Now I'm not an "old" player, but I've definitely seen the impact.

The first, and most notable point, are mutations. A mutation is supposed to add a unique, fun, and rare twist to your lion. They aren't supposed to be easy to get, with most mutations having very low chance to appear or pass on. It's supposed to take a while to breed one, and therefore be worth a pretty penny when you eventually do. But because of many factors, mostly the increasing player count, more and more people are breeding and breeding and breeding and popping out more mutations than anyone cares for which is lowering their value A LOT. You used to be able to sell piebalds for at least 10gb for the boring ones, and 20-30gb for some of the higher value ones. But now, there are just so many that you'd be lucky to get rid of yours for a single GB. So when your king finally passes down his mutation after so many breedings, its basically nothing more than a cool lion to look at. Nobody will want it, and the excitement of being able to sell it doesn't exist anymore.

To expand on that, there is a very very very rare encounter during the March event that gives you an item to guarantee a particular mutation. When applied to a lioness, her next litter will have a Primal Ferus, which is the only way to get this mutation outside of breeding. The item alone costs 300-500gb depending on the season, but the lion itself (not including second-generation ones because I don't know the price for them) only costs 2-5gb on a good day. They used to be 20gb at the MINIMUM and now you get fuck all when you get lucky enough to breed one. The only time people actually buy mutations anymore is to use as a king, unless you have a personal use for them (such as lore or sentiment). And another lineart-altering mutation is a dwarf, which are cute little mutations that are only achieved through use of the Lion Scrotum, (an item that has a 25% to pass the mutation of the mother), which can cost 50gb later in the year. But people are breeding them so much that selling them is only worth 15-20gb, which means you'd actually lost profit if you bought the scrotum instead of gaining like you used to. (Dwarves used to be 40-70gb)

A particularly close example to me is combo breeding. If you pair certain bases together, there is a very low chance of getting a very rare combo base. To put this into perspective, I have roughly 60 lionesses I'm using for combo breeding, and after about three heats each (averaging 360 cubs i think) I've only gotten 3 combo bases. This doesn't seem too bad, but when you remember that each lion has a 20 day breeding cooldown, this means I've only gotten 3 in two months. Anyways, my point is they are extremely hard to come by, and therefore should be very valuable, right? Absolutely not. When new combo bases are released, the extremely rich breed the fuck out of them and profit hugely, while the rest of us who are still saving up to buy the lions needed are left in the dust. By the time I had bred my first combo, the price plummeted and nobody cares about them anymore. I've gotten very lucky, and I'm super excited whenever it happens, but It doesn't last long because I know nobody will want it and I'll be lucky if i can even sell it for cheap.

The point of this ramble is that many lions used to be worth something, and you'd be excited when you breed one and be able to profit a bit from it. After a while, you'd collect enough money to afford something you've been wanting, or to start a passion project. Now the only reliable way to make a significant amount of money is to hoard breeding items and wait MONTHS to resell at a higher price. Thats fucking boring, but mutations are worth literally nothing now so you barely get enough to feed your lions.

Yes, people flock to breed new things, but usually after the infatuation the people slow down and the price goes back up. But now they don't, and after the price is driven into the ground it just rots while the rich are counting their dollars from the profits they made before anyone else.

This is a long rant, and there are many more examples to be made, but I think this is enough to give an understanding. I apologize for making you read all this

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Hey, don't apologize for being informative and detailed!

I think what you said definitely put things into perspective for me. I am still at the stage where every cubs are exciting to see since what they inherit is unknown to me. But I can see that once I get use to the game the price would become more of an issue to me.

And the issue about breeding items not giving a profit and how people are not slowing down after lion prices have been driven to the ground is concerning. I wonder what could have caused that?
Perhaps they have never since a market where lions are worth so much so they have a much lower expectations regarding lion prices than those who have seen a healthy market? And therefore formed a really low resistance level in terms of lion price?

Gosh, I need to read up on behavioral finance!

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As far as I know, the market has only been declining for the past year, maybe two. I've heard people say its because Lioden has reached Tiktok and now people are flooding the game too fast for the devs to accommodate. Last year, sometime near November or December, the whole site needed to be redone because of the sheer amount of lag and crashing everyone was causing. And in feb, the player count peaked at 7000 ONLINE players, which is the biggest I've ever seen it at.

But I think what is happening is people want money fast, and so they price their items much cheaper to get a quick sale. That lower price becomes the norm, and so people start pricing even lower because they're impatient. The results are that now everything is dirt cheap. So now the newbies see this new low price, and like you said, they've never seen the "right" price and now their expectations are in the ground.

And I totally get what you mean, I remember falling IN LOVE with every lion, even the plain ones when I was still new, and its kind of a shame that we lose that as we progress. I now view lions almost exclusively in terms of value rather than sentiment or awe and I almost wish I can just erase that and go back haha.

But anyways, the good thing is that people are actively trying to help the market. You might have seen someone talking about "the Collector" or people who give away their lions to someone who kills them. That is a clan who is taking as many mutations, bases, and markings out of the market and killing them so the demand will rise, and hopefully, the price will as well. And there is also another group of people who are pricing their lions at a "normal" price, so the newer players see this and think its the correct one.

I'm really hoping we're able to fix this on our own, because it'll get to the point where newbies wont be able to gain any footing without spending money, and therefore quit before they even start. The devs will have to come up with something to fix their economy, which is usually never good because they'll most likely raise prices, lower pass rates, or wipe accounts to try and fix this.

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I'm also not an old player by lioden standards, but personally I don't really understand what people's problem is with the economy. It's player run, meaning anyone can sell anything for any price. It's extremely subjective.

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Necroing this coz its an important topic still raging on and getting worse.

Rango (#334921) :: The tl;dr is everyone suffers when the market is messed up, and folks that don't price wisely further harm the market. Right now, we're dealing with the issue of oversaturation. Supply is exceeding demand drastically. And nobody wants to buy anything from you because they have too much. Not your lions, not your items, not anything.

Here's a scenario if it helps (I'm not certain which part you don't understand but I'm trying) of what I've seen in the past.

Imagine something new and shiny comes out. Imagine it's price is high.
But you have no money to buy it because you haven't been able to sell anything in months.

The folks with money likely are in one of three positions:
- Buy GB with RL money.
- Sell heats of hybrids or RL/RLCs
- Already had a sizeable savings from before the crash.

These folks won't have issue getting it, which then keeps its price high and unobtainable. It's valuable. And that's good. But it becoming accessible to anyone who doesn't have that kind of money - and can't make it due to not being able to sell - really relies on someone crashing that market too, to make it available.

But if that happens, now you can't make money off it like the people before you.

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It's hard to figure out the value of things when people price it at really high numbers or very low numbers. I mean this is a dumb suggestion, but it would be nice to see an estimated average price for an item or marking on the website. I don't even know anymore if a male with three common markings then one interstellar is worth anything. I think the ability to see average pricing of a lion/marking/item depending on whats being sold and previous trade prices would help many especially newbies.

It would help if we had a system similar to TCG with trading cards to tell us an average price for items/lions/markings. This way newbies and average players can know the current pricing for things.

For example someone wants to know the average price of an interstellar base lion. It would take all lions that fall under that category and average the price. Possibly there could be some way for the system to notify itself to ignore outliers such as interstellar with double uterus which would be a much higher price.

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Unfortunately if a player had enough of a certain lion and wanted to artificially skew that result, all they'd have to do is list them stupid low and it'd crash the average and players would be lead to believe it's the norm.

Certain pricing mechanics absolutely should be treated as harmful pricing and should be removed from the market. Free market is cool and all until players crash the market by purposefully pricing 15+ GB lower than lowest to drive prices down.

It should be considered disruptive gameplay.

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Yes and that would be a bannable offense. If anything the system would see who owns the lion and if its the repeated price from the same owner then it would just use one or two lions from the seller.

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I have strong memories of there formerly being a rule somewhere against 'influencing the market' but can't find it now.

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Personally I would love to see the 'price checks' forum bolstered with proper pricing for certain lions/items. Or at least some sort of guidelines in the FAQ section or even the wiki. It's kinda annoying when I go to the tc and end up leaving with a pretty decent pie for about 900sb but it happened today. I don't think that lowering the pass rates will really help, that would take a long time depending on the max age lionesses can breed to in the game. It's a slow fix but by the time a lionesses dies there could be 10-12 in it's place depending on how hardcore the mass breedings are/how popular it is. I think the best route would be to release new markings/whatever slower and not 5 or 6 at a time. Scatter 'em out over the course of a few years. That way by the time the new markings are ready to be released, the craze from the last one has died down and stabilized.

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Devs need to fix the black friday tiers. People have been asking for them to do so for over a year. it's a big contributor to why the pie / patch market crashed

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True, it's just the most recent that comes to mind lol. Do you know what clan aklosecret is talking about? I'd like to join to hopefully drive prices back up

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It's a clan called "The Collector"

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Thank you!

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