Wish list/ statistics for animal demands in franchise trading

[Red the panda]

While I enjoy the concept of trading high quality animals across different zoos, players are pretty blind and simply must hope for the best when selling/ searching for animals. I love posting my high quality animals in hopes that someone will greatly benefit from a freshly aged to young adult animal with all green bars for stats and a shiny golden stamp. Sadly, I am often reposting many animals, one at a time, every hour (kind of wish they would just stay on the market until cancelled), until my storage is close to full and I end up just releasing a ton of them. While releasing them is a part of the conservation experience, eventually animals will need to be replaced due to age/ infertility and the Frontier posted animals have really poor stats and are halfway through their lifespans. I believe this is done to encourage trading among the players and yet there is no way for me to reach out to other players for a specific animal. For example, when I have a lovely family of animals, but then animals becomes infertile from age, I like to be quick to get a new ones in, but I'm at the mercy of whether or not someone placed a suitable animal on the market and it just feels bad never knowing when a new one is posted without refreshing the page every few seconds. And I don't want to just sit there refreshing either; I have many other duties to attend to. Players need more information on the trading market. Here are my current suggestions:

Wishlist/ alerts: If I need a new male bison for the herd, I want to be able to just specify that I'm looking for a male bison that other players can see. Maybe there can be a separate tab in the market where zoos that contain bison can see that someone is currently looking for one (maybe they get an alert when the request is made, maybe not if it would be too disrupting). When a player sees the demand for that animal, they can post their bison on the market right away, knowing that the animal will likely sell quickly. When the new animal is posted, those who were wishing for it can get an alert that a new one is available on the market (so that players don't have spam refresh for new postings). This would allow players to know that their animals will sell quickly and players won't have to be constantly returning to the market in hopes of updates.

Sales trends: While the Wishlist/ alert idea is more direct, another idea to aid in market trading would be the ability to actually see which animals are selling well and which aren't. A graph of all species would be nice, but even a top 10 or top 5 would be better than nothing. For example, if I have a bunch of tigers and lions in my storage, maybe I would be able to see that one day, tigers are selling really well, but lions are lower on the list. I would know to place my tigers on the market since they're more in demand at the time and I would save my lions for when they start trending higher on the list. If this would be too much information within the game, maybe put it on the planet zoo website for players to reference.

I believe these ideas would help make trading faster and improve the player experience. While the concept of trading across zoos is fun, let's be honest, the actual process is not. Posting each animal one at a time takes a while and feels like a chore that breaks up doing other, more fun tasks in building and maintaining the zoo(s).

 

[LindaBroer]

I like where you are going with this, though I think the practical implementation may not be so easy. That being said, here are my thoughts on this matter.

I recently finished a franchise zoo (mostly play sandbox) and as my zoo started growing bigger I ran into the problem of choosing to either sell or release my newly matured animals to the wild. I would check in the trade center to see how many of a specific species were for sale at that time. If few I would attempt selling my animals. If a lot were for sale however, I would just release them into the wild. It wildly fluctuates on a day by day (probably hour by hour) basis which animals are available. Sometimes there were dozens of red foxes and other times there were none. Instead of knowning top trading trends, it may actually be more useful to quickly see how many animals of a specific species are offered on the market. Or both could be an option.

I agree it is highly annoying to try to find a new male for your herd, or a new breeding partner for your own young adult. In fact, this is the main reason I mostly play sandbox. It gets frustrating when I cannot find a mate for my own animal meaning I have to 'settle' for Frontier animals just to keep the habitat filled. I'm not sure pop-ups will help, but a tab in the trading center where you can see if a specific animal is being requested could help with breeding programs. That you as player who is requesting a certain animal gets a pop-up when it is made available on the market would be helpful and not disruptive for other players. They would actively have to check what kind of requests are out there so can choose to do so or not. It would certainly help inform my decision to place animals on the market rather than releasing them to the wild. In fact this kind of tab would also serve for my point above. In one quick glance I could see if there is a demand for the animal I have available and I can make my decision accordingly.