Breed only is the only thing that keeps this game interesting for me. I don’t think I’d be playing still if it wasn’t for that. If I just bought a king, I don’t think I’d last very long at all, where’s the incentive to keep breeding when you already have a finished king?
Breed only traits give you direction, something to works towards and breed for. Each step you have to reking, which is often 25gb each time.

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I really just can't support this. I've tried to see this point of view, but honestly, I still don't see anything wrong with making them applicator marks, just the same as when I voted in the original poll. Making them applicators does not mean you have to obtain those applicators through any means, and you can still breed for the marks all the same. Yes, if they were made applicators, other, newer players would have much easier access to the marks than players had originally, but that shouldn't minimize how good it feels to breed it authentically. Hell, I think it would make for a better challenge to breed for them despite there being access to them in applicator form, but maybe that's just me.

I'm not much of a marking breeder, in all honesty, so in the end it doesn't really matter to me, but my lack of understanding of the point of view presented doesn't help either. I'm just not convinced that this is a real problem, just something to again separate more "hard-core" players from the casual players in a battle of whose opinion matters most.

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I think the thing is.. It becomes pointless to breed for them if you can just apply them?

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If it becomes pointless to breed anything you can apply, why do people breed for certain applicator bases?

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Bases are profitable in a different way to markings, I don't know of anyone who specifically breeds for applicator markings.

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I can't think of anyone either, but surely some people breed for cloudburst markings? Those come from an applicator; only available in wet season, and you have to be lucky enough for it to show up in your flood pit, and it's a random cloudburst marking that's applied.

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I don't really know of anyone who breeds for Cloudburst markings by themselves, from what I've seen they're a lower-tier applicator marking. The same theory applies for all event applicator markings, since they are only available in their respective shops once per year.

I look at it like this - would you make Vitiligo, as an example, an applicator marking? Vitiligo has a long history as probably one of the main breed-only marking goals. If that became an applicator mark, it would no longer be as desired or as fun, because the challenge would only become your own. If other people can just apply the markings, there would be little initiative to begin on a breeding project of any scale except for your own personal interest. And let's be real, a major portion of game-play on Lioden is surrounded by breeding things that other people will want, so that you can profit and in turn buy things that you want.

I have literally spent months breeding my current king, he's a 9-Vitiligo slot 6 Noctis Margay. I spent months before that just breeding the Vitiligo to roll so that slot 6 would remain empty so I could breed (initially Mottled Rosette) the margay into it. If I breed a 9-vitiligo marked lion, I can sell it for around 20GB at the moment, if I'm lucky. This price has dived substantially from the previous of 120+GB that you used to be able to get, because they are more readily available, because more people are breeding it. That is a huge shift in the market pricing. More availability = less profit.

If vitiligo was applicable, 9-vitiligo marked lions would become a dime a dozen and essentially become worthless.

The thing isn't necessarily applying the mark will hurt the economy.. It's the fact that the markings are bred down from the lions they are applied to. Markings pass a lot more frequently than bases, which is why their value is much less overall. An example would be..

My king currently has 23 cubs. Two of these are full 9-vitiligo, the remaining all have multiple vitiligo markings. He hasn't passed his base, not even once.

Markings spread at a much faster rate than any base, which is why making a breed-only marking into an applicator marking would damage the market for those markings.

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Lioden is a breeding sim not an applicator sim. I have quite a few friends on here, and I don't know anyone who breeds for applicator marks, especially cloudburst cause they're so cheap easily accessible year round. Folks seem to enjoy working torwards something difficult, the right combo of marks and that elation when finishing after 3 months of work! I just don't see folks getting the same gratification from a 3k SB applicator anyone can get.

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Part of the challenge is finding marks for particular slots and breeding them, designing a king around limited available slots, sometimes it can take months just to get a mark and then you need to breed it.

If they all become applicator then suddenly you have marks available in numbers in every slot, there’s no longer any challenge.

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Kind of going on a tangent but speaking of breed only/app marks, you know what else is depressing? The fact that a lot of old raffle marks barely exist anymore (e.g. Soft Unders, Undershine, Dim, etc.) because of the abundance of app marks. :C

Even things like raffle-only Felines have been shoved out of the limelight.

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I'm sorry, I just still don't get it. To each their own, I suppose; I don't spend enough time on the breeding aspect of the game to extend much sympathy when it comes to spending months trying to breed something that should supposedly not take too long to achieve if marks pass easier than a base does. Lioden just isn't much of a breeding sim to me. Sure it all looks nice, but I can't understand the effort in it as someone who will take anything that looks nice and use applicators to spruce it up as I deem fit.

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I was surprised to see this topic suddenly become active again after 7 months of inactivity.

Everyone's concerns are very valid, but I did want to clarify that in July 2019's big update, we acknowledged the community's feedback about not turning the Celestial, Sidereal, and Skyward markings into applicators. In case anyone was under the impression that we would still be turning these existing markings into applicators, we aren't going to do that.

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If I may-

Think of it like a video game.
You need to play through the game to unlock all the abilities, all the levels, all the cutscenes or weapons or whatever. You're used to playing this way- you spend hours or days on puzzles or on a tricky level or grinding gear/levels for a tricky boss battle. It's frustrating. It sometimes sucks. But when hou beat it, it's such a great high- I still remember some great gaming moments I went through as a kid and a teen. Beating Cynthia in Pokemon Diamond for the first time, grinding for a month in World of Warcraft to finally get that Neatherwing drake. I still think back on those fondly.

You know what I don't remember?

Playing through Diamond with Action Replay cheats, or tossing gold at an NPC to buy an extra Neatherwing or two 'cause Onyx got boring.

Sure, sandbox or cheats is a whole lot of fun- I had a blast doing the above, don't get me wrong. But would I have enjoyed that big victory half as much had I been sky high on 'infinite Max Revives/ can steal Trainer-owned Pokemon cheat / a team of Lv 100s that I Rare Candied up' the first time I run through the Elite Four (to continue with the Pokemon example)? Probably not.
Would playing Minecraft's sandbox mode be fun if you just instantly spawned in the exact fort you wanted to build after a little bit of flyong over biomes? After exploring it for a minute, probably not.

It saps the reward out of it if you know that, if ever things get tough, you can toss a bit of currency around for an easy win. That this is the default most will go with- why waste hundreds of hours and GB breeding something when you could save yourself the hassle for a fraction of the time and energy?

How would you feel if your playthrough, your accomplishment for completing a game, was reduced because 'oh, well I want the achivement too, but do I HAVE to complete the game for it?". If you wanted to play through the game, honestly wanted to put the time into it, but cheat codes are right there every time you hit a snag, tempting as hell.

And if you do push through, you do complete it on your own... you'll always know that everyone else got it the easy way, and will beat your scores with far less effort and never quite get what you put into it.

I've spent nearly a year on some version or another of my current project. I don't want to think about how much GB I've spent, but I'm damn sure it's more than anyone spent getting a Quad Sunset, even with the worst prices and worst RNG. Probably several times more GB if I'll be honest. It's more profitable for Lioden if we gamble away our GB on projects we can't cheat through (if they don't listen to our passion for this playstyle, maybe they'll listen to that? Lmao)

The 'sandbox mode' of applicators (which, while also RNG-based, also have FAR better odds than what we're dealing with. A 9 Vit from two 9-Vit parents, ideal circumstances, is a 7.5% chance. Absolutely best odds. Getting the right Cloudburst mark is 25%+, there isn't a fair comparison.) is nice, but is frankly not a game many of us want to play. There are already loads and loads of applicators, we're just asking that these markings be left untouched and as we enjoy them. There are few enough BOs as-is, is it too much to ask that their numbers don't get reduced further?

Don't turn our 'RNG deathmatch, 1 life, no autosaves' into 'invincibility, infinite replay, enemy AI has the brain of a stick'. We get joy out of creating things, working towards goals step by step, overcomming odds to make something truly unique and hard to replicate - maybe you get your joy collecting the apps and seeing that lion come together on a quiet evening, maybe you don't mind nearly as much that someone could accomplish the exact same thing just as easily.
Everyone has their game modes they like- we just like this one and would really, really, really appreciate if our hard work, time and money wasn't easily traded for an app that'll collect dust in Hoards. <3

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Double post, but no worries Katze! It's still a worthwhile discussion to have I find- I do remember that News post, and I'm kind of tickled you guys are still keeping an eye on this and our feelings on the matter. It was brought up earlier because we were still ansty at the idea, and i linked the post so people could read up- I didn't think this wpuld get necro'd givkvkv

We appreciate it- even after months fistfighting RNG, tossing my SB at Opal Saltlicks, we have fun this way and are glad we get to kerp stubbornly hoping slot 8 will finally pass (it did but missing another key mark)

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I wanted to apologise, as after re-reading my last post, the first line makes it sound as though I'm discouraging this topic from being actively posted on. You guys are absolutely permitted to keep discussing it. I wanted to clarify that we weren't going to be making the existing markings into applicators in case anyone new is coming to this and suddenly gets hit with a panic about Celestial Speckles becoming applicable.

Personally I can attest that breed-only markings are much more attractive than applicable ones. I don't see any real value in applicator markings, myself, and ones that pass from only breeding them down selectively are in line with my gameplay. I'd love to see more breed-only markings, but it does seem like a lot of casual or newer players prefer applicators.

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