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

Support, 100%. Especially since the male cooldown is longer than the female's, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You'll be skipping a heat every time, waiting for the male to be ready. As it is, this mechanic adds nothing to the game at all to the point that I will probably not even use it.

I definitely support this, particularly the idea of it being unlimited. When I first found out about this change I was really excited, and I still am excited now! I just think it could be improved further so that it's a little more useful - especially for players with large packs. Even if a pack only had, say, 40 wolves, they could only breed two pairs per month. Either they would have to breed all the other female wolves to their breeding male, or pay to stud them out. This is particularly a problem for players who want to avoid inbreeding their wolves; either they'll have to breed all their females to the same breeding male, or they'll have to pay extra to breed most of their females to outside studs, who might end up having a lot of pups who then they'll have to try and avoid the next time they have to use a stud.

If concerns are about the pup market being flooded, well, it already is. If players can't breed their females to their paired male, they're just going to breed to a stud instead - it'll still be the same amount of pups. If concerns are about lore-only breeding pairs and memory being used to store these pairs, well, they already are. In fact, we're more likely to have lore-only pairs now when you can barely breed your pairs at all - this suggestion will actually make breeding pairs have more of a purpose. I think the other restrictions, like only being able to breed in a pair and having a 30 day cooldown after breaking a pair up before you can put them in a new one, are enough.

Again, I'm really glad we've got this new feature, but in my opinion it needs a little more streamlining. I 100% support this suggestion!

Support! 

A few people have said the restriction is there to reduce pups flooding the market, but I don't think that's the case - I think it's there to encourage people to use outside studs and protect the stud market. Which I do not think needs protecting. I think the stud market will be just fine whether there are caps on how many pairs can have pups or not. 

@VehementRed, I don't understand your argument? It sounds to me like you're saying there should be a cap on how many pairs you have, but that's not what the cap is. It's how many pairs can have pups. You can have ten pairs but only two of them can have litters in a month. 

I don't think there should be a limit on how many pairs can have a litter in a month. I think all playstyles should be supported by the games - mass breeding is supported, studding out every time is supported, having one male have a thousand pups is supported, doing all your breeding in your own pack (albeit with just one male) is supported. I think breeding within your own pack using only pairs should be supported too. 

Support!

I'd also like to see the male breeding cooldown removed - it's really more of an annoyance than it is an actual cap. Like, sure, I won't be able to breed them again when the female next goes into heat... but I can still get pups because I can just breed the female to my breeding male or a different stud. The idea of a male breeding cooldown just doesn't make much sense to me in that aspect tbfh.

I certainly support this. 

A different concern which may need addressing is the impact on studs. Some people may argue that the reason why pair breedings is limited is so that studs are still regularly used. While I understand the reasoning, I have to disagree with it. In terms of the stud market, only the top wolves really get reliably used. This will not change if the pair breeding cap is removed - people will always want to get new markings into their pack, and a high quality stud will always be in demand. 

Not to mention that a lot of people will prefer not to use the pair bonding system. They will like to keep breeding their females and utilise the quicker breeding cooldowns to get more varied litters. The pair breeding system already penalises people who wish to breed in-house with the long breeding cooldown, so there are already incentives built in to use the studding market.

My concern isn't with play style by any means, my concern is based on the mechanics on how the function works. It takes up memory to store information for these pairs, breeding or not. My concern rests in the Memory for maintaining all these pairings, and how this would affect long term usage. If the system is maintaining 10 different breeding pairs per user, it needs to hold all the cooldown info, and I would be cautious in releasing the cap to prevent the function failing in some way. Sudden release means sudden breaks. A gradual increase that was maintainable with the Server load and hopefully add something to the game would be my preference. 

@VehementRed

But how does having a breeding cap help with strain caused by making pairing? We can already make as many pairs as we want. The limit is only for breeding our pairs. I don't really see how removing the breeding cap would give the servers any more stress than what they already are under.

I doubt it’s more than 2 or 3 variables - bond status (unbonded, bonded, on cooldown), who they’re bonded to, and breeding cooldown. That’s... really not that much data. Also you can already have an unlimited amount of bonded pairs, so that data is already being stored.

@VehementRed - 

I don't think there is a current cap on how many breeding pairs there can be per user, or if there is a cap, there's no mention of it on the pair bonding breeding page itself. The server is already storing the information for all the potential breeding pairs - and this isn't what the suggestion is necessarily about anyway. This suggestion just removes the cooldown for the 2 breedings allowed per month cap, ie, only 2 litters per month. 

edit: grammar

If the number of bonded pairs a player is such a data sink, then why are we allowed to make as many pairs as we want? I could have 50 bonded pairs if I wanted to but could only breed 2 of those pairs a month.

Like, I do get the concern, but I do not think it is as big of an issue or memory hog as you think it is. If it were, there would be limits to how many pairs a user could have, but we do not have that limitation, so it's probably not a problem.

This thread's more talking about how the breedings are limited, anyway. So server load on number of pairs a player is a different topic from what OP's presenting.