Remove Sickness (or somehow change it drastically)

[Fuzzbucket]

Well, OK - suppose fog let you see your own growing stuff ? The thing is that people can actually note the codes of fogged stuff and add them to fan sites the second they unfog...  I never see why anyone wants to show off GROWING stuff unless it's in trade (which is why I'd like to see teleport links stopping views.) I have always longed for us to be able to show adults and hide everything else, rather than the other way around. If we want to hide our ADULTS we can hide our scrolls..

Edited December 10, 2018 by Fuzzbucket

[Dragon_Arbock]

4 hours ago, Fuzzbucket said:

(and before you say "phone" - I don't HAVE a smart phone and can't afford a contract like so many of you have.)

 

I didn't have one for a long time. I could still play fine. I didn't have one last year during the last viewbombing crisis. There's a 4 day window where eggs can hatch where you only have to be around to monitor them for about an hour. If you don't have 1-2 hours to spare in 96 hours, picking a game with death to play might not have been the best decision in the first place. (also the cell bill for me is only $20. I didn't get some top of the line thing).

 

Also.. okay, why do people hate the fog sprite so much? So someone above says it'd even be fine if they'd have to do everything you need to do with fog just as long as they could show their stuff off? It's called a screenshot.

 

i'm probably just gonna bow out o this, but nobody has been able to convince me we really need anything more than some protection for trading. If I'm doing 100% fine, I don't see why other people can't. I'm not living in 'fear', I'm being practical. World doesn't change for you, you change for the world.

 

 

Edited December 10, 2018 by Dragon_Arbock

[Fuzzbucket]

I'm doing 99.9% fine too - but I can accept that others aren't - and also that others don't have to agree with me. I guess that's the difference between us

[tjekan]

44 minutes ago, Dragon_Arbock said:

World doesn't change for you, you change for the world.

 

Why would we even HAVE a gameplay improvements forum if that were really the designer's take on it? Like most game designers, I'd imagine he wants to fix broken things and improve inconvenient things, so as to attract more players to his game. Yes, people are all capable of adapting to cope with broken and inconvenient things, but in this case the way many of them adapt will be finding a different game to play that doesn't allow third parties to wreck their work if they're not able to log on and check nothing happening every few hours.

 

If things are broken and not fun they should be slated to be fixed, one way or another.

[osmarks]

@Dragon_Arbock I am, well, insulted that you go around implying that people's eggs deserve to die if they can't check on them for 10 hours. Amazingly, people sleep, don't always have internet connections, or don't want to check a game constantly because of trolling. I've said it before. I'll say it again. It should not be necessary to significantly change your playstyle to protect from trolling. I mean, if it were some horrible issue which couldn't be fixed without fundamentally changing the game, sure. This isn't.

 

@Fuzzbucket As I have repeatedly said, it would be possible to regulate hatcheries (it already happens, even), since they rely on the API. Probably the main obstacle would just be hatchery developers who are now inactive.

Edited December 10, 2018 by osmarks

[olympe]

Actually, we can simply fog our eggs and hatchlings before we go to sleep - and unfog them when we get back online. It's not that hard, just inconvenient.

[Fuzzbucket]

True - but to say "everyone can play the way I do and be fine so nothing needs doing" is cavalier at the very least.

[Fuzzbucket]

27 minutes ago, osmarks said:

 

@Fuzzbucket As I have repeatedly said, it would be possible to regulate hatcheries (it already happens, even), since they rely on the API. Probably the main obstacle would just be hatchery developers who are now inactive.

 

And as I have said, people HAVE run hatcheries - not to mention clicksites, while bypassing API access (This I was told a long time ago by someone who ran one back then, so it must be possible); TJ has better things to do than regulate external sites, and the idea that all hatcheries MUST insist on log in is far from popular anyway.

[olympe]

49 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

True - but to say "everyone can play the way I do and be fine so nothing needs doing" is cavalier at the very least.

Well, to be quite honest, pretty much everyone should be able to fog their new stuff and unfog shortly before hatching them. 

[osmarks]

Yes. However, you may also want to put it in trades, and really we shouldn't have to.

Edited December 10, 2018 by osmarks

[purplehaze]

I know that there is a mechanic by which we can protect our eggs and hatchlings. I know TJ even gave us ward as extra protection. But we should not have to use those layers of protection just to have our eggs survive and grow up. Do I fog my eggs? Yes, I often do because I must. However, it shouldn't be necessary to normal game play! It is not what sickness and fogging and such were designed for. Sickness was not supposed to be a way to kill everyone else's eggs if they aren't fogged until old enough to hatch. There needs to be some way to prevent it from being used that way without screwing up some other aspect of the game!

 

I don't think regulating the hatcheries to require log-in is going to be enough. Sadly there are whole web networks set up by trolls to help trolls. They don't really even need to program an attack themselves.

[tjekan]

5 hours ago, BrazenChase said:

At the end of the day this guy thinks the ability of trolls to harass and destroy stuff is more important than regular player's ability to safely enjoy this game.

 

Stop wasting your time with the contrarian.

 

It isn't him we need to convince, it is the pertinent site staff. Focus your energies there.

 

I do care about the philosophical underpinnings here. I believe when things are not working as intended and are having negative consequences because of it, they ought to be fixed. I think that matters, and I'm going to say so.

 

But yes, in the end, if the staff are reading, notice that even the loudest naysayers like Dragon_Arbock acknowledge that the current situation isn't fun and has a problem, and support at least taking band-aid measures to protect eggs in trades, as well as conceding that eggs shouldn't die of sickness in LESS than 8-10 hours (presumably because that's how long people have to, you know, sleep.)

 

It's not a good feeling to wake up after falling asleep early reading in bed and think "Oh #@^!, I wonder if my eggs are dead." I don't USUALLY worry too much about that, because honestly most of the eggs I work with are replaceable in the case of an attack, but at holidays and when I've done things to bring myself to troll attention like authoring a thread or posting in News, yeah, it's a worry. 15 minutes may be apocryphal, but the one time my eggs died because of it, it took about 3 hours. I was online, just busy doing work. One time in many years of play isn't that bad practically speaking-- I've been much more disrupted by lag-- but the lag isn't intentional or against the rules, and the viewbombing IS, so it rankles way more.

 

The takeaway here: if we instituted a delay before eggs could be killed by sickness, it would make viewbombers be inconvenienced much more and regular users be inconvenienced much less. Whether that delay is 8 hours, 12 hours, or 24 hours is up to TJ (who probably even has statistics about how often users are able to check their scrolls, thus making his guess more educated than any of ours.) Those are just the details of the thing. The real point is, something NEEDS to be corrected. It's just a question of figuring out what method or methods should be chosen to do it, and much damage will be done before that happens. A time delay to death by sickness plus trading protection sounds good to me. A holiday reprieve plus stunting or timers counting backward instead of dying sounds good to me. Restricting death by sickness to the first 24 hours of life would probably work as a standalone measure. As long as the trade protection is user-controlled and the stunting/timers thing only activates when an egg would otherwise have died, none of these things would force anyone to change their current playstyle, and all would do something to help the problem.

[Fuzzbucket]

If you are trying to inconvenience bombers and help players, it needs to be 24 hours because of time zones.

[KrazyKarp]

5 hours ago, purplehaze said:

I know that there is a mechanic by which we can protect our eggs and hatchlings. I know TJ even gave us ward as extra protection. But we should not have to use those layers of protection just to have our eggs survive and grow up. Do I fog my eggs? Yes, I often do because I must. However, it shouldn't be necessary to normal game play! It is not what sickness and fogging and such were designed for. Sickness was not supposed to be a way to kill everyone else's eggs if they aren't fogged until old enough to hatch. There needs to be some way to prevent it from being used that way without screwing up some other aspect of the game!

This, just, this so much. I couldn't have worded this better myself!

[Marrionetta]

On 12/10/2018 at 2:57 PM, purplehaze said:

I know that there is a mechanic by which we can protect our eggs and hatchlings. I know TJ even gave us ward as extra protection. But we should not have to use those layers of protection just to have our eggs survive and grow up. Do I fog my eggs? Yes, I often do because I must. However, it shouldn't be necessary to normal game play! It is not what sickness and fogging and such were designed for. Sickness was not supposed to be a way to kill everyone else's eggs if they aren't fogged until old enough to hatch. There needs to be some way to prevent it from being used that way without screwing up some other aspect of the game!

 

I don't think regulating the hatcheries to require log-in is going to be enough. Sadly there are whole web networks set up by trolls to help trolls. They don't really even need to program an attack themselves.

You make it sound like everybody's clutches are out here dying all the time. 😕

[purplehaze]

14 minutes ago, Marrionetta said:

You make it sound like everybody's clutches are out here dying all the time. 😕

No, they aren't, but it is the uncertainty...knowing it can happen, has happened, and will probably happen again, because the trolls are out there and there is no mechanism in place to stop them.

 

My scroll has been under attack several times, but the only time I actually lost anything was last year when EATW was targeted with such a massive attack that things died in minutes. I'm generally not too worried about it, but everywhere you go on the forum you hear people talking about the need to hide your eggs all the time until they are ready to hatch, or at least whenever you can't attend them every minute. There is a lot of paranoia out there about egg safety. 

[Guillotine]

14 hours ago, purplehaze said:

No, they aren't, but it is the uncertainty...knowing it can happen, has happened, and will probably happen again, because the trolls are out there and there is no mechanism in place to stop them.

 

My scroll has been under attack several times, but the only time I actually lost anything was last year when EATW was targeted with such a massive attack that things died in minutes. I'm generally not too worried about it, but everywhere you go on the forum you hear people talking about the need to hide your eggs all the time until they are ready to hatch, or at least whenever you can't attend them every minute. There is a lot of paranoia out there about egg safety.

Something that doesn't seem to be understood by those who weren't there is that for many, the eggs did not just die in 15 minutes... they also got enough views in 15 minutes that they would die the second a Ward wore off. Of the 6-7 I had put in EATW before realizing it was bombed, only one survived. With Ward.

 

It is unacceptable that this core issue hasn't been fixed since then.

[olympe]

But that attack only worked so well because EATW was safe to put your fresh eggs in, as it only gave a very small percentage of views to fresh eggs. Which is why people put them in in the first place.

 

However, since EATW is no more and the site's chore mechanic died with it, everybody should be aware that putting fresh eggs into a hatchery is not a good idea. Unless you can watch them closely. So, most of the time, it's enough of a safety measure to not put your eggs in any one hatchery in the first 24 hours - which is what I usually do. But during the recent spikes in views from AoND, I did go the better-safe-than-sorry route and fogged.

[Cinspawn]

@TJ09 it's been a while, is it possible to get an update on whether you're even considering on changing/removing sickness? 

[saarkin]

After reading through this I guess I just don't see the purpose in changing something that really doesn't affect all that many people and is so easy to avoid.  Most folks don't use more than a couple hatcheries and if one gets sick fogging it for a couple hours is so easy.  I can't see the purpose of changing something that affects so few people when other updates can improve the quality of play for all players.

[Cinspawn]

34 minutes ago, saarkin said:

After reading through this I guess I just don't see the purpose in changing something that really doesn't affect all that many people and is so easy to avoid.  Most folks don't use more than a couple hatcheries and if one gets sick fogging it for a couple hours is so easy.  I can't see the purpose of changing something that affects so few people when other updates can improve the quality of play for all players.

This thread is not at all about sickness as a mechanic being a problem - the problem is the mechanic can be very easily abused by people who want to be annoying (viewbombing). It's about people having control over whether your dragons live even if you take care of them well (only put in hatcheries when they're a bit older etc). It's about people being tired of having to fog everything or having to hide their scrolls a lot of the time because they might become a target otherwise. Etc.

 

It's not a Huge Mass Viewbombing Attacking Problem* (although there has been quite a huge "attack" in the past, see EATW) it's a tiresome game of taking into account trolls and/or hoping they don't target you.

 

*yet, and people are trying to avoid rather than having to patch things up after people have lost dragons.

[saarkin]

And I totally understand those points BUT While EATW did suck, I'd bet most players probably weren't affected by it.  Especially taking into account all the new players since and all that were around then who don't play anymore.  And while I hope it never happens again I can honestly say I don't run my scroll out of concern for if it does and those who weren't around for it probably don't either.  So while yes changing the mechanic will put the minds of some at ease I still believe it will only be for a minority of players. And as someone who has run game sites for more than 10 years I will add one other thought.  If someone wants to abuse the game and be a troll they will find a way to do it. So while removing this one thing may fix this minor issue another will just pop up.  So as I mentioned before since TJ is a person who has limited time I'd prefer changes to be implemented that affect the masses in a quality way vs something more minor.

 

Now all that being said if he does decide to adjust it I won't be mad I'm not against the idea just advocating for the best changes we can get in the time TJ's life allows.

[DragonLady86]

most players probably weren't affected?  It was the most popular hatchery on the site, during a holiday and the vast majority of players have been here for many years.  Good for you that you weren't, but assuming it wasn't a widespread issue, when evidence says otherwise, doesn't really make sense.

[Fuzzbucket]

Even so - MOST players weren't affected. A lot were, and it totally sucked, but even so....

[pinkgothic]

On 5/2/2019 at 9:19 AM, saarkin said:

After reading through this I guess I just don't see the purpose in changing something that really doesn't affect all that many people and is so easy to avoid.  Most folks don't use more than a couple hatcheries and if one gets sick fogging it for a couple hours is so easy.  I can't see the purpose of changing something that affects so few people when other updates can improve the quality of play for all players.

"if one gets sick fogging it for a couple hours" is easy when you catch it in time, which many people unfortunately can't (being asleep, or at work). Lots of people have woken up to dead eggs; sometimes to very expensive dead eggs (CB metallics, 2G prizes, 2G Saltkin, et cetera).

 

Regrettably, this problem has gotten more unpleasant ever since anonymous people have decided to (sporadically) target the Trading section - which makes sense, those are (from the perspective of the viewbombers) wonderfully vulnerable eggs, since they're probably not going to get fogged when the person goes to bed, and a lot of the eggs in the Trading section at a given time are probably not being actively watched.

 

There was also this gem from about a year ago. This kind of thing is not easy to avoid, unfortunately.

 

Currently, the only ways of truly dealing with this are to either consistently fog your critters when you're not able to watch your scroll like a hawk... or just stop caring about pixel dragon death? I mean, that works, but it's really just a sad (as in literal 'sad', not derogatory 'sad') work-around.

 

I really think it would be important to fix this mechanic (although at this point I honestly assume it's supposed to be this brutal, since nothing's being done about it, so I don't think it will be fixed). Even if it's only hurting a few people, it is hurting them really badly. Example - I don't collect prizes, but I know how hard the 2G prize game is, so if you've spent a year working your way up to getting a 2G prize from a common, you score a deal with a prize owner, and then someone viewbombs the 2G to death while it's not even on your scroll yet but in the transfer link, then that's really awful for both parties.

 

Some features / updates / convenience changes to the site don't, in my opinion, measure up to the kind of loss that malicious viewbombing can cause. Maybe if fixes to the viewbombing mechanic were truly disproportionately more complex than the average update, then I could understand shying away from them - but I don't see that, so at the moment I would prefer if the ability of people to destroy other people's efforts were curtailed.

 

I understand where you're coming from, but I really, truly think...

On 5/2/2019 at 10:09 AM, saarkin said:

the best changes we can get in the time TJ's life allows

...includes fixing the sickness mechanic, somewhere close to the top of the list.