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Jazeki

Transparency in DC

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Oh! I didn’t realize that Jazeki’s been updating the first post >___< I’ve been jumping to the most recent stuff and didn’t notice.

 

My question mostly stemmed from suddenly seeing talks of breeding mechanics and I got confused about whether we’re asking for transparency on subjects we want more info on or what kind of transparency we want. x___x my bad.

 

But thank you @Jazeki for compiling everything for everyone!

 

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I'll update thoroughly tonight as lots of discussion did happen.

 

@TJ09 Would you be more open to a user survey as opposed to a poll? I only mentioned them because I  remember there was a time where people who did not have forum accounts could "engage" in decision making. I agree that the discussion is what matters and not necessarily the polls themselves. A survey would probably be useful because users could comment in more detail.  

 

Also, thank you for taking the time to reply to this thread.

 

 

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I rather suspect that the players who care enough to respond are actually here. People like my younger grandson would not be terribly helpful in such a thing. A lot of the players who aren't here are not here because they are kids whose parents wopn't allow them on forums.

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  • State of the Cave/frequent update or newsletter on potential changes, etc.
  • cave wide polls or surveys
  • more communication from TJ with users/more input into site threads
  • more communication between TJ and mods
  • addition of more mods/global mods/site coders/mediator between TJ and users
  • advance warning about changes
  • less deletion of posts/censorship
  • more openness about the site
  • more power to mods
  • more communication from mods 
  • extended communication within threads after TJ "vetoes" a suggestion/topic instead of sudden closures
  • 2-week feedback after the implementation of a change
  • mods compiling a list of suggested changes for TJ to review, which result in him weighing in on the topic
  • tell people in advance/request feedback about sprite changes
  • have a mod (s)/designated person look over news posts to make sure that TJ is as clear as possible
  • have additional work delegated to mods instead of just falling on TJ
  • more openness between mods and users about the site
  • more communication about suggestions/requests that have been around for years
  • team work

 

Interesting list, but it all boils down to one basic thing... TJ needs to quit being so secretive. But before everyone says I'm an idiot, I don't mean about new releases.. that kind of secrecy is good, and we expect and anticipate it.

 

What I mean is that everything revolves around TJ talking to us.. not just the mods.. EVERYONE. He needs to explain himself and give us solid reasons behind his no's and his yes's. I'm sorry, but I'm not 5 years old and the 'because I said so' excuse doesn't work for me.. and it shouldn't work for anyone else either, unless you like being treated like a child.

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I find that list a bit expansive, and I have a feeling that it's not our place to tell TJ how to communicate with his mods, or what he allows them to communicate to us.

Also, not all "changes" need advance warning, only those that have the potential to negatively impact any one player. (Like, from that point of view, we wouldn't need a warning if two-headed breeds were able to crossbreed with regular dragons, simply because it would not negatively impact anything we can do right now. Bred mistletoes being able to be either gender, however, would have warranted a warning so people don't loose one year's breeding to misgendering.)

 

On another note, after the gold sprite update and the nilia dimorphism debacle, I think TJ and spriters have done a good job about giving us ideal sprite updates. The only major change was to the silver sprite, and that has been handled with lots of feedback. (Well, kind of. It would have been nicer if TJ had closed the silver sprite replacement thread as soon as he got the sprites he wanted to use so people don't put in hours of work perfecting their suggested sprites pretty much for naught.) And almost all other sprite updates have been rather subtle, with as little impact on the lineage view as possible.

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43 minutes ago, olympe said:

I find that list a bit expansive, and I have a feeling that it's not our place to tell TJ how to communicate with his mods, or what he allows them to communicate to us.

Also, not all "changes" need advance warning, only those that have the potential to negatively impact any one player. (Like, from that point of view, we wouldn't need a warning if two-headed breeds were able to crossbreed with regular dragons, simply because it would not negatively impact anything we can do right now. Bred mistletoes being able to be either gender, however, would have warranted a warning so people don't loose one year's breeding to misgendering.)

 

While I agree that we don't need advance warning of *everything*, I disagree with your specific example... being able to breed two-heads with regular dragons would affect a *lot* of two-head lineages, and anything that impacts lineages in a huge way really should have advance warning (like the alt sweetling mess.....).

 

Also, I'd say that the breeding system most definitely *is* broken, at least in terms of logical common-sense outcomes. It is not logical at *all* for two super-commons to *always* produce one type and *never* the other. That's not a little quirk or whatever, that's a huge thing that really just shouldn't happen. The entire breeding system may not be broken, but there are definitely parts that are.

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5 hours ago, Cinnamin Draconna said:
  • He needs to explain himself and give us solid reasons behind his no's and his yes's. I'm sorry, but I'm not 5 years old and the 'because I said so' excuse doesn't work for me.. and it shouldn't work for anyone else either, unless you like being treated like a child.

 

This bothers me a tad bit. TJ does not need to explain anything to us, and I feel like a lot of user frustration stems from this expectation. While it would be absolutely fantastic to get solid answers for his decisions on a regular basis, I don't believe that anyone should feel entitled for him to explain his reasoning. At the end of the day, it's very much his game and "because I said so" is within his rights.

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4 minutes ago, DaniBoo said:

 

This bothers me a tad bit. TJ does not need to explain anything to us, and I feel like a lot of user frustration stems from this expectation. While it would be absolutely fantastic to get solid answers for his decisions on a regular basis, I don't believe that anyone should feel entitled for him to explain his reasoning. At the end of the day, it's very much his game and "because I said so" is within his rights.

 

While it certainly is, it’s also not a great approach and tends to drive people away from games, which is the opposite of what should be aimed for.

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5 minutes ago, DaniBoo said:

 

This bothers me a tad bit. TJ does not need to explain anything to us, and I feel like a lot of user frustration stems from this expectation. While it would be absolutely fantastic to get solid answers for his decisions on a regular basis, I don't believe that anyone should feel entitled for him to explain his reasoning. At the end of the day, it's very much his game and "because I said so" is within his rights.

 

That may be true, but it's certainly not a good way to run a website or game (or anything that is consumed by the public). He maybe doesn't 'need' to explain anything, but refusing to disclose the reasoning behind huge changes (and huge 'no's) is simply not a good way to keep people around. This is a free game so of course TJ doesn't owe us anything at all, but anyone who deals in the customer service area will tell you that being silent and secretive and shutting down suggestions with no real reason is not a way to keep customers.

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I never said it was a good approach, in fact I very much dislike how secretive TJ is. I myself work in customer service and I know that being open is the best way to go about things (within reason, of course) however I notice many users in this community who demand explanations. I don't believe it is any of our place to ask for his reasoning, that's all. It seems to frustrate users when they don't get the answers they're looking for and I understand that, but we all have to remember that they were never owed to us in the first place.

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The first page has been modified with the additional suggestions that I could find and quick links to TJ's responses. 

 

@olympe and @DaniBoo - As far as I've seen in this thread, no one is demanding anything of TJ or forcing him (or any of the mods) to answer. These are just a list of suggestions for TJ and mods to hopefully help with improved communication on  Dragon Cave. I asked before making this thread and as I stated in the first post, it comes with mod approval. It also is apparently a thing that is on their minds as other transparency posts from the sweetling thread were hidden for further review at a later date. 

 

Regarding requesting advance warning, it's mostly in reference to changes that affect game play (not things like new releases or minor changes). 

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I think that having a list is less a list of demands but rather a list of suggestions on what kind of transparency the userbase and the mods would like to have. This is because we can talk about wanting transparency all we want, but without giving examples of what kind of transparency we would like it all becomes moot because everyone has different ideas of what transparency even is.

 

I do agree that TJ does not need to explain his every action - and I am part of the very minor group who is perfectly content with a "Because I said so" answer. However, most people aren't, especially for major changes that can be perceived as fair or unfair. Yes, fairness and unfairness are subjective to each individual but these concepts lead to a lot of heated discussions among those who have and those who don't.

 

So, that's pretty much what I feel like this thread is about: discussing what the users would like TJ to address and how we would like it addressed. Meanwhile, it's also a thread for TJ to come in and see what we would like to see, weigh our opinions, and maybe even chime in every so often to explain his rationale.

 

Having a list is to make this process clearer and easier for everyone to see what the main arguments are and pros and cons of each.

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I may have been the one that brought up the "Because I said so" response. What I meant was that getting "Because I said so." was better than no answer at all over several months of asking for input from him. And I still would prefer that to complete and utter silence.

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Sorry, but 'Because I Said So' sounds like either a frustrated parent or a petulant child that doesn't want to deal with something. And IMO, that is NOT the response we'd like to hear from a responsible site owner.

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Honestly I think 'because I said so' is worse then silence, at least imo. With silence you don't know either way and still have some hope for the suggestion... If a suggestion I really want is shot down with just a 'because I said so' then that not only douses the hope of the suggestion but (imo) feels like I'm being talked down to and treated as an inferior. 'Because I said so' is equivalent to 'this is how I want it and you don't really deserve any actual explanation so just stop asking', at least that's how I see it. 

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16 hours ago, cyradis4 said:

@TJ09 would it help on discussion threads if the OP created a list of the arguments for and against *in* the first or 2nd post? As ADP said..... All the threads I've seen have always hashed out the "should it be done" and "is it a good idea" before getting into the nuts and bolts. Certainly the Unfreezing thread had that, as did the "raise CB Holiday limits". Frankly, just letting us get old CBs again solved only half the problem. 

It'd certainly be more productive than opening the thread and seeing "we want exactly this with these specific limitations."

 

14 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

Lots of discussion here since I went to bed. Again I feel I must respond to this, because it doesn't really answer or help the issue at hand. I think most of us here completely understand that very-off-topic posts, as well as inflammatory posts, are not productive to a thread and mess with what the thread could possibly accomplish. I don't think anyone would argue that point. The issue is that those off-topic or inflammatory posts are *disappearing* (you say they are 'only hidden', but for us non-mods the results are the same as complete deletion, ie they just don't exist anymore) instead of simply being edited to remove the unwanted stuff. To me, and to many others, it's very frustrating and sort of insulting when an entire post we made just up and disappears, especially because often only *part* of the post was off-topic or inflammatory and the other part actually had good on-topic discussion. We know that mods have the ability to simply edit a user's post, we see that often when view links and scroll links are edited out, so it really feels like just blatant censorship for the entire post to be deleted when we know that's *not* actually necessary. It's like, we know there is a small action that can be taken to enforce the rules (editing the post), and yet the 'nuclear option' is usually used instead, which... Doesn't feel right.

In the particular case, the inappropriate content spans the entire post. Mods could edit posts to remove everything and leave an empty shell to indicate that something there was removed, but that doesn't help the "distracts from the flow of the thread" problem that I mentioned.

 

I don't know if there's a way to collapse certain posts by default, but I don't think there is.

 

14 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

I'm also a little confused about your response here to the breeding mechanics issue. You say things have been tweaked, but breeding is a 'black box' so you can't take much action... What does that mean? I have no clue about the inner workings of breeding, but 'black box' means absolutely nothing to me, I have no clue what that means. What are these 'practical reasons' that breeding has to stay that way? The breeding dominance issue is a fairly serious, fairly widespread issue that's been happening for a loooong time (I'm not going to dig out specific examples at this time, but they've been posted all over the forum over the last few years)... It really is almost impossible to get certain common dragons from a common/common pairing because the newer type is always produced. Is that really not a big enough issue to tackle? Whatever 'black box' means, I assume what you are saying is that things are too complicated with the breeding mechanic to really change the breeding dominance issue in any real way, but... I don't know, you can prioritize however you want, but imo something that has been a fairly big problem for years, that has frustrated many users and hurt many potential lineages, would be something that really should try to be fixed.

Ironically, "black box" basically means "provides no insight about the inner workings," so your intuition there is spot on. The point is that there are a lot of inner workings that could be changed, and while those changes are visible in aggregate, they aren't going to be super visible in individual breedings, and can't necessarily be articulated in a way that makes any sense to someone that doesn't know what those internals are.

 

13 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

Look, I realize that TJ has an actual job and an actual life and such, and that if the whole breeding thing is a complicated 'black box' it may be more trouble then he thinks it's worth to actually totally change it.... That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, or at least talked about. It's very, very obvious that whatever the breeding mechanics are, they simply aren't working in a way that benefits the game as a whole. They *haven't* worked in a way that benefits the game in a long, long time (if ever, honestly). I totally get not wanting to completely overhaul a huge complicated system, or even not having the time to feasibly do it, but.... It definitely seems like just keeping it the way it is is *not* helping the game at all. 

No, I never said it's hard to do the necessary tweaking, but (as my previous post says) describing individual changes doesn't mean much of anything without full context (that's not really possible to have)—and dumbing it down to "I made a change that might make certain commons less common" is again arbitrary and unverifiable.

 

I also wouldn't really agree that breeding is "obviously" not working. Holding the opinion that it isn't working is fine, but making claims about the entire game is drawing pretty sweeping conclusions.

13 hours ago, cyradis4 said:

Or he could have a multitude of factors playing into which egg is produced (which we know from the past is the case) and he isn't sure which factor is what's driving the mess. He's said he's "probably" made some changes. Well, I remember that in the past, it wasn't as bad as this. 

The first part is true, but again, it's not a case of breeding being a black boxk to me where I'm randomly throwing levers. See above for at two iterations of the same response.

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8 minutes ago, TJ09 said:

Ironically, "black box" basically means "provides no insight about the inner workings," so your intuition there is spot on. The point is that there are a lot of inner workings that could be changed, and while those changes are visible in aggregate, they aren't going to be super visible in individual breedings, and can't necessarily be articulated in a way that makes any sense to someone that doesn't know what those internals are.

 

Thank you very much for explaining that, that does help me understand it a bit better. 

 

2 minutes ago, TJ09 said:

No, I never said it's hard to do the necessary tweaking, but (as my previous post says) describing individual changes doesn't mean much of anything without full context (that's not really possible to have)—and dumbing it down to "I made a change that might make certain commons less common" is again arbitrary and unverifiable.

 

I also wouldn't really agree that breeding is "obviously" not working. Holding the opinion that it isn't working is fine, but making claims about the entire game is drawing pretty sweeping conclusions.

 

I understand and agree here to a certain extent, saying a change 'might make certain commons less common' is fairly broad and probably wouldn't be noticed too strongly in general... However, if you were to make a change that resulted in those specific 'common A and common B pairings always produce common A' issues being tweaked, I wouldn't say that'd be unverifiable, since eventually the userbase would notice the fact that a pairing that never gave them a certain result before suddenly is. I know in the past people have kept track of certain pairings and the extreme dominance of one breed, so I rather doubt that a change that actually *changes* something with that would be unverifiable, since those people could make records of those new results as well. Unless you meant something else by 'unverifiable'. 

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6 hours ago, DaniBoo said:

 

This bothers me a tad bit. TJ does not need to explain anything to us, and I feel like a lot of user frustration stems from this expectation. While it would be absolutely fantastic to get solid answers for his decisions on a regular basis, I don't believe that anyone should feel entitled for him to explain his reasoning. At the end of the day, it's very much his game and "because I said so" is within his rights.

 

6 hours ago, angelicdragonpuppy said:

 

While it certainly is, it’s also not a great approach and tends to drive people away from games, which is the opposite of what should be aimed for.

 

Basically this. I don't really think that every (or perhaps even most) changes need to come along with the rationale , but certainly cases where it's less clear deserve some special attention for the sustained sanity of everyone involved.

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Here's an example of the breeding problem:  the person who bred this dragon of mine is working on a pygmy spiral, and when they hit the Kyanite Pygmy, they got 10 in a row of the Kyanites and can't get a Common Pygmy from the pair to move on with.  Is this the problem people are talking about?  Check out the father of this dragon--10 Kyanites in a row!

https://dragcave.net/lineage/BjdX2

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6 hours ago, TJ09 said:

 

 

Basically this. I don't really think that every (or perhaps even most) changes need to come along with the rationale , but certainly cases where it's less clear deserve some special attention for the sustained sanity of everyone involved.

Exactly.... and especially if the VAST majority of people are asking, I would say.

 

While, as @DaniBoo said, you aren't REQUIRED to answer, it certainly will make people happier if you DO choose to explain. AND as they put it, it'd be 'absolutely fantastic'.

 

ADMITTEDLY, of course, we need, as a user base, to be more mindful to be POLITE perhaps, in how we do our asking.

Edited by JavaTigress

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6 hours ago, Brekke said:

Here's an example of the breeding problem:  the person who bred this dragon of mine is working on a pygmy spiral, and when they hit the Kyanite Pygmy, they got 10 in a row of the Kyanites and can't get a Common Pygmy from the pair to move on with.  Is this the problem people are talking about?  Check out the father of this dragon--10 Kyanites in a row!

https://dragcave.net/lineage/BjdX2

 

Yes, this is the problem. I’ve seen people take almost a year to get the common they need out of a pairing with a slightly more common common.

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15 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

 

While I agree that we don't need advance warning of *everything*, I disagree with your specific example... being able to breed two-heads with regular dragons would affect a *lot* of two-head lineages, and anything that impacts lineages in a huge way really should have advance warning (like the alt sweetling mess.....).

 

Also, I'd say that the breeding system most definitely *is* broken, at least in terms of logical common-sense outcomes. It is not logical at *all* for two super-commons to *always* produce one type and *never* the other. That's not a little quirk or whatever, that's a huge thing that really just shouldn't happen. The entire breeding system may not be broken, but there are definitely parts that are.

Actually, current two-headed lineages wouldn't be affected by allowing two-heads with regular dragons. You could still breed them, just like you can now. It wouldn't hurt your existing lineages at all, merely add more options. Okay, so you'd need to do more scrolling when breeding - but I'm sure you'd survive that quite easily. Which is why I chose that particular example. (This does not mean I'm asking for it to happen, though. That would be an entirely different discussion.)

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5 hours ago, angelicdragonpuppy said:

 

Yes, this is the problem. I’ve seen people take almost a year to get the common they need out of a pairing with a slightly more common common.

 

*shudders* 31 Olives. 31! And it was just crossed with an Albino!

https://dragcave.net/progeny/P09Ke

 

And that list doesn't count the eggs that were killed (of which there were several), nor the other pairs I was also breeding (there were several). The oddest thing about that was, when I first started that line they bred 50/50, then between one breeding and the next.... it went all Olives, all the time, for all pairings. I've also heard of, I think it was Black Tea x Green. That was.... beyond absurd. I heard rumors of 60+ Black Teas. 

 

As for politeness.... From what I've seen, the first 3 or 4 requests are polite. Its only when problems are hitting 6 and 7 requests that things start to degenerate.... But giving mods more power to answer would probably help with that a lot. 

 

Cheers!
C4. 

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*ahem* I though we were asked to take the breeding posts to the CAVE feedback thread...

Edited by Fuzzbucket

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1 minute ago, Fuzzbucket said:

*ahem* I though we were asked to take the breeding posts to the CAVE feedback thread...

 

Huh? I didn't see anyone asking us to move, did I miss something? O___o I'd prefer TJ just tackle the suggestions being mentioned in their own threads, but right now this seems to be a central hub to catch his attention on the matters...

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