African Penguins and Current Franchise Community Challenge

[iloveyourzoos]

I've been saving up 3 star African Penguins for this week's Franchise Community Challenge.

However, the first few I've released don't seem to be counting.

Anyone else encountering this? I've checked the zoopedia and they show as orange (endangered), and have checked the 3 star rating for each one I've released.

I'll try again tomorrow in case it's just something with my computer. But thought I'd ask here in case I'm missing something.

 

[ShadowLilly]

They need to reach 3 stars during the challange.. Not before

 

[iloveyourzoos]

Thanks. I don't remember that being the case before (I usually start the challenge week by going through my zoos to see what qualifies), but I gave it a try. I marked all the existing three stars, and then let the game play for some new ones to rank up.

Unfortunately, even the new three star penguins don't seem to be counting for me when I release them. I guess I'll try another animal and see what happens.

 

[Arrakai]

They need to reach 3 stars during the challange.. Not before

That is not true. I saved a few hundred elephants with 3 or more stars from the last challenge and released them day one of the challenge, and they all counted

 

[DrBurrito]

There was a similar issue with some of the Indian animals in the Indian animal challenge last year. Apparently the info tags (e.g. continents, biomes, barrier grades, Red List categories, etc.) in the game engine and the information we see in the Zoopedia are not interlinked, or in other words, the Zoopedia doesn't retrieve information directly from the engine and needs to be updated separately, which causes discrepancy issues, as it is prone to human error.

My guess is, the African penguin's blueprint was copied from the king penguin but some of its tags were not updated on the engine, therefore it is probably categorized as Least Concern (LC) and therefore does not count towards the challenge.

Another possibility is, each animal needs to be added to such challenges separately by the team when a challenge is created, and thus some animals are missed.

Either way, what I do in such tag specific challenges is, I do not build up all my investment for the challenge based on info in the Zoopedia, but instead wait for the actual challenge to begin and test with a single animal for each species and then plan on from there.