Been struggling a bit to find a pet question that hasn’t really been asked already, as the scope of what is being allowed is rather narrow.
However, I think I can add something of value here by refining some of the questions into something more focused.
My question is “What were the devs’ goals with the pet bonus system towards incentivizing players to level/“ascend” pets”?
I’m personally scratching my head over the design implementation over the bonus system used with pets. Some simple numbers illustrates the point quite easily.
– 41 copies of a pet are needed to raise a pet to max level (1 + 5 + 10 + 25 = 31)
– At Level 1, team bonuses are at a multiplier of 2x, increasing to 3x at max level.
– A single copy of a pet can be raised to Level 5, increasing the multiplier to 2.25x.
So, with a single pet, I can obtain (2.25 / 3) = 75% of the maximum potential bonus of a fully leveled pet. I need 30 more copies of that same pet to obtain the remaining 25% bonus.
Why even bother at that point? There’s no logical way to spin “I need to apply up to 40x the effort to achieve 1/4 of the potential reward”.
Well… what about the resource generators, like Lucky and Moon Moon?
Unlocking the pet, generates a 1% bonus. Leveling it to 5 doubles the bonus to 2%. Yay! But, 5 more copies to raise the pet to 10 generates (3 - 2) / 2 = only a 50% additional bonus. Hrmm… Ok, with if I level the pet to 15, the bonus increments by (4 - 3) / 3 = 33%??? We’re going in the wrong direction here! And so on.
So, what we have for both types of rewards systems are diminishing rewards returns curves while requiring exponential growth curves in investment. Sadly, the situation isn’t like normal math where a negative times a negative equals a positive. Instead, the end result is a situation where there are significant disincentives to ever farm pets/buy baskets, as the lion’s share of pet bonuses are obtained with the very first pet of a given type.
What should happen, IMO, is that the reward needs to worth the chase. Rewards need to signal to players that they are worth the additional investment. For example, for resource generators, I would use bonuses of (1%, 2%, 4%, 8%, 16%), or if those values are too high, (1%, 2%, 3%, 6%, 10%). Similarly, an example of pet multiplier bonuses would be (1x [unlocking the pet is the level 1 bonus], 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x).
And that’s my two gold pieces on the matter. I want to farm pets, but cold logic is telling me that the rewards are not with the effort after unlocking a specific pet, as the system currently operates.
EDIT: Credit to TheIdleOne for correctly pointing out my epic math fail.
