Notification about Special Rates

Hello guys, just a short news post here to keep you all informed of a change we made tonight.

Earlier today, we received a report from a player querying the rate of Selene x Luna breedings compared to Luna x Luna, or Selene x Selene. The report suggested that Selene x Luna had a higher chance of producing both Selene and Luna puppies vs straight Luna x Luna or Selene x Selene. We looked into this and, to our surprise, noticed that there was a discrepancy between the two and that this was in fact bugged.

Luna x Luna or Selene x Selene breedings were set to a 2% chance of passing, much lower than the originally announced 20% we mentioned way back during development. Luna x Selene was set to the 20% we originally mentioned.

This had not been bug reported before today and we were really surprised by this result.

We immediately held a short notice admin meeting to discuss this and the implications of it. We deduced that, whilst the original rate was meant to be 20%... With hindsight, that rate seemed exceptionally high and potentially damaging in terms of game balance. We discussed this for quite a while and ran some example breeding simulations.

We have decided that raising Selene x Selene or Luna x Luna up to 20% would be too damaging for the game and cause a significant drop in rarity for Special bases.

Instead, we have opted for the following:

* Same special breeding (Selene x Selene, Luna x Luna, and so on and so forth) carries a chance of 5% that the special base will pass onto a puppy. That means roughly 1 in 20 puppies will get the base as opposed to 1 in 50 as it was up until this news post. 

* Different special breeding (Selene x Luna, and so on and so forth) carries the same 5% chance that the offspring will have a special base - which can be either of the parents' bases, in this case Luna or Selene.

This means that if wanting to breed a specific Special, you'll have the most chance of getting one by breeding two wolves that have the same base. This also means that, though the rate isn't the original 20% we'd said before, the new rate will still feel higher and more populous than all players are currently used to.

We hope you understand why we have made this decision and stress that we will keep an eye as to how this plays out going forward.

This change applies to all breedings generated from the point of this news post. We identified a total of 40 puppies conceived in the period the rates between Luna x Selene were higher, and 9 of those had either a Luna or Selene base. We decided not to opt for a drastic option such as a site rollback for a considerably low number of puppies and breedings affected.

Thank you!