There are many reasons to breed your wolves. To extend your lineage, to get more wolves to pop companions on for extra income, to sell and trade to other folks who like the colouring of your wolves. To train and release for big money. To make different synergy combinations required for hunts. To lessen the stamina burden and food consumption when doing things like the gauntlet or campaign. At this point, apart from limited den space, I see no reason not to breed your wolves.

Training to release wolves is not an efficient use of time, food or energy as it currently stands. It's not very worthwhile. There are a few suggestion threads about improving this mechanic I've seen, too. Additionally, it's more efficient to purchase wolves for this purpose than to breed them. You can put companions on wild wolves and purchased wolves just as easily as on bred wolves. Getting wolves in any way can do almost everything you've mentioned. Selling to other people who like the coloring of your wolves is viable only for a very small amount of currency, which is getting smaller. It's unquestionable that very soon there will not be any incentive to breed at all.

I do not think breeding in the breeding game that has this many gameplay mechanics otherwise should be a completely optional and frivolous mechanic, used only for slightly more beneficial color schemes. It should have some gameplay purpose separate from the other ways to get wolves. Simply for the benefit of people inventing alternative playstyles, or using playstyles inherited from another website, and at the determent of gameplay for those of us that want something to work towards or find through breeding.

I genuinely do not mind if there are rare, difficult to obtain alternatives for people who want to continue playing the game in any invented way. But I don't think those alternatives should be so easy that they take away from a mechanic that would make the game more exciting for the majority of players.

Nevertheless, I have plenty of den space but feel no reason to breed my wolves. I've got more than enough for anything I want to do, and people don't appear to be breeding wolves that would be useful for a couple of long-term breeding projects I want to work on--and honestly, for those, I might be better off just waiting a while for the perfect WW to show up for them. None of the mechanics mentioned are really inducements to breed more wolves once you've gotten a certain stable base of them.

"Every trait should be available for all wolves regardless of age because otherwise people will feel bad about not being able to change their older wolves" is an argument I understand but am ultimately not sympathetic to. Old wolves have value because they're old. New wolves can have value because they have access to things old wolves didn't. Saying players will be so emotionally distraught over their old wolves not getting to have a new breed or a special professions perk or an unusual affinity is, to me, kind of demeaning. People will be disappointed but also find ways to have fun with the new mechanics. It'll be fine -- and being able to breed in a whole bunch of new, exciting traits will give people a lot more things to work on, and give the game a lot more longevity.

The value of old wolves, same as the 'value' of WWs is all artificial. I hold no value whatsoever to low IDs, but some do. The same with WWs, some value them, some don't. I don't think we should make a forced tangible difference between the two. As I said, give breeding a chance at these things for free, but at least make them available to all wolves. Old, new, ww or bred. Make em hard to get if need be. But make it possible.

The argument about the value of old wolves/wild wolves cuts both ways. If it's purely due to sentiment or people liking Small Number, and everyone has equal chances to breed new wolves with the new traits, how is anyone being harmed by not being able to breed change an old wolf into one of the new crossbreeds? Or not being able to give an old wolf an affinity only available through breeding?

Didn't see this mentioned before: What if high gen wolves got an experience bonus? Say, for every five generations, they get +1 experience to explore actions and a 5% increase from hunting/companion experience. Higher the gen, better the bonus. You could lore this with some flavor text like, "With ancestral guidance, this wolf gains an extra XYZ per action." This would especially come in handy as the level cap is increased, and it might make mass breed'n'release strategies more viable.

The value of all wolves, currently, aside from the g1 bracchus, is artificial. This is leading to things like numbers, generations, and if or not the dog has parents or offspring being given expanded social and economic value, and devaluing the new wolves. This is in fact exactly my problem. There are new players who are joining and coming into an environment where they simply have no options to create or find a wolf with unique value. They have very little reason to breed their wolves, because their wolves lose artificial value (the only value we currently have) from breeding. When we have no options to give value, even artificial social value, (which, again, is all we have), to bred wolves, new players are going to suffer for it.

this is why i think greatly the introduction of super rare, but not impossible to obtain genes is also a good option. Something that is very rare and expensive to find otherwise will encourage breeding without removing the option entirely for user-invented alternative challenge playstyles. The Bracchus does this for older players, to some extent, but new players have no way to get in on it.

I'm with Fawn and the others on this.

I've played Wolvden for some time before coming here and even if I've stopped playing (I was playing it while moving houses and it was just too stressful to keep up with and, since I like to collect virtual pets, the hunger and death mechanics weren't really for me), I still remember fondly the breeding mechanic over there.

It was one of my favorite aspects of the game, it was really good to see the base stats of bred wolves going up with each passing generation, and it was really rewarding to breed my first wolf with a recessive gene and after that my first melanistic wolf! I've felt kind of proud to achieve that after all the work and planning to get there.

I also still play FR, and as much as I still like the game, breeding there isn't exactly rewarding in the same way. As Fawn said, it is now mostly a "doll dress up game" with a breeding mechanic attached to it, since you can change any dragon from head to toe without keeping anything accessible exclusive (or almost so) via breeding.

I can see this game heading in the same direction of FR. The mindset of "we should be able to apply any new cool stuff to any old wolf" it's exactly what made FR a mostly "doll dress up game".

I've started to play Lorwolf because it seemed to me to take inspiration from both games: a slightly more complex breeding mechanics with more colors and a campaign like Wolvden, and a more "forgiving" and easy game with immortal pets, companions and side activities like Flight Rising, all while adding their own unique features.

I want this game to actually be "in between" those two, and taking more inspiration from Wolvden breeding might help, like increasing stats, hidden traits or something you can feel proud to achieve after working for it. Just adding a generation badge won't do, I still like the idea but if all the other things remain the same it would just be another reason for people to avoid that wolf like Fawn said.

If things remain the same, if we keep the same mindset we have on FR, Lorwolf will just become another FR, another "dress up game with the optional breeding" if you're bored and feel like devaluing your own wolves to the eyes of other players. And frankly, it would be kind of sad to see another promising breeding game going down that route.

I'm someone that get really attached to my pets in this kind of games. I like to collect them, dress them up, make them the most beautiful they can be (and I can afford them to be XD), think about lore for them, work toward something breeding them and I don't really enjoy releasing wolves. Right now for a player like me breeding almost feels like shooting myself in the foot. I'm still breeding for the fun of it, but then I have to face the inconvenience of a almost constantly full den, pups that don't sell if I don't list them for really cheap all the while hearing a lot of people only valuing WWs and G1 wolves just because their info page is apparently more appealing with the unknown parents or something.

And even if I grow attached to my wolves, if I can't give them the cool new stuff, it's still fine. If stuff suggested here get one day implemented and I couldn't apply them on my progens or WWs I would just breed new wolves to find those traits.

(I'm sorry if my English isn't great, it's not my first lenguage and I hope I didn't come across as too harsh or something because it wasn't my intention at all^^")

I'm kind of in a similar boat to Gaia, but I also wanna bring up another point!! :O

First gens can be very expensive and difficult to acquire and pretty up. That's what breeding is for, to give yourself a more control to acquire the wolf you want, and could potentially be cheaper to acquire! It's also sometimes way more fun to run a breeding project than just hoping to RNGesus that the next button click will give you the desirable colors you want on a first gen wolf. It's a different and just as valid playstyle.

Treating G1s and G2+'s as playstyles that can't co-exist just because one is "technically" more valuable than the other is assuming that every player on the site shares the same value and interest for G1s, which they don't. Maybe it's just me, but I see plenty of very popular and successful hatcheries and tons of G2+ dragons in almost everyone's lairs on FR, unless you come across the rare g1 lair of course.

I really don't think G1s are as big of a problem as people think they are. While it's possible a lot of the dedicated FR players that lean towards the G1 aspect trying out this new game and trying to get as much value out of their low ID wolves as possible, I still don't think that means WWs will always dominate the market, it just might take more time for G2+ wolves to become more normalized :O In fact, I think it's that mentality of "learning from experience" that in such a new game, you know that these low ID, WWs, regardless of how bad they look, might fetch you value one day in the future, even if you aren't into WWs.

And I think letting yourself (general you, not specifically OP) get caught up in it even if it's not your preferred playstyle is potentially dampering your own experience of the game. I'd say just sell WWs you pick up that you don't want to keep to fuel said projects!

So in essense, I don't support the idea of giving G2+ wolves too many perks, especially not of the gene variety. I think the market will sort itself out eventually!

And I think it's worth noting that a lot of people actually didn't like how the eye update was done on FR, and a lot of the upset from it didn't become fully quelled until they released purchasable vials for every eye type. If people didn't like an rng heavy, nearly unchangable feature unless you used a consumable retired item, I don't think people would enjoy anything similar on any larger of a scale either ^^; Of course unless there was a non-breeding way to get it, but that would still defeat the point of putting it in for the sake of making G2+s special.