[Origin Cave]

Achievements & Breeding Time

We've taken a cue from some of the survey answers and would like to poll you guys on whether or not you'd like to see some changes:

Achievements?
Yes? No? Tell us what you think. These will be little pixel awards you get for having a certain number of posts, completing quests, etc.

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months?
Should sexual maturity in Gembounds occur at 4 or 6 months? If 4 months, we'll change the breeding period from 5 to 3 months, allowing for 3 breeding periods to occur in a year as opposed to 2. If we leave it at 6 months, nothing will change.

Code:

<b>Achievements?</b>

<b>Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months?</b>

Achievements? Yes yes yes!

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? I think 6 months is totally fine! Ima have to change my opinion. After reading Atlas' post, I have to agree with them. Seven months is a long time to wait to have kids. I think four months would be better.

Achievements? Achievements would be a ton of fun. Maybe even small magic bonuses to go along with more strenuous achievements? But yeah! I like them. :>

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? I prefer four. Seven (6 for maturity, 1 for the baby to be born) months is a long wait for someone to see any offspring from their character. That's over half a year to wait for the chance to play an awesome and important life event!

If someone can stick with the site for 4 months (5, to see an offspring) I think that vouches for their credibility / loyalty / "worthiness" enough. I know you don't want an overpopulation, but from my experience there's only a handful of players that can last over 1-2 months on a site. And since we cannot join the site with "pre-aged" characters (every character that joins starts at 1 cycle old) I think it'll be very few that last to 6, let alone 4 months.

PLUS. There's already the limit between reproducing, so the characters that are 'breeding age' cannot back-to-back reproduce. 4 months is plenty long. I might be selfish in that I want to see the lifecycle of characters happen, but I do! And I really wanna play someone's kid. :<

If you wanted to make sure the reproduction stays balanced, you could trim down litter sizes to compensate for the quicker maturity time? I'm down for that.

Achievements? yessssssssss, i love them! I dunno how cluttery it'll look if you add it to the sidebar of threads given there's already icons for magic and the character's magic alignment. But adding a box on the profile would be way cute and maybe have a section on the side profile of threads that says something like "achievements: X" or whatever you decide to call 'em then list the amount of achievements unlocked. Then if someone sees that a character has like 15 achievements more than them, they can just look @ the profile to see what's goin on.

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? WELLLLLLLLLLL, I never end up breeding my characters. But half a year is a lot to some people, I'd like to think of it as a lot of time even though it FLIES BY *i'm so old* I don't think it really matters, but 4 months might appease other people more. :)

Achievements? Absolutely adore the idea of achievements but maybe an achievement box under the mini profiles? or just in the profiles? Sort of like the little icons you have currently for the elements where you hover over them to see what the achievements are c:

If you want to keep the achievements the same, pick a certain object and just change the shades of colour so it keeps it all neat! but hovering over shows the difference <3

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? I'm going to say stick with 6 months <3 It shows a commitment to the site and is not going to end with people's adopted characters ending up parentless in the future.

Achievements? Oh oh oh YES. For the shape of the little achievements, they could be little crystal shards, like a small one for minor achievements such as post 25 times and they get bigger and fuller as you reach goals like 100 IC posts, and there's a crystal box or something that they are shown in. Or perhaps orbs! :D I'd be willing to make pixel art for the crystals if needed and if there needs to be better image of it. I'm also willing to code. eue

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? I say 4 months for the same reasons as Atlas has touched upon. Even I have a habit of hopping from site to site and it's difficult for me to stay rooted down to one for six or more months, but I'm sure that I will stick around on Origin. Just other people have a tendacy to get bored after a while and seek new sites, which is understandable.

Achievements? I completely agree with Aza's idea! That sounds so cool! That sounds like those little hatchlings where you either click them enough or post enough to make them hatch, and I've always liked those. It would be really fun if one of the achievements did turn out to be one, secretly.
But that's just me fantasizing, ignore me. ;3;

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? I think 4 months, or 5 to have a kid, is a perfect amount of time. In my opinion, a lot of what keeps people on rp or pet sites are both short term and long term goals.

7 months would either create a lot of character hopping, or character pausing, waiting for maturity.

Popping in to comment - Banshee & Kay, I really love the idea of using crystals for the achievements, and having them "grow" as you obtain higher achievements. You'd still have ALL your achievements show up on the box, just higher achievements (100 posts as opposed to 25) would be larger/fuller crystals. I really like that. I may fiddle with that idea. :P

Achievements? Most definitely :D. Ban's and Kay's idea sounds fantastic~

Sexual Maturity - 4 or 6 months? I'd have to go with the four month. 6 months is a long time to wait.

Achievements: YES. Yes yes yes yes yes to all of this. Pleeeaase let me be an achievement whore. xD

Maturity: Eh, I'm torn. I'd be completely fine with waiting 7 months to have my character reproduce, and honestly, I feel like that wait would pick out the good, loyal members from those just looking for character hoarding, which can become a real problem on sites like this. :/ At the same time, though, I get where people are coming from, wanting just 5 for babies. While 6 is a realistic wait, 4 seems like, idk, they'd be awfully young IC to be having babies. :/

It'd complicate things a bit, but what if you split it up? Characters under a certain size are able to reproduce at 4 months, while characters that are over at 6 months- so where a dog or cat could breed earlier naturally, it'd be realistic to assume a horse or rhino might have a longer wait- bigger bodies = longer 'gestation' time, as more to create from practically nothing. So in this sense, we'd see the same population comparison as real life- with more smaller animals than large- and keeps the caves from overcrowding once babies do start happening? I don't really know what else to say. XD I'd down with whatever in the long-run.