As a newbie, I'm probably not familiar enough with the site to pretend to know what you guys are talking about with the potions, but I can easily say nothing should change there.

That being said, I definitely think hoarding needs something different. I very much like the idea of having more options for it. I dread sending my pets on hoards now because they range into the half-a-day to full-24 hour lengths, and I have almost nothing to brew, cook or refine, so I need to keep sending them on these long hoards to get items. And the amount of items I've gotten are abysmal for a full-day of waiting(Not complaining, just stating facts). I feel as if I'm not playing or indulging in a game at all.

From my point of view, I joined just this week(huzzah!). I instant-hatched my first pixpet, and he immediately found an egg on his first hoard. I made the mistake of waiting to hatch the Veemooth(do all eggs take 76 hours... uuuugh...).

So I garnered very early on that this game is about patience and waiting. I'm sort of fine with that. I'm patient and can wait, but in the early on-set for all games, this system isn't great in catching and keeping the attention of new potential players.

My first pet leveled up enough from his first hoard to skip right into 3-5 hour hoard times. So I gathered my first hoard, rested and sent him packing again and then... Well, I did my laundry and didn't return until the next day because there was nothing else to do here. With any game, it's the first moment of play that's the most crucial and determines whether the site can keep the attention of a user and keep them logged on for longer times or returning more frequently.

So I'm basically saying having more options for sending a pet on hoard would be awesome and beneficial. I'm not saying to give more items or rarer ones at a faster rate, but there definitely needs to be an option for a shorter path.

I'll be blunt. I'm not all that invested here, aside from my love of the artwork and house customization. The lengthy hoard runs that increase every time I send my pet out almost makes me question if I want to bother coming back to send my pet for another day all over again. I feel disconnected, because I log on, send a pet out, then leave.

Sorry if any of this has already been brought up/discussed or pointed out, I didn't read all of the posts.

So to help with the overall Hoards Suggestion, I would like to throw the idea of a junkyard out there. Maybe broken items can be introduced for shorter hoards? For example: If my pixpet is going out for a five or ten minute run through a swamp or trash heap, even if he only brings me back junk items that are worth 1 PC(or 0, because it's trash and would be funny to throw into your house as a stinky decoration), I would feel like I'm getting back something worth the lesser time I sent him out for. And maybe "broken" items could be a thing. Chunks of items or partial liquid ingredients/seed bags/what not that you can combine with refining/cooking/brewing to make a fully restored, "Liquid quartz" or something.

So let's say a level 100 pet goes on a hoard path that takes half the time(50 hours, right?). He comes back with a legendary egg! Oh... but it's fossilized. And you need an equally rare item(like a potion, or another equally rare item you find on another half-hoard) to revive and be able to hatch it. So a person could either sell the egg for half the price of a ready-to-hatch one, or they can buy/find the revitalizer and eventually wait to hatch the egg. So that way those Rarity Excluder would still be just as potent for a reduced-time hoard. Right? Possibly. Uh, if the math doesn't check out, then just ignore me.

But uh, that's just a vague example. I haven't dabbled in potions enough to have any experience with the Rarity Excluder, so I'm not certain how it works. But I think it would be cool to be able to find, "junk" that can be further combined. Like finding empty bottles of glass and then finding uncut gems and refining them to make a "liquid quartz" or anything else. It could be expanded to be more or less complicated, but I hope my general outline of the base idea is understandable.