Allow All Males to Breed within the Pack

I can't support this, I feel like it would ruin the market for both studs and puppies. There's enough free /  1sc trades as there is.

I dont agree with this idea, it will cause mass breedings and will cause the trade center to be flooded with more unwanted pups. Currently its already difficult to look through pups on the TC. Not only that buts its extremely unfair to say males are useless. Here's a couple uses for them: You can have one hunting party made up completely male and they never have to stop hunting to take care of pups or nest, you can have a male herbalist who never has to nest or nurse pups so he's always available to make medicines, you can have male scouts who also never have to nest or nurse pups so you can get your exploration done faster. Males aren't useless, just under used. You can always sex change a wolf, I know you said its not worth it unless the wolf is really good and thats fair, however the option to do so is still there in game. While its true most of the time only the alpha pair breeds in packs (this is actually due to amount of food the pack can get rather than just hierarchy) females in the pack may sometimes breed with outside males, due to the fact inside the pack males are usually related to them. This has been observed in Yellowstone on rare occasion. So the realism with studding to outside males still fits

Here’s a potential concern I haven’t seen addressed here yet: if this were implemented without certain restrictions, players would be able to unofficially “stud” out their non-breeding-male wolves by traditional breeding: arranging a fee, taking in the other player’s female via trade/gift and breeding it, then sending it back with the pups. Since this would essentially negate the need for a breeding male role and I doubt that’s what the devs want, I think that allowing all males to breed would require restrictions like maybe having them assigned a single mate, or as Valana suggested above, having a limited number of litters per life.

Just want to add that I’d love to see some version of this implemented, but I can see how it might not be considering the above issue.

Something I just thought about! You cannot keep your old stud or lead's looks when retiring, so allowing all males to breed within their pack means players can keep up their breeding projects without having to spend a lot of GC to constantly replace, and on top of that, only be allowed to keep the result of their project for a few months. I think the current system would essentially force players into mass-breeding for a clone, something that the "one-breeding male" system seems to be trying to discourage.

I definitely don't think not being able to keep a wolf's looks is an issue, because that feature throws any semblance of realism out the window, and only encourages stagnation/whole packs of inbred clone wolves, but I certainly think having more options for pairing up your wolves would make breeding projects much more fun and diverse ^^

I completely agree! Male pups are already becoming unwanted this early in the game and it’s also sad that pretty boys can’t pass their markings onto the next gen. It would be really nice to be able to breed more freely. 

I think limiting how much a non-breeding male can breed would be a good idea to avoid mass-breeding too. I think maybe a non-breeding male could have only 5(?) slots in his lifetime, so you’d need to be careful as in how to spend them. 

@Ice- the number of puppies on the site is limited by the number of breedable females, not the number of breeding males. More puppies being kept male/sex-changed to male actually means less puppies overall. 

@Rey- I think the simplest solution is cooldowns for both sexes. That way 'traditional' breeds would be more limited than stud breedings, with non-stud males only being able to have a certain number of litters in a lifetime, same as females. I think traditional breeds would end up either very expensive or not worth the hassle. The stud male would still be 15 slots per week, which is basically unlimited if a player doesn't roll their account much

I suppose if your main goal in the game is breeding projects, I can see then how male wolves would be deemed useless. I just wonder how such a large change can be implemented without changing the game as a whole. The system as is never bothered me. I’ll say I somewhat agree since many people have raised decent points. However at the same time, I don’t feel that male wolves are useless. In fact, I feel they have quite a few good advantages as stated above by Ice #15164. Male wolves are far more useful than male lions in LD. Not everyone treats WD as a breeding game, so to say female wolves will become more preferable by the majority is probably not true! :o)

Support!! I would love to be able to keep my lineage within my own pack for lore purposes.

I wouldn't mind limitations on it either like being unable to have multiple outside studs or a cooldown like some people suggest.

Maybe a less popular of an idea but what if males who aren't your breeding male can have 1-2 breedings within their entire lifespan? So you can't spam the puppy system or whatever. That way you can breed your other males once, get pups to continue their line, and if you hate the pups you get one more chance and that's it.

i 100% agree with this suggestion, something needs to be done to make males less useless/a genetic dead end. i know a lot of people say they have some use, but i personally disagree.

sure, you could have an all male hunting pack, but i don't see why you'd want to. if you nest on the last day of pregnancy, after you've depleted all of your hunts, the wolf will give birth the next day and can be up and hunting again by that rollover. therefore, it's better to have an all female hunting pack because they can do everything a male can and breed as an added perk. same goes with herbalists, scouts, etc. if you nest on the last day, after sending them out on hunts/foraging/scouting, they aren't really out of action at all.

i really do think it would be better if all males were allowed to breed, as it would allow for diversity within a person's pack. i don't think this would flood the market with puppies at all - like someone said earlier in the thread, if 300 female wolves go into heat, they are going to be bred regardless of whether they are bred to someone's breeding male, a stud, or a pack male.

of course, there are ways in which having all males breedable could be manipulated [e.g sending over a female wolf to breed with someone's pack wolf] but providing we could get around that, i think it'd be a good addition.

I feel like though this would be a nice feature to have it would be way too big a mess to stop players from abusing the system such as having unofficial studs along with the general nightmare of basically destroying the studding market 

while it would not cause an influx of new pups, it certainly will cause other issues elsewhere