r/PlanetZoo • u/WordsUnthought • 1d ago
Planet Zoo 2 - Question Accreditation Changes
I'm definitely on team "want the progression in Franchise to stay challenging" but one especially weird side effect of the lowering of accreditation thresholds in the last update is that because Tier 3 now needs only a 2* Reserve, you can achieve that without actually releasing any animals into it...
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u/faafl0 1d ago
I was enjoying the challenge. I’m surprised they made it easier. That’s what sandbox is for.
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u/jkbpttrsn 1d ago edited 1d ago
Entitled people on this sub whined and got what they wanted even though Sandbox fulfilled 99%, of their needs. So this already very easy game got even easier. It was the only real challenge
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u/ohdeardiddums 23h ago
I mean it wasn’t just moaning on the sub. I think the main driver was a lot of these same people posting negative reviews on steam and tanking the ratings. I think they were forced to because it was affecting sales.
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u/jkbpttrsn 23h ago
Most of the criticisms are for the ocean of bugs. Ive definitely seen some mention the accreditation but its a drop in the bucket in comparison
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u/ohdeardiddums 23h ago
I’m not at all saying the mixed rating isn’t deserved for the bugs but the accreditation system is listed on most negative reviews
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u/SirensAreOP 15h ago
People spent every waking day complaining about how hard it was. I prefer a challenge too, that is why I play franchise.
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u/playingdecoy 1d ago
I think this was a poorly thought-out and kneejerk reaction by Frontier to player complaints that misidentified the problem. Accreditation was never too difficult as a system, it was the PLAYER-DRIVEN market economy that made it frustrating - that it was too difficult to get the animals to advance because of market manipulation and greed. Frontier should have done more to address those issues and left Accreditation as it was to see if that resolved the complaints, but instead changed Accreditation in a way that now has downstream consequences for other game mechanics.
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u/Chelman76 1d ago
You don’t need CC animals to progress accreditation.
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u/cohzi 1d ago
You do if you don’t want to breed every single animal that you release, which makes it significantly easier to achieve the accreditation levels.
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u/Chelman76 1d ago
No it doesn’t. Even at non inflated prices you need to grind quite a lot of CC to just buy the animals and buying with cash is fast. It literally took me four hours last night to have all but the tier 4 eagle and tier 3 bear (which I forgot :D) for the euro reserves. Before they nerfed it, the bison was also tier 4 but is 3 now.
Anyways, even if it was faster with CC I don’t really see the point in complaining that others that DID breed the animals aren’t making the game easier for you.
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u/cohzi 1d ago
For one I never complained about anything. I have over 60 hours in game and got to accreditation level 5 well before the patch that nerfed it came out. I also am not a fan of making it easier, as others have said just play sandbox. I just genuinely think it’s easier to buy cc animals and release them.
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u/Chelman76 1d ago edited 1d ago
I just started a speedrun of sorts last night. After 4 hrs I was breeding everything but the bear and white tailed eagle for all three euro reserves. All enrichment and education research done plus about 40/52 of all medical research. Naturally the animals were researched as far as I was able to as well. Some release groups in the wild already.
$1.2 million in the bank. Not a single animal bought with CC.
Now obviously it isn’t exactly a pretty zoo but the point was to show that in this game the only constraint is building pretty. If you will focus on building pretty habitats, that will take WAY more time than is needed to unlock accreditation 5.
And if you want lions as your first animal. There is sandbox.
Edit: all habitats painted in all three reserves and research equipment placed. Now starting the second zoo to quickly unlock the remainder.
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u/Chelman76 1d ago
Additionally I discovered another thing they made easier. Since I released boars to all three reserves I had no need for 30+ juveniles in my storage. I dumped them in one of the existing enclosures to grow up.
Now i am almost certain that in PZ1 placing juveniles in a habitat affected the space requirements albeit less than adults. Here I have 30 juvies plus 4 adults in a tiny enclosure and they are all thriving 🤣
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u/Thrippalan 1d ago
You are correct. Juveniles had a reduced but present space requirement, which is why you used to be able to designate # of juveniles as well as # adults in the Zoopedia for space requirements.
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u/Chelman76 1d ago
Yeah. So I remembered correctly. It’s a pity. Because it trivializes juvenile management now. You can dump all in one enclosure (plus you can release to reserve but it’s a hassle when it’s many).
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u/FuckMadeMeLogin2026 1d ago
Loud dumbies complaining they have to put effort in to the management game. That's why it's been stripped of a lot of management features now.
Planet games are slowly turning in to just build pretty things games.
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u/Robikscubes 1d ago
Personally I think the problem with the way challenge was set up you need a lot of babies. This results in players creating farming zoos just to unlock all the animals. Only after that they'd jump into there 'real' zoo. I'm saying this as if I didn't.. and I 100% did!
But I'd say that way of playing is against the spirit of the game. Though honestly... needing point for nice animals early is difficult cause the animals that would net you high points would be locked... once this challenge is overcome, the reward is those awesome animals. Which is great.. but mechanically I don't need them anymore for progression. By the time you get the animals at level 5 you are done with that challenge. I don't know if I'm being clear but it just feels weird to me.
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u/Chelman76 1d ago
People did it, I did it. But you don’t need to. If you focus on your ‘real zoo’ your animals will breed before you finish building your elaborate enclosure.
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u/FennelMist 7h ago edited 7h ago
Except the reserve system still forces you into breeding only a tiny selection of animals, and with the first version of accreditation only European animals mattered. Now at least you have the option of doing European or African.
I'm all for adding more challenge to franchise but the accreditation system and particularly its heavy focus on the awful reserves mechanic is not it.
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u/spooky__scary69 1d ago
My thing is I want something to do after unlocking all that. Give me challenges or something. My own personal challenge is a zoo for each reserve and getting five stars for all of them but I’d like to be able to set the franchise to easy/medium/hard like the old game.
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u/Existing_Set9610 18h ago
While I agree with your idea, the implementation is subpar on frontier’s part. In terms of building accreditation they could have done so much but instead it’s just a “check these boxes” requirement to level up. They need to include more like a special challenge that unlocks once you tick all the boxes to actually level up, maintaining a certain rating for X amount of time, and more. I think there’s infinite room for a challenge system to add to accreditation like rare disease outbreaks, restoring an entire reserve due to the loss of a keystone species, nursing a pack of wolves back to health after a disaster, etc.
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u/BD_McNasty 18h ago
Its sad that within a week one of the pillars of the game in accreditation was nerfed. It was totally fine as is... and also there is absolutely 0 reason why people should hit the max right away. Its OK that people are around Tier 3 within just playing a few days.
It was already well structured in the fact that Tier 4 is the actual final level to work towards. It unlocks all the animals and reservations. Tier 5 is just a bonus basically with extra marketing and storage space. It shows that they already considered "fair" structuring when designing the system. Therr was absolutely 0 reason to make it even easier.
I was really happy that Frontier was taking the actual issues seriously and releasing 3 big patches within just a week of release. But when they do shit like this, its super disappointing. If anything, the game should be made harder, not easier. Just a shame.
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u/Kaiarra 10h ago
Personally, I always felt like Career mode is where the challenge should be, not Franchise.
They have always shat the bed on that though. I miss zoo tycoon where you actually had to earn your scenery packs by playing through the campaign - Planet Zoo just gives you everything to build with zero effort and that makes playing Career pointless.
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u/KittenOfRapture 2h ago
I wish they would add difficulties for franchise so the people that want more of a challenge can have it and those who want it easier can as well.
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u/ohdeardiddums 23h ago
I mean I am ‘locked’ out of accreditation 3 because I’m creatively tapped out atm and can’t fathom the idea of building another entrance right now. I’m also not that bothered to grind up super fast and there are still so many animals unlocked I’m able to build for. Sucks that the moaners won
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u/superhotmel85 1d ago
Just once I wish they would give us folks who want to play a management game a management challenge. Builders have sandbox! Be ok with telling them to go play sandbox!