Remove time from frequently abandoned eggs

[RealWilliamShakespeare]

Honestly, I hate walls. But for reasons people mentioned, I kinda don't agree with this suggestion. I'll openly admit that if this suggestion were implemented, I would pick up and reabandon things just to get the wall rid of faster, I really would! But I can see how that's unfair. As much as I despise them, they give me a reason to get off DC and actually work on my assignments for once. Speaking of...

[BlueLatios]

I'm neutral on this one. As someone who hunts for hatchlings in AP instead of eggs, I find it peculiar watching the "time to death" of eggs in AP. No matter what wall is being thrown at you, there's always mysterious anonymous people who would clear them 

 

was secretly hoping that they'd abandon the hatchlings while clearing the wall, too

[Moonlight_Eevee]

I'm against this. It feels like you're trying to punish users who love to lower the ap time by mass breeding a favourite breed of theirs. What would you rather have? High timed eggs that have 2 days to hatch or an egg that's actually incuhatchable?

[The Dragoness]

I would prefer to see eggs that I have already grabbed and re-abandoned be greyed out in the AP. Personally, I'm more concerned with picking up the same messy egg over and over and having no way of knowing until I check the lineage page. I wouldn't mind a limited time reduction being added as well though.

[Fuzzbucket]

16 minutes ago, The Dragoness said:

I would prefer to see eggs that I have already grabbed and re-abandoned be greyed out in the AP. Personally, I'm more concerned with picking up the same messy egg over and over and having no way of knowing until I check the lineage page. 

 

I couldn't agree more.

There's a thread somewhere. And even better - when there are multiclutches, to grey out all the identical ones from the same clutch.

Edited January 2, 2019 by Fuzzbucket

[Shadowdrake]

25 minutes ago, The Dragoness said:

I would prefer to see eggs that I have already grabbed and re-abandoned be greyed out in the AP. Personally, I'm more concerned with picking up the same messy egg over and over and having no way of knowing until I check the lineage page. I wouldn't mind a limited time reduction being added as well though.

I believe TJ has already shot a similar suggestion down due to difficulties in having everyone see a different thing.

[HeatherMarie]

2 hours ago, Shadowdrake said:

I believe TJ has already shot a similar suggestion down due to difficulties in having everyone see a different thing.

 

Yup, that was one of my favorite suggestions awhile back, to have some indication we've already picked up an AP egg, and TJ shot it down because the AP is the same for everyone (and should be). 

 

edit: As a work-around I've taken to jotting down codes if there are a lot of the same breed (especially helpful during holidays). Not as easy/fast, but it works.

Edited January 2, 2019 by HeatherMarie

[tjekan]

3 hours ago, Dalek Raptor said:

I'm against this. It feels like you're trying to punish users who love to lower the ap time by mass breeding a favourite breed of theirs. What would you rather have? High timed eggs that have 2 days to hatch or an egg that's actually incuhatchable?

 

It wouldn't be punishing breeders to make their eggs lose time every time they get picked up. If anything it would contribute to their goal of lowering the AP time, since the eggs would actually become incuhatchable that way (otherwise they're only incuhatchable there at holidays usually.)

 

However, it seems it would probably be a real hassle to change an egg's time every time it is abandoned. Why not just make all eggs lose time faster while they're sitting on the AP? That seems like it would be much easier to implement and less open to manipulation, and would achieve the same goal of clearing up long-sitting jams faster.

[Moonlight_Eevee]

35 minutes ago, tjekan said:

 

It wouldn't be punishing breeders to make their eggs lose time every time they get picked up. If anything it would contribute to their goal of lowering the AP time, since the eggs would actually become incuhatchable that way (otherwise they're only incuhatchable there at holidays usually.)

No it wouldn't help to contribute to the other eggs afterwards. This would count towards a single egg. Say all the eggs from the mass breed get picked up and dropped over and over within an hour, the eggs behind those would still be massively high

[Psykotika]

How about a simpler mechanic where if the same egg gets abandoned more than 10 times it automatically loses one day and then cannot be incubated? It's like an auto-incubate?

[purplehaze]

33 minutes ago, Psykotika said:

How about a simpler mechanic where if the same egg gets abandoned more than 10 times it automatically loses one day and then cannot be incubated? It's like an auto-incubate?

No thanks. People expect to be able to incubate eggs that they pick up. Auto-incubating it before it is picked up would not really be any advantage, except saving a Red BSA, and would result in confusion as to why suddenly incubate can't be used on an AP egg.

[tjekan]

2 hours ago, Dalek Raptor said:

No it wouldn't help to contribute to the other eggs afterwards. This would count towards a single egg. Say all the eggs from the mass breed get picked up and dropped over and over within an hour, the eggs behind those would still be massively high

 

Mass breeding to the AP doesn't ACTUALLY make all the eggs behind the wall lower time, you know. It just prevents people from picking them up sooner than that. They're still ready to hatch at exactly the same time they would have been without the wall blocking them. Is there really any difference between picking an egg up on Monday which can hatch on Wednesday morning as opposed to being blocked from picking an egg up on Monday but then picking one up on Tuesday which can hatch on Wednesday morning?

 

I'm fairly indifferent to this timer suggestion myself, but it WOULD really make the overall AP time less, by reducing the time on many of the eggs there.

[cyradis4]

Love the post. Don't support the suggestion. 

 

The simple truth is: 

If a breed is blocker enough that you *can* form a wall that lasts more than 10 minutes with it, then that breed clearly needed a lot of eggs bred. Walls do a lot of good, despite the grumbling. 

 

They: 

1. Add a lot of a massively under-populated breed to the game (if ratios weren't out of balance, they wouldn't be able to breed so many: been there, tried that, failed miserably). 

2. Greatly lower AP time, letting people grab more eggs for the same time investment

3. Do not happen often at all: which is why a wall that lasts more than 1 hr makes such a Big Splash: they just don't happen much at all because they are brutal to create (also been there, done that). 

4. Require a massive number of eggs (aka adult dragons) to create, this means that in order to form one, the creator first must gather hundreds of a very common breed.... making that breed less common, which helps the biomes move more. 

 

Basically, you can't form walls out of less common or uncommon breeds: you just can't generate enough eggs to block the AP (min number to form a wall is 100 ish eggs, to form a wall that lasts an hour or more? Something over 500+ eggs). So walls do a great deal of good, helping the internal works of DC, well, work! 

 

Cheers!
C4. 

 

 

[Firefury Amahira]

12 minutes ago, cyradis4 said:

Love the post. Don't support the suggestion. 

 

The simple truth is: 

If a breed is blocker enough that you *can* form a wall that lasts more than 10 minutes with it, then that breed clearly needed a lot of eggs bred. Walls do a lot of good, despite the grumbling. 

 

They: 

1. Add a lot of a massively under-populated breed to the game (if ratios weren't out of balance, they wouldn't be able to breed so many: been there, tried that, failed miserably). 

2. Greatly lower AP time, letting people grab more eggs for the same time investment

3. Do not happen often at all: which is why a wall that lasts more than 1 hr makes such a Big Splash: they just don't happen much at all because they are brutal to create (also been there, done that). 

4. Require a massive number of eggs (aka adult dragons) to create, this means that in order to form one, the creator first must gather hundreds of a very common breed.... making that breed less common, which helps the biomes move more. 

 

Basically, you can't form walls out of less common or uncommon breeds: you just can't generate enough eggs to block the AP (min number to form a wall is 100 ish eggs, to form a wall that lasts an hour or more? Something over 500+ eggs). So walls do a great deal of good, helping the internal works of DC, well, work! 

 

Cheers!
C4. 

 

 

Just to back this post up with some stats (as my massbreed was the apparent catalyst for this thread):

-The blacktip wall in question lasted roughly 12.5 hours total.

-Said wall resulted from breeding 702 blacktips to about 480 celestials and assorted rares, sending a grand total of 1,143 eggs to the AP. (919 blacktips, 224 celestials.)

-Of those 702 attempts, 570 successfully produced eggs, 8 were refusals, and 124 were either 'no interest' or 'no egg produced'. Assuming I'm not messing up my basic math, that's about an 81% success rate for producing eggs. (Not all pairs produced blacktip eggs either, some only resulted in celestials.)

-Massbreeding 702 blacktips took roughly 6 hours in total. (This count DOES NOT include the time spent corporealizing the aforementioned 480 celestials, which was done the day before the massbreed and probably took a solid hour or two by itself.)

-As such a massbreed relies so heavily on celestials, I could in theory only wall the AP like that once a month. In reality, I only massbreed the full army a couple times a year precisely because of how labor-intensive a task it is. And as I am but one player, even if I was massbreeding at every opportunity, that likely would not be sufficient to tilt the ratios to make them less prolific.

 

Ultimately, the reason walls happen isn't a matter of AP time or mass-breeding, the root cause is the ratios that govern the rate at which those eggs are produced coupled with the community's focus on already-overpopulated breeds. This suggestion simply attacks the symptom in an ineffective manner, it doesn't address the underlying cause. Do ratios need to be re-evaluated and tweaked? Probably. Either that or more people need to more regularly breed these 'blocker' breeds to bring the ratios back to a point that they aren't blockers anymore.

[Fuzzbucket]

5 hours ago, Firefury Amahira said:

Ultimately, the reason walls happen isn't a matter of AP time or mass-breeding, the root cause is the ratios that govern the rate at which those eggs are produced coupled with the community's focus on already-overpopulated breeds. This suggestion simply attacks the symptom in an ineffective manner, it doesn't address the underlying cause. Do ratios need to be re-evaluated and tweaked? Probably. Either that or more people need to more regularly breed these 'blocker' breeds to bring the ratios back to a point that they aren't blockers anymore.

 

Quoted for truth. To be blunt, we actually NEED walls.

[FeatheryWings]

7 hours ago, tjekan said:

 

They're still ready to hatch at exactly the same time they would have been without the wall blocking them. Is there really any difference between picking an egg up on Monday which can hatch on Wednesday morning as opposed to being blocked from picking an egg up on Monday but then picking one up on Tuesday which can hatch on Wednesday morning?

 

Yes there is. This way you can hunt more from the cave and hatch more often. You have the freedom of what you can do in the time between 7 days and the egg's timer in the AP, which includes maybe doing some trades to get some eggs you can hatch in that time or hatch the eggs you already have. Maybe you can even fit a cave hunt in that time. The timer of the egg defines how long you'll be locked and how often you can pick and hatch a new egg. So there really is a huge difference.

Edited January 3, 2019 by FeatheryWings

[tjekan]

3 hours ago, FeatheryWings said:

 

Yes there is. This way you can hunt more from the cave and hatch more often. You have the freedom of what you can do in the time between 7 days and the egg's timer in the AP, which includes maybe doing some trades to get some eggs you can hatch in that time or hatch the eggs you already have. Maybe you can even fit a cave hunt in that time. The timer of the egg defines how long you'll be locked and how often you can pick and hatch a new egg. So there really is a huge difference.

 

Since it's impossible to tell how large the wall is or how long it's going to last, you can't plan any other hunting, breeding, or trading activities around that. Anything you breed or catch in a biome will take two full days to hatch, and some completely random amount of time to trade. There's no way of predicting whether the wall or any low-time backlog will still be there when you're done with that. Even the backlog of low-time eggs behind the holiday wall was gone in less than 12 hours. If you can't predict something, you can't obtain any 'freedom' by timing other things around it.

 

The ratio issue, now that might potentially be alleviated by mass breedings. I'm pessimistic, though. There've been mass breeds for years and you still can't breed checkers out of certain breeds. The ratios are more broken than one more massbreed can fix.

Edited January 3, 2019 by tjekan

[purplehaze]

11 hours ago, tjekan said:

Mass breeding to the AP doesn't ACTUALLY make all the eggs behind the wall lower time, you know.

Maybe true, but it is also true that the more eggs there are in the AP, whatever their breed, the lower the time on the eggs at the surface. So whether I mass breed and create a wall, or just breed every breedable dragon on my scroll, it does lower the times on the AP!

 

Edited January 3, 2019 by purplehaze

[osmarks]

Regardless of ability to actually plan much regarding the AP, being able to pick up eggs from it when they're lower-time certainly does help a bit.

 

Anyway, this suggestion (well, assuming it was implemented such that eggs wouldn't go so low they died) would not break the ratio-fixing aspect of walls. It's the same amount of underpopulated breed eggs being picked up and raised either way. Given the ridiculous opacity of basically everything related to the ratios, it's kind of hard to tell if massbreeds actually do much, but - given the very large population of dragons around - I doubt it.

[FeatheryWings]

11 minutes ago, tjekan said:

Since it's impossible to tell how large the wall is or how long it's going to last, you can't plan any other hunting, breeding, or trading activities around that. Anything you breed or catch in a biome will take two full days to hatch, and some completely random amount of time to trade. There's no way of predicting whether the wall or any low-time backlog will still be there when you're done with that. Even the backlog of low-time eggs behind the holiday wall was gone in less than 12 hours. If you can't predict something, you can't obtain any 'freedom' by timing other things around it.

 

Umm... This is only vaguely relevant to what I was saying. What I told was that there is a big difference between low-time and huge-time AP, mainly focused on this sentence: "Is there really any difference between picking an egg up on Monday which can hatch on Wednesday morning as opposed to being blocked from picking an egg up on Monday but then picking one up on Tuesday which can hatch on Wednesday morning?".

 

When AP is low time, you can simply just incubate and hatch again and again and again which would definitely result in much more hatchies than you stucking with eggs that are huge time and you can not hatch immediately/soon. Think of it this way, it is Tuesday and you grab something that will hatch on Wednesday. You can just incubate and hatch in maximum 2-3 hours. Then you can get another batch and repeat and repeat. But if it is Monday that you grab them, you'll have to wait one day before incubating and therefore hatching. You'll gather a new batch, and again will need to wait another day to hatch. I think the difference is pretty visible.

 

Also, why would you need to "plan" hunting, breeding or trading anyway unless you are especially seeking an egg on AP. AP is completely random eggs if you are not seeking something specific already. So you can do whatever else you want to do, cave-hunt, trade for an egg you actually want etc. If there is something you very much need on AP or just want to get some random stuff you can just abandon the eggs you traded for or hunted already. 

[cyradis4]

33 minutes ago, tjekan said:

The ratio issue, now that might potentially be alleviated by mass breedings. I'm pessimistic, though. There've been mass breeds for years and you still can't breed checkers out of certain breeds. The ratios are more broken than one more massbreed can fix.

 

Blacks, Mints, and a few others provide strong evidence of that happening. Waaaaay back when, Blacks were massivly mass-bred for alts, and went..... well. THey were worth more than CB Gold, which were themselves extremely rare. Then over time, the ratios corrected and now they are merely commonish.

 

With the Mints, when Abs started to mass breed them, they formed massive walls that lasted forever and were super super common. After a year or three, that changed and now they are less common. 

 

Balloons. Back before Thu started her massive Balloon collection they were major blockers. Then, as her collection expanded, they became at best common-ish to less-common. It was noticeable. 

 

The various collector competitions which focus on one breed also see shifts over the course of the year. 

 

But the best way to see how the ratios are affected by mass breeding? Bribe @Firefury Amahira to breed once a month for the next 12 months, and see if percent of eggs produced per month changes from the start (January) to the end (December). That of course would mean that 12,000 Blacktips would be added to the ratios. I think you'd find that after about 2 or 3 months, the number of eggs produced will be noticeably down. 

 

There is no data like hard data.  Why not get some? Also, anyone with a massive army can do this, too. Just save the stats from your Log (which saves auto-abandoned eggs now. :D)

 

Cheers!
C4. 

 

 

 

[Fuzzbucket]

2 hours ago, cyradis4 said:

 

Blacks, Mints, and a few others provide strong evidence of that happening. Waaaaay back when, Blacks were massivly mass-bred for alts, and went..... well. THey were worth more than CB Gold, which were themselves extremely rare. Then over time, the ratios corrected and now they are merely commonish.

With the Mints, when Abs started to mass breed them, they formed massive walls that lasted forever and were super super common. After a year or three, that changed and now they are less common. 

 

 

I remember that. For ages it was almost impossible to find a black, and you could trade them for HEAPS.

 

2 hours ago, cyradis4 said:

Balloons. Back before Thu started her massive Balloon collection they were major blockers. Then, as her collection expanded, they became at best common-ish to less-common. It was noticeable. 

Is hers as big as this one ?  

 

https://dragcave.net/group/1661

 

I'm with Cy. And would someone please make a wall of pipios so that I can get a kyanite from one ? My lineage is STUCK !

[osmarks]

I just massbred all my (breedable) dragons, minus about 10. Enjoy.

 

Anyway, that does sound more like large-scale changes, not just single massbreeds doing anything.

[angelicdragonpuppy]

I see a lot of worry about this being abused, but it would take 25 people working in concert, targeting the same specific egg(s), to drop an egg's timer a single day. If you coupled that with preventing things from going below 1d, wouldn't that be a pretty solid mechanism of preventing abuse? If people are worried about things not being influencable, it could even be capped at 3d1h?

 

And I know massbreeds can help the ratios (to some extent... they're borked beyond what we can affect, I think). I participate in many. But a mass of a single breed, all with lineages many avid collectors term "meh,"* taking up the AP for 6+ hours isn't fun. Having the time go lower would still keep that many eggs around; it would help the ratios (as much as they can be helped...) and breeders could still do whatever they wish, BUT with the added perk of the less desirable walls breaking up sooner. Yes, this might affect some attempts to lower AP times by walling, but only some. A mixed wall of more desirable lined things will still do the same, but wouldn't be as tiresome to sort through, making the wait more pleasant. People also probably wouldn't be dropping those over and over (they'd be keeping them), so they don't get picked up as fast due to higher time, still lowering AP times...

 

*I shouldn't have to put this disclaimer every time, yadda yadda different people value different lineages, but anyone who's ever used the in-game market or the forum trade threads knows there's a pretty good consensus on value for a large chunk of the userbase. 500+ random lined Blacktips do not fit the bill for many.

[Fuzzbucket]

6 hours - even 12 hour - isn't that long. Go read a book while you wait ? I don't often disagree with you, ADP - but I really can't see this one helping anything.