[Tick-Tock]

Alrighty squabblers, listen up. There's been quite a bit of confusion lately over contracts made at the time of trade of a pet, chiefly, breeding restriction agreements.  You know, all those sellers who won't agree to sell their precious pet unless Soandso agrees to only do X number of breedings with it, or limit it to X number of offspring, or whatever.  Until now, things have been going well, and people have been, for the most part, honoring these contracts, so I'd hoped I'd never have to post something like this. Let me explain how sale contracts work, folks. :D (Oh, and you don't have to read this, I know all about attention spans, but don't whine when you get in trouble because you broke a contract and didn't know it. That's part of the moderators' job, to enforce contracts. ;P)

When you buy a pet with restrictions on it, those restrictions are a contract agreed upon and "signed" at the time of sale. They are a condition of the sale being made in the first place, in the same way that payment is a condition of the sale being made. You can't pay, you don't get the pet, you don't agree to the seller's conditions, you don't get the pet. Once you get the pet, you are bound by the terms of the contract, they were a price you had to pay, but, just as you can't change the amount of ks you paid for that pet, you can't change the terms of the contract that you agreed to.  But on the other side of the same coin, neither can the previous owner. The pet is your property now, the previous owner has no jurisdiction (say) over it any more. Now you might be a nice person and agree (with the previous owner) to more limits, or to their removal, but you are under no obligation to do so. The only obligation you have is to the terms you agreed to when you bought the pet.

You are obligated to follow those terms, and, you are obligated to alert any future buyers of those terms.  The contract follows the pet. If you were to sell that pet you bought (the one that came with restrictions), whoever buys it must also honor those restrictions. You cannot sell it with no restrictions (or looser ones) if you bought it with restrictions. You can add restrictions, but you can't sell it with a contract that doesn't fulfill the conditions of the original contract (I.e, you buy the pet and agree to breed it only twice. You then want to sell it, but you want whoever buys it to only breed it three times. You can't do this. You can make the buyer agree to only one breeding, however).

Finally, arithmetic.  Say you buy a pet and agree to breed it only three times. You then breed it twice, but then decide that you don't want it anymore, for whatever reason, and sell it. Whoever buys it from you can only breed it once. This is another facet of "the contract follows the pet."  Otherwise people could just trade pets back and forth to reset the restrictions, and then no one would be satisfied. @_@

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Name change requests:

Once per person. That's it. Fads are bad, mmkay? We do have to keep records on you all, you know. Name changes make that a wee bit tough~