The Great Thread of Small Changes

[Vaatzes]

The Great Thread of Small Changes

A compilation thread containing suggestions and requests not aimed at changing how the Cave fundamentally works, but to make it easier to work with.

 

 

 

Index:

Spoiler

1. Introduction
2. Proposals
3. Adding ideas
4. ???
5. Profit

 

1. Introduction

Throughout the years, many features have been added to the Cave. A lot of these ideas came from user requests and were implemented not to change what the Cave is, but to make it more fun to manage, interact with and collect your dragons. I think it goes without saying that most if not all of us are grateful for these additions! However, there are some features that lack polish or do not realise their full potential, even among features that have already existed since the inception of the Cave.

 

Changes proposed in this thread are not meant to be changing the way the Cave or systems within it work inherently. They are merely intended to enhance, solidify, optimise and improve the consistency of actions and mechanics already existing within the Cave. In short, this will be a collection of so called Quality of Life (QoL) proposals to the Cave. That does not mean this thread is intended to replace already existing threads about such suggestions. Rather, this thread is supposed to offer a means through which to catalog and summarise such threads. Oftentimes the best way to fully flesh out any idea, even a small QoL suggestion, is to post it as an individual thread and let the idea be formed by the replies in that thread. Once the idea is both complete and popular enough it can be added to this collection.

 

In the future I may want to consider ordering the list of proposals by a certain metric, or host polls, but for now it'd be nice to just get this collection started. Next follows the complete list of proposals summarised within this thread. If you want to know how to add your own suggestions, read on to "Adding ideas".

 

2. Proposals

• Hidden dragons/groups by Zalom

          Add a way to hide a (selection of) dragon(s) from your public scroll.

• Breeding within groups by Fuzzbucket?

          Change breeding such that it (offers the option to) sorts mates by group.

• Mass fog/defog by ?

          Allow for the fogging/unfogging of all or selections of eggs.

• Small CB indicator dot by High Lord November

          Add a small indicator dot to dragons (name/gender) to indicate whether they're CB or not.

• Selection remove from group by ?

          Allow for the removal of a selection of dragons from a group.

3. Adding ideas

For now, it is enough to PM me or reply to this thread to add proposals. Preferably include a link to the proposal's own thread as well. If the idea's origin is someone else than the author of that idea's thread, please mention that too.

 

Requirements: TL;DR suggestions must follow the spirit of this thread. Ideally, proposals are either minor additions in and off themselves or slight changes to already existing systems. No proposals on here should be controversial. This also means that it should not favour certain groups of players, or be designed for a single type of players. It is acceptable if a feature is inherently more relevant to certain players than to others, for example suggestions that improve breeding are inherently more relevant to people who actively breed dragons, but should ultimately be useful to any generic user of the Cave. Obviously, this does NOT include any change that is solely intended to simplify or make the Cave "easier", like increasing the appearance rate of Gold dragons, increasing egg slots, etc.

 

4. ???

That's all for now. Ideas that have already been disapproved by TJ can still be catalogued for reference, but should probably contain additional remarks about this. I'll likely add this to future iterations of this thread, so check back sometimes

 

5. Profit

It is my hope that this thread will serve threefold. First and foremost as a catalogue and summary of QoL proposals to the cave. Secondly, as a simple overview of potential QoL to be implemented in the Cave. Thirdly, as a way to quickly navigate ideas: to find if your idea has been suggested before and to find out where to go to improve upon an already proposed idea. Hopefully it'll grow quickly and be helpful to all!

Edited April 5, 2019 by Zalom

[Vaatzes]

Obligatory reserved

[DragonLady86]

as these ideas all have their own threads I don't see the point in this one.  TJ reads the various threads as they are even if he doesn't post much.  Too many ideas in one place will just muddy the information as it will become hard to follow who is talking about what.   Threads are closed as they are answered so there is no need for a "summary" page to list them.

 

Side note: polls are disabled in this section because you can only vote once and people often change their mind and/or don't actually read the threads before voting. 

[purplehaze]

I kind of think that I agree with @DragonLady86. It seems whenever we get a suggestion thread that includes a number of different suggestions, TJ will come along and tell us to make separate threads for each of them. So I'm not quite sure what purpose it serves to put a lot of small suggestions together -- especially those that already have a thread of their own.

[olympe]

While I personally feel like such a thread is a good idea for brainstorming, it won't stay up for long because these kinds of idea collection threads get shut down pretty quickly. Although we *might* be able to get away with closely related suggestions in one thread - like suggestions about account options (hide growing things only, display extra info...) or various suggestions affecting teleport (offer on only part of a trade, accept only part of an offer, allow for larger teleports, allow for actions to be performed on things in teleport...) - that kind of thing.

Edited April 5, 2019 by olympe

[Vaatzes]

I was aware of TJ's preference for a single thread per issue, but I still decided to post this thread for multiple reasons. Small, quality of life threads often don't require large threads, as such don't garner many replies and may fade into obscurity quickly. Furthermore, these suggestions are easily overlooked as there are usually bigger, more pressing things to work on in the Cave. Consequentially older suggestions are likely forgotten when the time comes around to implement smaller changes. It also forces old ideas to be reposted multiple times over, as players feel unheard or are simply unaware such an idea already existed.

 

The biggest inspiration may have come from the scientific method itself. Often times there are metastudies done to summarise the current works on a topic to focus future research. Obviously, since there's only one person who's going to be ultimately working on this, this might be less relevant.

 

Either way I've taken your feedback into consideration, and I understand this thread might not be as nifty an idea as it seemed to me 😛

I still believe there could be value in this for the reasons explained above, however, so I'll try to keep this updated and running unless strictly told to do otherwise.

Edited April 6, 2019 by Zalom

[pinkgothic]

I do like the idea of collecting truly small changes in one place, but I have to admit I'm very surprised about some of your choices of what's small. ;; I would not consider:

On 4/5/2019 at 9:01 AM, Zalom said:

• Mass fog/defog by ?

          Allow for the fogging/unfogging of all or selections of eggs.

 

Or:

On 4/5/2019 at 9:01 AM, Zalom said:

• Hidden dragons/groups by Zalom

          Add a way to hide a (selection of) dragon(s) from your public scroll.

 

Or:

On 4/5/2019 at 9:01 AM, Zalom said:

• Selection remove from group by ?

          Allow for the removal of a selection of dragons from a group.

 

...as a small change, as they require a new UI or page (as opposed to "changes likely confined to a few lines of code in one existing script").

 

Here are some things I'd considered small changes:

(= maybe another table, expand the query that populates the dropdown with the corresponding join, change which field is the one that's displayed, done.)

(= tweak Bite so it doesn't put a kill slot into cooldown.)

(= spit out some <img> tags based on what else is attached to the trade)

(= could be solves as simply as with copy & paste source code (proper solution not significantly more complicated))

(= change egg count query to group held eggs e.g. by microtime timestamp of planned abandonment)

[Vaatzes]

Hey pinkgothic, those are some really nice suggestions, thanks for linking them here! I'll add them to the list later today ^^

1 hour ago, pinkgothic said:

I do like the idea of collecting truly small changes in one place, but I have to admit I'm very surprised about some of your choices of what's small. ;; I would not consider:

...as a small change, as they require a new UI or page (as opposed to "changes likely confined to a few lines of code in one existing script").

My definition of what's small is reasonably well defined in the original post. Anything that relies on changing old systems in small ways, rather than inventing new systems would generally be considered small enough to me. I never said that they have to be limited to a few lines of code in a single script, but I think you'll find that most of the suggestions above should not rely on too many additional lines in pre-existing scripts, depending of course on how it's implemented. Either way, the suggestions should be considered small in what they do, not in how they're implemented. I'm not asking forum goers to reason about code complexity before posting.

 

The fogging for example, is nothing more than a for loop over every egg in a player's inventory on the click of a link, very similar to how fogging already works for one egg. This link could be placed under actions or under groups to fog all eggs in that current group.

Hiding all dragons already exists. Hiding one dragon therefore should not be more complicated, code wise.

Adding new dragons to a group can already be done with refined selections (ctrl + click, etc). Removing them is literally the same code with a remove query.

This all depends on how it's implemented back end of course, but I doubt it's truly as large a change as one might think.

 

On the other hand, changing how the kill action works would literally change the amount of times you can use kill in combination with biting. Hence, far more dragons would be able to get killed were that the intent (and I mean far more). This changes the game fundamentally: dragons are not meant to be killed, so limiting the kill count makes sense. Hence a very minor change in the code can have large changes to how the Cave works. The alternative proposal would be to have a separate kill count for BSA, but that'd be a convoluted system in my opinion. The idea is that the suggestions I collect here are small changes to how the user interacts with the Cave, rather than changes to how the Cave functions itself. Obviously, sometimes changing how the Cave functions in a small way would go a long way in improving the way players interact with the Cave, so suggestions like that are also welcome! I'd probably consider the kill count change such a suggestion.

 

There seemed to be some confusion over what suggestions would be useful to collect in this thread, and I hope these examples clarify my position. Remember that these suggestions can and should all have their own separate thread too, and this is not intended to replace such threads.

Edited April 6, 2019 by Zalom

[purpledragonclaw]

While I understand wanting to keep a list of desired in-cave changes in one thread, ideas need to be splintered out into individual threads for visibility's sake. When we take one thread and fill it full of ideas, it increases the potential of ideas getting buried because some ideas garner more discussion than the other, and the thread becoming unmanageable because of all the cross-chatter between ideas. Please post your suggestions in existing threads, and if one doesn't exist for your idea, create a new one.