A Pets Update

A major game update for Bconomy has been released.

Changelog

Pets

• After almost two years of absence, Pets make their triumphant return to Bconomy!
  • And for the first time, they’re part of the core experience – Pets now have a defined role in gameplay, although their mechanics will be familiar to veteran players
  • If you owned any pets in-game prior to their removal in previous updates, they’ve been safely migrated, and are waiting for you to log in
    • For consistency, some pets have had their species reassigned, but other data values are retained
• Send Pets on Adventures to passively gain Items
  • Pets now have an Energy meter, which is filled by feeding the Pet food items
    • Feeding a Pet a food item will grant it XP, which helps to increase its Level (and thereby its item-finding efficiency and buddy action multiplier)
      • Pets can develop Cravings, where satisfying them by feeding specific food items will grant a 4x XP gain bonus when fed
  • Set a Pet to go on a Fish, Hunt, Explore or Mine adventure, where it will find items of that type for you as long as it has enough Energy
    • Each Pet species has a specialization for what kind of Adventure it excels at, and sending the Pet on that type of Adventure increases the speed at which it can find items
  • While a Pet is actively adventuring and is set as your Buddy, you’ll gain a multiplier for the action its species specializes in
    • +0.01x for each 4 Levels
    • Ex: a Level 50 Pet will grant +1.125x, a Level 100 Pet will grant +1.25x, a Level 1 (Tier 3) Pet will grant +1.75x
• A new system has been introduced for Pet breeding, heritage and genetics
  • Pet breeding cooldowns now follow an exponential backoff pattern
    • First time breeding induces an 8 day cooldown, second induces a 16 day cooldown, third 32 day, so on and so forth
  • Pets now keep track of their Generation
    • A newly hatched Pet will inherit the highest Generation of its parents plus one
    • All Pets owned prior to this update have had their Generation set to I, and their parentage information has been cleared due to incompatibility between the old and new systems
    • Pets with lower Generation counts will be significantly rarer by virtue of the heritage system, increasing their perceived value and uniqueness
    • A Pet’s Generation does not affect any gameplay functionality
  • Pets can now have two unique cosmetic properties, Skin and Aura
    • Base Skins can range between Alpha, Beta and Gamma classifications (least to most rare)
    • Base Auras can range between Green, Purple, Orange, Cyan, Red, Pink, Blue, Yellow and Black classifications (all share same rarity)
    • When hatched, a Pet may acquire a Skin or Aura through inheritance if one or more parent possessed the quality (more likely) or through spontaneous mutation (very rare)
    • If one or more Pets holds Mutagenic Sludge (formerly Neurotoxic Chemicals) or a Cursed Charm during breeding, the chance for a Skin or Aura mutation can be artificially increased significantly (but the item is consumed in the process)
    • Skins and Auras can’t be changed for a Pet once it has hatched
    • Skins and Auras are cosmetic and do not affect any gameplay functionality
  • Eggs are now considered separate entities from Pets in-game
    • An Egg’s inherited properties are determined when it is hatched, not when it is produced
    • Eggs can be freely transferred to other players before they are hatched
    • Wild Eggs can be found as a rare drop from loot-bearing actions, provided you have space available for one
• New Pet-related stats are now tracked (Pet Items Found, Pet Items Fed, Pets Bred)

Factions

• Faction Boosts are now completely reset if the Vault FP falls to 0
  • It was previously possible to set high Faction Boost multipliers and deposit small amounts of FP needed only for the duration to run commands to maximize command efficiency – unfortunately, this was not intended behavior and has been patched out

Autosell

• The Autosell feature has been redesigned to better fit modern Bconomy gameplay
• Set a limit for the max amount of an item owned, if that limit is exceeded through finding or harvesting that item, the excess will be converted to BC
  • Rather than an outdated “all-or-nothing” approach from a time when most Bconomy items had no use other than to sell, this new system lets users efficiently manage their inventory and while always having a certain amount of each item on-hand

Market

• Transaction fee is no longer charged when listing an item, rather deducted from seller proceeds when item is purchased
  • It’s now free to list an item on the market, but the transaction fee is deducted from the sale (for ex. a listed item sold for 100 BC, but seller receives 95 BC if there is a 5% fee active)
  • This change should make listing and managing items on the market smoother for sellers, and improve price discovery for buyers
• Maximum listing price is now 10 billion

Ball Pit

• Ball Pit base prize increased to 1 billion (from 50 million)

Actions

• Minimum cooldowns for some actions have been adjusted for consistency (all actions minimum cooldown is now always 1/10 of the maximum cooldown)
• Personal Boosts are now not dependent on how many times an action is run, but rather the amount of charge an action has reached
  • Spamming actions now no longer provides an overwhelming advantage – running any action at maximum charge will provide the same item output and personal boost roll chances as spamming at minimum charge for the same duration
    • This change seeks to more evenly distribute Personal Boosts, as the previous system granted action spammers chain boosts, while more casual players almost never encountered more than 1-2 boosts in a session
    • A “pity” boost is not longer given to players who have not run an action in several hours

Prestige

• New Pet-related Prestige Perks have been added
  • “Stable Renovation” – Increase the maximum number of pets owned (up to 25)
  • “Raiding Party” – Increase the number of Pets that can Adventure simultaneously (up to 8)

Web UI/UX

• Active Market listings are now included in the Items and Market view with quick action buttons to centralize location of listed and inventory items, rather than hiding them in a modal
• Broadcasts associated with specific users (Ascension broadcasts, Ball Pit wins, Faction promotions) can now be clicked on to show the user’s profile
• Scrolling on Journey Log and Chat Box now occurs immediately on data updates
• Progress bar animations now move smoothly instead of abruptly updating every tick
• Action button particle effects now trigger even if keyboard shortcut was used instead of a click interaction
• Setting “Play Animations” to Off now actually disables all in-app CSS animations and transitions
  • This will hopefully provide performance improvements to those with low-power devices or want to minimize browser resource use by turning off animations
  • “Play Animations” is now forced Off if prefers-reduced-motion is set via browser or at the OS level
• Faction per-member FP contribution ticker now uses monospace font for improved visibility with sorting
• Text input boxes for setting in-game names are now prepopulated with existing values
• Numerical keyboard shortcuts for pages have been reassigned to accommodate for new Pets page
• Increased rate of data refresh for item market
• Optimizations to decrease data transfer bandwidth for game updates
• Misc. bug fixes and improvements

Developer Notes

Throughout Bconomy’s existence, The Pets Update has remained a symbolic, unachievable milestone that’s never actually materialized. For years I’d charted it out extensively in notebooks and word documents, planning out the intricate details that would open the game up to a new world of complexity and depth. But the amount of development effort to fully realize that perfect update has always proved itself to be unrealistic. In previous attempts, adding all those features meant constant rewrites to try and retrofit an already unmaintainable codebase with complex new mechanics. Hours of effort would melt away with no tangible progress. Without fail I’d always burn out on making The Pets Update happen after a solid few weeks of development. An impending “Pets Update” has always led to the downfall of past iterations of Bconomy, causing it to lose any momentum and community goodwill it gathered. Periods of update drought, unpatched balance issues and stale gameplay resulting from trying to deliver The Pets Update had more than once caused the game to “die” in the eyes of many devoted players.

But, today, I’m releasing an update that finally returns Pets to the world of Bconomy. They finally have a role beyond sitting on your profile and having cool (read: useless) stats! But, is it The Pets Update? Not quite. This update makes up only a tiny fraction of my vision for what an ideal The Pets Update would’ve looked like. But I could feel myself reliving what caused the game to fail in past times as development progressed… so lots of features didn’t make the cut. Pet Ascensions, Active/Passive Abilities, Random Encounters and Combat would have been so awesome to ship. But if I wanted this update to see the light of day, and for this game to survive, they had to get shortlisted. As long as this project is still kicking (and so am I), those features will be implemented someday. But probably more gradually, in a way that’s more sustainable for the development of the game and my sanity.

So this is “A” Pets Update, not “The” Pets Update. In fact, “The” Pets Update may not ever end up existing in the way I originally envisioned it. And you know what? That might be a good thing.

Anyways… at least we got that boring dev commentary out of the way. Hope this update didn’t screw the game balance too hard! I’ll be doing spot adjustments and hotfixes as needed throughout the week. Bug reports and feedback are appreciated. Enjoy the new content, and – as always – thanks for playing.

Wewert