Cave egg sprite revamp or reveal

[CryptidUni]

On 6/4/2020 at 7:41 AM, HeatherMarie said:

Regardless of if images-only, description-only, both, whatever: Big Huge NO for any sort of unlocking/encyclopedia-tied/etc. *That* is the *most* unfair idea in this thread. If the reason for this whole convo is helping newbies, *that* would not help them in any sense and would greatly advantage players that have been around for awhile and unlocked everything already. If the reason is 'text is more difficult for some people than others', how would this suggestion help that? Eggs are easier to memorize/remember, okay, but users will still have to *view* eggs in order to get them 'unlocked' in the first place, and until they do they are still in that 'text is harder' position. 

 

No unlocking. No requirements. If this is a suggestion to help people, it can't be hidden behind that sort of thing. 

Yes to this, exactly this. ^

[Paradisiske]

No requirements for unlocking if we want a level playing field. Everyone starts out the same.

 

A big issue I see with this in adding images is lag. DC has already been dying with a bunch of tombstone pages. How would adding images to the cave affect this? 

 

I catch cb metals and see them a lot in the cave with just the text.  Adding images would be neutral to my playing as I would still get the cb metals. 

 

As for alts, instead of all these complicated workarounds how about just simply showing what egg its going to be huh? The cave already knows what egg it is when it generates the egg in the biomes. WE know this for a fact because we used to be able to view these eggs before picking them up. 

 

Idk if adding images wouldn't put too much stress and lag on the site then I'm not really against it. Whatever can be done to help people hunt.

 

And hunting in the AP is not the same as hunting in the cave. AP you don't know what lineage you're going to get PLUS what is in the AP is at the mercy of other players do on their own scroll.

 

Cave hunting is in no way similar. With the cave you are at the mercy of the ratios. You know any egg is going to be cb. What other players breed does not affect your cave hunting as those ratios were divorced from each other.

[pinkgothic]

I'll be frank and say it confuses me a bit that a recurring argument against this is that the status quo levels the playing field.

 

I can tell you that my touch screen makes me possibly an order of magnitude faster in clicking on eggs than someone who only has a mouse (for example, I can hover my fingers over multiple spots on the screen, and then tap the one that's relevant - no repositioning necessary). And it's a known problem that people with latency spikes on the network route to the Dragon Cave server(s) are disadvantaged to people who don't have latency spikes - e.g. those in US metropolitan areas will be better off at catching than those in a rural area elsewhere on the globe. That's not going to change (and that's why we have the Market, bless ❤️).

 

Meanwhile, currently, people who have problems memorising text (of a constantly growing number of species - and to put this into some perspective, I've hit the point where I can no longer always remember the species name if you show me the adult sprite, even though I recognise the sprite) are also disadvantaged, against people who can. You would increase the levelling of the playing field if you added images. (Not true if we went for images-only, for the record.)

 

Other people will almost surely still manage to snatch that CB gold away from you, because they have a touch screen, or because they have a more reliable internet latency, or just (and most likely) because it's all they're sitting in the cave for and all they're priming their reflexes for, while you're browsing for miscellaneous goodies including uncommons.

 

I haven't caught a CB metallic in months (I want to say "in years", but I got lucky once a few months back). I don't mind! I'm not looking to increase this occurrence; I have enough shards that I can buy one if I want one. I'm usually hunting for purples (for Fertility) or pinks (for scroll separator freezies) in the biomes, or species I like (like Labradorites, Scripts, or purple Ridgewings). Images in the cave would make this less disorienting. Yes, of course I would try to click a metallic if I saw one, but I already do that, and I catch it with what feels like a 50% chance when I do see it, because touchscreen + good internet + good reflexes. I'm just not hunting enough to even see them, because I'm not trying to optimise for rares.

 

Presently, the people who hunt rares reliably memorise a tiny handful of description fragments and use those to hunt. Anyone who 'just happens' upon a rare will not get that rare, because the people who have memorised the description fragment will get it before them. Rare-catching is 90% having the dedication for it, 10% everything else.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you add images, the people who are dedicated rare egg hunters are still going to get the rares, but now some of those dedicated rare hunters might be people who couldn't do the previous catching method well due to problems with parsing text. You've increased the diversity of the people who are getting rares.

 

Anyway, lots of words to this effect: I think this would help increase the number of people who can catch rares, but it's still going to be a tiny handful of people.

 

Regarding unlocking, I don't think it makes a huge difference in effect, since a few days of clicking through the hatcheries will get you all the egg unlocks you could possibly need, and it might be a nice minigame. But, although I know we're not supposed to argue about server strain because that's up to TJ to decide, it is true that having to unlock the images first would be an additional check the cave pages need to do against the database before showing you the cave eggs (and this calculation needs to be done at least once for every set of eggs visible for each individual viewing them, i.e. it can't be globally cached, but only for your account, until the egg set switches), and I'd rather the code didn't have to compute that. It's probably not the worst overhead ever, but I'd just prefer not.

 

As to my actual opinion:

 

I would like this change, but it's obviously not the end of the world if it doesn't happen. ❤️ I don't care if alts are mystery eggs, mixed eggs, or just revealed to the world; I'm much more interested in what happens with the unambiguous cases, which would already be a great QoL booster.

[ShorahNagi]

What about - as a sort of compromise, if the cave eggs were slightly blurry, greyscale versions of the egg.

 

For some eggs (horse vs. Frill) - this would let players see which one it is. (The vertical stripe versus the swirl)

 

For others (pink vs. Flamingo in the Coast) - this still keeps some of the mystery of the same description [yes, there is a shading/color difference - even if greyscale].

 

For eggs with more than one variant (Dorsal, Ridgewing, etc) - the surprise still remains [again, save maybe a minor shading/color difference between the two]

 

To me, this keeps the mystery element for new and old players, while also helping others learn to identify eggs. It also doesn't change much when it comes to noticing a Gold/Silver egg as they would look similar to some of the other 'unremarkable' eggs we already have for common breeds (looking at you mint, dark green, etc)

 

TL/DR: I'm neutral on changing this

 

[angelicdragonpuppy]

Look, eggs are always going to go to whoever has the fastest comprehension (and click speed, and internet speed); it doesn't matter if that comprehension is based on text or picture recognition. "Text based is more fair" isn't true, it's still a matter of "who comprehends fastest," it just gives everyone a tedious loophole to jump through.

 

As someone who's played this game for ten years and STILL has to double check the wiki to remember which egg description is which, I'd really appreciate this. I've pitched having egg descriptions in the encyclopedia before as a middle ground, but even that requires more tedious memory searching then I'd prefer to do. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

 

Edit: the only real reason I can think of to keep this is to keep the mystery / chance element around eggs with alts (ie ridgewings, dorsals) but I think the novelty and appetite for that type of gamble has faded. There's so many dragons and so many people trying to get them that stumbling across the right egg at the right time and being able to grab it first is already a minor miracle, no need to add extra layers of complication on top of that. 

Edited April 14, 2021 by angelicdragonpuppy

[pegasi1978]

I can think of another reason why text is more fair -- if you are someone who regularly cleans the cache on your browser deleting pictures, or if you have never seen an egg of a certain type before, it takes longer to pull the image to load. With the mystery egg showing it's the same image every time. When you live in an area with rural internet providers that extra time gained by having the mystery egg load rather than the true sprite can make a difference. 

[Fuzzbucket]

That's a very good point - especially for those - very few of us - who still have to resort to dialup.

[Seriva Senkalora]

Honestly this is one of the very few challenging parts of the game.

If everything is easily obtainable - where is the fun?

 

No support, sorry.

[Murkydepths]

I like it the way it is, I always thought the 'mystery egg' made the game a bit more exciting. And because we have the ap which shows visuals, and the cave which shows text, I feel like it's fair to both? 

[pinkgothic]

On 4/14/2021 at 1:59 PM, pegasi1978 said:

I can think of another reason why text is more fair -- if you are someone who regularly cleans the cache on your browser deleting pictures, or if you have never seen an egg of a certain type before, it takes longer to pull the image to load. With the mystery egg showing it's the same image every time. When you live in an area with rural internet providers that extra time gained by having the mystery egg load rather than the true sprite can make a difference. 

Hmm, surely the better solution here would be to turn off images for Dragon Cave? I would expect that Dragon Cave's image heavyweight is the intricate background (assuming you're not on a skin that basically has none) - the main skin's background is 163kB, versus less than 1kB for an egg. The eggs in the cave have a width and height set, so if you turn off images, you'd still have a 'broken image' icon of the same size you can click on, without any overhead at all.

[Fuzzbucket]

If this were to happen and you turn off the images you'd have nothing - no way to know what you were clicking on - that's a powerful reason to stick with text.

[pinkgothic]

11 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

If this were to happen and you turn off the images you'd have nothing - no way to know what you were clicking on - that's a powerful reason to stick with text.

I'm sufficiently confused by your comment that I think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about the situation where a user has chosen to disable their local cache or frequently clears the cache, and the mystery egg is replaced with egg sprites. No other changes!  The text is still there.

[Charu]

Solid no. Yes, there are an immense amount of eggs today compared to how many there were 15 years ago, but I don't think this would be a positive change. Eggs are already picked up by people with faster reflexes and by my experience, people react much quicker to the AP than the text descriptions on the cave. I've snatched plenty of Trios (and once a CB Gold) because people look at the description and confuse it for something else and ignore it. All it takes is a few people ignoring it consistently to realize what is sitting in front of you. 

 

I also think it would trivialize getting eggs with the same description. 

[Fuzzbucket]

43 minutes ago, pinkgothic said:

I'm sufficiently confused by your comment that I think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about the situation where a user has chosen to disable their local cache or frequently clears the cache, and the mystery egg is replaced with egg sprites. No other changes!  The text is still there.

But this suggestion was to have the actual egg sprites show instead of the mystery egg and the text.

 

Quote

welcome to the topic of “Egg sprites from caves should be revealed”

I don't think the people saying it would load so slowly are that troubled by the mystery eggs loading. It's what it would be like if it were the ACTUAL egg sprites.

[MissK.]

33 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

But this suggestion was to have the actual egg sprites show instead of the mystery egg and the text.

 

I don't think anyone was suggesting getting rid of the descriptions, only displaying the actual egg sprites instead of the mystery egg ones...? Unless I'm completely misunderstanding things.

 

If the suggestion is indeed for showing egg sprites and keeping the descriptions as they are, I don't feel too strongly about it but leaning towards support. There's a lot more to remember by now than there was a few years ago after all. On the off chance that it is suggested to get rid of the descriptions though I'm not in favour.

[Sextonator]

I do find it hard to egg hunt currently with the inability to remember descriptions for a good number of dragons, but I don’t think I agree with showing the actual egg image.

 

Would it be fair to just say what the egg is underneath the description?

[Paradisiske]

1 hour ago, Sextonator said:

I do find it hard to egg hunt currently with the inability to remember descriptions for a good number of dragons, but I don’t think I agree with showing the actual egg image.

 

Would it be fair to just say what the egg is underneath the description?

Hmm like this?

 

Egg sprite

This shiny egg radiates power. 

(Zyumorph)

[Sextonator]

Yeah, like that. There is a worry that it can be abused, but currently descriptions can be abused already, and I know people will auto click on certain words, so I don’t see it being more of a problem than it already is, and a positive that can come of it is that people learn breed descriptions because it’ll tell you the breed underneath.

[Murkydepths]

I don't really see the point in having descriptions at all if the breed is listed underneath. Might as well add the egg description into the encyclopaedia as a bit of extra info. 

[HeatherMarie]

2 hours ago, Murkydepths said:

I don't really see the point in having descriptions at all if the breed is listed underneath. Might as well add the egg description into the encyclopaedia as a bit of extra info. 

 

Actually, after so many years being trained to hunt for specific descriptions, I will admit I sometimes recognize a description as click-worthy without actually registering what breed it is at first. After so many years of descriptions-only, having a breed name and no description would mean having to re-train our minds all over again. Yes, I know 'radiate' is a keyword in a description I need to click on, does it immediately click that it's a Zyumorph? Not always.

[Sextonator]

I actually believe egg decriptions should be in the encyclopedia anyway, especially since it's so hard to remember which ones are which.

[Fuzzbucket]

It's an awful lot quicker to check on the single page in the wiki than check individual dragons in the encyclopaedia....

[Shadowdrake]

Not if you know what dragon you want and just need to know what to hunt for. The wiki site is full of in-your-face ads and low-quality images compared to the encyclopedia.

[Lagie]

No support here.

I like the mystery, even with the added challenge that on my phone I can only see part of the description.

(The forest ones I only see the top words...)

[Shokomon]

Just to note.

 

The suggestion is for this:

 

To become this:

...if you have the eggs unlocked already in the encyclopedia, NOT to do away with the descriptions entirely.

 

(Fun note, I had to look up 2 out of 3 of these eggs. I only knew the Nocturnes without looking them up.)