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Zada2011

Possible Measure Against Some Viewbombing

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Personally, I like the idea that someone brought up a while ago about simply removing sickness or making it non-fatal.

It's sort of like when they had unlimited lava blocks in minecraft. People just went around griefing like mad.

If sickness were non-fatal, it would still be as annoying as all get-out to have that notice at the top, so people would almost certainly still take care of it. However, it would stop bombers in their tracks. If the best you could do is annoy someone, it makes for a lot less motivation.

Agreed. So far I that's my favorite option.

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Agreed. So far I that's my favorite option.

 

 

Me, too, although it did take a bit of consideration to arrive at this conclusion, since some apparently have concerns that this would cause 'waste entries' or 'spamming' of fansites, although I don't see why anyone would go to more trouble that they needed...

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Also that could make the game TOO easy - as in you don't have to make any effort at all - and I wouldn't support that...

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I really don't like the idea of removing sickness or making it nonfatal. One of the challenges of the game is getting your eggs hatched/hatchies grown as quickly as possible without making them sick. I think that the original reason for sickness was to prevent strain on the server from everyone trying to get massive numbers of views for their eggs -- someone correct me if I am wrong about that.

 

I would support a higher level of views to cause sickness and perhaps having them need to be sick for a longer period of time before it can be fatal. It is sad when you hear of people who have lost eggs in a matter of just a couple of hours.

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Make sickness nonfatal, but force sick dragons to take longer to grow up.

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Sickness should stay the way it is. There should be some risk in this game, otherwise it gets boring. Just because it's somewhat inconvenient doesn't mean that its bad for the overall gameplay. Not everything should be handed to the players.

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Sickness should stay the way it is. There should be some risk in this game, otherwise it gets boring. Just because it's somewhat inconvenient doesn't mean that its bad for the overall gameplay. Not everything should be handed to the players.

I would not call having eggs killed by view-bombers "inconvenient."

Edited by _Sin_

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I would not call having eggs killed by view-bombers  "inconvenient."

Well, I do. They're just pixels.

 

e. and I'm not saying that we can't have other measures against viewbombing, just that sickness is a fundamental part of this game and removing it would alter how this game is played significantly.

Edited by platedlizard

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At first glance, removing sickness seems like the perfect solution. But sickness was added for a reason. People were playing "how many views/etc can I rack up?" games with their eggs, causing undue strain on the dragcave server. I'm pretty sure we have a lot better server now than we did then [lots lots less lag!], but I suspect sickness removal might start that up again and could at least increase lag.

 

The other problem is viewbombing is not the only harm that can be done. Someone who trades and wants to keep that CB gold they caught around as long as they can to get the best trade can be quite annoyed at loosing two or three days of trading by someone ERing that gold for them, even if it doesn't put the life of the dragon in danger.

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At first glance, removing sickness seems like the perfect solution. But sickness was added for a reason. People were playing "how many views/etc can I rack up?" games with their eggs, causing undue strain on the dragcave server. I'm pretty sure we have a lot better server now than we did then [lots lots less lag!], but I suspect sickness removal might start that up again and could at least increase lag.

 

The other problem is viewbombing is not the only harm that can be done. Someone who trades and wants to keep that CB gold they caught around as long as they can to get the best trade can be quite annoyed at loosing two or three days of trading by someone ERing that gold for them, even if it doesn't put the life of the dragon in danger.

I'm not suggesting removing sickness, just avoiding death. I'm ok with a solution that would still "punish" the player even if I cannot figure out why I should be punished because some .... decided to view-bomb.

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But what kind of punishment could there be if not death? Lowered fertility rate? That still gives a viewbomber power. Even if it isn't death, they're still harming the dragon.

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But what kind of punishment could there be if not death?  Lowered fertility rate?  That still gives a viewbomber power.  Even if it isn't death, they're still harming the dragon.

But it isn't as permanent. I am not good at catching metals(I have caught ONE in the five years I have been here), losing a CB metal to viewbombing means that egg is near irreplaceable unless someone is kind enough to gift one. I would rather have the slight inconvenience of it growing up slower than lose a near irreplaceable egg.

 

I still like the idea of a BSA that protects a single egg. Like I said, certain eggs are near irreplaceable for me, so I would only use it on that one egg. Normal eggs would not receive such protection and I would be as cautious as normal(which quite frankly, isn't very, it isn't that hard to keep them from getting sick under normal circumstances).

Edited by Nectaris

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So you're suggesting severe sickness delaying the "magic point" [currently 4 days left] where an egg or hatchling is able to go to the next stage? I could get behind that as long as it never delayed to the point of an egg dying because its growth was delayed past the death point of 7 days after birth.

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I'm not suggesting removing sickness, just avoiding death. I'm ok with a solution that would still "punish" the player even if I cannot figure out why I should be punished because some .... decided to view-bomb.

But what is the point of avoiding sickness then?

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Perhaps for every hour of sickness, an hour is added to the timer of the egg?

I would be ok with that.

 

 

To others:

Anyway, do we realize that, instead of finding ways to frustrate and stop the view-bomber, some here are thinking mostly on how to make the life of the victim as hard as possible?

The victims ARE NOT the problem. The view-bombers ARE. What are you proposing to STOP them?

Or are we assuming that view-bombing is an acceptable play-style?

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I would be ok with that.

 

 

To others:

Anyway, do we realize that, instead of finding ways to frustrate and stop the view-bomber, some here are thinking mostly on how to make the life of the victim as hard as possible?

The victims ARE NOT the problem. The view-bombers ARE. What are you proposing to STOP them?

Or are we assuming that view-bombing is an acceptable play-style?

Watch your eggs and hatchies and fog them when they get sick. Which is what we've always done. Some people only unfog their growing dragons when they can monitor them, and fog them again when they go to bed or whatever. Personally I would like an email or maybe text notification when a growing dragon gets sick, that way the owner could fog it asap.

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Watch your eggs and hatchies and fog them when they get sick. Which is what we've always done. Some people only unfog their growing dragons when they can monitor them, and fog them again when they go to bed or whatever. Personally I would like an email or maybe text notification when a growing dragon gets sick, that way the owner could fog it asap.

Do you realize that some (adjective removed) "experts" can give an egg thousands of views in very short time right after that the egg had been caught??? And I'm talking about eggs that weren't in any hatchery. Fogging them didn't work, they died anyway.

The email warning was something I suggested as well but would seem that the hatcheries cannot do. So now I'm working with a friend to create a private service to detect "weird" rates BEFORE the egg gets sick.

 

Edit: In the meantime I told every friend or family member to fog rares seconds after catching them. And to make the view-bombers mad by catching more of those smile.gif

 

Edited again for typo. I meant "fogging"

Edited by _Sin_

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Do you realize that some (adjective removed) "experts" can give an egg thousands of views in very short time right after that the egg had been caught??? And I'm talking about eggs that weren't in any hatchery. Unfogging them didn't work, they died anyway.

The email warning was something I suggested as well but would seem that the hatcheries cannot do. So now I'm working with a friend to create a private service to detect "weird" rates BEFORE the egg gets sick.

Do you mean fogging them didn't work? If they gain too much in a short time they can still die while fogged, sure, but actually its very rare. I'm not convinced most cases of viewbombing are malicious, it seems to mainly occur when there's a holiday or new release which indicates to me that either people are mistaking higher amount of views at hatcheries as bombing, or newbies are trying to be "helpful".

 

I really do not want to alter the sickness mechanic because it's a core mechanic for this site. If that means there is a risk of eggs dying due to being viewbombed, I'm fine with that. Perhaps I feel this way because I've never been viewbombed successfully (I had someone try back in 09 but all they did is grow my eggs for me laugh.gif )

 

Also you want to be very careful about developing any kind of script for this site because it can count as hacking, which TJ does not allow, depending on how you programed it. What I meant was that DC itself should send the notification, rather than a hatchery or another third-party source.

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Do you mean fogging them didn't work? If they gain too much in a short time they can still die while fogged, sure, but actually its very rare. I'm not convinced most cases of viewbombing are malicious, it seems to mainly occur when there's a holiday or new release which indicates to me that either people are mistaking higher amount of views at hatcheries as bombing, or newbies are trying to be "helpful".

We are talking about thousands of views in few minutes on eggs that weren't in any hatchery. It was view-bombing and I would bet that was someone that missed the egg. They were fogged and still died.

 

Also you want to be very careful about developing any kind of script for this site because it can count as hacking, which TJ does not allow, depending on how you programed it. What I meant was that DC itself should send the notification, rather than a hatchery or another third-party source.

Sure smile.gif My friend is thinking of getting the data the same way that the hatcheries do, from DC, only age and number of views, UV, would be needed.

Edited by _Sin_

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Sickness is a core part of raising dragons, and honestly, is a very realistic part of "hatch and raise (whatever)". Humans get sick. So do every single other animal species in the world. And yes, if it's not caught and treated soon enough, they can die. That's just how it works. I would *not* like to see sickness taken away completely.

 

Toning down the severity of sickness, however, I'd like to see. Not "it can get sick but can't die", because then what's the point? But maybe ones that get sick have, I don't know, a grace period of a few hours before it turns "lethal". That way if it's *actual* viewbombing and they get sick within minutes, you can fog them and it won't be "lethal" yet so eventually they will get better. That way, the most common cause of sickness-deaths would shift to people who simply don't check their scroll often enough, or don't fog when they should, don't take those type of precautions that we all should.

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Watch your eggs and hatchies and fog them when they get sick. Which is what we've always done. Some people only unfog their growing dragons when they can monitor them, and fog them again when they go to bed or whatever. Personally I would like an email or maybe text notification when a growing dragon gets sick, that way the owner could fog it asap.

And also - when you get something stupendous - fog it at once and leave it there for 24 hours. By which time I'd bet the bomber (if any) will have forgotten about it.

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Perhaps for every hour of sickness, an hour is added to the timer of the egg?

I'd only support this if the threshold for sickness was increased. I add my eggs to one site immediately. They almost always get sick, but they always recover as unique views turn into repeat views. I'd be rather annoyed if suddenly I had to be paranoid about sickness like everyone else.

 

Also, hatching tinsels [and shimmers?] would be a pain in the neck. Right now when you put a 3 day 23 hour [with incubate?] tinsel in an ER it gets sick before it hatches. That's fine for the hatching, since it would just stay at 3 days 23 hours until it hatches. But it's also sick for a while as a hatchling after, so the timer on that hatchling would be frozen for a decent while until the sickness went away.

 

 

So basically, increase the sickness threshold for normal eggs by half or a third or something. And increase the sickness threshold for prize dragons so that you can actually ER them without them getting sick.

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I wish there was an autofog button that's like "automatically fog my eggs for ( ) hours after being caught/bred." You can enter the hours, etc....

I hate quoting myself but....

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Oh trust me, something like that would be very much possible. Look at the URLs of eggs in the AP right now. You'll notice after their code is a bunch of random stuff (and I believe it changes each time somebody takes it and dumps it back into the AP). A similar thing can be done with eggs and needing a hidden code in order to receive views, it just obviously wouldn't be visible in their URL.

 

It'd be a great way to combat viewbombing. You have the egg's code which is pretty just their ID number (you punch in the code to the view URL, and you get that exact dragon no matter what) that will still be visible when cave or AP hunting. This is good for people like me who will often take commons because they have an appealing code.

 

But, once you grab your egg it is assigned a second hidden code that can only be seen by the owner and this is the code that must be submitted to fansites and is shown in the BBCode/HTML lists in order to gain views. How annoying it would be to type wouldn't matter, since you can just copy it anyway.

 

I think though, this would be a thing that's better set as an option for the individual user than be something mandatory. I can see how some people might not like it because it's slightly confusing or complicated for them. But for those who wanted even better security beyond hiding their scroll and fogging their things, it would be highly beneficial.

I like this. This combined with a few other ideas would be good.

 

My best suggestion would be a simple re-coding of how sickness and stats are used in general. Basically, I would suggestion a "cap" on the number of stats a "vulnerable" egg could get per day, and within that "cap" the chance of sickness should be reduced. When a dragon/egg hits ER-status that cap is lifted, thus allowing for egg-spamming to quickly hatch your ER dragons, and sickness isn't *usually* as big of a problem for ERs.

 

So, a max. stat-count dragons over 4 days can get per day. The limit is lifted for ER dragons for obvious reasons.

Would hatchlings follow suit? Maybe hatchlings, for a period of time after hatching (especially on some hatch sites where for a few minutes the hatchling is still in ER after being put there as an egg), they can't receive any more views? Maybe even up to a day. And then from there, they would have the same kind of "cap" like the eggs.

 

ETA:

I wish there was an autofog button that's like "automatically fog my eggs for ( ) hours after being caught/bred." You can enter the hours, etc....

Is it really that hard to, on the get code page right when you get the egg, to follow the egg's link to its page, then go to actions and hide the egg?

Or even go straight to your dragon page>actions>hide?

And then it stays hidden until you unfog it. I would suggest being mindful of the time on your egg...

 

I wouldn't mind if a BSA like the one proposed for Grays fogged all the eggs/hatchings, but I wouldn't ever want a timer on it :\ That makes the game TOO easy.

 

Edit: In the meantime I told every friend or family member  to fog rares seconds after catching them. And to make the view-bombers mad by catching more of those smile.gif

That's currently the best way to combat view-bombing. Fog the eggs as SOON as you get them and be mindful of their time. Wait till they get to "4 days xx hours" and then do all the influence/incubate or other things you want to do...

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