How are the Confetti kitties going for you?

[Tad Carlucci]

Here is an example of "Expect Failure" .. say you have 2 males and 2 females, all showing Red and all known to have Orange hidden. You open all four at the same time, pair them, and breed them, producing 20 boxes, in total, until all four age out at 121 days. You should expect (given your luck is exactly 'average') to have two boxes, both showing Red, and have a 50/50 chance of one being male, and one being female; which you're lucky enough to win. Now, though, you only have one pair and, bred out for 120 days, and should only expect to have one box. So, while, in the first generation, you had success, taken to the next generation your breeding program has failed and cannot continue.

Your only option, at this point, is to obtain another Red (or three) from the general market, or obtain another White (or three) starters.

Now, you might get lucky and be able to obtain three more 'Red hiding Orange' from the market and continue for another 8 months before you find yourself back here again.

But you're not alone. Someone else is doing much the same thing. So, every time you cycle through this, either you, or they, are making it impossible for they (or you) to continue and are forced to resort to White Starters.

Eventually, there will be virtually NO Red, or Orange, or anything other than first-gen White offspring of White starters.

So, unless your breeding program is to produce only White offspring from White Starters, with the occasional chance (1-in-4) of getting a non-White offspring you can sell, you're doomed to failure.

Sure, I'm talking about relatively long time periods. That length depends upon how many others there are playing this losing game. But this depends upon nobody getting bored, frustrated, whatever and giving up on Confetti. That's not happening! So it depends upon a stream of new people coming into the Confetti game to replace the lost players. Unfortunately, word-of-mouth works against that. Eventually (maybe already) the poor performance of the Confetti game will ensure the lost players are NOT replaced. Eventually, all you'll find will be only those playing who can accept working only with White Starters, and can accept the need to constantly replace those Starters with other Starters, for the unlikely chance of occasionally having a non-White offspring to sell.

Will the Confetti game end? No. There will always be some who continue. But the 'Confetti Market' WILL contract.

My concern is not that. My concern is that, while this occurs, the feelings will spill over into the 'normal' KittyCatS game, causing a decline there simply in response to the negative feelings the Confetti game engenders. From the comments both on the Forums and which Charm reads to me from the in-world chat groups, I think this is already occurring.

The question is: what can be done about it? Simple, increase the odds of a Confetti offspring appearing to be BETTER THAN that 1-in-5.5 magic number!

The problem is, then, we'll have an ever-increasing Confetti population. We'll begin to actually see lines of non-White continuing to produce sufficient non-White offspring to continue the line.

But that means Confetti are ADDING to the exploding box surplus the game was designed to burn off.

And it means the prices will 'crash' as more and more of those non-White offspring enter the market.

So, while the Confetti game can be 'saved', doing so means it fails to solve the very problems it was designed for.

I'm brought to mind the end of the movie War Games. "The only wining move is not to play the game." Would that KittyCatS had made that move instead of leaving it to the players!