A theory on regard & mutation

Mon
07/25/11

This is my first post here after two months of lurking in these forums and breeding my own Meeroos. What I am about to describe below is a THEORY of mine, just a theory. I'm not making bold statements about how things work, I'm not saying you should all take what I describe as the actual truth, it's just a guess, a supposition, a theory. It is based on statements from Malevay Studios staff to be found throughout this site and from the observed breeding results of myself and others to date.

This theory will be of interest to you if:

a.) You don't believe (despite numerous statements to the contrary by the good folks from Malevay Studios) that regard (Personal and Meeroo) has any effect or is working as stated.

b.) You are happy to beleive regard has an effect on your breeding results, yet you harbour nagging doubts about it and wonder when it might kick in.

c.) You are perplexed about how getting deeper into the generation numbers can somehow surface more new traits, coats and species becuase logic dictates the further you go, the more distant those ancestral traits become.

d.) You think that new coats or traits are yet to be "switched on" by Malevay.

We've all seen many posting in these forums about how regard apprently isn't working, breeding isn't yielding expected new coats or species or ears fast enough, etc. A number of people have advanced their own theories to explain this, yet one thing missing from the majority of these theories (and rants) is that they fail to assume Malevay studios is telling the truth. They go to great lengths to try and explain what we see, without listening to what we are told.

We are told that regard DOES have an effect, that breeding down through generations IS beneficial, that EVERY Meeroo does indeed have the genetic potential to ultimately produce all the possible traits in its family line. Just because what we see happening with breeding results TO DATE doesn't appear to support these assertions does not mean they are untrue.

The theory I'm about to put forward takes into account what we've been told by Malevay AND the results (or lack of them!) we have seen to date. It synthesises the two to offer a possible explanation for how things might be working.

I beleive the process of mutation in meeroos could be a two step process. (Incidentally, when I say "mutation" you could also substitute the term "reaching back into ancestral genes" but I'll stick with the word "mutation" becuase it's easier to type!)

Step 1: Let's say a pair of our beloved meeroos are producing a nest. At the time of nest creation the regard of both parent Meeroos and that of the Meeroo's owners is taken into account to determine the odds of a mutation occurring. The higher the regard the better the odds of a mutation. Lets also say in this case, the combined regard was high so odds were very good and a mutation is going to occur for this new nest, yippee! This was step 1.

Step 2: A decision has to be made on what the results of the mutation are going to be. In other words, what will surface from the ancestral gene pool? It is this second step that forms the core of my theory.

Let us suppose for a moment that every Meeroo has a genetic value odds (chance) for every conceivable species, coat, trait etc in its electronic “DNA”. These values could, hypothetically, range from the low (1) to maximum (100). These genetic odds could be set in starter nests with some element of randomness but weighted toward the more common traits. As an example, lets take a small selection of possible coats and assign some "genetic odds" values to them for a plain little Winecoat Roo we got from a starter pack...