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When is inbreeding going to be bad?


Vas

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When is inbreeding going to be bad?

I've heard from multiple friends now that inbreeding in the game is very good, that it gives superior stats. I find this disgusting.

We need to use these family trees in game. Not as just some fancy useless thing that tells you what color mutations you're going to get. Degrade the DNA, destroy the dinosaurs, make them worse, and die. Weaker and weaker each generation till they can't even survive baby-hood.

I've seen some things here with people being reptile experts claiming that you can breed reptiles together 10 generations to get mutated colors without any "actual mutations". How do they know they aren't decreasing the reptile's resistances to disease? Or making its body weaker? Perhaps it doesn't know how to hunt because thats a trait that got mutated out? Perhaps its organs are weaker and are more prone to failure? Who knows what sort of mutations to its genetic line you're causing.

When I play the game and planned on breeding dinosaurs, I was planning to tame 6-12 max level dinos, and watching their family trees carefully when I breed them along to get better dinos. Now, I'm not a min-maxer, I don't give a damn about "the perfect stats". I expected genetic superiority from dinos that are carefully monitored. Not this stupid bullcrap where you tame 2 level 150s, max them out in levels, then leave them in a tiny room with their eggs, then their children, and their children's children, and end up with over 9000 melee on them because inbreeding only benefits you.

Whats the point of this family tree you have in the game, if you aren't going to make people use it to be careful? If you can gain superior dinos by letting the children mate with their mothers and daughters, why bother having a family tree in the first place? Just to have a representation of how f-ed up the family is?

Here's the way I would implement inbreeding DNA issues.

Parents make child. No inbreeding. Child has the best stats of both parents.
Child breeds with brothers and sisters. Stage 1 Inbreeding, stats drop between 2-5%. Color mutation 10%.
Grandchildren breed with their brothers and sisters. Stage 2 inbreeding. Stats drop between 8-15%. Color mutation 40%. Chance of random death in baby stage 3%.
Stage 3 inbreeding: Stats drop between 12-30%. Color mutation 100%. Chance of random death in baby stage, 10%, child stage 3%, teen stage 1%.
Stage 4: Stats drop 20-50%, Color 100%, Death baby stage 25%, child 10%, teen 3%.
Stage 5: Stats 45-75%, color 100%, Death baby stage 50%, child 20%, teen 10%.
Stage 6 and up: Stats 60-90%, color 100%, Death baby stage 75%, child 45%, teen 20%.

Stage 6 ultimately produces useless dinos that if they even reach adulthood, are slow, weak, pitiful, but might look pretty. They pass on their genetic impurities even if you breed them outside the family. Decreasing the stage by 1 but keeping the color mutations. So ultimately you could get the colors you want, then breed the impurities back out and keep the colors, but who knows. I just wish the game would make the breeding system more complex than "shove a bunch of eggs in the same room, let them all breed together till you get superior super dino, kill the rest, clone that dino 200 times".

-- I omitted some things here, to prevent topic from being deleted from the angry comments I was thinking when I typed it up.

-- -- Please note, I don't care if you're a reptile breeder that makes your pets breed each other 10 generations down the line. Unless you are a geneticist and can provide undeniable proof that it does not damage their DNA permanently, I don't want to hear it. Simply saying "Well my 10th generation snake is pure white and doesn't have any extra body parts so its clearly ok" isn't proof. Just because it didn't sprout a second tail or a second head does not mean his body is perfectly healthy, or his brain.

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3 minutes ago, Vas said:

you tame 2 level 150s, max them out in levels, then leave them in a tiny room with their eggs, then their children, and their children's children, and end up with over 9000 melee on them because inbreeding only benefits you.

This is not how it works. I think you should research on how breeding is currently implemented in ark or wait for mj effect to pass.

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Well, first of all, maxing out desired traits post-tame won't do anything. It makes a dino that's nice to USE, but only the pre-leveling stats determine whether or not it is good for breeding, as leveling does NOT affect the offspring's stats. In fact it is not recommended to level (or imprint, at that matter) the dinos you're gonna breed, because then you might forget what their pre-level stats were which puts you at risk of accidentally breeding your actually good dinos with dinos that are made good for riding but aren't good for breeding.

Second of all, it's not that easy. Undesirable mutations are very much a thing in ARK. Sure, a dino won't sprout a second head or forget how to eat, but it can get a mutation on a useless stat, which means that it won't be good for breeding, because its offspring will also inherit the useless mutation). Which means that one has to watch carefully which stat gets mutated (that's why unleveled parents are better - you can compare baby's stats with each of its parents), killing anything that got an useless mutation.

A bit more complex, than " put 2 dinos in a room, make them bang, harvest a bountiful crop of perfect baby dinos", as you can see.

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But you still don't see people avoiding inbreeding, I still see people just taming one, maybe two owls, and then breeding them repeatedly to get hundreds of eggs and then picking the best babies to breed with each other, etc etc. Its not exactly complex. Its just "Whoops, its a bad one, kill it."

As I said, I tried to look up this topic, but the articles are all over the place and some people say good thing, others say no ill effects. So I did research it. I just haven't personally raised dinos yet because I never get that far into the game. I'm always building instead of raising dinos.

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9 minutes ago, Vas said:

But you still don't see people avoiding inbreeding, I still see people just taming one, maybe two owls, and then breeding them repeatedly to get hundreds of eggs and then picking the best babies to breed with each other, etc etc. Its not exactly complex. Its just "Whoops, its a bad one, kill it."

As I said, I tried to look up this topic, but the articles are all over the place and some people say good thing, others say no ill effects. So I did research it. I just haven't personally raised dinos yet because I never get that far into the game. I'm always building instead of raising dinos.

It's only numbers & RNG and has nothing to do with genetics, it's not that deep really and is just a case of passing numbers on and looking to randomly increase them, it's only a game so don't think too hard about it

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38 minutes ago, Vas said:

But you still don't see people avoiding inbreeding, I still see people just taming one, maybe two owls, and then breeding them repeatedly to get hundreds of eggs and then picking the best babies to breed with each other, etc etc. Its not exactly complex. Its just "Whoops, its a bad one, kill it."

As I said, I tried to look up this topic, but the articles are all over the place and some people say good thing, others say no ill effects. So I did research it. I just haven't personally raised dinos yet because I never get that far into the game. I'm always building instead of raising dinos.

First of all, realism in games sucks.
Why do you absolutely need it in one thing, but not the other? Why not complain about dinos running around in ark, because they went extinct a long time ago? Or bronto sitting inside a cryopod.

You want to selectively use realism. Fine. Inbreeding is not that bad on its own since ark is populated by artificially created life. Those dinos were generated perfect, they don't have genetic "errors" to begin with so no malicious mutations to multiply in offspring because of inbreeding.

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I suppose, but I really would like there to be a much larger disadvantage to inbreeding. I think there should be complexity to this system so people actually have to work to get these high powered dinos.

EDIT: My response was to RageQuitter. :P

Just now, deedoubleu said:

First of all, realism in games sucks.
Why do you absolutely need it in one thing, but not the other?


God I love people like this though. You forgo realism in one area, and you have to give it up in all. Its an all or nothing type person thats just always hilarious. Reminds me of those times I tried to add realism to Space Engineers and ignored Gravity Generators because its implausible to play a game where you can't actually walk on your own ship among other features I ignored because of coding restrictions.

Realism in games does not suck, it only depends on how you do it. You are equating realism with perfect real life gameplay with no fantasy of any kind. Pure Hard Sci Fi. I'm not. Its possible to add realism without making the game 100% real.

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Only someone who hasnt tried to breed from base 400% melee rex to 1300% melee rex can write a topic like this. Update the post once you achieve this solo, on your own with 2x150 parents. We will be waiting here, see you in approx 1-1,5 years.

I really dont want to sound offensive, but this minigame with numbers is time-consuming and pure RNG, what would be the point of making it even harder? Its not like you are saying "just breed them together get hundred eggs and you have 1500% melee". You are complaining because you are far behind the people that started breeding lines years ago and want to see their stats ruined ? .

- a word from a sad breeder.

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3 hours ago, Vas said:

I suppose, but I really would like there to be a much larger disadvantage to inbreeding. I think there should be complexity to this system so people actually have to work to get these high powered dinos.

Has never bred a dino before, complains about people not having to work for their high powered dinos...

Like someone already said, go breed some boss dinos, do some mutation stacking and then come back telling us you dont have to work for it.

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4 hours ago, Vas said:

I suppose, but I really would like there to be a much larger disadvantage to inbreeding. I think there should be complexity to this system so people actually have to work to get these high powered dinos.

EDIT: My response was to RageQuitter. :P


God I love people like this though. You forgo realism in one area, and you have to give it up in all. Its an all or nothing type person thats just always hilarious. Reminds me of those times I tried to add realism to Space Engineers and ignored Gravity Generators because its implausible to play a game where you can't actually walk on your own ship among other features I ignored because of coding restrictions.

Realism in games does not suck, it only depends on how you do it. You are equating realism with perfect real life gameplay with no fantasy of any kind. Pure Hard Sci Fi. I'm not. Its possible to add realism without making the game 100% real.

Realism is alright in graphics, but when it comes to gameplay it makes things more blend, predictable, boring, unbalanced etc.

Suspension of disbelief in necessary in any and all games. if you allow your mind to play with an idea of a world filled with fantasy creatures then it shouldn't be surprising that some parts of the game will be different from real life.
What I was pointing out is inconsistency in your desire of realistic world behavior. I'm not against some portions of the game to be more or less realistic than the other, I just can't understand why is it genetics specifically that's not allowed to be unrealistic?

4 hours ago, Vas said:

I think there should be complexity to this system so people actually have to work to get these high powered dinos.

It is quite complex if you dive into ark's mutations realm and adding disadvantage for inbreeding will only make it harder for maybe 10 tribes who actually breed those insane dinos with hundreds of stacked mutations, everyone else will still buy it for tek or real money as they do now.

If you want another layer of complexity in breeding you can either create limitations for yourself and keep own ancestry line carefully avoiding inbreeding or pay someone to code a mod for you, then run it on your server. Who knows, maybe it will become so popular that devs will add it on officials.

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6 hours ago, Vas said:

When is inbreeding going to be bad?

I've heard from multiple friends now that inbreeding in the game is very good, that it gives superior stats. I find this disgusting.

We need to use these family trees in game. Not as just some fancy useless thing that tells you what color mutations you're going to get. Degrade the DNA, destroy the dinosaurs, make them worse, and die. Weaker and weaker each generation till they can't even survive baby-hood.

I've seen some things here with people being reptile experts claiming that you can breed reptiles together 10 generations to get mutated colors without any "actual mutations". How do they know they aren't decreasing the reptile's resistances to disease? Or making its body weaker? Perhaps it doesn't know how to hunt because thats a trait that got mutated out? Perhaps its organs are weaker and are more prone to failure? Who knows what sort of mutations to its genetic line you're causing.

When I play the game and planned on breeding dinosaurs, I was planning to tame 6-12 max level dinos, and watching their family trees carefully when I breed them along to get better dinos. Now, I'm not a min-maxer, I don't give a damn about "the perfect stats". I expected genetic superiority from dinos that are carefully monitored. Not this stupid bullcrap where you tame 2 level 150s, max them out in levels, then leave them in a tiny room with their eggs, then their children, and their children's children, and end up with over 9000 melee on them because inbreeding only benefits you.

Whats the point of this family tree you have in the game, if you aren't going to make people use it to be careful? If you can gain superior dinos by letting the children mate with their mothers and daughters, why bother having a family tree in the first place? Just to have a representation of how f-ed up the family is?

Here's the way I would implement inbreeding DNA issues.

Parents make child. No inbreeding. Child has the best stats of both parents.
Child breeds with brothers and sisters. Stage 1 Inbreeding, stats drop between 2-5%. Color mutation 10%.
Grandchildren breed with their brothers and sisters. Stage 2 inbreeding. Stats drop between 8-15%. Color mutation 40%. Chance of random death in baby stage 3%.
Stage 3 inbreeding: Stats drop between 12-30%. Color mutation 100%. Chance of random death in baby stage, 10%, child stage 3%, teen stage 1%.
Stage 4: Stats drop 20-50%, Color 100%, Death baby stage 25%, child 10%, teen 3%.
Stage 5: Stats 45-75%, color 100%, Death baby stage 50%, child 20%, teen 10%.
Stage 6 and up: Stats 60-90%, color 100%, Death baby stage 75%, child 45%, teen 20%.

Stage 6 ultimately produces useless dinos that if they even reach adulthood, are slow, weak, pitiful, but might look pretty. They pass on their genetic impurities even if you breed them outside the family. Decreasing the stage by 1 but keeping the color mutations. So ultimately you could get the colors you want, then breed the impurities back out and keep the colors, but who knows. I just wish the game would make the breeding system more complex than "shove a bunch of eggs in the same room, let them all breed together till you get superior super dino, kill the rest, clone that dino 200 times".

-- I omitted some things here, to prevent topic from being deleted from the angry comments I was thinking when I typed it up.

-- -- Please note, I don't care if you're a reptile breeder that makes your pets breed each other 10 generations down the line. Unless you are a geneticist and can provide undeniable proof that it does not damage their DNA permanently, I don't want to hear it. Simply saying "Well my 10th generation snake is pure white and doesn't have any extra body parts so its clearly ok" isn't proof. Just because it didn't sprout a second tail or a second head does not mean his body is perfectly healthy, or his brain.

If both subjects are genetically pure they should be able to mix together to produce the same thing.

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4 hours ago, Erinn said:

Only someone who hasnt tried to breed from base 400% melee rex to 1300% melee rex can write a topic like this. Update the post once you achieve this solo, on your own with 2x150 parents. We will be waiting here, see you in approx 1-1,5 years.

So why does it have to be a random number generator? Why can't we select 6-10 high level dinos, breed the best traits from both, the best traits from two others, the best traits from 2 others, have 6 total dinos produce offspring with the best of specific traits, and then breed those together but not with siblings, to get even better traits from them, leading to a 3rd generation with superior traits, breed them to get the superior traits amongst that group, with a pure uncorrupted genetic line boosting their traits. Why make it just a random number game that ultimately sucks because you just keep killing the useless dinos over and over?

Personally, however, I don't minmax, its boring, and stupid for a game. The game should be balanced so that you don't have to spreadsheet everything to be good at it. But whatever, I can tell no one here will agree with my side, change is evil after all.

1 hour ago, deedoubleu said:

Realism is alright in graphics, but when it comes to gameplay it makes things more blend, predictable, boring, unbalanced etc.


What I was pointing out is inconsistency in your desire of realistic world behavior. I'm not against some portions of the game to be more or less realistic than the other, I just can't understand why is it genetics specifically that's not allowed to be unrealistic?

If you want another layer of complexity in breeding you can either create limitations for yourself and keep own ancestry line carefully avoiding inbreeding or pay someone to code a mod for you, then run it on your server. Who knows, maybe it will become so popular that devs will add it on officials.

Take On Mars is almost entirely realistic, its only problem is that it takes so much CPU to run that almost no one can run it. Thats just one example of a game with as much possible realism to it.

I focused on breeding because it contains a mechanic I disagree with on principal. It promotes inbreeding, and I find that gross, and deteriorates the genetic line of the species. People who do it RL wth animals do it to get prettier animals but it damages the species forever in an irricoverable way, eventually the animals die from various problems or go mental and attack people, children too which happened here at my place when a pure breed dog suddenly went nuts and attacked my neighbor's grandkids. Its cute and all because you get designer puppies and pretty snakes, but ultimately you're damaging the species. Who knows what kind of genetic errors there are on the inside when you have genetic errors in skin color. Thats why I am against it, and why I don't like to see it promoted in games as if its a good thing to do.

As for the mod, I'm not sure its possible for a mod, that'd be a huge huge change that seems infeasible. I give up on this though, people will fight it because they are used to their thing already, and I know it'll never change anyway. There are dozens of things I wish were different in the game. Some for realism sake, but eh. Oh well. Also I'm on disability so I can't afford modder rates anyway. I've had a few ideas I wanted done but I kept them to myself since no one does requests anyway.

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Inbreeding in real life is pretty common for animals, even royals were doing it for a while and there wasn't a problem for many generations. Eventually yes there will be problems, but if one knows what they are doing it's not devastating. Plus mucking with breeding and making it so that inbreeding is bad for the dinos would cause more tames to be tamed (to bring in fresh blood) and that is one of the things they are trying to avoid because it causes lag. 

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I think at a certain point you have to accept that certain mechanics or attempts at realism would be too much.  This is one of them.  If we're going to shouting about what isn't very realistic, let's talk about how an Argy can peck at a Rex's head until it dies when the Rex should be able to grab it by the mouth and swallow it with a single attack.  Ark is already complex, let's not take it too much further.

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39 minutes ago, Vas said:

So why does it have to be a random number generator?

Because guaranteed best stats from parents would be too easy to achieve and break balance.

 

40 minutes ago, Vas said:

Why can't we select 6-10 high level dinos, breed the best traits from both, ...

You can.

 

41 minutes ago, Vas said:

The game should be balanced so that you don't have to spreadsheet everything to be good at it

First you wanted breeding to be more complex, now you  don't want to keep track of dino ancestry, but you would need to if you want to make sure you are not inbreeding.

It seems as if don't even know how you would want it to be, apart from "not as it is now, because inbreeding is bad and even though I'm not forced to use it it's still bad therefore roar". 

 

42 minutes ago, Vas said:

It promotes inbreeding

It does not and I don't understand your fixation on it. You can breed god-rexes without inbreeding.

Not to mention I already provided you an explanation which fits the world logic, but you chose to ignore it - ark dinos created perfect, inbreeding has no downsides. Horrors of inbreeding exist only in your head because you are trying to measure ark dinos with your real-life ruler. Inside ark world it is not wrong, immoral or harmful to dinos.

 

48 minutes ago, Vas said:

As for the mod, I'm not sure its possible for a mod

You have any reasons to think it isn't? 

 

55 minutes ago, Vas said:

I give up on this though, people will fight it because they are used to their thing already

You complaining about mechanic you clearly don't understand without providing any valid argument might also have something to do with people fighting your idea.

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9 hours ago, Vas said:

When is inbreeding going to be bad?

In my personal opinions, I hope never in Ark. I love breeding like this.

If only ppl knew how I played Ovipets.
Ark for me is like Ovipets mated with Rust and blended in a smoothie mixer with Disney's Dinosaur and How to Tame Your Dragon

Edit to add:  with Wreck it Ralph having access to the blender's socket :P

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At the end of the day breeding should be complex enough to keep people interested and take enough time to give people a sense of accomplishment when they get that super stat dino but i couldn't care less how its done, its just a game. 
 

You still need to tame alot of dinos to get really good stats to start with and then spend alot of time getting mutations in the stats you want. Then if you want that dino to look cool you have to breed all the colour regions together and add it to the stats. 

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I just find it hilarious how you genuinely hate and loathe this, lol. It's a game my friend. Also, as others have said, leveling the dinos makes no difference on the stats because it's post-tame/bred stats (before imprint) that matter. Why are we even debating the realism and acceptability of inbreeding irl? This isn't irl. This is Dinosaur-Plus Island: The Game where you are doing your best to survive, either the land or other players. Especially in the case of other players, you want to get a leg up, no matter the costs. Pretty lineages don't matter. You're looking for badass colors and badass stats to match, or in most cases, just badass stats. I imagine for PVE it's different, but at least for PVP, that's my motivation. Not like the animals care and apparently it's not that bad for them. Though i guess you could consider speed or oxygen (in tames that don't have an oxygen stat) mutations pretty harmful.

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  • 4 months later...

If you are so against the inbreeding in the game, play something else. The games been around since what, late 2014? It's not going to change to pandee to your snowflake view on inbreeding. Animals inbreed off and on irl, all the time. Regardless, these are virtual pixels. Not real animals with real gene pools. Making that argument is ignorant. You don't play a game with racism like Skyrim, then cry that the dev's made Stormcloaks racist to all but Nords. 90% of us hate racism. Still played it. Didn't complain. Get over your egotistical "better than thou" attitude, play and enjoy the game for what it is. Like others said, imply your non-imbreeding challenges on yourself.

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while I would love to agree with you, sadly nature has already proven this to be false. In fact a species of big cat was saved by inbreeding, done without human interaction.....think it was the jaguar. Can't remember....But with human interaction, it has proven effective in cattle, specifically milk cows. 
A certain line was bred for milk production, and to keep that gene, inbreeding was put into place. Effectively a huge gain in milk production was seen and inbreeding was accepted for cattle.

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