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Send Biome Blockers to the AP

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The biomes seem to have been moving pretty quickly over the last couple of days; I wonder if the ratios have been adjusted.

 

Hopefully, it will continue moving along - then we won't have to have blockers booted to the AP. poptartFINALTINY.gif

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The biomes seem to have been moving pretty quickly over the last couple of days; I wonder if the ratios have been adjusted.

 

Hopefully, it will continue moving along - then we won't have to have blockers booted to the AP. poptartFINALTINY.gif

 

 

Lol, spent last night and some of today almost invariably staring at the same Blockers - I'm afraid the biomes are only moving when enough people are on and desperate enough to waste any spaces they have on picking up unwanted eggs, together with the people who try rapidly picking up several eggs in a row to see if anything good comes up in what they've taken that they wouldn't normally be fast enough to get.

 

I miss the people I used to talk to who don't bother coming on any more, except for Releases, but can't say I'm surprised... this Blocker situation is really freaking boring...

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I agree and kind of disagree with this idea.

 

I disagree because it would draw a lot more people to the biomes, and personally, I like to hunt alone. Since I have to use a proxy to use DC, even though my reflexes are fast, my internet isn't so I can hardly ever snatch anything. Doing this would make it a lot easier for "hoarders" to catch huge amounts of rares, but it would do nothing for those of us who can't catch CB metals now.

 

(But then again, it does increase the chance of seeing rares which increases the chances of catching.)

 

I think there are plenty of rare eggs, and the abandoned is already pretty full. The main reason why most people can't catch (IMO), is that all the rares are going to the same players, over and over again.

Edited by assasin6547

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I agree and kind of disagree with this idea.

 

I disagree because it would draw a lot more people to the biomes, and personally, I like to hunt alone. Since I have to use a proxy to use DC, even though my reflexes are fast, my internet isn't so I can hardly ever snatch anything. Doing this would make it a lot easier for "hoarders" to catch huge amounts of rares, but it would do nothing for those of us who can't catch CB metals now.

 

(But then again, it does increase the chance of seeing rares which increases the chances of catching.)

 

I think there are plenty of rare eggs, and the abandoned is already pretty full. The main reason why most people can't catch (IMO), is that all the rares are going to the same players, over and over again.

This suggestion isn't aimed at getting Rares. The biomes would still move slow, they'd just actually move. Right now, unless you hunt in the first minute after the hour, the same eggs sit, and sit, and sit,and sit.

 

The point of this suggestion is so people can actually find the commons they need that aren't the current blockers. And to encourage the raising of the blockers sent to the AP by turning them into low time eggs (and hence desirable).

 

And of course, any raising of blockers will help the ratios out, so indirectly, by making blockers more plentiful, you're enabling everyone to get a shot at more eggs.

 

I like Fiona's name for it, "removing the middleman", which is what it's really doing. I've also been grabbing 7 blockers, and dumping them to the AP 5 hours later. And you know what? Even though I'm grabbing them one right after the other, on a fast connection and using ctrl+click to open the eggs in a new tab, I'm still just uncovering the same eggs, over and over again.

 

Cheers!

C4.

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As Fiona and others have pointed out, the purpose of the game isn't to make people sit staring at Blockers until they fill up their limited spaces with unwanted eggs to dump to the AP 5 hours later, or the next day.

 

The purpose of the game is for people to have fun collecting the dragons that players actually want/need.

 

Unfortunately, the ratios demand that more of certain types of dragons be produced and raised than 'the environment' - the players - can support, which is not ecologically sound or sustainable in any sense, including that of fulfilling 'market demand' or of 'fun gaming'.

 

TJ seriously needs to make a decision as to whether he'd prefer to retain the same inappropriate ratios with no fixes built into the game, or to deal with the Blocker issue so that people don't have their play spoiled- and thereby retain/acquire a lot more players and ad revenue.

 

The game concept and dragons are great and, DC evidently having been designed as a family site, many people of all ages around the world like the concept and join/have joined, even though many have old computers and poor connection speed and are therefore unable to play many other, more competitive games which may also not appeal to their personalities - but if Cave hunting is excruciatingly boring and time-consuming, people are going to lose interest over time, because they then don't have the access to dragons they can use in lineages, trading, gifting - the myriad other aspects of the game that in probably most circumstances virtually all depend on people being able to obtain enough of the right CBs to fully engage in.

 

A lot of us love our dragons and have stuck it out for years, but more and more of the people I used to talk to are either showing up essentially only for Releases or simply not showing up at all, and even though I'm lucky enough to have a functional computer now - which not everybody is - and am catching more dragons, I know that I find it progressively harder to force myself to try to hunt on the often Blocked Cave.

 

Who has time for this, without some sort of positive result appearing at least possible?

 

We've seen one glorious fix for the previous AP-Block of the Cave problem, with the AP thereby becoming a major asset to the community, but to have the variety of dragons we are gradually accumulating available, we need the Cave to move, so that the full variety involving every sprite is revealed in every biome by having the Cave move, because then that variety shows, rather than merely an endless overload of sprites virtually everyone already has enough of and of which relatively few want more.

 

 

There is a huge market share, largely unserved in the fashion that DC could, if only it were to be modelled more closely in a fashion serving that huge majority of prospective family-site players without high-speed computers or killer instincts, but a love of collecting dragons - if only the ones they actually want.

 

Edit: sentence under reconstruction, lol, left a spot...

Edited by Syphoneira

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I'll support anything that gets the biomes moving. I barely play anymore because I can't get the caveborn eggs I need/want.

This. I've since quit playing because of other sites and the fact that all I want to do is build armies, which requires little attention.

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The main problems I see with this are:

 

1. Five minutes may be too short a time to wait; the large hourly drops could end up being too quick if all the commons are discarded, because people will just sit there waiting for the uncommons and then grab them all up, leaving little or nothing for anyone who can't attend the hourly drop. (Not everyone can be on all the time, or for several hours in a row to get in on a big drop.)

 

2. Even less incentive to pick up CB blocker eggs from the Cave could result in them overwhelming of the AP; it's already a frothing fountain of blockers, so if there's even more commons added, the chances of finding anything good there becomes hideously low. Sure, some people will cruise in to pick up low-time eggs and not care what they get, but -- though I'm not sure what the proportions are as far as "I'm here for low-time anything" versus "I'm here hoping to find something interesting" -- if the latter are a reasonable fraction of AP hunters, the AP will end up with fewer people taking its eggs, further increasing its numbers.

 

I'm not completely against the idea! In fact, I didn't vote in the poll because I wanted to read comments and think about it, and I wonder how it will play out in these particular avenues.

 

Maybe the "sit time" should be upped to ten minutes? Or the "move to AP" effect should only be in place at certain times? (Rotate through biomes? Use only during peak hours - or maybe during off-peak hours, to encourage more even traffic? Change the "sit time" according to periods of heaviest Cave usage?)

 

Other things that I've been considering might be useful in combination with your idea, too.

 

For one thing, I'd like to see eggs <i>losing</i> a day when thrown to the AP (being tossed out into the cold and abandoned by the mother dragon means they aren't being incubated anymore, so they have less time till exposure kills them).

 

For another, I'd really like some way to randomize the AP view (I think a couple people have mentioned this or skirted around it) - I hunt the AP mostly for unusual and interesting things, so I'm frustrated by the fact that the AP seems to be organised strictly by time remaining. (I'd love to see, say, half the eggs pulled from the pool of lowest-time, and half chosen at random from the rest of the backlog.)

 

I like the idea of reducing the "hold time" on Cave eggs to, say, 2 hours, too! As others have said: 5 hours is more than I spend on DC at one time, so this turns "grab some stuff to help clear the Cave" (which I like to do, both to help myself and other players out!) into "be locked for roughly 24 hours in most instances", because most of the time I can only get on DC in the evening. I seriously doubt that I'm in a minority of players who only have one timeslot per 24 hours to play on DC, and it seems like a lot to ask of us when we're trying to help!

Edited by sorenna

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The thing is, 10 minutes would be way way too long to do any significant good. The point of this is to guarantee movement every few minutes so people actually can hunt the cave instead of sitting staring at the same three blockers.

 

You say it might overwhelm the AP, but I think what it would mostly do is replace people sacrificing slots to pick up blockers and dump them 5 hours later. Yes, it might increase the load in the AP, but I don't think it would increase it by enough to be an actual problem.

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The AP is meant as a place for blockers to go, so there is no reason that it shouldn't be used that way.

Edited by Ashes The Second

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For another, I'd really like some way to randomize the AP view (I think a couple people have mentioned this or skirted around it) - I hunt the AP mostly for unusual and interesting things, so I'm frustrated by the fact that the AP seems to be organised strictly by time remaining. (I'd love to see, say, half the eggs pulled from the pool of lowest-time, and half chosen at random from the rest of the backlog.)

 

I like the idea of reducing the "hold time" on Cave eggs to, say, 2 hours, too! As others have said: 5 hours is more than I spend on DC at one time, so this turns "grab some stuff to help clear the Cave" (which I like to do, both to help myself and other players out!) into "be locked for roughly 24 hours in most instances", because most of the time I can only get on DC in the evening. I seriously doubt that I'm in a minority of players who only have one timeslot per 24 hours to play on DC, and it seems like a lot to ask of us when we're trying to help!

Both of these would be really good supplements to this suggestion. While I would still only want to see the lower time eggs showing, I think a 24-hour shuffle radius (i.e., everything from 3 days 10 hours to 4 days 10 hours, INCLUDING hatchlings, shuffled on each refresh) would make AP hunting more interesting.

 

Most of all, I'd really like to see the ratios adjusted to make many of the uber-commons not so common any more. Syphoneira had some fantastic points along those lines. (Can you imagine Mints suddenly becoming rare for a few months?)

 

There is one more concern to be considered regarding auto-kicking eggs to the AP after a certain amount of time: the biomes have a limited amount of eggs. The Desert seems almost perpetually empty, and sometimes other biomes (though almost never the Forest or the Jungle) show the "There are none to be found" message. Unless a larger supply of eggs is dropped every hour / five minutes, we might find ourselves staring at empty biomes most of the time.

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I'd rather stare at empty biomes for five minutes or less than stare at an unmoving wall of eggs for an hour. Empty biomes mean that the biomes are actually moving, so I really don't have a problem with them being empty sometimes.

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There are always fresh eggs being generated at the five minute marks, so even if the hourly eggs generated are gone there will be no more than a five minute wait for fresh eggs. Granted, there aren't as many generated at the five minute marks, but there are still eggs then. I don't think empty biomes will be much of an issue.

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Especially given that the ones that currently empty out probably don't have eggs sitting around for a long time, so this wouldn't trigger often with them anyways.

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I like it, but I think the eggs should sit for more than 5 minutes.

 

I've been frustrated that the right cave-blockers haven't been appearing. Royal Blues often appear and sit for ages, and I collect Turpentines, which don't appear all that often.

If I'm not looking for anything in particular, I will grab things like Neotropicals and Whiptails because I think they look cute as hatchlings and adults.

 

Part of the point of Cave Blockers is to balance ratios. Since people can pick up low-time Blockers in the AP, that doesn't seem to be as much of an issue.

But only 5 minutes? That seems rather impatient to me. 15 minutes?

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We'd have to time it, but I don't think any of the Desert's eggs sit around for 5 minutes.

 

As such, the eggs in the biomes that empty would never go to the AP via this method.

 

Now, Jungle and Forest (which do have some interesting eggs in them, but never move), this would affect the most strongly.

 

Cheers!

C4.

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I like it, but I think the eggs should sit for more than 5 minutes.

 

I've been frustrated that the right cave-blockers haven't been appearing. Royal Blues often appear and sit for ages, and I collect Turpentines, which don't appear all that often.

If I'm not looking for anything in particular, I will grab things like Neotropicals and Whiptails because I think they look cute as hatchlings and adults.

 

Part of the point of Cave Blockers is to balance ratios. Since people can pick up low-time Blockers in the AP, that doesn't seem to be as much of an issue.

But only 5 minutes? That seems rather impatient to me. 15 minutes?

 

 

Seriously, you'd rather refresh an unmoving wall of Blockers for 15 minutes rather than 5?

 

Even if a dozen people remove Blockers in that period, there's quite likely to be simply more of the same appearing, and as more people lose interest in trying, as occurs all of the time, the likelihood of movement in various of the biomes over much of the typical full DC day reduces.

 

Some biomes - in example, not only Jungle but Forest now as well, and Desert and Coast now, too - more and more often have one person or nobody in them when I go in, especially in the wee earlies, although I didn't go into the Cave yesterday evening or night to see if this remained the same or had worsened.

 

Some sprites are hardly appearing at all in the slower-moving biomes, which means that they're hardly appearing on scrolls... this situation is not sustainable or game-like at all.

 

We do need a Cave that usually has eggs in it, to allow those having short periods at odd moments to hunt to do so, but they should not be loaded with mass quantities of eggs that the player base cannot willingly absorb which prevent the appearance of eggs that people want or can use.

 

We need variety available in proportion to demand, and if we're always going to have all of these unwanted eggs continually dumped on us, we at least need them to not spoil play on a continual basis in the extreme manner that they have been.

 

 

Even those who are into the idea of competition used to speak of our competing with each other for wanted eggs - refreshing on/picking up unwanted eggs is no 'challenge', just a boring waste of time.

 

And it seems evident to me that fewer people are wasting their recreational time with this all the time.

 

I really hate to see DC, a great concept and the only game I play, go to waste like this...

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With all the fuss over the new release, I thought I'd bump this and give people a chance to support it some more. smile.gif

 

Simply put, if the blockers are less blockerish, then the ratios won't mix in the old eggs quite so soon on new releases, which means more people can get them.

 

And of course, if the biomes actually *move* (a novel concept, I know) then you can get the eggs later, after the rush dies down.

 

Cheers!

C4.

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I could get behind this. I'm more likely to pick up blockers and commons if I can hatch them instantly and have the egg space needed for metal/uncommon hunting.

Me too. I actually love to pick up low time eggs and hatch them quickly so I can have the egg space.

 

I know TJ said no more egg slots, but what about hatchling slots? I'd constantly pick up low-time eggs, hatch them, and keep adding and adding if I could, but I have to be mindful of my total limit.

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I kept checking out the biomes last night, and in the wee earlies, as is too-usual, there were too-often anywhere from 0 to about 4 people in some or even each of them, even minutes after the hourly.

 

I picked up a couple of eggs I didn't want and the odd time various others would, and in some cases more people came and sometimes got things moving enough that I could miss several Blusangs and some other things, lol, even make a couple of catches, but we don't have room to act as 'unwanted egg conveyers'.

 

I just now was finally able to drop one unwanted egg, unlocking me, but I really should have got some sleep rather than hoping to get back in, now that more people may be on, but maybe not too many to give me no hope of catching something I'd like.

 

If at least one egg was APed every 5 minutes, maybe at least we'd see a different Blocker more often, lol.

 

There seemed to be more people in the AP than in all of the biomes combined, going by what I was seeing, and at least that was moving more, which would be why, but considering how many of us want more new eggs from the Cave, that really shows how fun-killing the Blocker situation is...

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I totally support this. I love lurking in the cave but it's really frustrating when nothing happens until the hourly drop hits... D:

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I'm a fan of reducing the 5 hour wait to abandon/teleport

Me too sad.gif I don't hunt in the cave anymore except for releases because why have an egg with 5 hour cooldown and is at 7 days when you can probably get a CB egg of the same breed from the AP?

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I'm split on this. I don't cave hunt because of how slow it is and how aggravating it is to miss the hourly drop (the five minute drops never seem enough in the slowest moving biomes)

 

But the AP is hideously backlogged already. I don't know if we should put extra strain on it

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I'm split on this. I don't cave hunt because of how slow it is and how aggravating it is to miss the hourly drop (the five minute drops never seem enough in the slowest moving biomes)

 

But the AP is hideously backlogged already. I don't know if we should put extra strain on it

 

 

Lol, that 'AP back-log' gives us a great advantage and causes many eggs to be picked up which otherwise wouldn't, as long as eggs are in that 'sweet spot' between Er-able and Influence-able - although ER eggs, even if not Influence-able, are always picked up, if only for freezing as hatchies, because of not taking up egg spaces for any longer than it takes to immediately hatch them.

 

I've picked up many commons I otherwise wouldn't have because of this, and would pick up many more, had we more hatchy spaces.

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But the AP is hideously backlogged already. I don't know if we should put extra strain on it

I simply don't see how the AP backlog is doing any harm, seeing as it no longer blocks the biomes.

 

The "instant-ER!" is pretty much the only gimmick of these completely unwanted blockers to ordinary players who do not really like them anyway.

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