Rider Afterthought asked:

we were told to breed out

not breed back

that we could breed for things not found in starter packs

why then does it take breeding and interbreeding 2 3 and 4th gens to make all the new coats?

why doesnt my 9th gen sierra become idk a king roo?

where are the roos you can not get from starters, as all every single one, stems back from the chest lotto, if not earlier (id number) starter roos.

i figured i'd ask here for something everyone can chew on cuz i dont see anyone progressing away from the starters.

ANSWER: Hi Rider! Every day we seen tremendous sums of people who are discovering traits and coats new to them. They may not be the first to discover something new, but they are making measurable progress in their efforts. You may not see anyone progressing away from starters, but it's certainly happening. In fact, 25 coats have been discovered since the beginning... more recently we've seen the Western Desert and the Dune.

When we said Breed out - we meant to develop your own process, we cannot tell players how to breed or what to breed. Everyone has a different method. It's a bit like a puzzle finding pieces that change the result.

Saying that every single rare stems from the lottery is diminishing the efforts people have made because it isn't true. Thats like being upset because every single rare started from... starters! And over 99% of our players started with the same traditional (or common) Meeroos as everyone else. The lottery did not benefit them, their efforts did.

The lottery is a great big myth, blown well out of proportion. When put into perspective, back when we had the general forum we would hear people upset because they went back and bought two, three, five starter chests and got nothing they deemed valuable. We received complaints from people who said "I spent thousands of Linden and all I got was this Winecoat!"

Putting it into perspective, the people who benefited from "The Lottery" were an incredibly small, miniscule number of players. And the people who went up in arms were not mad that someone else got these "rare" meeroos... they were angry because they didn't or weren't the first to have it. The people who have bred the terracotta, or the Azure or any other meeroo, their history can be traced back to common starters - not "Rare Lottery Meeroos." Also, more people have found Snowpaws, Painteds, Jubilees and every other kind of Meeroo currenty out there by doing it organically... these results were not from a lottery. So to make that statement that all of these meeroos on the market have come from "the Lottery" negates the countless people who have bred honestly and without the random-starter-luck that was happening to a handful.

I'm certainly not diminishing the implications that the lottery had. It was a type of gameplay we did not expect and were unprepared for, and required some significant changes to the mechanics of the game to stop it from happening. We didn't want there to be a "win" button. Even though it was percieved that thousands upon thousand of people were getting rare meeroos from starters, a spin around the community will make it evident that it was a handful, while the many who tried got typical results. The fact that so many were *trying* to play the lottery expecting a win was a big demotivator for our players. They wanted to feel like they won something, and that wasn't the game we intended to make. These rare meeroos, to some effect, are still rare and are not the result of starter trunks.. these are genuinely the result of player controlled (or uncontrolled?) breeding efforts.