My springboks are still stressed despite being in the trade center

[DrBurrito]

The thing I was getting annoyed at in this thread was the fact that some people seems to think that the tradecentre will insta give the animals alot of stars and that people using the tradecentre don't have to put any effort in, when in fact you still need to play ALOT to get those stars, no matter if you use the tradecentre or not.

I wouldn't call it cheating, but I think it is something Frontier should look into. It would benefit the entire playerbase if animals didn't require being stored in the trade center to freeze growth to ensure all reach required star ratings before death or age of infertility. In community challenges I've used the same trick myself, but after reading people having issues with the challenge on the forum, I think it is better to have a universal fix so everyone can benefit from it.

"but for now I can tell you that growth, star rating increase as well as stress is treated as if the animal is still inside a habitat"
Stress shouldn't apply in a trade centre when the stress was caused by something in their habitat.
Growth to record size (no matter what size gene)
Star Rating = based on appeal by guests - you don't show the animals in your trade centre to guests - so why more appeal?
Seems like a bug in the trade centre.

I did forget to mention two more examples of this trade center bug. One is, say you have 20 animals in a habitat, and then you send 19 of them back to the trade center. The food cost displayed in the habitat menu will still be for all 20 animals, but the keeper will only place food for that single animal, so it won't show up in the financial stats.

The other is, if you keep a juvenile in the trade center for long enough, it will prog to adulthood at the record size for that species. Say you have 0% size and longevity offspring, if they stay in the trade center for a very long time, they will be at universal record size the moment they prog to adulthood. Another thing worth mentioning is, for growth, the animals don't even need to be assigned to a habitat. If you buy them and let them stay there with no habitat assigned, they will still grow to record size.

 

[Arrakai]

I wouldn't call it cheating, but I think it is something Frontier should look into. It would benefit the entire playerbase if animals didn't require being stored in the trade center to freeze growth to ensure all reach required star ratings before death or age of infertility. In community challenges I've used the same trick myself, but after reading people having issues with the challenge on the forum, I think it is better to have a universal fix so everyone can benefit from it.

Yes, like I wrote before, I wholeheartedly agree that the star system needs to change so that animals gain stars faster, since some animals are practicly impossible to reach 5 stars before death. At the same time, I don't really think it's necessary to remove the star rating gain from the tradecentre. But I would not mind at all if animals gained stars way faster when in a habitat (wich would made sence). My biggest concern is that frontier will see posts like this, remove the gain from the tradecentre but not increase the rate animals gain stars. That would really make the game worse in my opinion.

I did forget to mention two more examples of this trade center bug. One is, say you have 20 animals in a habitat, and then you send 19 of them back to the trade center. The food cost displayed in the habitat menu will still be for all 20 animals, but the keeper will only place food for that single animal, so it won't show up in the financial stats.

The other is, if you keep a juvenile in the trade center for long enough, it will prog to adulthood at the record size for that species. Say you have 0% size and longevity offspring, if they stay in the trade center for a very long time, they will be at universal record size the moment they prog to adulthood. Another thing worth mentioning is, for growth, the animals don't even need to be assigned to a habitat. If you buy them and let them stay there with no habitat assigned, they will still grow to record size.

I have not really seen the food bug myself. That may be because I hardly ever use the habitat display to check food costs, I look at the zoo overview, and there it seems to display correctly. And the food cost itself goes down when you put animals in the tradecentre (they do not get fed there), so it's not a bug that is really affecting the gameplay.

I had no idea about the size thing. Is it only the numbers that change or is the animal getting visibly bigger too? (like if you put a 100% size and 0% size animal in the same habitat, would they visibly be the same zise?)

 

[NL_Mutso]

lol, calm down mr white knight, you are blowing this way out of proportion. You are making it sound like this is a big gamebreaking bug that sinister players are taking advantage of to gain a huge advantage over poor inocent players

Well, you started mentioning words like cheating - so just following up. And yes it is a gamebreaking bug for some - because they stop doing the challenges. Hitting the first spot (top %) gets a lot more difficult when others can use this trick to get easy gains.
Some challenges are nearly impossible without doing this - with a proper fix they would have the chance of reaching that spot. I know a lot of people who struggled with the Lemur one, when it hits the right amount of stars - it's almost too old and your only option is to send them to a home.

Oh, and you do realise that the "prepare a zoo then just leave it running" works just as well with the animals in the habitat, right?

They would still age, which is mainly the point why this is an issue. We were referring putting your animals in your trade center, right? So they won't die etc. So an empty zoo with a filled trade centre and just let it run. Would take you maybe 1 hour (maybe even 30 minutes) per day if you do it this way, I know some people who are using this trick because they want to reach the top with only a few hours work. (at least they found ways to spend CC)

And to say that knowing about the challenge many days ahead (the connected community page) is not an advantage is just ignorant

I said you can complete challenges without knowing this. At least read it before using terms like ignorant and without creating an argument for me.

You claim that the star rating challenges aren't affected by knowing the challenge in advance. Eh, that is simply not true. Lets take the ostrich challenge for example. You can buy/breed a bunch of ostriches the week before, put them in a zoo, set the speed to max, wait for them to gain 3 stars, put them back in the tradecentre, then log in as soon as the challenge starts and release all of them

I think you are missing the point here. The "wait for them to gain 3 stars" is exactly the issue. And calculating ratings don't change in the week before or during the challenge - so yes not affected.

The ostrich challenge were in no way Impossible if you had your animals in their habitat (sure, maybe if you had ostriches with low longevity, 0-33%, but come on, ostriches are abundant in the market and finding one male and one female at 100% longevity is neither hard or expencive!, and those two can produce more than enough babys for the challenge)

Still people struggled and it was worse with other animals, I mentioned the Lemur :. High priced animals on the market and the Frontier zoo ones were too bad.

My biggest concern is that frontier will see posts like this, remove the gain from the tradecentre but not increase the rate animals gain stars. That would really make the game worse in my opinion

I think that's why we disagree, at least one reason .. I'm really not concerned about that one, the biggest happening would be failing 1 challenge.
Don't think it won't be fixed before the next challenge. Best way to fix things is taking a hit.

 

[Arrakai]

Well, you started mentioning words like cheating - so just following up. And yes it is a gamebreaking bug for some - because they stop doing the challenges. Hitting the first spot (top %) gets a lot more difficult when others can use this trick to get easy gains.
Some challenges are nearly impossible without doing this - with a proper fix they would have the chance of reaching that spot. I know a lot of people who struggled with the Lemur one, when it hits the right amount of stars - it's almost too old and your only option is to send them to a home.

You are the one that is calling it cheating and gamebreaking bug, not me...
Getting the top % has nothing to do with this bug, it's about how much time you can/are willing to put into the challenge (I do realise that alot of people don't have the time). The ones that usually get's the top % wont change even if they remove this. As an example, in the current challenge, I have so far bred over 500 animals, and I bet there are others like me. Not many "normal" players will ever get to those numbers.
And saying things like "when others can use this trick" implies that you need to use some special trick that not everyone can do, wich is not the case, as I have pointed out a bunch of times.

They would still age, which is mainly the point why this is an issue. We were referring putting your animals in your trade center, right? So they won't die etc. So an empty zoo with a filled trade centre and just let it run. Would take you maybe 1 hour (maybe even 30 minutes) per day if you do it this way, I know some people who are using this trick because they want to reach the top with only a few hours work. (at least they found ways to spend CC)

Yes, they would age, but as I said, you can easily calculate how long you can keep your game running before they die/become infertile. Did you read what I wrote? I was stating that you could do this strat Without! using the tradecentre, wich mean every player can set this up and keep the game running (well every player can use the tradecentre too, but that was not the point I was trying to make with that particular post)

I said you can complete challenges without knowing this. At least read it before using terms like ignorant and without creating an argument for me.

Yes and you can complete the challenge without knowing about the star rating in the tradecentre too. The thing we (or at least I, it seems) were discussing were what advantages different things would bring. You said that the tradecentre gave an unfair advatage because not everyone knew about it. And that was the only reason I brought up the connected comunity page, as that too gives an advantage wich not everyone knows about...

I think you are missing the point here. The "wait for them to gain 3 stars" is exactly the issue. And calculating ratings don't change in the week before or during the challenge - so yes not affected.

And I gave an example of exaclty how you can gain those stars, so what is your point? You specifically said "the ratings ones aren't affected by knowing or not knowing this", and I showed you that they infact are, as you can get animals with the right rating ahead of time.

(I'm not really sure what you mean by "calculating ratings don't change in the week before or during the challenge" so I appologise if I'm missunderstanding you here)

Still people struggled and it was worse with other animals, I mentioned the Lemur :. High priced animals on the market and the Frontier zoo ones were too bad.

You can work around this by buying low stat animals ahead of time and breeding them to get better animals (This again comes down to players that have more time to invest in the challenges having a bigger advantage, has nothing to do with the tradecentre rating). And this also comes down to the poorly designed star rating, i.e. animals getting rating too slowly, wich is something we both agree on.

I think that's why we disagree, at least one reason .. I'm really not concerned about that one, the biggest happening would be failing 1 challenge.
Don't think it won't be fixed before the next challenge. Best way to fix things is taking a hit.

Well the thing is, that star rating challenges have already failed on multiple occations in the past, without any changes to the star rating happening because of it. One example is the Indian challenge (release 3 star animals from India).

And I think that is also a thing that I don't really like about your approach to this topic. You don't really care if they fix it (the star rating), as long as they remove this thing that you don't like? A thing that not alot of people seems to think is an issue (before this post, it wasn't even mentioned anywhere on the forums to my knowlege), but that some people really like (I for one think it's a nice little feature, like I said many times).


I don't know if we will get any further in this discussion to be honest, as it seems really clear that we totaly disagree on this topic and I think neither of us is gonna change the other persons mind I just want to clarify that I don't have anything against you, and I appologise if I seem snarky or are attacking you (wich is not my intention) and we probably can agree on alot of things about this game, just not this topic

 

[DrBurrito]

Yes, like I wrote before, I wholeheartedly agree that the star system needs to change so that animals gain stars faster, since some animals are practicly impossible to reach 5 stars before death. At the same time, I don't really think it's necessary to remove the star rating gain from the tradecentre. But I would not mind at all if animals gained stars way faster when in a habitat (wich would made sence). My biggest concern is that frontier will see posts like this, remove the gain from the tradecentre but not increase the rate animals gain stars. That would really make the game worse in my opinion.

I'd say let's wait for the official response to see whether this was intentional (or not) to begin with. Right now all we can do is make assumptions whether it is a feature or a bug. My hunch is it was never an intended feature, but who knows, maybe it was.

I have not really seen the food bug myself. That may be because I hardly ever use the habitat display to check food costs, I look at the zoo overview, and there it seems to display correctly. And the food cost itself goes down when you put animals in the tradecentre (they do not get fed there), so it's not a bug that is really affecting the gameplay.

Yeah, it does not actually affect gameplay. It's just a visual bug in one of the menus. Just like the food grade bug we had a while ago, where the drop down values were visually inaccurate but didn't affect the actual food quality. Instead the order of the dropdown menu and the value stated above was accurate. The stress thing is also visual, it doesn't actually cause the game to spawn protestors. However, all these combined (stress, food, size, stars) makes me think they are all interrelated and can be explained by a single trade center bug as the root of a web of problems. Which is why my hunch about animals gaining stars in the trade center is due to this bug.

I had no idea about the size thing. Is it only the numbers that change or is the animal getting visibly bigger too? (like if you put a 100% size and 0% size animal in the same habitat, would they visibly be the same zise?)

Yes, it does also translate to animal model sizes, not just in value. If both the 0% and 100% size gene animals have grown to record size, they will be the same size. If only the 0% size gene animal has grown to said record size, and the 100% one hasn't yet, it will even be smaller than the 0% one.

 

[NL_Mutso]

I don't know if we will get any further in this discussion to be honest, as it seems really clear that we totaly disagree on this topic and I think neither of us is gonna change the other persons mind I just want to clarify that I don't have anything against you, and I appologise if I seem snarky or are attacking you (wich is not my intention) and we probably can agree on alot of things about this game, just not this topic

I'm fine with this . We aren't going to change our opinion about this. I think discussions like these aren't best suited for a forum - I don't think you are understanding the pov I'm bringing and the same vice-versa. Sometimes an issue when you type stuff instead of saying it in person and showing them the issue.

Same here, nothing against you and if you feel "attacked", not my intention and ofc. sorry. Let's just agree to disagree on this one.

 

[Chante Goodman]

Hello all, thank you for this thread and information share throughout. This is something that the team will be taking a look into, so if you think of any other additional information you think might be useful to us, please share in this thread!