Suggestion: Being able to get menagerie cats retrieved

[Tad Carlucci]

How about a two-stage Menagerie process? Think of the Windows Trashcan icon ...

When you click in-world, or in the Cattery, the cat/box goes into a suspense listing (similar to the Cattery) and the K$ store credit goes into a suspense account in your K$ transaction history. You cannot expend K$ store credits which are in that suspense account. The cat/box will remain in the suspense account for no more than 24 hours. Prior to the end of that 24-hour period, you can call up the suspense list and select the cat/box to be returned to your Dock, or the Cattery, and the K$ store credit will be returned to the company; or you can select cats/boxes to immediately finalize the Menagerie process. If 24 hours passes, the process is automatically finalized. Upon finalization, the K$ store credit is moved from suspense to your balance. While in suspense, time-based functions such as age, hunger, rest, etc., continue running; but there is no food, pills or potions (this is NOT the Cattery) so, if a cat becomes sick while in suspense, and you later pull it back, it will be sick.

The intention of this process is to allow a 24-hour grace period, to allow the user to recover from an accidental press of the Menagerie button.

I chose 24 hours at random. Any time limit (or even no time limit) would work as well. But, with no time limit, some users will inevitably simply click the button in-world and wonder, days or weeks later, why they're never able to get their Le Tigre, totally missing the fact that they need (since there is no time limit) to log into the web site and finalize the Menagerie process. Such user errors are, as I said, inevitable; but they can be greatly reduced by having the Menagerie response in-world, or on the web, display a reminder about the need to finalize the transaction on the suspense page.

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In an ideal solution, factors such as the time limit for the suspense account, as well as whether the transaction is automatically finalized or automatically returns the cat/box to the Cattery, would be options on a User Account Options page. There are a number of other items should should be controllable on a by-account basis, such as first-time assistance, warning and error messages, whether store-credit (currently misnamed "balance") K$ can be used for normal expenses (as opposed to reserved for such things as Le Tigre purchases), and even automating the purchase of food and/or milk for the Cattery.