I agree elephants SHOULD be celebrated but at the moment is a massive rush to go as slow as possible including ive see 3hrs = 1 yr game play that means that a new born elephant takes 45 Hours game play to mature. 45 hrs game play is not acheivable Im doing well if I play 5 or 6 hours A WEEK so over two months. There is no point in me trying to do it so get rid of the elephants they are unachievable
The clammer at the moment is the slowest speed is two fast - the last couple of days Ive found the fastest speed to slow
I think it's important to note that no one is arguing against the ability to speed up the game as they see fit. So even if it did hypothetically change to 1 year = 3 hours, it wouldn't take you 2 months to see a young elephant grow up. I imagine if your sole focus is elephants, you will spend a lot of time with the game sped up. So if you can even 2x the speed, it will take a month at the rate you play. 3x the speed, even less.
What's being asked for is a slower speed and I think for good reason. No, I don't think it should take hundreds of real time hours to see a baby elephant grow up. But I also feel like it should definitely take more than an hour or two to see many, many other animals have several sets of offspring (or none, based on the last beta update but hopefully that changes) and live out their whole lives and die. You keep using the elephant as justification for a faster speed, but please remember there are 50+ other animal species that people love and few of them come close to the aging or breeding mechanics of tortoises and elephants. I hate that I felt like I didn't have time to enjoy my animals during the beta because they were constantly dying of old age. I'm talking ungulates, canines, felines... all the species that only live a decade or two. In a single average sitting of playing Planet Zoo, I could see a lion be born and die while never once using the time speed change. That's not fun to me. Why did Frontier bother making animals have unique patterns if they're just going to die in a couple real life hours?
I expect I'm going to enjoy the option to turn off animal aging in sandbox mode on the game's release. Not because I don't want to see any animals age, but because I want to take a full hour to build a fancy exhibit without the game paused and not seeing a fraction of my animal population die in that amount of time. I would love to see the animals live for more than one sitting of the game for me. But then, I STILL DO want to see an option for players to speed up time. I think that's an important element to skip to major events in your zoo, and to make breeding certain animals more realistic. But if given the option to choose between being able to see a baby elephant grow over 45 hours of real time and having all of my other animals live longer lives that I can also follow and enjoy or having baby elephant grow up in a third the time while I don't even have a physical option in the game to make my other animals live long enough to be fun, I'm always going to choose the former. I'd be way more excited to see a baby elephant realistically take a long time to grow up then never even get a chance to know the names of the dozens of springbok that had come and gone since it's birth. I enjoy all animals in my pretend zoos. Not just the big ones.
Just to clarify, I am pro a slower time passage but also feel strongly about having an adequate time speed up option for those who would want it.