Protection for eggs/hatchlings gaining views behind the AP wall.

[Myoukin]

A problem that I've noticed going on for a while that has been making hunting in the AP frustrating is that whenever something really nice is coming through the AP (2G Salts/Thuweds/etc.), within a day or two, someone will have viewbombed them while they're still floating around in the AP. If the AP is below 4 days, that means no one gets a chance to grab anything before it hatches and/or grows up wild; this has happened two years in a row for the blue/light blue Pyranost Holiday SAlts and it just happened for the Christmas Thuweds. I don't know who's doing it (and I was under the impression viewbombing was against the rules anyway), but it's being done consistently enough that it's making it nearly impossible to hunt special lineages, which sucks when you're timing out a drop only to find someone ruined it the next day and there's nothing you can do about it.

 

What I propose is some type of protection measure for egg/hatchlings in the AP; either:

• Eggs/Hatchlings get a frozen status of sorts and don't gain views/unique view/clicks while they're in the AP, or at least not until it gets down to a certain time (maybe 1d 1h left?). 
• Eggs/Hatchlings are coded so they can't be added to hatcheries unless they're on a user's scroll.
• 'Accept aid from others' option in the Account Settings can be reworked; having the option checked allows eggs/hatchlings to be freely added to hatcheries whether on a scroll or in the AP while having the option unchecked locks eggs/hatchling bred to the AP from being addable until they hit someone else's scroll (the wording may be a bit funky, let me know if someone has a better way to word this).
• Eggs/Hatchlings are locked from growing to the next stage while they're in the AP, but are still able to gain views. Picking it up out of the AP (if it has enough views/unique views/clicks) will let it grow to the next stage.

 

Let me know what you guys think or if you have any ideas because we need to start taking some measures against all of the viewbombing.

Edited December 26, 2023 by Myoukin
Added a fourth option

[Moriaty]

I...don't like that. 

It's very very rare occasion, but when something like this Halloween's death wall happens, I use silvi to save eggs bred by my dragons. I don't care if they grow up wild, I don't want them dead. Most of those eggs don't even get picked up by anyone, ever, so both of these proposal would mean there would be no way for me to save these eggs from death should something like this happen

 

Also I think there're people who want eggs from their dragon to only end up on their scroll and so when breeding holidays they deliberately kill the other multiclutch egg. Though I guess that could be done when the egg is still on their scroll before they pick one to keep

 

EDIT: I did not notice the 1d 1h part. If that's the case I personally probably am gonna be fine with this situation. However I still think this other portion of player who want to try kill their multiclutch eggs floating in AP exists, so not sure about how these suggestion can play out for them

Edited December 26, 2023 by Moriaty

[Myoukin]

Maybe it would be possible to rework the 'Accept aid from others' option in the account settings so it does something other than just wag a metaphorical finger at people; if you turn it on, it allows you or other people to freely add eggs/hatchlings to hatcheries whether they're on your scroll or in the AP, but leaving it off prevents people from adding something that isn't on their scroll.

[Dracaena]

ARGH!  The thuweds have been bombed again!  @TJ09 please look at how many of your offspring lately have grown up wild.  This is counterproductive to distributing them via the AP.  This is very much a problem!

 

At this point I'd take the holiday death wall over giving trolls the win.

[KageSora]

I'd probably just quit the game in frustration if you forced logins on all hatch sites.  It'd just be too much if a pain to have to log in constantly.

 

That said, also, you don't need a hatch site to viewbomb--you just need a forum that's got enough activity to generate UVs and then you can spam any auto-refresher you want.  (And if you propose blocking ARs I'm not sure if that's feasible and if it is that would be a nightmare for trying to make NDs anymore).  Heck, you don't even need the AR if you get enough traffic to generate tons of OVs.

 

That said, I think a block on being able to obtain views while they're in the AP until they get down to a low enough time would be acceptable--it would also be helpful in cases where somebody forgot to yank it out of a hatchery before dumping it to make room for something else, prevent them from continuing to get views and maybe getting sick while in the AP.

[Lushwave]

I wouldn't want a lock on views. It's nice to sometimes find eggs in the AP that have been gaining views over time and show up with cracks or large holes in them, saving their new owners some time and effort.

 

How about a lock on growth instead? Eggs and hatchlings in the AP will not hatch or grow into adulthood until they acquire an owner, no matter how many views they have.

 

Since we're on the topic of bombers making sAlts and thuweds grow wild, a growth lock would negate the threat of wild growth altogether. And with view gain still possible, bombing attempts can end up making such eggs easier for hunters to identify by their large holes - with the added bonus of these eggs already prepped with enough views for hatching - possibly dissuading bombers from trying this if they are not intending to benefit others.

[04uni]

Maybe a lock on growth from hatchlings to adult?  I don't know if the temptation of having preloaded views will stop the death wall from happening near Halloween - I remember the shovelling that happened this year, and the glory of the Halloween hatched that followed. I do think that stopping hatchling growth into adults would both fix the issue and not cause any big ones that I can think of!

[D-wing]

Not support for lock view gain, but support for lock on growth.

 

Because seem like the hoilday ap are drop down to a dangerious line and maybe we need some view-boom to let them not died at ap. If lock view gain it'll let the save become harder (you need to have space) but perfect if only lock on growth.

[Myoukin]

I like the idea of a growth lock, especially as making special eggs more easily identifiable is likely to discourage trolling/sabotage attempts; added that as an option to the original post.

[ryon_brink]

Against this. I have the impression it's a relatively small concern and to me doesn't justify the large changes that would need to be made to address it.

 

Like other players in this thread, I also want to be able to prevent my holiday bred eggs from dying if nobody picks them up. Both a lock on view gain and a lock on growth would make it impossible to save eggs that I can't guarantee will ever be picked up while their timer runs down.

The only solution I could see the growth lock work would be to check AP eggs upon death time to see if they have enough views. If yes, the lock is lifted and they grow up. If no, they die as normal.

 

That seems like a very big coding change to make (separate how AP eggs are treated from how other eggs are treated, implement the growth lock, implement the on-death-time check). I doubt the benefit is equivalent to the size of the change.

[D-wing]

18 minutes ago, ryon_brink said:

Like other players in this thread, I also want to be able to prevent my holiday bred eggs from dying if nobody picks them up. Both a lock on view gain and a lock on growth would make it impossible to save eggs that I can't guarantee will ever be picked up while their timer runs down.

I think growth-lock would have less problem, only need someone pick it once and give 1 view to unlock the next stage in their scroll, and than they can throw them back. (or only lock the adult? hatchling less than 3 day can grow up immediatly so only egg walls would cause the problem. ) But not sure for the difficult of coding.

Edited December 26, 2023 by D-wing

[Naraku]

Literally the only time things died in AP from not being picked up was Halloween this year. I would plan to breed things earlier next Halloween if I didn't want my eggs to die (they'd also have time to be influenced appropriately, but I digress).
 

Full support specifically for growth lock.

[Lushwave]

2 hours ago, ryon_brink said:

That seems like a very big coding change to make (separate how AP eggs are treated from how other eggs are treated, implement the growth lock, implement the on-death-time check). I doubt the benefit is equivalent to the size of the change.

How are you sure a feature would be burdensome to develop if you aren't the developer? If none of us interact with or even see the codebase, is it really fair for us to make assumptions on TJ's behalf about how "very big" a "coding change" is?

 

Additionally, now that I think of it, I'm not sure why AP deaths during holidays is being brought up as an argument, as if that's a normal part of the site and not also an issue itself that needs some examining. Ideally nothing should ever be dying in the AP - nothing has since the bottom row was implemented (and this additional fix was made). What happened this Halloween was a matter of there being more eggs being bred than people can take - an outlier, not the norm.

[Moriaty]

i agree that nothing should be dying in the AP, but since there's already precedent, I'm kind of against things that stop me from being able to save dying eggs in AP, even if such event is an outlier. I was ok with the "very low time" lock, because there's still some hours to give the egg view if we ever come to that low, but complete growth lock (or view lock) means they can only die if they're in AP and not picked up and I'm not ok with that.

 

Growth lock until they're 1 minute away from dying is fine by me personally though (ie, they can keep accumulating views in AP but instead of growing at 4d, they grow up only if their timer reach 0d1h (and have sufficient view) or something). I in fact think something like this shouldn't be too difficult to code, as long as the current structure of the database (?) is set up in a way where you can tell unowned egg apart from owned egg

[Skadi]

11 hours ago, Naraku said:

Literally the only time things died in AP from not being picked up was Halloween this year. I would plan to breed things earlier next Halloween if I didn't want my eggs to die (they'd also have time to be influenced appropriately, but I digress).
 

Full support specifically for growth lock.

Unfortunately if everyone breeds earlier, we will still have the wall of dead eggs and it will happen much sooner.

 

I support a growth lock and then they become AP hatchies because then we can pick up hatchies from the AP.

[Fuzzbucket]

When - except for that Hallowe'en thing, which only happened because @TJ09 extended the end of the event, has there ever been a wall of dead eggs ?

17 hours ago, Lushwave said:

How are you sure a feature would be burdensome to develop if you aren't the developer? If none of us interact with or even see the codebase, is it really fair for us to make assumptions on TJ's behalf about how "very big" a "coding change" is?

 

Additionally, now that I think of it, I'm not sure why AP deaths during holidays is being brought up as an argument, as if that's a normal part of the site and not also an issue itself that needs some examining. Ideally nothing should ever be dying in the AP - nothing has since the bottom row was implemented (and this additional fix was made). What happened this Halloween was a matter of there being more eggs being bred than people can take - an outlier, not the norm.

 

Exactly ! It was down to the extension.

[ryon_brink]

18 hours ago, Lushwave said:

How are you sure a feature would be burdensome to develop if you aren't the developer? If none of us interact with or even see the codebase, is it really fair for us to make assumptions on TJ's behalf about how "very big" a "coding change" is?

 

Additionally, now that I think of it, I'm not sure why AP deaths during holidays is being brought up as an argument, as if that's a normal part of the site and not also an issue itself that needs some examining. Ideally nothing should ever be dying in the AP - nothing has since the bottom row was implemented (and this additional fix was made). What happened this Halloween was a matter of there being more eggs being bred than people can take - an outlier, not the norm.

 

Both fair points. My assumption about the complexity of the change is based on experience with other coding projects, but it is true that I don't know anything about this specific codebase. Specifically, I was thinking about how it may be complicated to treat the timer of AP eggs/hatchies differently from that of other eggs/hatchies, especially when AP things frequently get picked up and tossed back, so every time this happens, the growth lock would have to be put off and back on. But I do concede that it's not a very strong argument to make as someone who isn't working on the actual codebase of the game.

 

It is also true that so far, this year's Halloween has been the first time in a long while that eggs/hatchies died in the AP from timing out. However, I've seen AP times get lower and lower each year, so I think it was only a matter of time, not necessarily some unique situation that will never occur again. I've already started only breeding my holiday dragons on request for a while now, because it always seems like there are plenty of eggs that nobody really wants and I don't want to add that much more to the pile. I'm curious to see how the AP ends up with the current holiday.

[KageSora]

1 hour ago, Fuzzbucket said:

Exactly ! It was down to the extension.

 

I don't think we can say that's the only reason for it.  It seems to me that this was always something that could have eventually happened.  The extension may have caused it to happen sooner, but I don't think that this is something that we can say will never happen again as long as no more extensions occur.  While there's a bunch of factors and stuff to consider, in the end players who have amassed a number of adult dragons over the years have the potential to produce far more than they're capable of picking up in turn (and, remember, not every player is interested in constantly filling all their slots with random holiday eggs off the AP--many players will be very selective of what they pick up, or will only grab certain things and then after that concentrate on breeding or catching non-holiday dragons even while the AP is still filled with holiday eggs), and if enough players are producing new dragons at a rate that outpaces what they're keeping or picking up it will continue to keep the AP flooding and, eventually, reach a point where the dragons are produced to a degree that supply outstrips demand and things languish and die.

 

This becomes especially challenging during Halloween because once they're below 3d you can't influence and a number of players won't want to waste egg slots on a dragon that will gender wrong to continue the lineage.  It's not so bad for Winter or Valentines when the majority of the dragons are single-gender anyway so there's no need to worry about most of them gendering wrong, but I don't think those holidays are immune to reaching a critical point and creating death walls, either.  Just more slowly than we see with Halloween.

 

And maybe without the extension things will go back to not having a death wall next year!  But I think that there will always be the possibility of a death wall happening in the future.

[Myoukin]

5 hours ago, ryon_brink said:

 

Specifically, I was thinking about how it may be complicated to treat the timer of AP eggs/hatchies differently from that of other eggs/hatchies, especially when AP things frequently get picked up and tossed back, so every time this happens, the growth lock would have to be put off and back on.

What if the growth lock only functions as a one-time 'flag' or sorts? An egg gains the flag when it's abandoned to the AP, and once it gets picked up by someone, that flag gets removed permanently. I'd imagine it could work similarly to how the stun BSA functions; you stun the dragon and it doesn't grow for two days, but if you trade it over to another scroll, it loses that stun (thus can gain views and grow) but can't be re-stunned because it's already been flagged as already stunned at one point.

[Lushwave]

On 12/26/2023 at 12:26 AM, Lushwave said:

How about a lock on growth instead? Eggs and hatchlings in the AP will not hatch or grow into adulthood until they acquire an owner, no matter how many views they have.

I've been informed of a counterpoint to this. Supposing the Emergency Room sections of hatcheries give views at a high rate, then - especially during the popular holidays - once a viewbombed AP desirable reaches ER time, it will remain in the ERs of hatcheries for potentially a very long time being unable to hatch. This leaves it quite prone to sickness, and we'll encounter the same problem in the opposite direction - rather than AP desirables getting viewbombed into the wilderness, they can end up viewbombed to death.

 

So, uh... maybe such a lock isn't so good of a measure? ^^' 

[Moonlight_Eevee]

What if ap had a cap of, say, 500 ov and won't get amymore until it recognizes that the egg had been picked up?

[Diggie]

Personally, while both suggestions seem to be coming from a place of good intentions, I don't see this as an actual issue. It's unfortunate that some people throw dragons in hatcheries while they're still in the AP, but honestly I don't think it's enough of an issue to warrant a change to the gameplay. I lean towards no support.

 

I believe I was actually the person who mentioned the sickness/dying problem (it was discussed in the official Discord), and again I think all these suggestions are well-intentioned, but would be a fix for a problem that isn't actually that serious--and could lead to other adverse outcomes, barring major changes to how the AP works.

 

As for people wanting bred eggs to not die, there has only been one recent death wall. I don't think it's actually a concern for eggs to die in the AP right now. Either way, the message that pops up when eggs are abandoned or auto'd tells you that the eggs are abandoned "to die" in the AP. Once they're abandoned, any claim to them has been relinquished and thus their fates are no longer in the hands of the breeder. Again, I don't think this is an actual issue, just an inconvenience to the breeder if they don't like the eggs they've bred dying. But it tells you right there on the metaphorical box that there is a possibility of death in the AP when you abandon or auto an egg/hatchie. Sure, you can still grow your eggs wild, but realistically what's the benefit of this? Keeping AP times up? 

 

Anyways, I personally don't think there's a problem with the current AP function and wouldn't really support any major changes to it for something that only affects a tiny fraction of "valuable" eggs.

[inghelene]

I think Diggie makes a pretty strong point; You aren't allowed to pick up your own eggs once abandoned. (Only if someone else picks them up and then re-dump, you can actually catch them.)

If you discard eggs they are not yours to keep, and their fate is left to the rest of the site.

There seems to also have been some nerf to mass breeding which will discourage another death wall.

 

As for hunting bred eggs of someone else, it's only by gaining views this can be combated.

If hatchlings growing up outside of scroll is such a concern, picking up eggs, adding them to hatcheries and dumping them back is actually a pretty decent way to keep the AP over 4d, to ensure all hatclings are seen. Xeno breeding has been nerfed, but prior, this was the only way to ensure every xeno wall didn't end up sending the AP to the graveyard.

[DogsRNice_]

On 12/26/2023 at 3:26 AM, Lushwave said:

I wouldn't want a lock on views. It's nice to sometimes find eggs in the AP that have been gaining views over time and show up with cracks or large holes in them, saving their new owners some time and effort.

 

How about a lock on growth instead? Eggs and hatchlings in the AP will not hatch or grow into adulthood until they acquire an owner, no matter how many views they have.

 

Since we're on the topic of bombers making sAlts and thuweds grow wild, a growth lock would negate the threat of wild growth altogether. And with view gain still possible, bombing attempts can end up making such eggs easier for hunters to identify by their large holes - with the added bonus of these eggs already prepped with enough views for hatching - possibly dissuading bombers from trying this if they are not intending to benefit others.

This makes the most sense, there's no benefit to anyone other than trolls to having dragons grow up in the ap

[inghelene]

Just now, DogsRNice_ said:

This makes the most sense, there's no benefit to anyone other than trolls to having dragons grow up in the ap

Massbreeders will block the cave, and with no views gained outside your scroll, you are locking yourself if you want to help the community and hatch those walls.