2021-02-17 - Abandoned Page Updates

[Charu]

7:55 AM cave time, the AP is completely walled off by a single breed. Most likely by the same breeder, though their scroll name doesn’t display on their dragons. 
 

This seems to have been a perfectly balanced update. 

 

Also helping eggs that would have died in the AP from the holiday wall turn into NDs or hatch normally is NOT an exploit. How is giving people the opportunity to collect an absurdly rare dragon on a pixel collecting site even remotely game ruining for everyone else? Those eggs would have died. You guys realize that, right? It’s so accusatory to call it “exploiting” as if the people giving those dying eggs views were doing some kind of horrible thing that is going to destroy the game. It’s so clear that the people finger pointing and calling this an “exploit” have no idea what is happening and are calling foul because of that. 
 

TJ banned ND discussion from the forum for years. Imagine if he had a blanket stance on all dragons. Y’all would have had a lot of fun trying to figure out Cantors. I guess it’s different if it’s the NDs though. Just remove them from the site at this rate if you want them prohibitively difficult and don’t want people to try and share them with others through limited time events that require weeks of planning. Good lord. 

[Jazeki]

19 minutes ago, Charu said:

7:55 AM cave time, the AP is completely walled off by a single breed.

TJ did say he would adjust the number of eggs shown by a single breeder once he saw how this worked out.

[Confused Cat]

Too bad we can't tell what's going on. Could be a glitch, i.e. the AP update just not working correctly, or could be two or more people who decided to prove the update was "useless" right after it was posted, or two or more people just trying to help someone who needs a non-Sapphire from a Sapphire parent.

 

No matter what's going on right now - sooner or later we will find out what a one-person, one-breed wall looks like with the update. 

 

[Mnkn10]

That was one, short lived wall that proves nothing. If one-breed walls continue to be a common occurrence, maybe TJ could limit the number of one breed that can appear at a time to 24? Just an idea.

 

Overall, I think this is a great update. It doesn't stop people from massbreeding, while making the AP more varied for those who hate massbreeds. It lets people who don't like holidays continue playing as more or less normal during them.

[Fuzzbucket]

4 minutes ago, Mnkn10 said:

That was one, short lived wall that proves nothing. If one-breed walls continue to be a common occurrence, maybe TJ could limit the number of one breed that can appear at a time to 24? Just an idea.

No - that's unfair to someone who happens to have bred two of the offending breed when someone else has run a mass breed.

 

4 minutes ago, Mnkn10 said:

 

Overall, I think this is a great update. It doesn't stop people from massbreeding, while making the AP more varied for those who hate massbreeds. It lets people who don't like holidays continue playing as more or less normal during them.

Exactly this. It's brilliant,even if it needs the odd tweak.

 

1 hour ago, Charu said:

7:55 AM cave time, the AP is completely walled off by a single breed. Most likely by the same breeder, though their scroll name doesn’t display on their dragons. 
 

 

Can't have been completely walled off - there's the sixth line thing.

[Mnkn10]

 

3 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

No - that's unfair to someone who happens to have bred two of the offending breed when someone else has run a mass breed.

 

I fail to see how it's unfair? That person's egg(s) will eventually get picked up after/alongside the massbred eggs.

[ValidEmotions]

2 hours ago, Charu said:

TJ banned ND discussion from the forum for years. Imagine if he had a blanket stance on all dragons. Y’all would have had a lot of fun trying to figure out Cantors. I guess it’s different if it’s the NDs though. Just remove them from the site at this rate if you want them prohibitively difficult and don’t want people to try and share them with others through limited time events that require weeks of planning. Good lord. 

Just want to point out that, in fact, no, TJ never banned ND discussion and he clarified this back in 2019

Quote

This is not a change to any written rule, but I want to clarify that the forum rules do not disallow discussion of any gameplay elements on Dragon Cave so long as the discussion does not involve or encourage breaking site rules. This means that topics such as neglected dragons are fine.

 

[Confused Cat]

1 hour ago, Fuzzbucket said:

 

Can't have been completely walled off - there's the sixth line thing.

 

 

It was completely full of Sapphires (all rows), with only some "Sapphire-fails" between them appearing sometimes. That's why I was wondering if there was a glitch or if they had been bred by more than one person.

 

 

[Slavic]

18 minutes ago, Confused Cat said:

 

It was completely full of Sapphires (all rows), with only some "Sapphire-fails" between them appearing sometimes. That's why I was wondering if there was a glitch or if they had been bred by more than one person.

 

 

Yep yep, I saw this too, but it lasted much less time than most other single-breed walls I've seen, so maybe it's working? 

[Shadowdrake]

I assume people had picked up and re-abandoned some sapphires, so they counted as different abandoners just enough to fill the AP.

 

Also TJ may not have personally banned ND discussion, but the mods were acting as if he had, removing ND chatter literally anywhere they saw it. I'm not sure if him not noticing this makes it better or worse.

Edited February 20, 2021 by Shadowdrake

[purplehaze]

35 minutes ago, Shadowdrake said:

I assume people had picked up and re-abandoned some sapphires, so they counted as different abandoners just enough to fill the AP.

 

If that is the case then this change will not really "fix" the problem of walls because that is what people do with eggs in a wall.

[Shadowdrake]

3 minutes ago, purplehaze said:

If that is the case then this change will not really "fix" the problem of walls because that is what people do with eggs in a wall.

TJ just needs to lower the viewed egg numbers like he said he was considering, it's not that big a deal. Particularly unwanted walls are barely picked up at all, going by the many times I've tried to grab things from my own massbreeds and found the majority ungrabbable.

[angelicdragonpuppy]

One new holiday sitting in the AP!

[lexi_]

On 2/19/2021 at 2:22 AM, tjekan said:

I don't really get what the big deal was with the low-time eggs. The ND group doesn't need to commandeer the AP to accomplish that. They can just all breed eggs at the same hour one day, wait a week and there they'll be with the exact same scrollful of 1-hour-old timestamped eggs apiece, without having to rely on the vagaries of the AP at all.

Am I missing something here?

 

20 hours ago, tjekan said:

Not trying to minimize your thing, I'm sure it takes a lot of skill and luck and all. It is after all the rarest dragon in the game. But how does getting a free scrollful of super-ER eggs save you "months" of attempts? It seems to me it would save you slightly less than one week, which is how long it would take for a scrollful of eggs on your scroll to get to neglected age naturally.
Do the ones you catch from the AP have a reduced chance of dying in the process or something?

 

sorry for the very late response to this, but i thought i'd clarify. (i was going to participate in the ND wall thing myself )

 

the point was to create a whole mass of them from the eggs that would still be hidden behind the priority valentines eggs. they normally would end up dying, but we were going to experiment on them when they were still behind the wall by putting them into auto-refreshers. its not about making personal neglected dragons, that can be done any time. im scroll locked now with experiments lined up LOL. it was more about flooding them into the AP for people to grab, since theyd regularly end up dying anyway. 

 

it wasnt just about... creating neglected dragons all at one time, independently. lol. the point in relying on the AP wall was because there'd be a whole mass of extremely low-timed (and stubborn, ideally, like avatars/prizes/zyus and the off fire gem/lumina/brimstone/tetra etc) eggs ripe for experimenting on, WAY more than we'd all be able to hold. (there were over 1100+ eggs bred for this project!) THAT is why we wanted to do this, but now all chances of it happening are completely dashed because now the eggs arent hidden under the wall anymore, and thus won't ever get to the time they need to be at in order to have a chance at turning into a neglected, since people love to grab low-time eggs simply because theyre low time.

[Firefury Amahira]

On 2/19/2021 at 10:02 PM, Nine said:

I don't think people making neglecteds in the backlog behind holidays count as an 'exploit' or bug, lol. That stuff dies anyways, it's people recycling tossed bottles and turning them into pretty flowerpots. Very expensive flowerpots that mostly end up on the flowerpot trading hub.

 

It's a good change regarding those annoying walls, which one could argue don't help ratios anyways because statistics are a tricky thing, though I do wonder if this will prolong the length of time holidays are in the AP for. Curious to then see how prolific "holiday fatigue" becomes, or if eggs end up dying due to disinterest.

Hi, let me show you some statistics that show it does help ratios:

Blacktip "mega" massbreeds since 2018. Note that the volume of blacktips has hit a plateau and actually begun to decline, versus the volume of celestials that has made a statistically significant increase. For added tasty statistics, here's the raw breeding data that the graph was created from. Of particular note are the annual totals. In 2019 there were 6488 attempts made, producing 7828 blacktips. In 2020 there were 8540 attempts made, producing 6899 blacktips. Despite 2020 having roughly 2,000 more breeding attempts than 2019 did, 1,000 fewer eggs were produced... because the ratios have been tilted and blacktips are no longer quite as badly underpopulated as they used to be.

 

I suspect the main issue with the AP change right now is that "per abandoner" bit, rather than "per breeder." It would probably work much better as an anti-AP-clog measure if it was by breeder, and likely the number of eggs per breeder knocked down by at least half of the current 24; right now it just takes two people breeding a bunch of eggs around the same general time to clog up the works. If the per-breeder total is fine-tuned to six like was floated in past discussions about this very change, at least then you'd need 5 people massbreeding at the same time which is both less likely to happen by pure chance and a bit harder to organize if done intentionally.

[HeatherMarie]

15 hours ago, ValidEmotions said:

Just want to point out that, in fact, no, TJ never banned ND discussion and he clarified this back in 2019

 

 

Just because TJ says that now doesn't mean it wasn't banned on-forum before, whether TJ meant it to be or not. It *was* banned on-forum for years, in the form of mods consistently closing any ND-related threads and immediately shutting down any discussion of them. Perhaps TJ didn't mean for mods to do that, who knows, but discussion *was* effectively banned for years. 

 

 

14 minutes ago, Firefury Amahira said:

rpopulated as they used to be.

 

I suspect the main issue with the AP change right now is that "per abandoner" bit, rather than "per breeder." It would probably work much better as an anti-AP-clog measure if it was by breeder, and likely the number of eggs per breeder knocked down by at least half of the current 24; right now it just takes two people breeding a bunch of eggs around the same general time to clog up the works. If the per-breeder total is fine-tuned to six like was floated in past discussions about this very change, at least then you'd need 5 people massbreeding at the same time which is both less likely to happen by pure chance and a bit harder to organize if done intentionally.

 

This is true. Especially the 'per abandoner', I think most people who participated in AP-wall-solution discussions were thinking any limitations would be per-breeder, not per-abandoner. If it's only per-abandoner, it may not truly help the 'wall' issue at all, because 30+ eggs from one breeder could still wall as long as a few people picked a few up and re-abandoned. 

[Confused Cat]

On 2/17/2021 at 7:41 AM, TJ09 said:

 

Visible eggs in the abandoned page are now limited to no more than 24 eggs per-abandoner.

 

@TJ09 Can you please clarify if "abandoner" means "last person who owned it" (including those who picked it up on the AP and re-abandoned it) or "person who bred it"?
 

("Last person who owned it" wouldn't really help with the "wall" issue, so I automatically read it as "breeder", but others read it differently - and there was a one-breed wall yesterday where we couldn't see if it was one breeder or several.)

[TJ09]

6 minutes ago, Confused Cat said:

 

@TJ09 Can you please clarify if "abandoner" means "last person who owned it" (including those who picked it up on the AP and re-abandoned it) or "person who bred it"?
 

("Last person who owned it" wouldn't really help with the "wall" issue, so I automatically read it as "breeder", but others read it differently - and there was a one-breed wall yesterday where we couldn't see if it was one breeder or several.)

 

Abandoner is the person who pressed "abandon."

 

Based on the data I have, there's no need to focus on the "original" source of the eggs (cave, breeder, whatever); when I talked about how "a few people are able to disproportionately affect how others play" I was specifically looking at eggs abandoned by people, and there's not much evidence to suggest eggs from a single breeder are being spread around before being abandoned.

[Confused Cat]

 

8 minutes ago, TJ09 said:

Abandoner is the person who pressed "abandon."

 

If I understand this correctly, it looks like you didn't want to accomplish what we were hoping for (6 "non-wall" eggs appearing during a "wall").

 

If someone sends 200 Blacktips to the AP, some of the visible ones will always be picked up, looked at, and tossed back within minutes, so the AP would show 24 never-picked-up Blacktips and 6 re-abandoned ones. Then we have exactly the same type of wall that caused all the discussions about walls.

 

What is the intended effect of the change?

(Apart from the row of non-holiday eggs during the holiday, which was great!)

 

Edited February 21, 2021 by Confused Cat

[FoxintheBox4]

There are already walls of same breeds again.. it's enough if 2 people massbreed now to be that way...

 

I'd say the tweak should be max 3 eggs from 1 person of the same breed per wall... when taken another appears etc. If more breeds per same person then always 3 of different kind on wall ~~ and 24 max so 8 different breeds from 1 person~   

And that way it would take more than 8 people to fill the wall with same ~darn~breed.

[dragongrrl]

AP time is above 5 hours now. Doesn't look like there are enough breeders out there right now to produce incu-hatch eggs. I'd rather have the random hour of wall than 5 day+ eggs any day

[MissK.]

1 hour ago, TJ09 said:

 

Abandoner is the person who pressed "abandon."

 

Based on the data I have, there's no need to focus on the "original" source of the eggs (cave, breeder, whatever); when I talked about how "a few people are able to disproportionately affect how others play" I was specifically looking at eggs abandoned by people, and there's not much evidence to suggest eggs from a single breeder are being spread around before being abandoned.

 

In my experience, when there is a wall I will pick up 2-3 eggs and drop them back just to check what kind of lineages there are (or even just to see who bred them out of curiosity). If even a few people do the same, wouldn't that entirely defeat the purpose of this update by blocking the last row with the same eggs? I could probably block it myself just by picking up and dropping enough eggs in fact. Or do you mean you have data that indicates this doesn't actually happen/wouldn't be significant? 

[Silverwatermist]

1 hour ago, dragongrrl said:

AP time is above 5 hours now. Doesn't look like there are enough breeders out there right now to produce incu-hatch eggs. I'd rather have the random hour of wall than 5 day+ eggs any day

Personally, I'm the opposite. I'd rather see different eggs at 5 days X hours than an hour-long wall of the same thing ... even if that "same thing" is one of my favorite breeds, it's just very boring to me. I'd rather be able to refresh the AP and see different types of eggs come through so I can grab whatever breed interests me, because I can still use incubate on them and cut down on tons of time. It's still way faster than grabbing a CB and waiting 7 days, so for me, I don't mind a slightly higher time on the AP eggs.
 

23 minutes ago, MissK. said:

In my experience, when there is a wall I will pick up 2-3 eggs and drop them back just to check what kind of lineages there are (or even just to see who bred them out of curiosity). If even a few people do the same, wouldn't that entirely defeat the purpose of this update by blocking the last row with the same eggs? I could probably block it myself just by picking up and dropping enough eggs in fact. Or do you mean you have data that indicates this doesn't actually happen/wouldn't be significant? 

Usually when I see a wall in the AP, I completely click out of the site and come back later, but whenever I do interact with a wall, I do the exact same as you: I pick up 1-3 eggs to see what their deal is, then re-abandon them and leave. So now I'm wondering the same thing you are and would like an answer to this as well!

[Confused Cat]

1 hour ago, TJ09 said:

 

 there's not much evidence to suggest eggs from a single breeder are being spread around before being abandoned.

 

Do you mean they are not being teleported between scrolls before they are sent to the AP? That's probably very true, especially since most massbreeders will breed directly to the AP and not manually abandon every single egg.

 

However, once the eggs arrive on the AP, at least some of them will be picked up and abandoned again (and again and again).

 

Which means - again, if I understand correctly - the (last) person who pressed "abandon" on an egg will change, and the AP will display 30 eggs from the same breeder (although different abandoners) just like before.

 

It looks like this update did not address the problem that we thought it was supposed to address. Did we (or at least I) completely misunderstand your intentions?

 

Would you say this update works as intended if at some point the AP is completely full of Blacktip eggs that were all bred by the same person?

I was expecting that in that situation, the last row of AP eggs would display the lowest time eggs from the AP backlog that were NOT bred by the person who bred the Blacktips.

 

 

[purplehaze]

2 hours ago, Confused Cat said:

I was expecting that in that situation, the last row of AP eggs would display the lowest time eggs from the AP backlog that were NOT bred by the person who bred the Blacktips.

 

Exactly. I can see it very well not changing anything at all for the walls if it is "per abandoner". I will often pick up an egg or two from a wall, just to see if there are good lineages there. It would only take, at most, six people doing that to accidentally keep the wall filling the AP. Seems to totally negate the purpose for the change.

 

Maybe TJ has studied the makeup of the walls more than I would be able to and knows this will work, but I am less hopeful now that this is a solution.

 

Edited February 21, 2021 by purplehaze