See: http://beastkeeper.com/thread/658/2

So, mutagens sound like a good idea. Gamble with your stats to maybe make your pet better, right?

WRONG.

Mutagens as they currently are, bad genes outweight good genes way too much. So much that any pet that uses mutagens will end up with tons of red stats and even so far as being unable to win any battles.

Mutagens are a premium item. They cost gold to buy. They should not dominantly give your pet negative genes! Who in their right mind will pay a buy of gold to ruin a pet? Seriously.

That's why, my suggestion is that mutagens get buffed. Good genes need to be at least double the chances of bad genes in appearing so that it's not 2/3 bad and 1/3 good. I also feel like everyone that has ruined a pet/pets using mutagens on their pets should get compensated for their loss.

Please feel free to comment, like/dislike, and add to this suggestion on how we can fix the problem with mutagens.

Please comment if you support mutagens being changed/buffed so that more attention can be brought to this problem.

No support, that is way too biased towards good genes. I wouldn't mind if it was slightly biased but double is just cheating.
Try breeding to get those good genes.

Also you can find them for free in chests or for 5k silver at the magic shop, so they aren't just a premium item. I would support the magic shop's priced being tweaked though, 3k seems more reasonable to me. Maybe they could be bumped down to 2 gold too, that may not be too cheap considering the damage they can cause.

I don't think they need a buff, it's random and we have good luck and bad luck.
I've used several with mixed results (all on the same pet, who's genes are rubbish currently. They were quite okay at one point and I should have quit while I was ahead.)

Besides I think all pets have 21 "good" genes, 15 "bad" genes, 7 normal genes, and 11 color genes. You already have a better chance of getting a good gene, just many have less genetic power than the bad genes.

I can understand the frustration. I used a Mutagen on Sand Walker, who wasn't stellar to begin with, and it changed his dom-Normal Senses into dom-Poor Hearing.

But I don't think it should be flat out doubled to give us good genes. Ankokou's right, breed for the good genes and save your Mutagens for pets you got nothing to lose on. This site is, after all, a breeding game; genetics and breeding are the main point, not "toss potions at a pet until you get a perfect."

I agree with Ankoukou about tweaking the price a bit- it's too expensive for a gamble, but I don't support making good genes appear more frequently from mutagens.

The problem is, this way "rich" people, or ones with lots of referrals, could just spam mutagens to egt a perfect pet, essentially "winning" the game= ruining it.

Me, I use mutagens on "neutral" pets, with all black stats, which I'm not sure if I want to keep. That way I can shrug off a failure, and be happy if I get a good result.

tweating the mutagen maybe to sophicitated for the system to process right. but i would support a price drop.

after 18 uses on one pet i can avidly say that the gamble is addicting and detrmental to my pet.
the mutagen is all about luck which it has become apparent that I dont have

I can't agree with changing the ratio of good to bad on mutagens. As is I have had excellent results with them personally and I've used quite a few. Yes I've had some bad results but the good have outweighed the bad.

On one pet I intended to sell they caused me to keep him in fact, even though he has 2 red genes (one he had alrealdy one was due to the mutagen) he now has 3 very rare and very good genes that he didn't have before as well.

I do agree with the suggestion of others that the prices could be tweaked a bit.

Imao

 I used 1 mutagen and got a very rare. C:

And I think the price is quite OK because if it's too low, some people would probably just keep muta-ing one pet. 

The price is pretty much making it a little harder to get, so people dont gorge. -3- 

Would it be too game-breaking to suggest that mutagens - perhaps with a geneticist in your inn or something - could be targeted at one area of a pet's genome, like both columns in the jaw or skin category for instance?

At least in this manner users could attempt to control and/or further gamble their losses and gains using this item.

Or perhaps by limiting the number of uses to a given pet, while giving increased control over the genes targeted would make the item more appealing and serve to stop players from abusing the item to get an ideal genetic specimen.

Because in all honesty, if we're using a remotely realistic premise for the game - what life form do you know of that can survive, let alone have a decent quality of life, while being repeatedly exposed to sudden genetic reconfiguration? It's like nuking a slug and seeing how many colors it'll turn before it dies. We're breeding pets, not cultivating guinea pigs.

Perhaps to counter the 'bad genes,' there is a chance that you'd get a gene that cannout befound on a wild pet. An example of a mutagen gene might be something like "Mesmeritic Eyes" which would make a critical hit more likely (because the opponent is less likely to avoid since they are kind of caught by those lovely eyes)

Seeing how much non-support buffing mutagens has gotten I guess people think they're clearly fine giving out more bad genes than they do good. I realize they are just a RNG thing because gene distribution is random, and that's what I feel is the main problem with them. A VERY SELECT FEW people have had GOOD experiences with mutagens and therefore think they're over-powered as is and that somehow they can be used to make perfect pets. This is only true if your idea of a perfect pet has ALL red stats.

So while I've forever sworn off ever using mutagens as I'm sure many people that have ruined a couple good pets have by using them, everyone else that either has no plans on ever using them in the first place because they don't plan on ever buying any, or people that think they're perfectly fine to only be used on pets they don't even want to keep anyways (which in my opinion is the same idea as stat-buffing pets you're planning on pounding) to MAYBE make them keepable (which is a horrible idea imho but to each their own) wont ever actually buy any mutagens either, so mutagens will pretty fade into obscurity as an item very few people want and no smart players use.

That's cool. I just think it's crap that I've ruined about 3 of my pets trying them before I knew they were utter garbage.

As for DragonSage's suggestion, I think genes that you could only get by using mutagens sounds like a cool idea, but with the current way that mutagens mostly give bad genes, you'd end up with pets with all bad genes and 1 limited gene. Not exactly stellar.

You're right. I'm new, and I haven't used a mutagen, nor do I plan to - because breeding seems far more reliable than essentially spraying and praying with mutagens.

With how mutagen currently operates is simply a good business decision for the site - people get a chance to improve or wreck their pets geneaology and the site gets paid every time you want to make that gamble and pay for it. As they say, the house always wins. The RNG prospect of this item will keep players that are so inclined to take the risk to continue to support the site.

It says right on the label that the chance for getting good genes is just as likely as bad - which would lead me to believe that if you're willing to buy this item, there's already a potential strategy in place to prioritize which pets to use this on to minimize the negative effects this item can have.

The argument that paid items should provide additional benefit is something commonly seen in the F2P genre. I don't think a game should ever become so imbalanced that players feel the need to pay to remain competitive - while this strategy it's good for marketing and the survival of a site, it makes for a terrible playerbase in most games I've seen. It's a slippery slope.

At least with my suggestion of narrowing the affected genes to a single, player-chosen category and limiting how many can be administered to a given pet players could at least have greater control over the risk of potential bad outcomes while not allowing them to abuse the mechanic.

Personally I'd probably only use a mutagen on a relatively bad pet to begin with in the hopes it might improve it somewhat, then again I don't pay RL money so any mutagens I'd get would be through sales or random finds during exploring.. 

If my suggestion of introducing mutagen genes was implemented, it could help counter the ratio of bad genes to neutral/good genes. The lure of special genes might well tip it in some people's favor, especially if they were occasionally inherited. 

Seeing how much non-support buffing mutagens has gotten I guess people think they're clearly fine giving out more bad genes than they do good.

It doesn't though. Statistically, they give more good genes than bad, just they tend to be recessive while bad genes tend to be dominant. If anything it's an issue with genetic power. At the most it's been tweaked to be 50-50, like the description of the bottle warns.

Being random everyone will have a different experience. You've been unlucky, other people have been unlucky. Many people have been lucky, they just don't complain publicly like we do when we ruin a pet.

I do feel they are too expensive, but they don't need buffed.

I've found the best use for them is to try and get a couple of nice recessive genes then stop. Use that pet to breed a better pet. Don't use it on a pet you will regret ruining unless you plan to use a ton to attempt to un-ruin it.

As near as I can tell from Angel's posts is that the focus of this site is breeding for genes. Keeping that in mind, I think the mutagen's fall right into that. Why on earth should they give very good genes at a high rate if the focus is to breed better pets rather than just use magic? You would never even need to breed.