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Thuban

Changes in Several BSA menus

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Fertility: A lot of people have stated that the fertility menu is annoying, bulky or just hard to load. Personally, I would probably use it more, if it looked the way the breeding window does. Easier to find things for me that way, since all the other scroll wide options list that way.

 

Option: Give users the ability to choose whether they want normal (mini boxes) view, or breed view for fertility, in account settings.

 

 

Now, if something like that were to happen, it then opens the door for something some users would find incredibly useful:

 

On the breed menu, the dragons you breed to most, show up at the top. What if this effect were to be carried over to other BSAs? Fertility, for example, could show dragons most targeted at top of the list. If you only ever breed a red dragon, to three specific mates, then those three would be at top. It would be nice to be able to limit other dragons from showing up, if you know you will only ever breed (or fertilize) specific dragons

 

Option: The ability to toggle whether ONLY dragons that have been targeted by breed or actions before show up, or ALL dragons.

 

Benefit: Instead of having to load every dragon you own, you could then only see the dragons who you have previously selected to recieve the action. It can be toggled on and off.

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I see nothing wrong with this suggestion. I probably wouldn't use it, but I definitely support it.

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I have my own work-around for this problematic and awkward BSA, but agree that Fertility is very awkward to use.

 

The addition of the Filter did make it considerably easier to sort through my 4700+ breedable dragons, and I do appreciate that feature. I would hate to see it removed.

 

I don't use Fertility that much, in part because it has always been awkward. I hope something can be worked out to streamline the way it currently loads, so I am very interested to see what options are proposed.

 

I don't use it on my most frequent breeders, BSA CB dragons whose offspring are dropped to the AP, just because they tend to breed reasonably well, and I see no need for a boost. I don't know that it would make sense for them to be at the top of the Fertility list, when I don't use it on them.

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I have my own work-around for this problematic and awkward BSA, but agree that Fertility is very awkward to use.

 

The addition of the Filter did make it considerably easier to sort through my 4700+ breedable dragons, and I do appreciate that feature. I would hate to see it removed.

 

I don't use Fertility that much, in part because it has always been awkward. I hope something can be worked out to streamline the way it currently loads, so I am very interested to see what options are proposed.

 

I don't use it on my most frequent breeders, BSA CB dragons whose offspring are dropped to the AP, just because they tend to breed reasonably well, and I see no need for a boost. I don't know that it would make sense for them to be at the top of the Fertility list, when I don't use it on them.

There are users who will always fertility as soon as it opens, on a dragon as soon as it breedable. By having the dragons used most on show up at top, you save having to scroll through everything to find the one you want to use it on. It helps because you might always fertilize one specific gold, and just happen to always use the same purple to do it

 

By adding the option to only have previously used on dragons show up, then you save not only a bunch of loading time, but also scrolling.

 

Its probably only useful for fertility and breed though.

Edited by Thuban

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Looks good to me! Though this will probably shortly be banished to the BSA subforum.

 

Cheers!

C4.

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I think now is an appropriate time to bring up the subject of "options" again. I've done it in the past, though maybe not with the same amount of verboseness as this post.

 

Making your suggestion an option is easy. It's safe. It guarantees that no one can ever hate what you're suggesting--how could they ever disagree if they can just turn it off if they don't like it? It's completely understandable to fall into the trap of option hell, because seemingly everyone wins.

 

But do they? Let's see where things can go wrong:

 

Burden of more code: Each binary option (yes/no, on/off, however you want to label it) inherently forks the feature into two paths. If there are multiple options for a given feature, you've now got exponential growth going on. Every time that feature gets touched, attention must be paid to all possible combinations. There are more edge cases and thus more surfaces to test. Since this is a matter of exponential growth, it's not just something you can throw more people resources at and make things better (besides, people resources don't scale linearly).

 

Burden of support: Suddenly, in order to report a bug, it is necessary to know a user's entire "state." If your fertility page is failing, which selector style do you have? Do you have the Javascript version enabled? If so, ... and so on and so on. Again, everything becomes exponentially more difficult to reason about and whoever is trying to help out (probably the mods) needs a lot more information to figure out what's going on.

 

Burden of choice: It's pretty paralyzing to be presented with a wall of checkboxes and dropdowns that precisely tune every knob that can possibly be tuned. In most cases, people don't even care about 90% of the choices presented to them, but their mere existence adds to the cognitive burden and perceived difficulty of use of a piece of software.

 

None of this means that there should be no options. It does, however, mean that what is made into a choice needs to be very carefully curated so that the controls that are given to people are super-meaningful. What percentage of people will actually use each side of a toggle? If only 10% of people will use a feature, is it better to split time in a 1:9 ratio, or just simplify things and spend that extra time making the one option better for everyone? What about if it's 5%? 50%? There's no hard cutoff for how to spend time, but the tradeoffs are pretty obvious. How important does something have to be to people before their wish becomes an option? Even if people are split on an issue, if it's a minor issue, then why bother?

 

In general, I find that very few of the proposed options in this section fall on the correct side of the "worthiness" split. For the most part, you're better off accepting that not everyone will be pleased and focusing on making the overall experience better for everyone.

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I get why you wouldn't want to have a yes/no/this/that option for every feature on the site, but I don't get why all of the other BSAs and breeding use the custom sort feature to choose the intended target, while fertility uses alternate custom sort. My main beef with this is that it's inconsistent and I'm doing something different when I use that BSA, verses the others. For me, having consistency across the different features would be more important than which sort option is being used.

 

So yeah, I'd like to see fertility change to the regular custom sort view (since that's the simpler option) for the sake of consistency.

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I personally like fertility as is and have no issues with it as is (except for the fact that gendered unbreedables still show up under fertility even if the action can't be performed on them).

 

It would be kind of nice to have it sort like breed does - dragons that get fertilized most show up at the top.

 

but I don't get why all of the other BSAs and breeding use the custom sort feature to choose the intended target, while fertility uses alternate custom sort.

 

Unless I'm misunderstanding you - it doesn't anymore.

Edited by SockPuppet Strangler

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Oh my, I am out of date! I didn't even notice that had changed! Sorry Sock!

 

Well, in that case, let me revise my statement slightly. tongue.gif I'd quite like either breeding to be more like fertility, or fertility to be more like breeding, again for the sake of consistency. (Though I think the breeding interface is easier to use, especially if you're on a dodgy computer or device). I don't really get why the two systems operate differently when they're essentially doing the same thing - finding the dragon you want to select out of your entire scroll.

Edited by StormWizard212

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