User blog:1y2e3r4u/Incorrect Promo Pet Values (explanation)

I posted this on the Promo Pets page but it got drowned out pretty quickly so I thought I'd post it here too. For people worrying about the values of pet groundhogs, seals, some doves, otters and sloths being out, here's part of the reason they haven't been changed. (I'm looking at redoing gh values and most of the demand for them all)

In these cases, the demand for 90% of the pets in these categories hasn't dropped, but when we start accounting for the bottom ones as our only minimum value, and we move this value down, we're almost guaranteed to start a sheep-trend where everyone will start freaking out and promo pets will undeservedly collapse.

Some other ideas that have been proposed within and outside of staff:

1. Create separate pages for each larger pet, showcasing features and explaining value changes

The problems this presents:


 * Not everyone's tastes are the same


 * It'll kill any demand for more 'common' larger pets


 * Whether the uncommon versions of these pets would collapse or not is left up to fate, and while the Wiki does its best to not tamper with the community's opinions at all, it would reflect pretty poorly on us if we didn't put thought into the implications of our edits

2. Briefly list common trends and features that some people prefer over others

The problems this presents:


 * Much akin to the problems with the first solution, everyone's tastes aren't the same


 * People will start to become discriminatory to certain features - while this already happens, this is a matter of people's tastes; if we state that most people prefer one thing, everyone else will flock to this, to align their tastes with value as oppose to qualities

3. Take pets off of the Wiki altogether

The problems this presents:


 * Makes us even less credible


 * Chaos

I think the takeaway from this is:

Pets are something in the eye of the beholder - they're qualitative things rather than quantitative, but when you try to quantify them, you lose that part of them that makes them special.