A solution PLEASE !

[anna Acanthus]

Well as it's clear now that we won't be allowed to know sex before birth, what to do about the fact that most of us still get very long runs of the same sex...
eg : I'm trying to develop a certain line and i now have 8 offspring and 7 are boys.
These runs last from a month to six weeks on average and it's one of the big downers for me.
I'm still not quite sure how the sex is decided server side but isn't there a way of balancing out a bit and calculating individually for each client? (No way can this just "bad luck" as i've been told a few times)
Of course i don't expect all my kitties to be exactly the sex i want each time but just a little more balance sure would ease the strain budget wise and sentimentally as well.

[Yuukie Onmura]

I've had runs of the same gender too, and of course the wrong one.

menagerie-ing 6 boys because what you need right now is a girl cat is quite annoying.

[Sisch Firecaster]

Yep, lately I've been unboxing an abundance of boys, too.... 7 males, 1 female in the last 2 weeks.
I'm at a point now where I would love to unpack another one for breeding, but I don't dare...

[Vilandra Miles]

I just unpacked 11 boxes...

9 (NINE) are girls...

Doesn't feel any close to even numbers between boys and girls to me...

[KittyCats Resident]

Hi all

I went and did some reasearch into the database so I could give you a detailed answer on this gender issue.
I selected a few different time frames to get an overall view of the spread between male and female cats.

Here are the findings:

1. For all cats/boxes ever born since KittyCatS! started 49.85% were male, 50.15% female.
2. For all active cats alive, 50.1% are male, 49.9% female
3. For all unopened boxes born in the past day 48.89% were male, 51.11% female.
4. For the unopened boxes born in the past 15 minutes 54.55% were male, 45.45% female

I also looked at the balance for one specific trait:
For all "American Shorthair - Red Tabby's" ever born 50.2% were male, 49.8% female.

As a final note I checked the gender for all unopened boxes ever bred by the Original Poster (Anna Acanthus):
51.7% of them have been male, 48.3% have been female. (this includes sold boxes and boxes sent to the menagerie as well).


Adjusting the gender towards each person to ensure they have an exact 50% spread is only possible by making the system totally predictable, so one would at the end know that for example, if this was a girl, the next born will be a boy, and after that a girl again.

But as you can see, despite the thought you sometimes might get about genders being unequal, its rather equal already. Apart from the guarenteed "girl" or "boy" starters for sale in the store, the current system leads to nearly an exact 50/50 split.

I hope this gives you some insight.


Regards
KittyCatS

[anna Acanthus]

Thanks for answering and going to the trouble of checking KCR
Well i'd checked in my pedigree and seen it's about equal and asked a few others who said the same so i'd guessed it was balanced out globally .
The problem in the balancing out is that we get these long runs of the same sex like the server says to itself oh ooopsy i've done too many girls, better send out a loada boys and fast then vice versa etc ad. inf. ...

I can see there could be other probs involved if the system was totally predictable as you say i.e. having to constantly check, calculate and separate at birthing time in order to get the right sex for the right kitty.
Also this would result in slightly faster breeding out of all traits, necessitating an even more frequent introduction of new traits to keep the market going etc ...

But the issue is in fact not that overall the balance is near 50/50 but that in this balancing out we really do get extremely long runs often of mostly the same sex, but curiously, for some it's all girls and at the same period for others all boys.
This would have been resolved if we could have had sex before birth option but ok we've had all that out and no point in going into all that again i suppose.

Anyhow i know that my posts are usually grumbles but always grumbles shared by others (and sure there'll be more coming soon )... this doesn't mean i don't appreciate the totally awesome and incessant work that goes into bringing us the absolutely best breeder in sl by light years and your own optimal usage of the scripting facilities available ...
KittyCats rock something terrible !!

[Vilandra Miles]

Birthes in my cattery over the last 8 days:

boys: 30
girls: 18

While 2 of those girls came from the Christmas pairs. I swear they would have turned out boys otherwise as well!

Sorry, but for me these numbers are significant for all my time of breeding KittyCats. Births in my house have always been in a number of 2:1 for boys and girls, which is... depressing... *sighs*

I will keep counting genders and update this post.

[Emme Oxygen]

I used to complain for months I would only get girls... and the few boys were the cats I could easily menagerie but I had to keep them to avoid a bunch o great females aging with no partners.

Now, I am getting a tsunami of males... And it won't stop. It's not about the balance of all our cats, but as Anna mentioned, it's really heard to keep lines when all you get are males (or females) and can't manage to develop a project.

I'm not asking for easy or predictable and I am not pro the gender on boxes, but after months trying to pull a hidden fur out of a starter and then it keeps giving the same gender, it's kinda frustrating.

Yesterday, i begged in chat to trade 2 males for females of the winter kitties. It's fine with starters, but for long breeding projects it's not viable.

[Saga Felix]

This is (still!) a major issue for me too. While I am NOT the type to go around and mutter "if I don't have my way, I don't wanna play!", I must admit that lately, I have felt a lot like that.

I haven't been in SL much anyway, I cut my cats down to a number around 40, my meeroos are down to around 20, and "the final cut" (0!) is getting VERY tempting every time another completely useless kitten sees the light of day - a pain that is felt even more now that I have a smaller number of cats than ever.

Months ago, I gladly went and spent excessive amounts of lindens in the KittyCats store on potions, collars etc., just because I wanted you guys to earn as much as possible on all the enjoyment I had from my cats - and because I thought you did a fantastic job, listened well to your costumers etc. etc. (If you can, check it - it's true )
This specific issue - gender on boxes - has ruined that for me, though. There can be NO doubt in anyone's mind by now that this is wanted by a vast majority of the KittyCats costumers, and yet... nothing.

As my cattery got smaller - (Which is due to me being less in SL, not issue with cats or anything else as such), the pain of birthing useless kittens got worse - and it becomes difficult to maintain any "real" breeding unless you keep more cats than you really want. So, I have to ask myself, what will it be? More than I really want - or none?
I don't know yet, but this is the issue of my cattery right now - and genders on boxes could fix that. I do not want to give up on my beloved breeding lines, but when I open the 4 boxes I have been eagerly waiting to collect to have a chance to continue the breeding with girl + boy, and they ALL are the same gender, the frustration is just damn near unbearable... This was supposed to be the next generation of MY unique breeds, and now I have four kittens and nothing to breed them with! -And do I want to sell them?!? Doh? NO! MY unique breed, see? Me breeding for MY perfect cat...

KittyCats, I also appreciate you taking the time to prove that genders are of course near 50/50 - but to be honest, I never doubted that for a second. You're a great scripter, and if the script didn't throw out just about an equal amount of boys and girls, I would have been MUCH surprised. -But that is not the issue - not at all.
The issue is not knowing before we birth it - and as a consequence, too many useless kittens are born, and too many boxes are given up on - simply because hard-learned lessons makes us go "Uh-oh, best not birth more... they're probably wrong gender anyway....", and being the soft, silly people we are, can we send them straight to menagerie even though they're "wrong"? Nah, far from always - so, instead of opening the useful boxes that stand in the corner, we open the "wrong" ones, because we can't know any better - and the frustrations grow. Please just fix it?

[anna Acanthus]

(11-28-2011 03:23 PM)KittyCats Resident Wrote:  Hi all
Adjusting the gender towards each person to ensure they have an exact 50% spread is only possible by making the system totally predictable, so one would at the end know that for example, if this was a girl, the next born will be a boy, and after that a girl again.

On second thoughts, if this is the only possible solution , and it doesn't interfere with the future plans that apparently make it impossible to have gender on box, then why not ?
The breeding out of traits really is difficult, and challenging enough. It can take weeks to get just the right traits out and another few weeks to get it again if it's the wrong sex. So birthing a possible contribution to one's project of the moment even if all the traits weren't there could be worth it but not if that too is the wrong sex.
I'm certainly not the only one who often shares Saga's feeling of ... is it really worth continuing the struggle ... the frustration and financial burden and feeling of throwing good money after bad, not to mention the new traits coming out too fast and making our beautifull 8 and 9 trait kitties that we've spent months on practically worthless on the market, but i'm getting off subject there ...
*Btw selling our kitties is not much fun for the majority of us even when we do manage get good prices. A few are totally insensitive and just consider them as a possible money making commodity to trash if no good, but not that many i think