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lamoxlamae

Abandoning lowers fertility and drop rates

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No.

 

I do much of my hunting in the AP, but must wade through MANY eggs to find ones I'll keep, picking up and re-abandoning until I find something right for my scroll. Why should my breeding attempts be penalized, when so many of my dragons are Cave blockers?

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I'm not talking about people needing CB Albinos to begin lineages.  I'm talking about people who need to breed Albinos in order to actually create a lineage.  Those people – who are breeding and keeping their commons and helping with the ratios, and so aren't the problem here – will have their projects slowed or even shut down all for the benefit of the players who want to main cave hunt more.

This.

 

In my lineage example, I needed specific dragons. Sure, I could have grabbed all the CB's I wanted--but what are the odds I was going to find a 3rd or 4th even-gen Male Electric/Female Gray checkerboard lineage?

 

Probably fairly low. And that's the kind of dragons I needed for my lineage--I didn't need extra CBs, I had plenty. More than plenty. But if it wasn't the right lineage, it was useless to me.

 

I shudder to think about people who are looking for LONGER even-gens. They wouldn't have reason to get more starters if those starters would never produce eggs, after all, as skauble also said.

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Have to disagree. This could really mess up rarities. However, I would like some kind of method to rid cave blockers.

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One question. If the change isn't permanent, if the ratios go back up to where they were before when the eggs are picked up, doesn't that mean that the ratios will force more of the eggs to be produced?

 

There was a period of time where the production of, say, albinos were suppressed. The AP empties of them, and suddenly the ratios say "we have too few albinos!" and starts spewing them out.

 

 

So unless you're planning on the AP always being full of all the blockers, which is a problem in and of itself, it would just cause cycles of under and then over production.

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Seems like this falls under the perennial sentiment of "commons are keeping us from getting rares, so they need to spawn less often"... which would mean they're no longer common, and the rares are no longer rare. wink.gif

 

As somebody who used to collect trading cards, I am familiar with the sentiment. But if I had to buy fifty-seven packs of something before I finally unwrapped that shiny foil chase card, the squee was fifty-seven times louder. Rares are awesome simply because they're so ridiculously hard to get.

 

Just sayin'.

 

(EDIT: Also, if that sort of change is implemented, I'm going to have a much harder time catching a worthy mate to this... wink.gif )

Edited by Evilminion

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I'd support this only if it also depended on what the breeders themselves have abandoned. That is, if you're mass-breeding an ubercommon just to abandon them, you should get some infertility on your end. But if you're breeding albinos and actually keeping them, you shouldn't be penalized.

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With your suggestion a few people with common armies could cripple not only the cave, but also everyone's breeding projects to boot--not to mention kick the ratios out of whack when the hourly drop only produces rares.

 

People are already doing this. It's pretty obvious when the cave is clogged for days with a single breed and that most of them have been bred that people are breeding and dumping armies! If anything it will actually help shut down people who breed and dump armies to mess with the rest of us because after 15 abandons, they can't mess with us anymore.

 

I think the point about rares is the big stickler here for many people. Unless the proposal addresses overall drop rates, not just drop rates for those specific breeds, then, shutting down production of the ubercommons would throw the ratios out of whack.

 

What I mean is that, if 40% of the drops in the Alpine are Albinos and 40% are Nocturnes, but neither can drop because there are too many in the AP, then the overall drop is reduced by 80%--a smattering of random eggs OK for release in that biome, with the usual blend of common and rare, so it's not all rares dropping. Then you'd get a backlog of Suns instead...

 

That would be a kick in the groin to both cave hunters and breeders.

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With your suggestion a few people with common armies could cripple not only the cave, but also everyone's breeding projects to boot--not to mention kick the ratios out of whack when the hourly drop only produces rares.

People are already doing this. It's pretty obvious when the cave is clogged for days with a single breed and that most of them have been bred that people are breeding and dumping armies! If anything it will actually help shut down people who breed and dump armies to mess with the rest of us because after 15 abandons, they can't mess with us anymore.

Actually, the AP is self-cleaning: anything that sits there long enough is deleted. Actual deletion, not wilderness release. It's impossible for any particular group of eggs to clog up things up for days unless you have a lot of people abandoning eggs of the same breeds at a fairly constant rate (and remember, we have tens of thousands of users; 30-40 people is all that's needed to cause a clog and it's a tiny percentage of the userbase) and even then it's always different individual eggs. Even if it didn't auto-clean and an egg did sit there for longer than a day or two, the short timer would get it snapped up as an easy +1 to scrollpop for trophy levels; eggs with 6 days are more likely to be picked up than 7 days. If you took the time to check the lines on those "blocker breed" eggs you'd know that the vast majority of them are CB. The "grab and drop" is common practice to clear commons out of the biomes to get at the more desirable eggs underneath. In other words, you're encouraging cave hunters to keep doing exactly what they've been doing all along.

 

Unfortunately, TJ doesn't like when we grab eggs specifically to destroy them. It's why "freeze and release" type AP programs stopped being effective, and why EQ kills started counting toward kill count and egg slot penalties. It's also why I pick up blockers fairly regularly and raise them, because there's no other way to get them out of the way for good without abusing some loophole that will be subsequently closed.

-----

I'm 100% against this suggestion because the way you've written it, having a lot of people abandon a specific breed will make that breed drop less in the cave and suffer reduced fertility. Yes?

 

Am I the only person who sees how this runs in total opposition to the ratio mechanism? There are only two technical reasons for a breed to be produced a whole lot: if it's underpopulated or if it's new (and therefore underpopulated). So how exactly does producing fewer of an underpopulated breed bring the system any closer to balance?

 

It doesn't.

 

You can't have this running in tandem with the ratio mechanism because of this opposition; all we'll get is a big infinite cascading loop of two opposing systems setting each other off. And letting cave hunters get past blocker walls at the expense of breeders' playstyle is not a good enough reason to rewrite the entire engine.

Edited by Lythiaren

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What I mean is that, if 40% of the drops in the Alpine are Albinos and 40% are Nocturnes, but neither can drop because there are too many in the AP, then the overall drop is reduced by 80%--a smattering of random eggs OK for release in that biome, with the usual blend of common and rare, so it's not all rares dropping. Then you'd get a backlog of Suns instead...

Then the cave stayed open and the biomes unblocked, but each with one so-called blocker breed up top.

 

I AM A PROPHET!

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Actually, the AP is self-cleaning: anything that sits there long enough is deleted.

Is there proof?

I never realized that was true... only heard rumors about it being possible.

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Is there proof?

I never realized that was true... only heard rumors about it being possible.

TJ said as much in an announcement a long time ago, before the news forum was purged. Remember, AP blockage has been a problem for almost five years now, since Halloween of 2008. Numerous solutions have come and gone in that time, some effective and some not. But the blockage has gone down significantly since then, and anyone who remembers the year and a half of perpetual cave block that only opened for maybe 30 seconds at a time if we were lucky can back me up on this.

 

But auto-clean was the only one implemented that affected the eggs in the AP directly, and has been very effective in what it does.

Edited by Lythiaren

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Considering we've seen eggs sit there and tick down in lots of time on the AP, are you sure that's still in effect? I guess if it sits there for the full time it'll die. =p

 

Unfortunately, TJ doesn't like when we grab eggs specifically to destroy them. It's why "freeze and release" type AP programs stopped being effective, and why EQ kills started counting toward kill count and egg slot penalties.

 

Freeze and release - is this referring to the fact that wilderness dragons don't count towards the ratios? I feel like this might be more the result of people doing this, TJ becoming aware that something didn't work/didn't work as intended, and fixing it. I'm pretty sure that EQ kills started counting towards the kill count and egg slot penalties because it's more consistent with how the other actions work and how kill is suppose to work, considering you are trying to kill when you EQ eggs or at least know that's a very good possibility. I don't believe it had anything to do with what people were killing with the action. o.o

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Mm.

 

The arguments against this have also been quite good.

 

I'm just trying to figure out how to disincentive mass-breeding and abandoning of blocker breeds, because I have literally seen people breed pairings that could only produce those breeds and then dump them en masse into the AP.

 

I am not sure what the point behind that behavior is other than "let's mess up ratios" or "I like to inconvenience other people a lot"; I have one CB neo pair that I was breed-abandoning for a while just to see where their eggs went, but I don't get doing it to your whole scroll as a playstyle.

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Mm.

 

The arguments against this have also been quite good.

 

I'm just trying to figure out how to disincentive mass-breeding and abandoning of blocker breeds, because I have literally seen people breed pairings that could only produce those breeds and then dump them en masse into the AP.

 

I am not sure what the point behind that behavior is other than "let's mess up ratios" or "I like to inconvenience other people a lot"; I have one CB neo pair that I was breed-abandoning for a while just to see where their eggs went, but I don't get doing it to your whole scroll as a playstyle.

I imagine the breedings are coming from people who aren't really aware that the eggs are unwanted, likely young players or players who don't use the forums.

 

The issue with trying to prevent mass breeding is that every suggestion regarding it I've seen also has the potential to hurt people who are actually breeding decent things for decent reasons. Accordingly, I still think that ideas to get people to PICK UP more eggs are better than ideas to make people BREED less eggs. If everyone had a few AP-only slots and eggs that sat too long lost large amounts of time, I doubt the AP would be an issue ever again.

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I imagine the breedings are coming from people who aren't really aware that the eggs are unwanted, likely young players or players who don't use the forums.

 

The issue with trying to prevent mass breeding is that every suggestion regarding it I've seen also has the potential to hurt people who are actually breeding decent things for decent reasons. Accordingly, I still think that ideas to get people to PICK UP more eggs are better than ideas to make people BREED less eggs. If everyone had a few AP-only slots and eggs that sat too long lost large amounts of time, I doubt the AP would be an issue ever again.

I could get behind the "user ignorance" idea except that even before I got on the forums I was beginning to get the idea that some breeds were super-common and therefore not as valuable.

 

I dunno. I like AP-only slots and a faster rate of time loss for eggs that sit in the AP, too.

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But we have a lot of players who might honestly not realize what they're doing is hurting other players.

 

They may just like using the breed action every week, because they find it fun--and they're not actually even thinking "If I drop a bunch of these eggs in the AP, nobody will pick them up for a while and then other people can't hunt in the cave. I'm being an inconvenience to them with my mass breedings".

 

Odds are, the thought that they're causing problems for others hasn't even crossed their minds.

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As much as I dislike CB-mania, wouldn't AP-only slots be tantamount to dictating a certain style of play--obliging players to pick up AP'd eggs if they want to raise more, instead of hunting or breeding as they like?

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As much as I dislike CB-mania, wouldn't AP-only slots be tantamount to dictating a certain style of play--obliging players to pick up AP'd eggs if they want to raise more, instead of hunting or breeding as they like?

Yeah, I think so.

 

But then, you CAN find lots of CB stuff in the AP--just not usually the really good stuff.

 

If there WERE AP-only slots, it'd have to be separate from the main slots otherwise that's just not fair to take away slots from people who don't hunt the AP, and I'm pretty sure TJ has said no more slot increases so that'd probably not happen unless he changed his mind on that--which is totally possible. (Or I could be remembering wrong. My memory's pretty bad)

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But we have a lot of players who might honestly not realize what they're doing is hurting other players.

 

They may just like using the breed action every week, because they find it fun--and they're not actually even thinking "If I drop a bunch of these eggs in the AP, nobody will pick them up for a while and then other people can't hunt in the cave.  I'm being an inconvenience to them with my mass breedings".

 

Odds are, the thought that they're causing problems for others hasn't even crossed their minds.

This!

 

There's also the fact that this game has a strong role play component to it, and sometimes I get the feeling that things are being bred in conjunction with that aspect of the game.

 

But seriously, there have been a lot of creative ideas about ways that we can create incentives for taking and raising commons. People have mentioned using badges for it. If we had an in-cave announcement system, then every month a few breeds could be chosen by saying something like:

 

"News has reached you that the resources of the land are being strained by a surge in breeds A, B, and C. You go forth to gather X amount of dragons and give them a home in your cave to ease the problem."

 

And then, if you collect that X amount, within a given time, you get a little badge. You could have a main badge in the top row which, when you clicked on it, could show all of the individual badges you earned. There's an incentive to gather blocker breeds and a way to target it to the breeds that most need to be taken at that time.

 

This is a game so, IMO, our best bet is to either find a way to make taking and raising these breeds useful, or we need to find a way to make it fun.

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This!

 

There's also the fact that this game has a strong role play component to it, and sometimes I get the feeling that things are being bred in conjunction with that aspect of the game.

 

But seriously, there have been a lot of creative ideas about ways that we can create incentives for taking and raising commons. People have mentioned using badges for it. If we had an in-cave announcement system, then every month a few breeds could be chosen by saying something like:

 

"News has reached you that the resources of the land are being strained by a surge in breeds A, B, and C. You go forth to gather X amount of dragons and give them a home in your cave to ease the problem."

 

And then, if you collect that X amount, within a given time, you get a little badge. You could have a main badge in the top row which, when you clicked on it, could show all of the individual badges you earned. There's an incentive to gather blocker breeds and a way to target it to the breeds that most need to be taken at that time.

 

This is a game so, IMO, our best bet is to either find a way to make taking and raising these breeds useful, or we need to find a way to make it fun.

I like your idea. Maybe you can start a thread about it?

Some may not like the idea of giving special badges for it, but I say at least it's a very good idea to send an announcement to all DC players, and make non-forum users realize that breeding their 14285 messily inbred albinos a week is causing a problem for other players instead of helping them.

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Considering we've seen eggs sit there and tick down in lots of time on the AP, are you sure that's still in effect? I guess if it sits there for the full time it'll die. =p

 

 

 

Freeze and release - is this referring to the fact that wilderness dragons don't count towards the ratios? I feel like this might be more the result of people doing this, TJ becoming aware that something didn't work/didn't work as intended, and fixing it. I'm pretty sure that EQ kills started counting towards the kill count and egg slot penalties because it's more consistent with how the other actions work and how kill is suppose to work, considering you are trying to kill when you EQ eggs or at least know that's a very good possibility. I don't believe it had anything to do with what people were killing with the action. o.o

Are you sure they're the same eggs and not just eggs people have dropped after longer than 24 hours, or even eggs that were picked up and re-dropped just before getting purged? I'm pretty sure it's still in effect. I could try breeding and dumping a messy purple dorsal in there and tracking the code for science, if we want to see. But since we've heard nothing from TJ to suggest that it's been turned off I'm going to continue operating under the assumption that it is.

 

And yes, I was referring to how the wild doesn't count anymore. He'd put that in from very early on and only changed it after he'd said how it worked in public and several AP programs appeared with intention to exploit it. Similarly, EQ was changed shortly after people started talking publicly about how they were using it for (essentially) genocide rather than forcing.

 

Looking at the circumstances surrounding both changes led to the logical conclusion that our dear admin frowns upon the practice of picking things up with intention to destroy them. Hence most AP programs nowadays focusing on getting people to raise and keep their blockers rather than releasing a zillion of whatever the current anti-FotM breed happens to be.

Edited by Lythiaren

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Definitely NO.

 

Actual meaning behind that idea - I'm too lazy to take a part in cave de-blocking projects. Let 's make this things done without user interactions.

 

One more contra - it would completely destroy the story setting - cave where WILD dragons lay their eggs.

Live with what you have. Your idea is a pure genocide.

 

 

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Mm.

 

The arguments against this have also been quite good.

 

I'm just trying to figure out how to disincentive mass-breeding and abandoning of blocker breeds, because I have literally seen people breed pairings that could only produce those breeds and then dump them en masse into the AP.

 

I am not sure what the point behind that behavior is other than "let's mess up ratios" or "I like to inconvenience other people a lot"; I have one CB neo pair that I was breed-abandoning for a while just to see where their eggs went, but I don't get doing it to your whole scroll as a playstyle.

I breed my scroll once in awhile. I breed commons. I have a big scroll, so it ends up being a lot of eggs.

 

Now, I check the "kids" once in awhile and they get raised. They even get named.

 

http://dragcave.net/view/bX4qm

http://dragcave.net/view/6eNLW

http://dragcave.net/progeny/toK9O

 

On the other hand, I breed my rares to the ap. They end up on multi-scrolls and burnt up.

http://dragcave.net/lineage/XDt6i

http://dragcave.net/lineage/gPPFC

http://dragcave.net/lineage/EXr6d

 

I put rares in my clicky surprise sig. 2 out of 10 people say thank you when taking an egg and offer to reciprocate in with a breeding.

 

I don't see or experience a lot of kindness from people that want rares. So, I've taken to gifting between other lineage nuts. I breed my scroll out to help offset the ratio damage from people that breed solid golds every week. Because, those people are what cause the cave blockers in the biomes. I am against any kind of action to halt common breeding that does not also effect people that mass breed their rares for their own gain. The rich don't need help getting richer imo. Their already doing fine.

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Vhale, the rares you cited are unnamed, but do belong to players: Two belong to Leusia, the third to kaemen.

 

Still, maybe make dragons that have their eggs abandoned (and not raised/frozen by players) too often lose part of their fertility? Because, whether or not there is some evil intent behind it, if someone breeds 100+ blockers every week, this is a problem for the AP. (Yeah, this is kind of an order to spam-breed your scroll now... /sarcasm Has happened before that my comments caused this kind of reaction, and it was even publicly announced on these boards.)

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If you click on the player names you'll find the scrolls are burned. This is what happens when they have eggs on their scroll. The eggs were in fansites so they hatched and grew up, even though the scrolls are charred.

 

This is my understanding of how the ratios work.

 

The ratios say you need about 1 gold egg per 50 whiptails.

 

So, 1 person breeds a gold egg. about 20 breed whiptails and the cave m akes about 20.

 

So, we end up with 1:40. Cave says, okay, now you get 1 gold egg per 75 whip tails.

 

So, 1 person breeds their 200 golds and gets 1 gold. About 30 whiptails get bred. Then the cave makes 30 whiptails but they end up as blockers so only 15 get picked up. 10 of those were thrown back to the ap.

 

Now the cave says, okay, 1 gold egg per 100 whiptails.

 

And then we get a gold drought for breeding and never get a cb.

 

Now TJ fixed the breeding ratios to be rare rather than common. So this is not as severe as it was. But the point is still, that if people stop breeding their commons but keep breeding rares, then the cave will generate them instead. Leading to massive cave blocker walls in the cave instead of the ap.

 

Personally, I think if we were smart we'd all be mass breeding commons because it seems like this would force cb rares.

Edited by Vhale

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