Support! I like WWs, but in a breeding game I also love to breed my pets and right now I could breed the perfect and most beautiful pup ever but it seems like for most of the site it would still be almost worthless.

So, yeah, I'd like something to rebalance this situation and increase the appeal of higher generation wolves.

I like all the ideas here, especially the badges (they would be super helpful for lineage projects too!), the increased stats/levels (it's really strange to me that stats don't increase in some way, it's rewarding for the player to see their characters get stronger in games) and possible mutations.

Perhaps the item could come with some wolf that have the trait so that it's less likely for people's current favorite wolves would not get locked out of anything. That or every breeding trait should be in the mole market.

Perhaps wolves born with the trait could have a badge indicating so.

This would especially be good with stats as it would prevent wolves being locked out of campaign, the gauntlet, or any future PvE feature if the game starts to be balanced for the higher stat wolves.

On FR I never cared for Gen 1s, on here...I do rather like the rng system behind WWs and can see myself collecting quite a few of em...on the other hand, I absolutely love making breeding pairs and can definitely feel a discouragement in that regard (I even had someone be shocked I was selling a Gen 4 offspring, and to question it's entire lineage xD)

Breeding-locked mutations are definitely great, but even FR had to add those mutations in as scroll items (though, I believe this was solely because FR has eye colors locked behind flights and no other way to change them, while LW has an eye scroll already)

Maybe even wolf specific traits in various generations that make them stronger in combat ? Just some additional stats here and there based off of their lineage in some regard would be very fun

I think this is a good idea. It's a breeding game, and I think breeding should be encouraged and rewarded. The G1 collecting thing is an alternative playstyle that players choose if or not to participate in, and they're already accepting many caveats to it- You cannot change a G1 wolf's number, you need to repeatedly randomize it's colors to make it look passable. You can't have a bracchus g1 without paying someone hundreds of real life dollars worth of ingame currency. I also feel like this playstyle is largely inherited from other websites like Flight Rising, but Flight Rising's playability as a breeding game has been actively harmed by support of the "dress up doll" playstyle.

As it stands, because of the mindsets of these playstyles, breeding past gen 3 is largely discouraged here, and a lot of what determines a wolf's value, (before it's design, non-bracchus breed and colors,) is an ID number and it's generation. I think this is a massive design flaw that needs to be solved somehow. Outside of being bracchus, wolves are not worth anything but numbers, and wolves created through the website's main feature are naturally worse.

That said, I don't think generation profile badges are a good idea. Allowing generation numbers to be immediately available has the opposite effect on pet sites I've played that have them. The generation number directly correlated with value, so pet value becomes even more abstract and low-number based as a result. Wajas "economy" is a good example of this--- but Wajas is a game nearly entirely based around throwing money at the website to buy fancy gen 1 wolves and sell their gen 2 babies. The profile badge would instantly be something people actively avoided moreso than something they looked for.

The differing sizes idea is cute, but any little flourish like that, or some sort of profile badge isn't going to add much to a wolf's value at all. Badges and small details on a profile have little positive function unless they're extremely exclusive.

Love any breeding exclusive marking or mutations. I don't mind if there are extremely rare specialty items that go with them, assuming they're much, much harder to get than breeding the mutation, but i would, personally, much rather there just be breeding exclusive traits.

I would also love to see super rare mixed breed wolves, but adding even one new breed to the website is a huge amount of work... I can't imagine multiple mixed breed puppy appearances. While this could be a minor inconvenience for some breeding projects, if the outcome was rare enough I can't imagine it being a particularly detrimental one, or an unfixable one, as any breeding between two different wolves is going to include one non-bracchus parent. And while I do think an alternative to this for players who want to apply it to g1s and existing wolves should exist, I don't think it should exist through shop purchase, as anything that is would be ridiculously common and discourage breeding. I would rather see them as limited prizes for ingame contests, or other activities that would introduce scarcity. And I know someone could still just throw money at someone else's prize gene. But not 200 people all at once.

If higher generation wolves had higher chances of mutation (possibly even giving g2 wolves no chance at all?) it would probably help their case a lot. The bonus should probably be capped somewhere though, as I have seen some wild stuff in places the like previously mentioned wajas...

I can see the breed "abilities," and their ability icons for hunting being changed through breeding being fun. Especially if they could mutate or inherit moves or skills that their breed wouldn't have otherwise.

I also like your idea for gameplay mutations-- Wolves having things like affinities for fishing that make fish show up more often, affinities for hunting that make the percentage go up a bit, or affinities for mining that makes them do more cool backflips while in the mines (or higher percentages for mining rarities) would be great. Or just using less energy.

But to like, continue on the subject of the "problem," which is the near complete worthlessness of bred wolves...

"Low Generation Numbers"/"Low ID Numbers" has become an ideal on lorwolf long before it did on other websites of the same type, I think partially because everyone is very used to "ID NUMBER" based pets from other sites, but i feel like the lack of scarcity within lorwolf also contributed.

There simply isn't a lot of variety on lorwolf yet-- and that's understandable. The website is a baby. But everything is very.. available. Nothing is "rare" but the Bracchus. I think this contributes a lot to the slow devaluation of all gen 2+ dogs.

There are very few markings, and all markings/breeds besides the bracchus only come from one source, the mole shop. The mole shop is largely pay to win, and contains infinite copies of any given thing to everyone. If there were genuinely rare or interesting methods to finding certain items that couldn't simply be overcome by now much money you throw at the site, I think it would be a massive improvement to the economy of breeding as a whole. I'm talking things like... Markings for long login streaks. Markings that come from large amounts of weekly vouchers. Markings that would be unlocked only once on an account as high job level bonuses.

There are things that likely wouldn't be super rare, but would add some variety to gen 2 wolves, like markings that can be won at high levels in the Gauntlet, or found deep in the mines/late fishing areas/rare high level hunting quests, or as rewards for releasing a certain amount of wolves. They probably wouldn't do terribly much to add value to bred wolves, but could help incrementally in even moving them at the marketplace.

But on the subject of wild wolves, I feel like they will eventually also need a buff. While a new gen 1 wolf is worth more than a bred wolf, if that wild wolf doesn't have a good color combo or a cool number, it's worth like 5 moonstones. (or less!)

Honestly, now that we're into the higher numbers of wolves, their value is basically nothing beyond the roleplay metric of having a blank "parents" slot. Hunting for them isn't worthwhile and the rates on encounters/knucklebones are miserable. I mentioned this on user surveys for the beta, but I feel like wild wolves should have some exclusive marking sets. I don't think this does any harm, aside from preventing people from putting those markings on their progens and pre-existing wolves. I know the team has said that they're interested in allowing wild wolves to "come with" scrolls for unique markings when found, but I feel like that defeats the purpose-- it makes hunting the wild wolves worthwhile, but further devalues the wolf itself, as there would be more of them in the economy and they would be worth even less. I also feel like this could boost the value of bred wolves with wild wolf parents. But, on another hand, any weird new non-mole way to get markings is something I would support.

Would this mean that a 4 digit gen 1 could never have these rare markings? Probably. But ID numbers and their value is one of my problems with pet sites, not a feature. It's something that I know for myself, and for a lot of other people, causes a lot of unintended anxiety. And while if a marking I really liked showed up as wild wolf exclusive, I might be a little disappointed I couldn't apply it to my progen, but it would incentivize me to hunt, it would incentivize me to buy from other players, and it would incentivize me to start breeding projects to get the wolf I wanted. If the only difference between two wild wolves is that one has a more valuable number, I think the high number WWs deserve the boost over lower ones that exclusive markings would give them.

In my eyes adding value to newer wolves can only be a good thing that encourages people to interact with aspects of the site the wouldn't otherwise if they could simply buy and apply anything to the same few dogs.

I do not see the point of making everything available to be applied to existing wolves. I know a lot of people want it, but I genuinely do not understand why it's a bad thing that occasionally, you might need to get a new wolf to get a new marking, outside of lore and roleplay reasons. If this is something the designers truly wanted and intended when making the website, I have no idea why the bracchus was included.

Breeding past g3 within normal breeds seemingly isn't even worthwhile to release the babies. Even the prettiest non-bracchus g1s are now producing hard to sell g2s. I see people encouraging each other not to breed wild wolves at all. I have encouraged friends not to breed their wws, for the sake of the economic value of the dog.

Because of the general interest in gen 1s from an arbitrary aesthetic standpoint, they're never going to be worth less than a bred wolf of the same breed and marking quality. But I don't think that this factor of the economy should be actively encouraged regardless of that fact, because the value of all other wolves can and will only just get worse.

I genuinely think a lot of these situations are kind of a "no matter what you do, someone will be unhappy" situation. If you incentivize breeding by giving them anything exclusive through it, be that stats, genes, breeds, sizes, etc, you will have players who what to treat the website like a dress up game very upset. There are people who want to play the game with only their original wolves, or for self-imposed reasons only want to have a certain amount. There are people who are attached to numbers that their wolf has and will be upset if they can't put a new gene on that wolf, have to level up a new wolf, or can't give that wolf stat bonuses bred wolves have. There are users who treat the website as a roleplay, and it would be detrimental to their lore if they let any wolf aside from this one specific guy do the fishing.

Meanwhile if you don't incentivize breeding somehow, allowing people to fully customize any wolf with any object, breeding becomes at best meaningless, profitless fun and at worst a widely frowned upon gameplay style that devalues wolves and causes player elitism. Players who come in late will have very little ability to "catch up" to those of us fortunate enough to be wild wolf hunting or breeding while wolves were still in lower digits. And while that will always be a problem because the numbers aren't going away, making both wild wolf hunting and breeding activities you cannot very easily profit from is creating a larger disparity between new players and old ones, and between people who can give the website money and people who can't. Because there is more scarcity in the dress up game playstyle, it will always be economically dominant regardless of any changes, but with nothing but good color schemes (that, if lucky enough, g1s can also have) giving value to bred wolves, their worth will continue to diminish exponentially, as it does on nearly all other breeding websites, and it will become harder and harder for players to make money on their own when inflation really starts to kick in.

And if the devs wanted this landscape, that's fine. If the point is that bred wolves have no value, okay. I can see that because breeding is, after all, free. It's just weird so many breeding games have systems that discourage breeding.

Edit: err, i didn't notice this was massive. Sorry. One other thing: I understand that any sort of addition to breeding will eventually go down in value as people breed more and more dogs. This is inevitable. But my real issue is just that the bred wolves have nothing at all to compete with economically.

I am completely in support of most suggestions on this thread -- especially @Fawn 's well-thought-out contributions -- toward making bred wolves interesting and worth breeding for. We really are seeing G1 brainrot hit early, and I think it would be healthiest for Lorwolf to introduce additional mechanics to make bred wolves valuable at this early stage as well. If new players coming in are already faced with an environment where there are many things you can't get on your progens, or even on wild wolves, we're less likely to get the situation that happened with Flight Rising's late introduction of dragon eyetypes -- where they could've been a really great mechanic to encourage breeding new dragons and valuing bred dragons, but weren't implemented well and were excoriated as the devs "breaking a promise" to the playerbase.

I think my only caveat would be for stat inheritance -- I think in this one case it'd be nice to have a catch-up mechanism where you can train existing wolves to have More Stat as well. Otherwise, I love the idea of wolves being able to inherit cross-breed affinities or even get affinities that aren't on any breed (finally, a way to 100% those hunts with huge stacks of Primal or Rogue affinity!), be half the parents' level, or get an ability from one parent's breed with the stats of the other.

Although, come to think, having breeding over multiple generations be the way to finally get wolf stats to parity with companion stats is also pretty appealing and encouraging... make things more like Pokemon breeding... yes... :|a

Mostly laughing at "FR gen1 brainrot" because yeah, it is prevalent and I have definitely indulged in keeping many wolves unbred simply because the culture of these games value a reverse incentive. It's like opening a toy from the packaging, you can either take it out to play with or leave it untouched to maintain "collector value". Since most people will open the toy, having an unopened toy is the value prospect. If it is valuable to breed the wolves, then leaving them unbred is a mark of status. If there's simply NO incentive to breed them, people won't breed them... in a breeding game. If anybody is worried about their gen1's "losing value" because there are more incentives to breed wolves, I just don't see that happening. The mark of unbred status might become even higher because of all there is to gain from breeding.

That to say; Support. I do not care for FR in a lot of ways that LW is much better about foundationally. LW can and should step away from the FR mold where it can and the FR breeding system is flawed in many ways. This will be better for longterm game health and identity, I think. Agreeing with others who point out big breeding implementation should definitely happen *early* in the game lifespan. Players should be given a heads up so they can plan/be prepared. Sudden change tends to... breed... backlash.

Completely personal note, I would have so many breeding projects if I could mix-match abilities and/or synergies onto different wolf breeds. Just sayin'.

No support except for the badge.

Any customisation available should be available to all wolves. Any markings, breeds, stats, synergies etc. should be available to all wolves. I don't mind visual changes to the profile of a wolf, based on their generation, but any aesthetics or stat/synergie changes should not be exclusive to generation or bred wolves.

@Gaia But it's already the case that one breed (Bracchus) is not available to all wolves (unless you're willing to spend a couple thousand RL dollars for it). What's your reasoning behind not wanting any other special perks available to bred wolves that wild wolves can't have? "Should" is a really strong word here.

@Plagueheart The fact that bracchus already exist, doesn't mean it is advisable or desirable to add any more of such restrictions. I don't mind bred wolves having a natural (free) chance to get a certain perk, and I don't mind at all if getting an item to get that same perk on an already existing wolf (be it WW or gen2+) is hard to come by, but there should be a way to get it.

The reason; it locks out quite a few wolves and quite a few players out of useful benefits or desirable customisation. This doesn't just apply to WWs, When a new breeding-exclusive breed or marking is released, this locks out ALL previous wolves prior to that. It'd suck royally if you happen to already have a wolf that would look absolutely perfect with that new breed or marking, but you can't change it to look like that, forcing you to keep it forever imperfect. Changing stats and synergies to have some sort of breed-only mutations, gives certain playstyles a huge game-play advantage. I don't think any type of gameplay style should be inherently disadvantaged, simply because the player-to-player economy isn't how some people would like to see it.

I personally think the main reason the value of wolves has dropped so incredibly fast is a. Wild wolves were relatively easy to come by. Yes it is a complete pain to hunt for them, but if we are going to compare to Flight Rising, they are a lot easier to obtain than eggs were back in those days. This greatly increased the amount of breedable wolves early in the game. b. the breeding cooldowns for wolves are incredibly short. and c. because you only need to nest an expecting wolf for 1 day, you can technically birth 5 nests a day (whereas on FR you can only do 5 nests in 5 days). The influx of wolves is a lot higher and den space limited. (Not at all helped by the fact that buying additional dens is limited to moonstone only expansions) That means people are running out of space, desperate to get rid of their wolves and lowering their sell prices to a pittance. Add onto that that releasing rewards have only recently been improved and in my opinion could use some more improvement, there's simply too many wolves.

Making WW and older/existing wolves inferior as opposed to newly bred wolves I think will do more harm than good.

The gen 1/Dress Up Doll gameplay styles are self imposed restrictions on gameplay. It is playing a nuzlocke. If players are choosing to play a game in a way that purposefully ignores the game's main mechanic, they aren't actually locked out of anything, they would be choosing to be locked out of gameplay mechanics for their own aesthetic ideals.

The problem isn't "wolves are too cheap," as the value of wolves will always go down, the problem is "there is no reason to breed in the breeding game, and there is nothing to be gained by breeding"