Increase (or remove) the monthly restriction of pair-bonded breedings

Hello!

To start with, I want to say that I'm super excited about the new breeding mechanic update that you devs have given us. Thank you so much for not only listening to the concerns of the community but acting on them, too!

Now to more serious matters. While I think most of the restrictions to the mated pairs and their breeding are more or less warranted, I still find the 2 breedings per month to be far too strict. On top of (non-stud) males only being able to breed in a bonded pair and having a 30-day breeding cooldown that arbitrary 2 slots per month rule doesn't add anything to the already heavily restricted gameplay.

The problem with breeding slots will most likely be much more pronounced in bigger packs later on where even with rotating pairs there simply aren't enough slots in a year (24 slots, to be precise, meaning only 24 pairs can get bred in a single year. Wolves don't even live for that long!). This can mean that certain pairs will only be able to breed once or twice in their whole life time if even that!

So as for my suggestions to how to change this...

1. My first suggestion is much more radical yet simpler. Remove the whole breeding per month cap. With the way males have a longer cooldown than females and the restrictions of even being able to pair bond two wolves I don't think its necessary to have a breeding cap. The male cooldown is enough of a cap on its own. It honestly adds nothing to player experience, but frustration and feeling of being forced to stud outside their pack anyway.

2. My second suggestion would be to raise the cap of pair breedings to 15 per month following the number of how many studdings a breeding male can do in a week. In a way to get more revenue to the site it also could open up the possibility, that like with the breeding males, all extra breeding slots could be bought with GC.

Things I want to address

The market will be flooded with more puppies!
No, it won't. Lets say there is someone who has 200 wolves in their den. From those 200 all are equal of gender and paired. This means the pack has 100 paired wolves. Those pairs would averagely produce a litter every 30 days. It should be remembered that one in game year is 24 real days. That would mean a single pair would have about 5 to 6 litters in their lifetime or even less if their ages don't match or they are out of synch. And some people don't even wish to breed all their wolves every month, anyway! It's much better for the population control to have equal numbers of males versus female in a pack. Because the alternative to is to have 1 breeding male that mates with 199 females. I don't have to say which of these is worse for the market.

EDIT 16/12/20: Changed the order of my suggestions. I came to realize how useless the cap is so removing it altogether would be much preferable.

1000000000000000000000% support! I want them to get rid of the limited breedings per month all together. It does nothing but cause more of a headache when males already have a longer cooldown (for some reason) and can only breed to their bonded female.

I do want to give the devs credit where credit is due. Overall I'm happy that they listened to their community, thank you, but there's room for improvement.

I don't mind the new system in of itself, but these extreme restrictions just piss me off even more. I went on a hiatus a month, or maybe longer, ago. I was honestly just tired of everything, how every single mechanic in this game was punishing just for the sake of being punishing, with no true reward. This new update actually got me excited to come back and check it out, but I'm just disappointed all over again.

Just like with EVERYTHING in this game the new mechanic is overly restrictive for no reason other than just to punish you more. Why even MAKE this mechanic if you can only use two non breeding males once a month. Like, they might as well have just added two breeding male slots because this heavy restriction does NOTHING to fix the problem that everyone was complaining about, which is that males are still absolutely useless. Not to mention a majority of people wanting this type of mechanic want it for LORE purposes. I don't even breed for marks/bases, I like to create characters, I'm a writer, yet it feels like the devs made this two breedings a month to discourage using this system all together and to just keep using studs. Why do I feel like even in this decision they made it as restrictive as possible to favor the stud system, when MAJORITY of players can't make a profit anyways, so why even implement this? (I'm not claiming this is how they fell or why they did what they did, its just how I feel.)

I swear this game is relentless, its not even fun, and then this bomb is dropped on something I've been hoping for since EA. I'm going back on hiatus, perhaps even permanently, unless I hear that they changed this ridiculous, UNECESSARILY PUNISHING  restriction. 

All in all, this system has fixed nothing, Harem lifestyles is still forced if you want to breed and use your females. How is that fair, that people, like me, want this for lore reasons, and they STILL can't have their lore pairs breed and have pups. Like, I might as well throw all males out of my pack and just keep a forced harem because apparently thats what the devs want you to do. I don't know, but I'm REALLY pissed. They just poured salt into my wound.

I have no problem with the restriction of 2 non-stud breedings per month. It's an attempt not to continue to oversaturate the market with puppies.

No support

But I feel like there are better ways to put said restriction than just 2 breedings a month. One suggestion I heard was males having a set number of puppies they can have in their lifetime, similar to females (due to limited heats) that way there's some restriction but the game doesn't tell you how many times, when, where and how. I don't think this bottleneck grip restriction is the only or best way to go about it

100% support.

I'm really grateful that the developers have implemented this feature. It feels like a great step forward.

I have been revamping my whole den to put to use the new mechanic for my lore / story purposes, and while I doubt I'll use the bonded pair feature in a serious manner for a while (going to wait a while and raise my territory size first), it was really disappointing to see that we are limited to 2 breedings per month for bonded pairs.

That...sucks. The way I was intending to play is that each cave is a faction or "pack" within the fictional world of my characters, where each 'pack cave' would have had two bonded wolves that'd be like a realistic pack's bonding pair, and other wolves within their cave would be their children - or even relatives - that stuck around and help out with each litter of pups.

With this limit of 2 breedings a month this means that only 2 of my fictional packs can breed, while the others are all left out until next month. To use this feature the way I want to I would have to basically plan my breedings where I breed them at the end of one month and then the start of the next so they can all have similar aged litters, and then wait 2 whole months to be able to do it again due to the 30 day cooldown for the males.

It's a lot of reaching I have to do to get the feature to work the way I would like to use it that honestly is almost borderline cheesing, and it's not something I am looking forward to at all.

Not to mention that someone in another thread mentioned the important point that this system would not allow you to breed pairs at the optimal time when their stats are higher at older ages. It's less careful planning and more flipping a coin to decide which wolf you really want to breed gets to pass down their stats and which potentially don't, which is kind of sad due to how much time the wolves already require to be worth anything.

I think the limitations of the 30 day cooldowns given for males (and females, if you disband), the steep amusement penalty when disbanding, and limiting breeding to 1 female are more than enough for limits of this feature.

However, if breedings must remain limited, I think a compromise could be that the number you have access to scales with your territory size (more possible wolves, more possible breedings) or are rewarded to you in various ways that require effort. 

If anything I'd at least want the total raised to 5, though I would want more. It's still abysmally small, but it is a lot more flexible and forgiving than 2 slots.

I somewhat agree and disagree with this, for one, this prevents pups flooding TC. That I understand. I've so far loved this feature regardless, and I'm hoping that they add same sex pairs in the future. I prefer the idea of breeding pairs increasing as your territory slots increase which could be beneficial, however there's already players with 200 slots (the limit I believe) which could prove to be a problem that once everyone gets there, there will still be a puppy flood. I believe there should be an increase but not to the extent where we're all flooded with puppies.

Support a million times over. I’m also glad they finally did something, but it’s not...very friendly. The restrictions are horrible. Now instead of only one useful male, I’ll have three, I guess? I really don’t understand how this new feature will help at all with larger packs. Mines fine with the one breeding male, but I can only imagine how stressful it would be in a pack of 50+. Though I imagine anything is stressful with a large pack. I swear Wolvden can’t decide if it’s a survival wolf sim or a wolf breeding sim; it’s not great at being both. Wish we stuck to the idea that more useful males=less puppies. Cant see myself having anymore males than I already do :/

The cool downs should have been enough, imho. 

There shouldn’t be a breeding cap. The other restrictions (only breeding in a bonded pair, 30 day cool down + mood penalty for breaking pairs, both wolves must be in the pack for 7+ days) are more than enough to prevent abuse and discourage traditional studding. The breeding cap serves no purpose beyond making the game artificially difficult and frustrating to play. So now I can what, have two extra breeding males, but with a 28-31 day cool down between breedings instead of their female mate’s 20 day cool down? I love everything else about the update, but this killed my excitement. Charging gc to raise the cap would be a slap in the face.

I have... mixed feelings. I do support a change but I'm not sure I just want it handed to us, and I definately do not agree with unlimited.

I believe that this feature should have some sort of functionality with each use, and I feel this would generate too many "lore-only" pairs that don't even breed, and possibly overload whatever memory or bank holds that information to save Pairs. It raises concerns as far as the behind the scenes mechanics versus so much the in game mechanics. When really, this should probably just be reserved to Biography or something to avoid overload issues. I would not very thrilled to discover the feature broke or need extensive fixing because of a issue like this rising. There needs to be some control there. I'm not a pro at coding or gaming, so I cant say for sure this would be the case by any means, but... again, it's a concern. Plus, personally I prefer that elements of the game are intractable and earned

I would definately support a system that increased your pack pair number based off something (preferably not another paywall, just dont feel itd be worthwhile enough for this feature for many). For example maybe... each new lead wolf unlocks +2 slots? Reward for difficult quests? (Ex; Uncommon RNG reward roll for +1 slot for 9/9 hunting daily quest) Event rewards? Something of the like. 

Just some things to consider, if nothing else!

Support! This is a great idea- packs that have more than fifteen wolves can only have two breedings per month; I find this to be quite unhelpful in the development of a pack.