prevent pup market saturation, perhaps mated pairs could have a lower litter size norm with only a rare chance of getting more than 2 pups." Allowing more than one breeding male already limits pup market saturation. Because more males in a pack means less females in heat. So if before someone with a pack of 10 could have 9 litters all at once, with mated pairs, if each wolf is paired, they can only have 5. The proposal itself is a limiting factor.

@chaossprincess

I see where you are coming from with fearing too many restrictions, but I think the reason most of us want more restrictions is because of what happened with long time unrestricted breeding on Lioden--we don't want to see that happen here. It is, after all, much easier to start with restrictions and then slowly ease up if they are deemed unnecessary, but adding restrictions later is much harder, especially once the player base and gameplay gets more established.

In my view, the restrictions of having a mated pair that is bonded somewhat permanently will force players to make harder decisions about which wolves to breed, sell, and keep, which will by nature mean fewer pups on the market. Thus pups will have a higher value rather than loads of people selling rare marked pups for low sc just to make space for more pups, thus saturating the market with something that was "rare" a month ago and is now ubiquitous.

Yes, having more males in a pack will lower the number of females in heat some, but those females will all be breeding with what will soon be a number of custom marked males with an equal chance of having lots of puppies. Thus creating more rare marked pups for sale, which will further decrease rare marking value (as well as pup value in general) and cause there to be the same aforementioned surplus of low sc pups being moved to make room.

I'm not saying mine is a perfect suggestion, but I was just thinking that lowering the litter count chance a little might help mitigate the inevitable market saturation that having more breedable males would cause, since this is likely the reason the devs didn't implement this mechanic in the first place. There would still be a chance of getting more pups with a mated pair, but perhaps it could help lower the number of pups being born every day and decrease market load a little bit more. 

That's how I see it anyway.

I don't get why everyone wants heap restrictions on this.  The math is very simple.  Half the females equals half the number of puppies.  Nerfing the litters will only discourage people from using the system, making it pointless to add.

@Raine What happened with unrestricted breeding on Lioden? I never played Lioden.

I wouldn't mind having a set pairing system. In real life wolves mate for life until they die and not only will it help the frustrations that surround the single male breeding system but it will allow both male and female wolves to have an equal  value when it comes to breeding. This will also solve the problem with inbreeding and allow more diverse pups to be born. I think this solution will provide more good than bad in the end. 

@Mossfoot- There isn't unrestricted breeding on Lioden, that's a bit of a misnomer. Lioden currently has the same "one breeding male" system than Wolvden does.

I want to mention that I support this exactly as it is in the original post, minus the last point. So long as the restrictions aren't "for life" or any other extreme penalties, it fulfills the same purpose as the 20-24 day male cooldowns on the other post. I wouldn't mind a mood penalty for breaking a pair, so long as you could do it whenever you liked, and, if you changed your mind, could pair them back up again.

If you have to wait an in-game year to pair either wolf back up again, I would just alternate the years each female breeds to my (in-lore polyamorous) male. I'd prefer not to have to pay GC to neuter my current stud, just so I can have 2 (potentially disappointing) litters from the next one before he dies :/

@Mossfoot

I played Lioden for about 5 years and for a long time it had no minimum stud fee. So breeding for custom/rare colors quickly took over game play and every rare color/mark was common and cheap within a month or so of its release. It just became an endless cycle of "what is the latest color, let's all buy that and then undersell each other until you're just giving them away" which kinda ruins the fun.

Eventually they implemented minimum stud fees, which helped, but then they allowed people to do "reverse studding" with their lionesses officially, which I get cause people were doing it anyway, but it basically made it to where there were very few breeding restrictions for most of the history of the game.

Perhaps it was misleading to say unrestricted, but it certainly feels like for the most part there have been very few measures put into place on LD to control mass breeding within the harem model and, at least for my part, it has made the game rather un-fun to play as that is more or less the only market in the game. the "GC" to "SC" rate in LD is astronomical (last I played it was upwards of 1000 "sc" for 1 "gb") and a lot of it is due to there being little control over supply and demand on what the players want, which at this point is basically just "oo, shiny lion." I would be sad to see WD turn into that, cause I already have access to that game if I want to play "oo, shiny animal."