Frontier please address the lack of promised social interaction

Positive social interaction was not included in the beta. After many, many people made posts it was finally "clarified" that those interactions were turned off for the beta and would be fully implemented for release. I was fine with that. Hopeful that we'd see some neat behaviors on launch. Now though we are seeing almost nothing. Baby animals consistantly flee their moms as soon as they are born, never to look back, and don't play with each other. Other than that there are very rare, very brief positive social interactions and fights for dominance, and breeding and that is it. No herding behavior, almost no recognition that other animals even exist. It really sucks to spend a long time on an exhibit, make it exactly what your animals want and need, and then watch them wander around aimlessly.

Since release I have seen 2 (possibly 3 but that 3rd may just have been clipping of 2 animals since that happens constantly) non fighting, non breeding interactions. No dev has bothered to reply to anyone concerned about this issue at all. It's too late to get refunds. This is not at all what we were promised and assured was coming.

If you had been transparent that social interactions were not really going to be a thing or you weren't able to implement it as promised back in the beta when people were concerned about it I would have said the game is beautiful but not for me and refunded it. Now I am out a significant amount of money. The fact that we were specifically assured that we just needed to wait for the full release and end up with this...essentially nothing on the social interaction front...leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
 
Completely agree. I’d love to have a statement on this from the devs. I’m still hoping that the interactions are bugged and not working, because otherwise the talk of unique animals, realism, and the animations being turned off for beta are blatant lies. I don’t understand how they could not be implemented when the rest of the game is so beautiful and well thought out. I’d love to have reassurance from the team that the behaviours do exist, and will be frequent once they’re patched.

If we never have these behaviours in game (happening frequently - at the very least 60% of the time) and interactions between mothers and young, this game will always be too frustrating to play.
 
I want to point out that herding behavior is in, just to a small extent/I've only noticed it so far in massive enclosures. The first was when I caught my entire herd of bison eating together. The second was when I saw my herd of zebra walking together in a group. So it is in the game as far as I can tell, just really infrequent and not really noticable unless you have a massive enclosure.

Otherwise I agree with everything else you wrote.
 
I want to point out that herding behavior is in, just to a small extent/I've only noticed it so far in massive enclosures. The first was when I caught my entire herd of bison eating together. The second was when I saw my herd of zebra walking together in a group. So it is in the game as far as I can tell, just really infrequent and not really noticable unless you have a massive enclosure.

Otherwise I agree with everything else you wrote.

I'm glad to know there is actual herding behaviors! I actually thought I may have made my exhibits too large (they were quite massive) and made them smaller but still no herding behavior for me.
 
The underlying problem in my mind isn't that the animations aren't in, but that there is no underlying intelligence or logic to it. They just randomly happen.

Completely agree. They just randomly happen and are incredibly infrequent to the point of almost not being there. This is the one thing keeping me from trying to get a refund-the issue seems fixable. I just want the devs to commit to fixing it ;) If I know that in a month I'll have social animals I'll happily build habitats for them now!
 
The babies didn't seem to stay near the parents, in general everyone seemed to wander for the most part, but the keeper had just reloaded the feeder and everyone was nearby. Baby walked up to dad and he picked her up for a bit.
 
I got to saw my cheetah interacting with her cub today. I saw her standing and waiting (the father coincidentally laying down beside her) and I looked for the cub and saw it slowly walk around the habitat until it made its way over to the moth, who proceeded to give it a lick.

Just made me want more of that though.
 
I got to saw my cheetah interacting with her cub today. I saw her standing and waiting (the father coincidentally laying down beside her) and I looked for the cub and saw it slowly walk around the habitat until it made its way over to the moth, who proceeded to give it a lick.

Just made me want more of that though.

Problem is i'm willing to bet if there was a second breeding pair in the same habitat that it would be just as likely to walk over to a different adult than its parents. At least that's what I saw in beta with lions. A cub would do the same animated behavior with a complete stranger adult just as likely as it would with its own parents. It was just random.

You see the descriptions of parent/child behavior in the Zoopedia and you want to see that in game :(
 
Frontier's silence about this is pretty worrying. It's making me believe that this isn't something they will improve. Like as if this was a strategic move to not fully explain the lack of intelligent social behaviour, now or in the future, because people are actually wanting refunds over it and keeping quiet will keep them lingering longer. This is actually negatively affecting my mood throughout the day which is only because is still have some hope. But that hope is fading and I'm starting to care less about this game that I've been literally mad for since the day I found out about it in May.
We've been promised animals with individual personality, yet we got empty husks that randomly play with toys, randomly walk, run and climb around and randomly and rarely interact using one or two animations, one being limited to a random adult and child (or how would we know, there's no family tree to check in, just a notification that gets burried). I appreciate all the individual animations but how long can you look at the same thing over and over if there is no deeper substance to it.
I hope I'm wrong and that frontier is actually working away at actually putting the intelligence into AI. And possibly family trees.

I usually don't plan on my posts being this long but I just have so much to say because I still care... And I don't have time to make my own post on everything I'm thinking about at the moment : P
 
I finally got a pair of Bengal tigers. I sped up time & watched them do their thing. Not once did they interact with each other yet they still became mating partners. That's when they started nuzzling each other but before it was like they were total strangers that didn't care about the others existence. I expected better than this & I'd like to know what interactions they turned off during BETA that were turned on for release because I'm not seeing it at all.
 
Frontier's silence about this is pretty worrying. It's making me believe that this isn't something they will improve.

They've been silent all the time, except for the offline mode. So not extra worried about the silence.

Shame about the interaction (hope they improve this one) and family trees (the icon is very misleading), was expecting this to be ready/implemented at launch.
 
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