How can December 18th be improved?

[kth]

For the release of store pets, I wonder whether something like Flight Risings raffle system could be implemented? Where every once in awhile there is a raffle off of older store pets/pets. There could be one main prize, say a Raven or something, and then a couple smaller prizes that a couple users could also win.

A user could buy a number of tickets to enter the raffle. It could be a capped number to ensure there aren’t people just buying an insane amount, or even a limited cap on how many tickets could be sold each raffle.

[Celozon]

Discussions like this do better belong on the suggestion board. I understand your intention here is to have a discussion about it, but you can do that in the suggestion board. The issue with having a thread that is just for suggesting various fixes to various issues really popped up due to the 'why are people quitting CS' thread because it was full of nothing but suggestions, but even if a lot of people liked one or it was a good suggestion, no one made a separate thread for it. Wherever the suggestion was in the thread it was buried in the thousands of other replies. If you do have any intention of a suggestion being implemented, then it should be put in the suggestions board. The idea is that staff are keeping an eye on it for things to implement, or a place to look for what users want when we plan to implement something. As soon as this thread is no longer being actively posted on, its not going to be remembered when we go looking for suggestions on this type of thing.

This type of conversation seems to happen over and over on various threads over time and they often bring up a lot of the same suggestions or other things that staff have already given official responses to. For example, suggestions of things like C$ raffles get brought up a lot on threads like these (as it already has been here) and staff have said multiple times that this wouldn't be happening. We already disallow users to do any kind of paid raffles on this site because it was determined to be too similar to gambling. As such we wouldn't be doing that ourselves either for the same reason. Paid mystery boxes are also considered gambling.

Its also already been said multiple times by staff that re-released store pets has been declined and while obviously it is ultimately up to the admins if they want to change that, there has been no indication that they plan to. The original reasoning still stands, and it has been stated that store pets aren't intended to be considered towards a complete collection (and are already discounted when looking at your collection in the archives). The point of having a list of declined suggestions is to not waste everyone's time discussing implementations for something that isn't going to happen.

My own personal opinion is that I don't really think any changes are needed. Dec 18th has already been extensively tweaked to ensure that re-releases provide an influx of pets while not drastically impacting the rarity of the pets, that is intentional. Whenever I see 'more re-releases' suggested, users often don't really discuss what kind of impact they actually want from the re-release, it often seems to me like users want more free rares and more chances at URs without considering the overall impact it would have on pet rarity as a whole. I think discussing changes to Dec 18th is fine, but I'm of the opinion it should be focused on more the intended impact to rarity rather than number of releases. I personally don't really see a big point in just splitting it into multiple points in the year with the same number of pets released, I think it works fine as a once-a-year type event. It seems to me like rather than alleviating traffic and other issues on Dec 18th, it would just be happening on two days instead of one.

I do not think a single item re-release should have a major impact on item values on its own. The change would be cumulative over several years. I think the main issue with item values not changing is more likely due to the fact that even if a bunch of rare items were given out, many would have ended up in the hands of users who don't trade items. The part of the community that is heavily involved in item trading is very small, so there probably are a fair number of animal egg 2 that got adopted, they are just spread out across the userbase. This is more an issue with how the community is structured and than not enough rare items being released. This was also the first time this has happened so most likely some changes have already been planned or applied for the next re-release, even if its just in things we as users can't see (like changing where the 'rare' threshold is for the rare item each user gets)

For item re-releases, I wonder if it could be done by year instead of rarity since there is no item rarity. Maybe everyone gets 3 items from 2008-2012, 5 items from 2013-2018, and 7 items from 2019-current or something like that, for 15 items in total

✦

2. not sure how the item re-release was done, but most of my items were from 2022. i don't particularly mind, but if the odds are you're more likely to pull "recent" items (items released in the last 3-4 years) maybe we should get 10 items instead? again, i might have just had a bad pull, so i am not fully confident in this.

the other thing is, does anyone know if any items were excluded from the re-release? i am assume the free items were, since you can get those any time. do we know if anything store items were released? admittedly i do not know much about how the item re-release even worked. (im not asking anyone to, but if anyone knows the answer could you pm me? i don't wanna sidetrack from this thread, but i am curious <3)

The item re-release actually did give you a mix of items from various years, it would have been impossible to get ones only from 2022. It was set up so users were given two items from 2014 or older, two items from 2015 and newer, and one with high rarity. A UR item could also be given instead of any of them, with a higher chance in the 'high rarity' slot, just like with pets.

From my understanding, certain very large item sets were excluded (like the put-it-together gingerbread house set) since none of them are particular rare and would have inflated the item pool with items that already get ignored in the L&F. I don't believe any store items were included (they are all either already available all the item or limited release like store pets). I believe items that were released under special circumstances were also not included (rainbow smoothie, cake contest set, etc). I don't know the full extent of what was or wasn't included but the item pool was curated to try and make sure that users got a good range items. Things will probably be tweaked for future releases as well considering this was the first time this happened.

[Xiao_Jian]

I've always thought it would be fun to scale re-releases on availability(?) I guess.

Like on Dec 16th, a program would take a snapshot of all open groups on active accounts. Assuming that open groups = tradable on some level, it would rank the pets up for re-release and rank them on how many are in the open groups. Say like there are 10 of a 2014 Rare dog outcome vs a 4 of a Rat outcome. The program could assume that the rat has more demand, since there are fewer for trade, and assigns the rat a slightly higher chance of re-release than the dog.

Obviously thig would take a lot of work and put too much faith in people locking their NFT groups (why not though????). But it would improve the chances of getting pets with demand traded around VS just chilling in trade groups for ages. Just my personal CS fantasy I guess, lol.

[Papilio Ulysses]

snip

From the front page of this topic- "I don’t want this topic to just become a “rerelease store pets” topic so please do not make it the main issue of your reply. It is merely a consideration." I also don't think that having to look at two separate threads is as taxing on staff as you make it out to be.

I was only relaying what I had been told by staff in the past. I wasn't exaggerating anything. In any case, I will leave it at that.