Abandoned Page Compendium - Display Suggestions

[olympe]

Indeed. It would keep the status quo as far as possible while still solving the issue of walls. Having lower-time eggs displayed first isn't a bad thing in and of itself. But having a random selection of eggs? Some people are absolutely looking for those low-time eggs, and won't be able to find them without a lot of effort. Which, if push comes to shove (and there are a lot of bred eggs around - like for holidays - there might be even more eggs dying. Even the holiday eggs that are only available for up to 2 weeks a year.

[HeatherMarie]

Yeah, I definitely think randomising would just lead to other problems. Different eggs with every refresh, awesome! ... Unless you *like* grabbing lower-timed eggs and love when the entire visible AP is incu-hatchable timed. Unless you *like* sifting through walls to find messies (or even-gens, or whatever). Unless you *like* that the times on the AP are usually stable enough that you can approximate when your eggs (or someone elses) will show. That last one especially, a lot of multi-user massbreeds on this very forum include lots of users excited about seeing all the different colors, different themes, whatever, that the group bred. Randomising wouldn't just 'help with walls', it would also destroy any chance of seeing a rainbow-colored AP, or a one-breed AP during holidays (which lots of people actually post screenshots of), etc etc.

 

Any sort of filter/pages/randomising/etc will, by design, allow users to see completely different things than other users. TJ has said before that everyone sees the same thing in the AP, and that's exactly what should be kept. We don't know if severe 'cherry picking' would happen, but we do know things based on how things currently are, and I don't see those ideas as being suitable for the AP.

[sh20000sh]

It looks like randomizing AP is implemented somehow. You can see eggs that certain time left is changing in several refreshes.

[Fuzzbucket]

9 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

Any sort of filter/pages/randomising/etc will, by design, allow users to see completely different things than other users. TJ has said before that everyone sees the same thing in the AP, and that's exactly what should be kept. We don't know if severe 'cherry picking' would happen, but we do know things based on how things currently are, and I don't see those ideas as being suitable for the AP.

This, so much.

[Stormcaller]

14 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

We don't know if severe 'cherry picking' would happen,

 

Just what is this "cherry picking" you are so worried about anyway?   Surely it couldn't be worse than these frequent wall that almost totally put a stop to many people's gameplay.

[Sazandora]

@Stormcaller It's that some people are worried about others only picking up the "best" things from the AP, mostly rares like metallics, Prizes and others + pretty lineages, and leaving everything else to rot and/or forcing others to pick up the trash because all the best eggs have already been taken... which is something that happens in the abandoned pile all the time and has been going on for ages, so I really don't know why people are so worried about it suddenly becoming a thing if something in the AP got changed.

[Stormcaller]

11 minutes ago, Sazandora said:

@Stormcaller It's that some people are worried about others only picking up the "best" things from the AP, mostly rares like metallics, Prizes and others + pretty lineages, and leaving everything else to rot and/or forcing others to pick up the trash because all the best eggs have already been taken...

 

That's what I thought, but when I thought further I decided I must be wrong because that idea is so absurd.  Really, who is to say what the "best" things are. Metalics and prizes are lovely but if you are avidly looking for some lowly common to increase your collection, those things just won't do.  Anyone willing to spend the time and effort to stalk the AP has as much chance of catching these "best" eggs as anyone else. Surely, no one would want to deny them the fruits of their labor, or would they?

 

 

[Sazandora]

Exactly, which is why I put "best" in quotation marks. For me, the best things in the AP are all the random CB Kingcrownes I sometimes (once in a blue moon, really...) pick up from there. But to me it seems like the general consensus is that rares are the "best" things to find from the pile, so they disappear very fast once they actually do pop up in there. It's happening already so it's not magically going to get worse if something was changed about the AP. Relax, you folks!

 

So to stay on-topic, I still do like the idea of randomization but I also very much like the previous thing I liked the best, which is limiting how many eggs from a single user are visible in there at a time. I understand people have issues with randomizing the selection of eggs so it won't be the end of my world if we never got that. 's cool.

[Stormcaller]

41 minutes ago, Sazandora said:

But to me it seems like the general consensus is that rares are the "best" things to find from the pile, so they disappear very fast once they actually do pop up in there

 

IMHO, that does not make them any better than anything else. They might be more popular or more scarce. You are right; it won't get better or worse no matter how the AP is arranged.

 

Personally, I favor limiting the number of anyone's eggs that can appear in the AP at any given time.

[tjekan]

"Cherry-picking" in this sense would really just be another name for letting the market decide. If someone is breeding eggs that are SO undesirable that the entire userbase cherry-picks other eggs and leaves them there to rot, well, that breeder needs to adapt by breeding more desirable eggs, or fewer of them. Supply and demand is an eminently reasonable dynamic in a game like this.

 

But with that said, I still prefer the solution that places a limit on how many of a breeder's eggs can appear in the AP at once, which should not cause any eggs to die off anyway.

[darkladyselenity]

Thinking about limiting the number of one breeder's eggs that are displayed, how would that work?

 

If I breed all 400+ of my caveborns, and drop the eggs, how long would it be before I saw them in the AP, and how many would I see once they appeared? How long would they visible? 

 

How much work would it take to overhaul the AP in this way? 

 

One thing I think the conversation is missing is how much time and effort would it take to implement something like this? And how exactly would it work?

 

We all (myself included) are throwing out ideas, but we're not the ones who have to figure out the coding to make it work. 

 

With that in mind, maybe leaving things as they are is the "best" (if not the most desirable) idea.

Edited March 2, 2020 by darkladyselenity

[aurora e]

Hi all, just jumping into the conversation here! 

This is such a tricky issue. I think TJ's comment that eggs left in the AP for too long lose their value crosses out a lot of the options. Tampering with which eggs get picked for windowshopping might make AP-goers' experiences temporarily more pleasant, but more and more eggs will get piled up in the basement.

 

My concern with the raffle ticket, also, is that it feels too much like a pity case. I fear that it might make picking up APs into a chore, done just for an unrelated prize. And on that line, I can't help wondering: wouldn't everything be easier if abandoned eggs somehow got more desirable? 

 

 

So here's a crazy suggestion: what if the lineage of an abandoned egg/hatchie gets wiped?

 

From the AP, breed isn't the single most important thing that determines what is kept and what isn't. I actually think the bigger, wider thing people look for is the lineage. Just from scrolling through the trading page, it's pretty common to see people list their wants as "cb hatchies." I also see a lot of "no messies please." 

 

This is how I see it working: once the egg/hatchling is abandoned, its data gets flagged as, well, abandoned. And once it's picked up by someone else, in the details page, the egg would either be marked as "Orphaned on: (date, like laid on or stolen on)" or "Father: (unknown) / Mother: (unknown)". Or both. And on the "view lineage" page, it will look just like a CB. Or, if that's too much, it might look like a 2G with question marks in place of parents.

 

I think this might actually make sense, too, story-wise. CB eggs are lineage-less, bred eggs have parents, and traded eggs would likely come with records of their breeding. But if eggs are "left in a familiar-looking cave" and are "just sitting outside the cave, dying," they likely don't come with sticky notes of family trees. Whoever picks it up will likely have no idea where the egg originated, or who are its parents. When you adopt an abandoned puppy from the street, you start fresh. 

 

 

I know this is a pretty radical idea, but I do think it's worth considering. Unless you're exclusively looking for rares, I believe AP eggs/hatchies are actually inherently more desirable than CBs on everything but their lineage. They generally have lower times, they don't egg-lock you, and you know what you're getting. But a lot of people like working on checkerboards or other pretty lineages, myself included, and AP dragons usually don't get to join that scene. I

 

I love getting dragons from the AP, and sincerely hope to help more people share this enthusiasm. Sorry I rambled 😂 and thanks for reading!!

 

 

P.S. I actually like the idea of a breed limit, too. It gets to the root of the problem. We could set a cap to the number of eggs that can be produced from breeding, in 1 scroll in 1 week, or something like that. It would be tricky to find the line, but surely there'd be a number where things are definitely unreasonable....? 

[purplehaze]

7 minutes ago, aurora e said:

So here's a crazy suggestion: what if the lineage of an abandoned egg/hatchie gets wiped?

 

NO! 1000 x NO!

A lot of people breed pretty lineages to share in the AP! And a lot of people appreciate them. Just look at the thread Great Lineages Found in the AP!

I have a lot of lineaged dragons that I have picked up in the AP just because I love the lineage. If there were nothing in the AP but eggs that showed no lineage I would hardly ever visit there again.

I do sometimes hunt the AP for CB eggs, but really that is a small percentage of what I am looking for.

[darkladyselenity]

I'm also against wiped lineages. 

 

This would completely wipe my hoarding @Terrafreaky abandons, which is one of the only reasons I mess with the AP at all. (Part of the reason I'm against limiting breeder eggs displayed.)

 

Maybe there isn't one single solution that is the answer, but a combination of things suggested here. 

[HeatherMarie]

A large number of users (I'd even say the majority of users) play this game specifically *because* of lineages. They hunt the AP specifically to find pretty lineages or lineages that they want to continue. Lineages are a *huge* part of the game at this point, I can't imagine wiping them on abandonment would be met with *any* positive reactions. (For my part, I spent over two years on DC *only* collecting messy lineages, some from trades but most from the AP. Two years. No lineages in the AP would mean I would've had no reason at all to be on DC.)

[GhostMouse]

I've been following along but admit I haven't read everything.

 

I think limiting number of eggs shown per breeder is the best option that's been presented so far.

 

I'm not in favor of limiting what one person can breed in a day or anything else that would limit someone's playing style, just like I'm not in favor of walls that take over the AP and limit everyone else's playing style. Randomizing the AP sounds like it would create to many issues; everyone should be able to see the same thing when they go there, and sorting by time left makes the most sense. I'd hate to breed something nice to the AP only to have it die unseen just because the page never shuffled it in (that's why I try to remember not to breed right before holidays).

 

Absolutely NO to the idea of "wiping" lineages. I love breeding nice things to the AP for others to find, and I love searching through it to see what has been left there. If all the dragons were "wiped" to be CB, or the only way to get lineages was to create them on your own scroll or use the trading hub, most of my interest in the game would be gone.

[demonicvampiregirl]

I'm for 3, 4, 7 and 8 on the first post. Those in my eyes would help the most with keeping the abandoned page down, we have too few slots per user to keep up with mass breeders and the more the site grows, the more people we have mass breeding and we just can't keep up with the amount. I'm not saying limit them from breeding, I'm saying limit how many either show or give us the slots we need to help out. Splitting the eggs into their own biomes would also help because we could also surf through them as we do the main cave.

[Lyncerta]

14 hours ago, darkladyselenity said:

Thinking about limiting the number of one breeder's eggs that are displayed, how would that work?

 

If I breed all 400+ of my caveborns, and drop the eggs, how long would it be before I saw them in the AP, and how many would I see once they appeared? How long would they visible? 

 

How much work would it take to overhaul the AP in this way? 

 

One thing I think the conversation is missing is how much time and effort would it take to implement something like this? And how exactly would it work?

 

We all (myself included) are throwing out ideas, but we're not the ones who have to figure out the coding to make it work. 

 

With that in mind, maybe leaving things as they are is the "best" (if not the most desirable) idea.

 

From what was discussed in this thread:
In your scenario, the eggs you've bred would start to appear when they reach the same time as eggs in AP - just the same as it is now.

How many would be visible at once depends on what display limit would be set. This wasn't decided yet, but players usually discussed something between three to six eggs from one breeder displayed at the same time.
Your eggs would be visible in AP untill they are all picked up (or in extreme case - die). AP in this case is still sorted by time remaining to death, but only 3 to 6 of your eggs with the lowest time would be visible and possible to pick up. The rest of your eggs would be hidden behind those eggs and unaccesible for others until the first 3 to 6 of your eggs are taken from AP. Even if time of those hidden eggs is lower than general time of eggs in AP.
I have no idea how much effort or time would it take to introduce this change to the AP

The idea is if the eggs you've massbred are considered nice for people hunting in abandoned page, at the end they will be picked up with no problem, even with the limit of only three or six visible at once. At the same time people who are not interested in your CBs offspring would have a chance to see eggs bred by other players. Your eggs would occupy only max of 6 spots in AP, while currently, without the display limit, they will take basically all visible slots (if not picked up fast enough).

Edited March 3, 2020 by Lyncerta

[Fiona]

13 hours ago, aurora e said:

So here's a crazy suggestion: what if the lineage of an abandoned egg/hatchie gets wiped?

 

Absolutely no on this. For one thing, you would then have a lot of "CB" eggs that are breeds that are not intended to be CB, or are prizes when CB. Furthermore, one of the things many people look for in t he AP are specific lineages, most especially things like SAltkin, or Thuweds or possibly 2nd gen prizes. Or other similar things that lose their uniqueness if their lineages are wiped.

 

Also, @darkladyselenity TJ has said before not to worry about  how easy or difficult something is to code. He'll figure that part out.

 

@demonicvampiregirl If you read all the way down the first post you see that 7 has pretty much been ruled out by TJ. And 8 has been disliked as favoring one style of play over others.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Fiona
further thoughts...

[Tawanda001]

Randomizing? I thought we were talking about the order the eggs show in the AP, older eggs mixed with newer eggs, not randomizing in the sense that different players see different eggs. No?

A no to wiping lineages, that's my main reason for going to the AP

Edited March 3, 2020 by Tawanda001

[olympe]

20 hours ago, aurora e said:

So here's a crazy suggestion: what if the lineage of an abandoned egg/hatchie gets wiped?

Then nobody but new players will get to really enjoy AP hunting during the Winter and Valentine holiday breeding seasons. Because nobody would be able to pick up the AP eggs due to CB limits. Nobody would ever be able to find perfect mates for their own lineages, or nice lineages they'd like to continue in general. People wouldn't be able to randomly gift bred shinies via the AP because these would turn up as CBs.

 

While this idea is creative, I don't think it would work out.

[HeatherMarie]

7 hours ago, Tawanda001 said:

Randomizing? I thought we were talking about the order the eggs show in the AP, older eggs mixed with newer eggs, not randomizing in the sense that different players see different eggs. No?

A no to wiping lineages, that's my main reason for going to the AP

 

From looking back at the last two pages, it looks like people are kinda talking about both? I believe some interpreted it as complete randomization with every refresh or similar. That's how I interpreted it. But either way, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

They both bring up the same types of questions/issues: if the lowest-timed aren't showing first, does that mean there will be low-timed eggs that die because they simply haven't been selected to be up front yet? Will it actually make it *harder* for users to find what they want (especially if it's automatically refreshed every minute or whatever, which seems to specifically be what was proposed first on the last page)? Plus, again, it would seriously screw with the entire practice of keeping an eye on times so you know when certain eggs should hit the AP (Thuweds, a *pretty* coordinated wall, people who mentioned they bred certain breeds at a certain time, etc). 

[Fuzzbucket]

23 hours ago, aurora e said:

So here's a crazy suggestion: what if the lineage of an abandoned egg/hatchie gets wiped?

 

 

Then there would be no point trawling the AP at all. Easier to catch what you want CB in the biomes. I only go to the AP to find ideas for new lines or eggs that fit lines where I need new blood.

 

19 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

A large number of users (I'd even say the majority of users) play this game specifically *because* of lineages. They hunt the AP specifically to find pretty lineages or lineages that they want to continue. Lineages are a *huge* part of the game at this point, I can't imagine wiping them on abandonment would be met with *any* positive reactions. (For my part, I spent over two years on DC *only* collecting messy lineages, some from trades but most from the AP. Two years. No lineages in the AP would mean I would've had no reason at all to be on DC.)

 

7 hours ago, Tawanda001 said:

Randomizing? I thought we were talking about the order the eggs show in the AP, older eggs mixed with newer eggs, not randomizing in the sense that different players see different eggs. No?

A no to wiping lineages, that's my main reason for going to the AP

 

Agree so much with both these posts. Of all the suggestions in this thread, this is far and away the worst.

[GhostMouse]

2 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

...

Will it actually make it *harder* for users to find what they want (especially if it's automatically refreshed every minute or whatever, which seems to specifically be what was proposed first on the last page)?

...

This raises another good point, which is that sometimes you'll see an egg go by in the AP, and refresh to see if whoever picked it up will drop it back in. If the whole AP shuffles with every refresh, or every X minutes, or whatever, you may never see that egg again, even if it is dropped back into the AP.

I can see the appeal of randomization, it's frustrating to refresh over and over and still just see the same collection of eggs you aren't interested in (wall or not), but I think it would cause more issues than it would solve.

[Tawanda001]

14 minutes ago, GhostMouse said:

This raises another good point, which is that sometimes you'll see an egg go by in the AP, and refresh to see if whoever picked it up will drop it back in. If the whole AP shuffles with every refresh, or every X minutes, or whatever, you may never see that egg again, even if it is dropped back into the AP.

I can see the appeal of randomization, it's frustrating to refresh over and over and still just see the same collection of eggs you aren't interested in (wall or not), but I think it would cause more issues than it would solve.

It would for sure cause a change to how people use the AP. I'm on the fence as to whether that's good, bad, or just different. It would make people reconsider tossing an egg they picked up to see if they could find something better (I'm guilty!) because they know they have a good chance of picking the egg up again.

And even though I've managed to pick up some 2g thuweds by 'timing the AP' I would not mind at all if that weren't possible because players couldn't predict the timing, It would mean those eggs truly had more of a chance to go to more, random players.rather than mostly winding up on the scrolls of those who who sit and wait on them to show at on a somewhat predictable time frame..