Karma Mechanic
Summary
1. Remove the energy cost to kill or send away a cub younger than [suggested 12 months].
2. Add achievement for high karma [suggested +1000]
3. Add achievement for low karma [suggested -1000]
5. Events that favor different levels of karma at different times.

Mechanic Description
To motivate players to utilize the lion deletion features, implement time-sensitive events that only trigger at a narrow karma range, such as a set of explore encounters, shop, or quests. Players will be motivated to kill or send away cubs as karma fodder, in order to "chase" the favored karma level.

Even though we currently have the infrastructure for cub deletions, players are not using them because the opportunity cost is lower than the potential benefit gained from trying to sell the cub, which doesn't drain energy from the king. If they are unable to sell it, they can always delete later, as a last resort if den space is needed.

If we remove the energy cost to delete cubs, add a time constraint, and motivation to get the karmic change, we can create a sink for undesirable cubs that are currently flooding the market.

Thematically, it makes sense because tiny helpless cubs are not very difficult to kill.

NCLs and adolescents should retain the energy cost to delete to prevent people from farming NCLs for karma fodder and to impose a time constraint on the deletion decision, so that players must quickly decide which cubs are worth keeping instead of hanging around to see if they will sell and creating a price block.

Karma works especially well as a sink because it isn't subject to power creep. The karma can be moved both up and down along a scale without generating an excess sum of any economic asset. In order to stay within the specific range needed for the event, players will have to utilize the karma snake (Bonus SB sink) to check their level as they take explore actions that might push them one way or another.

Suggested Amendment: Reduce the kill/send time to 4 months, so that players must decide whether or not to keep a cub before it is old enough to be traded, which prevents players from putting it up for sale just to fish around. The decision must be made before the cub is old enough to transfer.

Suggested Annual Cycle
Yearly quest event requiring +500 karma that runs for 5 days at the summer solstice and SB Shop requiring +800 to enter lasting for 24 hours on the day of the summer solstice.

Same as above, but negative karma for the winter solstice.

Twice a year quest event requiring between -500 and +500 karma to participate lasting three days around each of the equinoxes and SB Shop requiring between -100 and +100 karma to enter. Newbie friendly, since newbies are likely to be between those ranges anyway.

Suggested Trimester Cycle
A special event currency shop opens for 24 hours on the 15th of each month, which is only accessible as follows.
+600 to +800 February August December
-100 to +100 January March May July September November
-600 to -800 April June October
Or some other configuration of 6 neutral, 3 good, 3 evil, with no two months of the same alignment next to each other, so that players must actively change their karma every month to access the next month's shop.


Intended Economic Effects

Cub Market
Essentially, we are creating a price floor for cubs, wherein the sale price of any cub cannot fall below the opportunity cost of deletion.

Using a the price of a vulture egg as a comparison, 1 karma is currently worth about 15 SB, which would make the base price of a karma fodder cub about 75SB right now.

Since the price floor is tied to karma rather than directly to SB, it will self-adjust for any SB inflation that might occur.

What should happen is the divergence of two markets. At first high quality cubs with high stats rare markings will still retain the same prices as before while the price of undesirable cubs slowly increases to a point where it stabilizes with the value of 5 karma. (The value of karma should also be expected to increase when the events are introduced, and as cubs for karma fodder become less plentiful.) Cubs for karma fodder will all be sold at fairly quick turnover for the floor price. As the quantity of low quality cubs decreases, cubs that have only one or two desirable traits may also be deleted, decreasing the number of individuals able to pass a certain trait to future cubs and slightly slowing the depreciation of new rare traits.

Player Behavior
Since karma is currently not very valuable and there is no motivation not to breed other than the energy cost to the king, the rate of cubs currently being born is probably already close to the maximum rate allowed by the game mechanics. Therefore, we shouldn't see an increase in the number of cubs being born even if we add more incentive to breed.

The people who are willing to mass breed have already gotten away from using the game as a roleplay experience, and probably won't have an issue with cubs being deleted. Those same players are also the most likely to try to take maximum economic advantage of site events, such as the karma shops, and are therefore also most likely to chase karma. Hopefully, this will lead to the decision to self-delete without even putting cubs on the market, which will increase the price and rarity of markings dramatically because the individual player's valuation of cubs is subject to power creep. (If you already have 4 lilacs, another one might not seem worth the effort.)

In addition, by creating twice and many neutral events as good and evil events, the new features scale by difficulty. New players will start at zero karma, and it will take them a while to get out of the -100 to +100 zone, especially before they have learned which events affect karma and how, increasing the likelihood that they will be able to participate in the events. The more experienced a player is, the more likely he or she needs to dramatically shift karma in order to participate in the neutral events and the more likely he or she will have the resources to do so. However, if a player wants to roleplay a specific alignment, he or she still has the option of just waiting for an event that falls into his or her normal karmic range.

Potential Issues
In a worst case scenario, I have estimated very poorly and it turns out that we are currently nowhere near the maximum breeding rate and the new karma rewards are enough to push us there, so the number of cubs being created dramatically increases, and we cut the timing too short so that most players miss the deletion time limit and we end up with even more cubs than before.

Second to worst case scenario, we spend a lot of time and resources developing this cool new feature and it doesn't affect the market at all, but at least we have cool new features to play with.

There is also the potential for karma to turn into a runaway number, like what originally happened with stats, but the cycled events should prevent that from happening. The system is designed to be self-correcting, but if it becomes a problem, it can be solved with a cap.

Other than that, the main problem is making things to put in the shops.