Infertile Eggs

[Sadako]

actully its more like oops your dragons didnt make a real egg this time but here's a free sprite you can drool over

 

Only if you think of it in those terms! If you're hoping for a real egg and and you get a useless sprite instead -what if you never wanted a useless empty egg sprite to begin with?

 

Not everyone even wants frozen eggs or frozen young at all -the system shouldn't force them on people who don't want them. That would be like if 10% of hatchies randomly froze themselves -which I don't think anyone would want.

[21Phoenix]

- If the infertile eggs resulted from breeding they would not affect the rate at which females layed a viable egg. This option would be equally split with "The dragons breed but do not produce an egg.".

 

So if the percentages were something like this:

 

1. Egg/s produced - 35%

2. Bred but no egg produced -35%

3. No interest - 20 %

4. Refusal - 10%

 

The new options would play out along these lines:

 

1. Egg/s produced - 35%

2. Bred but no egg produced - 17.5%

3. Bred but produced an infertile egg - 17.5%

4. No interest - 20 %

5. Refusal - 10%

 

Eggs produced is not affected.

 

I just don't understand this mentality. Fertile eggs are not being affected at all. You only have an added chance of getting something instead of nothing.

[bionelly]

Only if you think of it in those terms!  If you're hoping for a real egg and and you get a useless sprite instead -what if you never wanted a useless empty egg sprite to begin with?

 

Not everyone even wants frozen eggs or frozen young at all -the system shouldn't force them on people who don't want them. That would be like if 10% of hatchies randomly froze themselves -which I don't think anyone would want.

Well, that's why I support having it as a GSA, and why that's an option in the poll (actually, I also like it as a GSA because that's more like the way it works in nature, but I also like having it as an option for those who want it, rather than something that will randomly happen when you're trying to do something else). Having it randomly pop up in breeding is not the only way to have infertile eggs, and by the looks of that poll, it's not the most popular way, either.

Edited January 22, 2010 by bionelly

[Sadako]

I just don't understand this mentality. Fertile eggs are not being affected at all. You only have an added chance of getting something instead of nothing.

 

I know that, intellectually -I understood what you were saying. I just still would be sad if I got an infertile egg when I was hoping for a viable one. Even if I knew, in my mind, that that egg had replaced a no-result breeding, my emotional reaction would still be disappointment because I would be teased with an image of an egg, only to find out it wasn't a real egg.

 

I don't understand why anyone wouldn't be disappointed by an infertile egg that came from a normal breeding.

 

I hate to be gross and graphic, so squick warning: We're debating the difference between menstruation and miscarriages. Female egg-layers naturally lay infertile eggs when they don't mate as a way to clear their bodies of an egg that didn't get fertilized in time. But if an infertile egg comes from breeding, it means something went wrong. I would be much happier if menstruation were enabled for dragons than if miscarriages were. (Though, with egg-layers, I believe it's not actually called menstruation, but whatever.)

 

I love the idea of females laying infertile eggs- as a GSA, or even as a function of normal breeding but one that you have to ask for, like a little 'infertile egg?' tickbox on the breed page. It could be explained by 'Do you want to give the dragons a contraceptive herb so that they produce an infertile egg?' It's the lack of control in the random-breed-result system that I object to. I want to be able to get frozen eggs if I want them, but only if I want them.

 

By the way, I hope it's clear that I'm only adding my thoughts to the discussion -I'm honestly not trying to steal/corrupt anyone's idea...

Edited January 22, 2010 by Sadako

[Harley Quinn hyenaholic]

Why do we have to breed these infertile eggs ourselves? I don't want to breed them; I want to pick eggs up off the AP and freeze them. Not ALL of them. Just some of them. So that I have an egg to remind me which egg is called what.

Edited January 22, 2010 by Harley Quinn hyenaholic

[21Phoenix]

Okay I see what you are saying. I guess the infertile eggs resulting from breeding is just natural to me. I used to raise poultry. A lot of poultry: chickens (both large fowl and bantam), ducks, geese, quail, partridge, guineas, and turkeys. I have dabbled in pheasants and peafowl as well in addition to owning cage birds almost my entire life and working with them in a pet store/and breeders environment for nearly two years. Lot of things affect fertility.

 

1. A younger male that has just reached sexual maturity may take a week or more to get the whole process down. Ex: Young roosters may start grabbing hens and attempting to mate with them as early as twenty weeks. But it might take up to 26 weeks for them to actually get the hang of it.

 

2. External factors such as heat affect fertility. Ex: My female ducks layed almost year round. I was guaranteed a good hatch if the weather was fairly cool outside and didn't climb into the upper 80's - lower 90's. If the temperatures reached the high 80's or above fertility was drastically affected because the drakes were unable to produce viable sperm. They would breed with the hens, and eggs were layed, but they weren't fertile.

 

3. A male : female ratio that is really off. Ex: One drake (male duck) can successfully cover 4-5 hens. Any less and he may aggravate them with his 'courting' (for lack of a better word) any more and he is breeding too many females as often as he can, so his sperm counts are low. This means less offspring are viable. Roosters are the same. Most can cover 6-8 hens, some up to 10. fancier breeds generally should be on less because things get in the way like rumplessness, to much feathering, or head crests.

 

4. Then of course their are things like sterility and fertility issues where the male isn't producing viable sperm at all. Things like feathers getting in the way, or even another male knocking the one breeding off before he can complete the process. Or the DNA simply isn't compatible. Like a moose and a cow. They could breed, but she would never be able to have a calf their sex cells could never form a living zygote. Obviously this is the reason draks aren't able to breed with dragons. Their genome is sufficiently different so that offspring would never be produced.

 

So an infertile egg doesn't always mean something was wrong, necessarily, just that all the right steps didn't happen, or something prevented the egg from being fertile.

 

I have to admit, the herb idea is an interesting alternative to getting an infertile egg. Or something along those lines.

 

It just seems so many people were against outright 'freezing' an egg I though I would try to find an alternative way. And infertile eggs are certainly natural.

 

I believe my comment earlier that made you respond with this:

 

  By the way, I hope it's clear that I'm only adding my thoughts to the discussion -I'm honestly not trying to steal/corrupt anyone's idea...

 

Was not directed towards you. You have been very helpful in expanding the idea.

 

1st how would vampires be infertilve. They bite a LIVING egg that is FERTILE.

 

How intuitive of you. I never would have guessed.

 

Here is the Vampire description:

 

"Vampire dragons are members of the undead. They sustain themselves by drinking the blood of others. It is said that they are only "alive" at night, and seem dead or asleep during the day, as they cannot endure sunlight for long periods of time. Vampire dragons can only reproduce by changing the eggs of other dragons, puncturing the shell with theirs fangs and injecting a venom that kills the baby inside."

 

It says they can only reproduce by changing the eggs. I never said anything about that. If they can only reproduce by changing the eggs of another dragon, who is to say that the female isn't perfectly capable of laying eggs of her own? Just that they aren't fertile. I mean all of their other systems seem to work: circulatory, respiratory, digestive, skeletal, muscle, etc... Why not reproductive? They still would only be able to breed by biting the egg of another dragon and changing the developing embryo, but this would be an easy solution to obtaining an infertile vampire egg. I was not implying that they would bite an infertile dragon egg and the resulting bite would get you a vampire.

 

So it seems so far that the majority of the voters would like this to be a GSA for all female dragons. So now we should think along those lines a wee bit.

 

1. How would you get an egg from a Yulebuck (or any other male only species)? By using my idea earlier?

 

2. How many eggs would you be able to collect? I would think one or two. No more. It could be a simple reason like, "You would have to build more shelves and display cases to house any more eggs and you are too lazy."

 

3. How would we get eggs from unbreedables? Same idea as before?

 

4. I am still at a loss on the dinos...

 

5. Would the GSA work as an option for all females to simply lay an infertile egg, or would an herb like dragonsbane be administered to prevent the breeding from being successful?

 

I just think having the ability as a GSA opens more questions and problems than the eggs simply resulting from a failed breeding. However if we can answer all the questions and work all the kinks out, perhaps this could be implemented sometime in the future.

[Harley Quinn hyenaholic]

I don't care if something's wrong with my dragons. I want to just be able to pick up an egg and freeze it, rather than having to go through all the complications of breeding and hoping that I get the egg I want AND hoping that the egg I want is infertile.

[Geobreeder]

I don't care if something's wrong with my dragons. I want to just be able to pick up an egg and freeze it, rather than having to go through all the complications of breeding and hoping that I get the egg I want AND hoping that the egg I want is infertile.

Because while it makes it easier for you, it also makes life easier for the people we don't want to to have life made easier for, people who'd abuse it.

[Sadako]

First off, it wasn't that comment of yours alone -it just seemed the thread was running the risk of getting drama-y -partly because of my own slightly heated responses to a couple of things.

 

I know a fair amount about basic biology, but I'm far from an expert on birds, so I didn't know about all of those various circumstances, though a few of them I could guess at.

 

So, if infertile eggs from a breeding really aren't all that unrealistic, then my only real objection is the emotional response that a non-viable egg would elicit -not only for myself, but imagine new players getting their first infertile egg. It would be confusing and they might not even realize that the point is to collect the egg sprite.

 

As to unbreedables, if it was a GSA, it could be enabled for all female adults and all genderless adults. They wouldn't need to be given a gender, really, and if they were it would mess up some people's names. Probably not the most scientific route, but hay, close enough. Maybe they attempt to reproduce by budding but they fail and so make infertile eggs?

 

I can think of two ways to get infertile eggs from a male-only species: 1. Use the GSA system and make all one-gender species alike and make them, like unbreedables, all able to lay infertile eggs (put another way, make Yules and any other future male-onlies into quasi-hermaphrodites the way unbreedables would be made into quasi-females.) They would only have the female's GSA of laying infertile eggs, and would not be able to function as female for breeding -they could never lay eggs fertilized by some other male. (I mean, unless you're into that. We could suggest making them true herms.)

 

or 2. Do it as a regular breeding but with intervention (herb tickbox). There would probably even be a way to make it so that yules could lay infertile eggs of their own breed regardless of season whenever you bred with the tickbox ticked, but still only produce eggs of the mother's type when breeding regularly. Under that system, though, there would be no way to get unbreedable's eggs without making them breedable.

 

The third possibility would be to simply exclude all holiday dragons forever from producing infertile eggs, which I think is kinda okay -they're a special one-time thing, after all.

 

It could maybe work if the herb tickbox method were enabled for all breedables, and the single-parent laying method were enabled for all unbreedables. But that would be two things to program...

Edited January 22, 2010 by Sadako

[SickSoul]

To me. Not thanks

 

Say i had a lineage pair give me no interest say 4 times then when they DO give me the egg its infertile id be pissed beyond pissed.

[Slaskia]

After some thinking (dangerous indeed), I agree that having it as part of the breeding results is a bad idea.

 

Consider the rare ratios for instance: it is rather hard to get a gold or silver these days and can take many attempts to get one through breeding. My golds were finicky about giving me gold eggs before the ratios were fixed and now I imagine it would take months to get a single one *hasn't bred them in ages*. I would be beyond pissed if the gold egg I got was infertile after months of trying.

 

So no, let's not have it as part of the breeding results. A GSA would be much more reasonable.

[21Phoenix]

Consider the rare ratios for instance: it is rather hard to get a gold or silver these days and can take many attempts to get one through breeding. My golds were finicky about giving me gold eggs before the ratios were fixed and now I imagine it would take months to get a single one *hasn't bred them in ages*. I would be beyond pissed if the gold egg I got was infertile after months of trying.

 

You do realize that you wouldn't have gotten anything but the message "The dragons breed but no egg is produced"? You at least get a pretty sprite to keep on your scroll.

[Slaskia]

You do realize that you wouldn't have gotten anything but the message "The dragons breed but no egg is produced"? You at least get a pretty sprite to keep on your scroll.

I'd would rather have the 'no egg is produced' then an infertile egg in this case.

[Sadako]

Maybe, if they were a random result of breeding, the breed results page could only have text on it. I remember your blurb earlier about candling -it could say that with no egg picture, so it would look more like the no-interest and no-egg results at first glance. Or it could show a special silhouetted empty egg sprite all in dull sepia tones ersomething, to show the candling, and to symbolize that it's void (but then be a regular-looking egg of its breed after). That would take away the sting of OMG EGG! -wait, no, egg-sprite.

 

I mean, I don't remember anyone specifying that there should be a picture of an egg, I just imagined it that way at first for some reason.

 

I AM THE LIZARD EDIT KING

Edited January 22, 2010 by Sadako

[Deus_Suetonius]

I think the only way this would work is if the Refusal/failure rate got cut in half and shared with the infertile egg. I think that's the only way it would work...

[dolphin79]

How about after the hatchling has hatched you have an option to piece back the egg?

[21Phoenix]

I think the only way this would work is if the Refusal/failure rate got cut in half and shared with the infertile egg. I think that's the only way it would work...

 

Which rate are you talking about just to clarify?

 

This is what I suggested:

 

So if the percentages were something like this:

 

1. Egg/s produced - 35%

2. Bred but no egg produced -35%

3. No interest - 20 %

4. Refusal - 10%

 

The new options would play out along these lines:

 

1. Egg/s produced - 35%

2. Bred but no egg produced - 17.5%

3. Bred but produced an infertile egg - 17.5%

4. No interest - 20 %

5. Refusal - 10%

 

Are you saying it should be between 4 and 5? I can understand 4 but I thought refusals only happened between certain dragons. A pair that has successfully bred, can't suddenly refuse to go near one another can they?

 

This makes perfect sense:

 

Maybe, if they were a random result of breeding, the breed results page could only have text on it. I remember your blurb earlier about candling -it could say that with no egg picture, so it would look more like the no-interest and no-egg results at first glance. That would take away the sting of OMG EGG! -wait, no, egg-sprite.

 

Not seeing the egg, but seeing the text would definitely be lessen the excitement of seeing the egg first and thinking the breeding was successful in producing a viable egg.

Edited January 22, 2010 by 21Phoenix

[Pigegirl 2]

This is my personal opinion: don't change it from how it is. At all. If we MUST change it, it hatches (unless too little time left and it dies) and there's a BSA or something to piece the egg back together.

[n00biito]

This is my personal opinion: don't change it from how it is. At all. If we MUST change it, it hatches (unless too little time left and it dies) and there's a BSA or something to piece the egg back together.

The piece it together suggestion is in another thread. You can go discuss it there.

 

We seriously should implement this as a BSA. Don't mess with the breeding system. It would make things more complicated. A BSA is easy. there's a link on the action's page with a description on what happens when you click on it.

 

Tadaa!

 

For those who want to freeze eggs so desperately. Why is that you want to freeze it? Most of us just like the eggs and want them on our scrolls. Why must the egg be an AP egg and you must freeze it? In the end you'll get a picture of a pretty egg. That's it. There's no need to go through all the drama that'll cause.

 

For one: people who follow every single egg they breed will get annoyed if someone freezes it.

Two: There are those who are against the idea of "killing" what's inside the egg.

Three: People may abuse this feature to get through the wall of unwanted CB and AP eggs which won't do any good for the ratio.

 

Also since the action is all about lonely females who lay unfirtile eggs, it should be a female only feature.

 

The most logical solution would be a female only BSA = female GSA.

[starred_one]

I have an Idea

 

there should be a gender specific action for females called lay

 

it would have a chance of producing an infertile egg

 

the resulting egg would not take up space on your scroll and could not be

named

described

abandoned

or affected by ANY BSA except Bite

 

the egg could be released into the wild or smashed

 

it would also have a marker on the scroll and it's page where it tell you that it is an infertile egg.

 

that way you can tell at a glance what it is

 

 

[F.ury]

I guess I'm playing devil's advocate here, and people are probably going to hate me for it, but if the infertile egg just sits on your scroll for a long period of time, wouldn't it start to go rotten? After all, the normal infertile chicken eggs that people eat go rotten if they are kept for long periods of time without being eaten. Or is there where the option to blow out the inside of the egg becomes available so that there is nothing inside the shell that might rot? Sorry if I'm restating something that was already said; I just got a little bit mixed up with all the different theories that have been suggested.

[starred_one]

 

but then again this is dragon cave we have X D eggs lettle trees chickens electrical dragons and Dinos that look like yoshi

 

since when did realism play into this...

 

 

 

 

 

I do agree with you however you can put a tiny hole in the shell and drain out the yolk-- or just hard boil it.

[n00biito]

I guess I'm playing devil's advocate here, and people are probably going to hate me for it, but if the infertile egg just sits on your scroll for a long period of time, wouldn't it start to go rotten? After all, the normal infertile chicken eggs that people eat go rotten if they are kept for long periods of time without being eaten. Or is there where the option to blow out the inside of the egg becomes available so that there is nothing inside the shell that might rot? Sorry if I'm restating something that was already said; I just got a little bit mixed up with all the different theories that have been suggested.

It's magically unfirtile Magic doesn't rot

[21Phoenix]

An interesting thought but one that is easily dealt with.

 

1. Yes eggs do go rotten, but the reason most eggs go rotten is because the 'bloom' the hen's reproductive tract puts over the egg in the laying process to prevent bacteria from gaining entry to the egg is washed away. This allows said bacteria to enter the egg through its pores and begin the rotting process. I have a decorative jar of pullet or dwarf eggs that were never washed. The eggs never smelled bad and eventually dried up. When shaken you hear something like a heavy but soft bead inside. Of course I wouldn't recommend this method for dragon eggs.

 

2. Earlier I suggested a scenario for this when it was a result of breeding:

 

The egg would be immediately recognized as non viable, not containing a hatchling, whatever. The message could read something like "The dragons breed to produce an egg. After candling you realize the egg is infertile. Do you want to blow the egg out and keep the shell as a keepsake?" It could give you a "Yes"/"No" option. It would require password entry to be sure. If you clicked "No" a message like "Are you sure you just want to throw the egg away?" could come up.

 

And later a way to limit how many eggs of a species you could have:

 

How many eggs would you be able to collect? I would think one or two. No more. It could be a simple reason like, "You would have to build more shelves and display cases to house any more eggs and you are too lazy."

[n00biito]

An interesting thought but one that is easily dealt with.

 

1. Yes eggs do go rotten, but the reason most eggs go rotten is because the 'bloom' the hen's reproductive tract puts over the egg in the laying process to prevent bacteria from gaining entry to the egg is washed away. This allows said bacteria to enter the egg through its pores and begin the rotting process. I have a decorative jar of pullet or dwarf eggs that were never washed. The eggs never smelled bad and eventually dried up. When shaken you hear something like a heavy but soft bead inside. Of course I wouldn't recommend this method for dragon eggs.

 

2. Earlier I suggested a scenario for this when it was a result of breeding:

 

 

 

And later a way to limit how many eggs of a species you could have:

 

I like the candeling idea. I don't there should be a limit on how many eggs you keep though.

 

First of all you have to produce them yourself

Second since they aren't really dragons and part of the population there's no need to keep track of their codes or they can have a different code entirely

 

So there's no reason to not have as many as you wish.