After a quiet time on the Petable front (aside from a minor hiccup with glow), the Petable team announced some tornado news.
Not only will we be able to trade in our eggs (which we can do via the Egg Trader) for points, but at a later release, we would be able to trade in our unwanted turtles.
Trading in turtles will be a little different, involving a group effort to increase a count meter kept at the Petable store – kind of like a charity donation meter I guess. Once that meter gets to 100% a new points item will be released.
This is good news for us here at the Barn, because previously we’ve been simply deleting a lot of good but ugly turtles, who weren’t useful for our breeding experiments, but still eating our food. Now, instead, we can trade them in – perhaps not strictly to benefit ourselves with more points, but to add to the group effort which will provide new points items for sale.
As a small-time hobbyist breeder, we don’t actually have a quantity of turtles breeding at once, so our points growth is very small compared to many. We only keep the glow because they make us happy, and trade in our nine or so eggs each morning. This means that for things like the 20,000 points special ‘Anomaly’ Turtle announced in the previous Petable Blog (link below) we simply can’t see us ever get to the state where such a turtle is within our own goals – our first points purchases are the large feeding bowls which will hopefully allow the full family to go off for a few days on holiday. It takes a while for us to save up enough for these items, made more difficult with the fact that full group food bowls became points items and not purchasable.
Perhaps the additional news this week, announced over the groups, will put paid to some of the problems we have with points items. In that news, Petable announced that full group food bowls would from hence on, be transferable. Although this means that they remain available as points items – so generally we will need to amalgamate points by breeding turtles together – if somebody else has copious points, they could feasibly swap their own points for these bowls, then put them up for sale – and people like us could buy them.
Back to the Turtle Trading however, and although there is no mention of being able to secure points for these unwanted turtles, we think that for us, there is enough motivation simply in being able to do some good with our unwanted turtles, albeit possibly not for ourselves. And the whole thing suggests another personal slant to all of this, in that the creators themselves, suggest that the meter system of vortexed or traded turtles will provide inspiration to themselves in delivering more features or points items.
The Turtle market is an interesting one at the moment. If you read the comments on the Turtle Trade post (first link below), you’ll find one signed anonymously as an ‘Unhappy Customer’. That person does have a point in that a huge quantity of turtle farms and farmers appeared amazingly quickly when Petable Turtles first came out, on the lookout for the next big earner after the collapse of the turtle markets. However it brings up the question that will always form – why is such secondary market saturation always placed back on the shoulders of the creators of an object? Another question sitting side-by-side with this one, is whether you’re into turtle farming as a business or as a fun game to do. And that, indeed, is a personal choice. The creators of breedables are obligated to look at the needs of both sides of these, their customers.
In respect of Petable Turtles and their staff – having something like the points system and being able to do some good for some of the others with trading in our own unwanted turtles – well, that actually makes it a little more fun for us to see what happens next.
But we can’t quite understand the problem between somebody demanding that the Petable staff do something about the market of turtles (which has fallen recently) and Petable issuing a new feature which affectively may rid that same market of some of the unwanted turtles saturating that market. We enjoy the fun factor of having something slightly different in the turtles, but this is, of course – a personal opinion.
Petable Blogs – for further information please read the following :
- Huge Announcement – information on the Turtle Vortex
- A couple of updates – the anomaly egg, and information on hatchlings.
Image Credit : The image used for this blog post was based on a flickr image by ahisgett (Creative Commons License). The turtles are our own. Please note : no turtles were harmed in the creation of this image, but may be soon!
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