Yes. Inbreeding. That thing that many players go "Why do you avoid it it does nothing anyways" about. But please read it all before hitting the "NO support" button; I'd love to hear your thoughts, but please hear me out first.

Inbreeding Mechanics

In real life, inbreeding will often cause malformations, mutations and a general detriment of the offspring's health if done to the extreme, and is used to conserve certain desirable traits in animals. We already have the second part easy enough - many breeding projects use the tactic of breeding the son that has the desired trait/s to his mother, or the contrary with a father and his daughters, to produce more lions with those same traits -, but I think it would be interesting to add a bit more complexity to Lioden. What if there was a set system that added a higher chance of miscarriage for each shared relative, with an added, smaller chance of producing a lethal cub, and generally producing offspring with lower stats than they would have normally, or even the possibility of spontaneous infertile cubs? It would certainly add another limit to the breeding system.

Why would that be useful?

The breeding system has currently a global limit, the fertile lifespan of a lion - from 2 years old to 16 years old for males, females from 2 years to 14, varying due to their own heat cycles and the use of Instant Cub Delivery, two limits to male breedings, and one for females: the males are limited by their own energy when mating with their own females, and the double of the usual energy and studding slots when mating with the lionesses of another player, while the females are limited by a cooldown after giving birth to a litter.

And yet, there are easy ways to bypass these limits: the use of Energy Roots to breed within our own lionesses, that and Cape Bulrush for the stud requests, the Black Stallion that ensures the female it's used on will get pregnant the next try, and for females there is the use of Yohimbe Bark to shorten their cooldown - granted, this last item is only available during one Event and it requires a lot of them to make a big difference.

Now, Energy Roots and Cape Bulrush are available all year around in the Oasis, and while the Cape Bulrush replenishes 3 stud slots per and costs 3GB - making those 3 additional studdings cost 1GB each at least -, it's rather easy to just buy Energy Roots and offer for people to send their females in heat to your account, along with the payment and other items that they wish for your male to use - at their own risk, that is. This means that the original 15 studdings limit - which would add a max of 60 new cubs to the game each week - is bypassed completely, and the amount of lionesses for them to breed now depends on the level of trust this player is given balanced with how much people want to stud to their male. A player could breed thousands of cubs, instead of the potential max of 24 cubs per lioness - the biggest litter is 4 and a lioness has a heat every 2 years until she's 14 years old, which means she can have around 6 natural heats - he could have in his own pride, plus the max amount of 2520 cubs if this male spent all of his weekly stud slots every week starting from 2 years old until he was forced to retire at 16, without using any of the items listed above. Even if we cut those numbers by half - because 1 and 2 cub litters are the most common - that amount of cubs produced by a single male is insane.

How many of those cubs end up clogging the Trade Center, not quite meeting the requirements of their breeders, and yet having cost too much to be used as fodder and disappear from the database? How many of those cubs in the Tree, where they get their stats lowered to NCL amounts from before the overhaul of the system, and thus losing potential owners? With the implementation of an inbreeding system the mass breeding would slow down, either because the stillbirth regulates the amount of cubs produced or more players take their time to plan for a breeding searching for a partner with whom they share goals, if they don't want to risk it with the inbreeding penalty, letting the market breath and rejuvenate itself - and before you protest, yes, I know studdings to highly sought out lions take weeks and even months, and a lot of resources. This is meant for more studs to be sought for the players, instead of the same group all the time, which would even the market by adding more competitors, and thus lowering the prices, even.

What would it consist of?

To keep it well balanced, the lethal mutations would have to be a lower chance than using a CRB - whatever that chance is - but it'd be an added thing to roll when the cubs are conceived. And we already have miscarriages when a lioness isn't nested or isn't well fed, only that this would be a cumulative chance of a set percentage per shared relative, around 1%, even when that lioness is sated and nested. To avoid having everyone suffering from the penalties suddenly, this could be introduced gradually over a couple or real time months, when players have the chance of starting to reach out for lions unrelated to their own and the coders can go over everything a bit more calmly.

The penalties could work in two diferent ways, but it's always calculated with the amount of repeated ancestors a lion has in his/her full heritage: first, by substracting the corresponding percentage of the inherited stats from a parent. Both parents would suffer this independently, before the resulting stats combined to be the ones of their offspring. If we take up to the Great-Great Grand-Parents of the parents, which would be up to a 30% of penalty per parent in the worts of cases; second, by adding a chance of the cubs of the litter being stillborn, rolling individually for each cub, and being the result of the sum of both the parents' penalties, divided by 2, which would result in a 15% of a cub being stillborn in the worst of cases.

There's a lot of controversy regarding the possibility of a slightly higher chance of lethal mutations, so there's the option of creating a unique mutation for the system - a runt lion of sorts - that would be infertile and wouldn't be able to hunt, breed, patrol or be a king, maybe have a shorter lifespan, or having no additional mutation chance at all. Along with this, there'd be a chance - the same as the penalty - to produce spontaneus infertile lions.

Summarized, inbreeding could entail:

• Lower stats than what would be expected


• A set percentage of an added chance of miscarriage|The chance would roll for each cub of the litter individually, not for the litter as a whole|With the lowest of chances and with a lion being and ancestor 15 times, it would mean a chance of 14 - 15% of a cub being stillborn - depending if we take it from the third time a lion is related to introduce the penalty or not


• A whole new item to ensure that at least one cub survives


• Spontaneous infertility


• A higher chance of producing a lethaly mutated cub, but still lower than a CRB - it only affects the chance of having a lethally mutated cub, not the chance of having a mutated cub overall|Or|An exclusive non-lethal mutation, consisting on weak looking, infertile lions that are unable to hunt,
  patrol or be kings, an keep the other lethal mutations' odds as they are currently


• Possible ways for the inbreeding to take place:
  
  
  
  
  • The effects above - minus the lethal mutation - would have a cumulative increased chance per shared ancestor
  
  
  • A three strike system could be added, too, and start from the 3rd ancestor shared and not the 1st for the effects to take place
  
  
  • There could be a limit to the amount of times a common ancestor can influence the cumulative system
  
  
  • The cumulative could stop working from a particular ancestor once it reaches the status of Great-Great Grand Parents or Grand Parents only
  
  
  • The inbreeding could only be considered such if the parents are directly related within five generations only
  
  
  
  

Frequent comments:

• This would harm new players, because smaller prides means more inbreeding: A little bit of inbreeding won't be a problem, so they are safe in this regard until they get the grasp of it, like everything else in the game, and the pride size doesn't matter when it comes to inbreeding.



• This would ruin the game for stat breeders: When this was first suggested, there was no limiting feature for stats, but the amount of time, effort and allies a player has, which means the market is controlled by a handful of people. This isn't meant to take away all their effort, but to make it so that they need to reach out for others to keep on with their breeding, and thus even the field. Now we have limited consumption of certain food items, or usage of other items that grant stats in one way or another, but this could be another way to do so.



• This would mean I have to get rid of my offspring because I cannot safely breed them to their father: Yes and no. You could risk it and breed them anyway - a 2, 4, 6, or 10% of penalty would require you to have really bad luck to have a stillborn -, or you could seek out a stud to breed them until you reach a level of inbreeding you feel safe again or until you get another main male.



• Lethals are supposed to be rare/This would make people stop buying CRB: For those who are worried that this would harm the mutie market making the lethal mutations more common, another possibility was added, that of an exclusive mutation that would be virtually useless. We already have the chance of claiming a CRB lioness in explore and people still buy Cotton Root Bark, so I don't see how increasing the chance of a mutant born of an inbred lioness would change it. Yet, the option of the unique mutation remains. Or not adding a mutation effect at all.



• This would make the rare markings/bases breeders project even harder: I agree, but I don't know how this could be avoided short of increasing the drop chance of those traits to make up for the penalty that results from inbreeding the lions that got the particular trait, or the introduction of an item and ensured the base pased - but those suggestions have a controversy of their own.



• This would be a problem for the players that have long, inbreed lineages already: Other than introducing the system slowly, with warning notices so these players could branch out their lions and avoid the worst, or plainly wiping the heritage of every lion currently on Lioden - as some of you suggested - there's no other thing I can think of currently to avoid the issue.



• I like "insert inbreeding feature nº1 here" but not "insert inbreeding feature nº2 here", can't it be just that instead?: Now, when this idea was born - brainstorming with a group of players, with eveyrone adding their own thoughts - it was as a way to add another layer of limits to the game inspired by real life inbreeding consequences. In my opinion, there shouldn't be a feature added without the rest, because they are meant to balance each other out.



• What if I don't want to play like this? Can't this have a toggle?: I don't think it is feasible to introduce such a change as something you can just toogle on and off, like the Events. Perhaps I'm wrong, but even if I'm not, this was thought with the intention of mending the market. If everyone could just hop off, it would be moot point.

*Note: Given the amount of feedback this has received, I will no longer reply to every single one; the OP is very clear on both the basis of the suggestion as well as the issues it was inspired of, and you are free to agree or disagree; just please don't take it on me as player. If you have doubts after reading it, feel free to PM and I'll try my best to explain myself better when I have the time. Nothing would please me more than to find a middle ground for the reasonable issues mentioned over the replies to be resolved, or even have another, better suggestion be born from this one.