Background Info

Hello!

I want to preface this with the fact that I am an old fart. I've been playing this game since 2015-- Almost 7 years! In those 7 years, there have been quite a few new players that have joined the game. Every week, everyone can have a chance at the raffle lioness.

Before, this used to cap at around 2,000 people-- Maybe 3,000 if it was a particularly gorgeous one.

As of the Tuesday I'm writing this, our current girl has 9902 entries and counting. I expect this to top off around 10,000 by the Friday she's drawn, meaning that 2,000 of old is *long* past by a factor of 5! This system was designed with the smaller numbers in mind!

The Problem

The raffle lioness is a special lioness meant to introduce new markings into the game, or refresh the old pool. She's a very special thing to win, but there are a few issues with her as she stands:

* She's nearly impossible to win.
* There are too many marks in too many possible slots that need to be fulfilled, so much so that 10 marks released a week doesn't really cut it.

When there were 2,000 people who wanted her, that was bad. With 10,000 people who want her, it's worse!

In short, demand has gone WAY up, and supply has remained the same.
Thalath summed it up beautifully: Too many marks, too many players, not enough lion.
We need to factor into account that the population of the site has increased since 2013.

Please note that I am NOT accusing the winners of hoarding marks! I also want to point out that it's HARD to let marks spread from a single lion only.

Some examples:
* Bushveld Brindle in slot 7 was released in October of 2022. There are currently 5 lions total with it.
* Fiery Brindle in slot 7 was released in June of 2022. There is currently 1 lion total with it.
* Shell Lace in slot 8 was released in July of 2017. There are currently 19 lions total with it.
* Feline 7 Ginger in slot 6 was released in April of 2017. There are currently 23 lions with it.

*Information has been gathered using the marking slot rarity Wiki page, and the raffle lioness directory pages.

This list can go on forever with a litany of how many markings we have, along with how many possible slots that can be filled.
For just a small sample size, there are 9 feline markings that can occur in 10 colors, making for 90 unique raffle feline markings. There are 10 possible slots that these can be released into, meaning that we're looking at about 900 separate slots and marks that need to be filled. There's 52 weeks in a year. If a lioness were released with nothing but unique feline markings in unique slots, it would take almost 2 years to get all of those out into circulation, which simply isn't reasonable. That said, there are a hell of a lot more raffle markings than just those few feline marks!

Proposed Solutions

1. More than 1 Raffle Lioness per week.
Event unlock numbers have scaled to accommodate more players, so why can't raffle lions? This one could be achieved in two separate ways:

1. Multiple copies of the SAME lioness per week.
2. Many different raffle lionesses per week.


This would get lionesses out to more hands per week, which is a greater opportunity for a marks to spread. It does not solve the possibility of marking hoarding, but it generally gets more markings out to more people. This resolves the issue of the old system being created for the smaller site traffic in mind.

If multiple copies of the same lioness are given out per week, it may feel as if they are losing how 'special' they are to people, though one could counter this with the existence of raffle lioness clones via crunchy worms. Multiple copies of every raffle lioness are almost guaranteed anyway, this would just create multiple lines of them genetically. Markings could spread more rapidly than some of the given examples above.

If multiple lionesses are given out per week, it allows for more diversity of markings to be released to the masses and stops the bottleneck of how slow dying marks take currently to be revived.

This does come with the cons that raffle lionesses may be deemed to be a little less special to the community (but remember winners getting harassed for winning?), and the human aspect that someone has to design these girls to be sent out, which may get taxing.

2. Each week a raffle lionesses is released, but a replica stud releases along with her.
Thank you to Angela!
This one is my personal preference. Let's think of August for a moment! We use August studs to quickly spread a bunch of markings to everyone, and everyone gets a fair chance to breed for what they'd like. It's all around a good system!

This option would see a regular raffle lionesses released per week, just as she is now. She'd also have a brother alongside her who can stud out to the community to release her marks on a much larger scale. Anyone who still wins the raffle lioness gets to keep a very special lady-- After all, a full breed-only lioness with g1 heritage is nothing to sneeze at! -- but those who may like her for her marks gets a chance at spreading those marks!

To keep it fair, you wouldn't be able to use breeding items with the stud, but you can still use items on your lioness. It's still pretty difficult to breed an exact copy, but it could get you close to it, and then you can shop with other players to get what you're looking for! This is a system we see on Wolvden already.

You could limit it to one lion breed per account, or you could make it a GB/SB sink-- Which is always needed in pet game economy to keep inflation from getting too high.

Suggestion: 2.5
The raffle stud system could mimic Wolvden's exactly, where everyone can take a chance to breed to the raffle stud. I'm quite partial to keeping the raffle lioness, though!

Space for Discussion

I do want to clarify that I do NOT want to get rid of the raffle lioness-- I personally have always loved the little mechanic.

I'd love to hear what you think! Are you interested? Do you think another idea would be better? Let me know! :)