Suggestion: Fewer tokens + some Summer Event Changes

[BuddyMaltese]

I'm in a car going along a bumpy and twisting road and am typing on a chromebook so please bear with me c':

I don't think CS is being exploitative or malicious, I think they just set up the event in a way that they feel will be the best and of course along the way there's bound to be hiccups because no system is perfect
To me this thread has done a good job at bouncing ideas off of each other to try and help, such as with the item pack and mini games (even though the latter had valid point brought up against it, I thought it was still nice that there was a discussion)

I think that it would be great if we could continue brainstorming ideas to help! Personally I'm still going back to the minigame that gives you tokens idea, I wonder if there's a way to tweak it to help combat the issues people may have?

Or itd be nice if you could get tokens from other things, maybe liking oekaki drawings or posting in the forums? (those are just examples and not ones to be taken at face value since it could lead to people spamming the forums, etc)

[Susiron]

I must say I'm pretty frustrated with this event also, with my frustration revolving largely around the sheer amount of tokens.

Right now, each banner is a chance at a chance to get a pet. It would be one thing if you got two tokens per banner-- perhaps one of the game tokens and then some variety of food/sapling. But the fact that there is only a chance to even get a chance at one of the chance game pets is very frustrating and tedious.

I like CS items, but the consolation prizes lose their charm after turning in your tokens so many times. At least with normal turn-ins, if you don't get the pet outcome you want you can always try and trade it with another player. But I don't foresee these consolation prizes having much sway in trades when they're much more frequent to come by than the pets themselves it seems.

I know these events are largely volunteer work and that the people behind them put a lot of work into them (just look at all of the wonderful pet designs for this event-- I particularly love the bush big cats), but I do think that staff should consider limiting the chance mechanics and token varieties for the next event. I'm sure there are people that like having more token varieties to collect them, but for a lot of players tokens are only a means to get the event pets and making a surplus of them doesn't always translate well into event gameplay.

[troyards]

Calculating the amount of tokens you need the MOMENT stuff comes out also isn't particularly fair, as the banners run for several days after the releases have stoped, and the trade ins stay up even longer. It may seem overwhelming at first, but by the end there is plenty of time to catch up. In my opinion it would be very disappointing to wait for the event to start only to find that there's one trade in up and you don't even like the pets that come out. I support variety so that more casual players can set up goals immediately instead of being disengaged because their lack of options are disinteresting. When token hunting you also don't have to sit there for hours on end. You can spend under 30 seconds refreshing for a banner and then leave and go about your day as normal.

there is time to catch up if you manage to start before we get into 40+hrs of banner grinding. last year we were up around 51 hours before i stopped keeping track? the time/token value is worse case scenario if you cannot find anybody to trade with and you start right when the event ends. obviously, keeping up with the banners during the event is easy but i am in the camp that has to grind out for an hour or two while doing other stuff, so knowing how many hours i'm sinking is actually kind of nice in a weird way?

honestly, i wouldn't be as vocal about this if we knew 100% without a shadow of a doubt the tokens were weighted by their groups and not individually. also apologizing for bringing up the loot box Thing but in my eyes and generalizing it, yeah, it's loot boxes. money might not be exchanging hands to get to the loot boxes (trade-ins) directly, but it's still a very gray form of gambling since you don't know what you're getting (would be nice to just have basic "a rare has x%, an uncommon has x%" with them? event pets usually end up rare etc but like, it's the thought that counts).

also not knocking the volunteer aspect of the events; they've only gotten better since 2011 and the space event was honestly my favorite and i believe that had it's own version of token hell with the trade-ups. there's a lot behind the scenes we don't know about and i understand Variety (TM) but... sometimes there's too much variety and it leads to problems like this.

Or itd be nice if you could get tokens from other things, maybe liking oekaki drawings or posting in the forums? (those are just examples and not ones to be taken at face value since it could lead to people spamming the forums, etc)

dude i'd be more active during events if there was a very slight chance of getting a token from posting! could probably swing it so it's based more on quality than quantity, but yeah i can see the spamming thing.

[metonymy]

let me reiterate: i don't actually think cs is being exploitative or malicious.

however, this event feels a lot more unfair to a large percentage of the audience, which means, in current cultural milieu, it's going to be a lot more easily read as exploitative or malicious.

indie one-person game devs are still game devs. (the professionalism of chickensmoothie relying mostly on volunteers is another can of worms to me quite honestly. i think cs as a business is being held back significantly by this. i am not saying the volunteers are doing a bad job - merely that if the business grows, it's going to have to be somebody's job instead of a volunteer operation.) either it's a mere hobby, or it's a business.

if it's a mere hobby, ask for donations, set up something like a patreon, imho. but if chickensmoothie is a business, even if it's a small one with a one person dev team, it's got to be aware of current trends, market forces, and worries in consumers. in other words, if it's a business, it's got to be fair game to compare them to other people in the business - like EA - and to see if they are following market trends.

i don't think cs is actually exploitative. but i do think it's easy, especially for an outside observer (like a parent of a player), to READ this as exploitative. and that's going to have severe consequences cs needs to address head on - especially because as a game for tweens/teens, cs is essentially courting two player bases (the children actually playing, and the parents who often control the purse strings).

and i do mean head on. not what volunteers guess and think might be happening, but an actual statement from the developer. (again, not opening the can of worms on that one. it's not an attack on the professionalism of the volunteers here, it's just that the person actually at the steering wheel needs to make a statement.)

[Burrito Bunny]

Pets do not have a set rarity as rarity directly corresponds to who many people adopt from a box. CS cannot guarantee a rarity for any non-retired pet. To release something saying "this box has two uncommon and a rare" would be either impossible, or an empty promise. Releasing percentages will get players splitting hairs about value, or older users using math to take advantage of the younger ones.


The only problem I see with the posting suggestion (beyond spam) is that it would be unfair to COPPA users, as they cannot post freely. If it was limited to oekaki drawings though, that could work, as COPPAs can post there. And maybe, if you are caught spamming to abuse it, the moderators could disable the option for you.

[nickjr]

I made a post at the bottom of the previous page and I can't tell if the lack of replies/references to it is because people are thinking about what to say or if it's because it got overlooked lol so here's a link to it real quick Forum/viewtopic.php?p=119920793#p119920793

I remember a few years ago, I think it was during the Egypt summer event or maybe the dreamland summer event (or both?), Tess posted something in the news and it was copied over to the first posts of the discussion threads afterwards about how the token calculations are done so that in the end, the average player will have what they need to get roughly 1 set? (Please don't quote me on that number) of the event pets. She made that post because people were getting really stressed over the amount of tokens they needed to trade in.

I don't remember how much that helped... But maybe something similar would be nice? Maybe it can be included on the event page itself, about how the CS Staff do their best with calculations and stuff to try to make sure the average user ends up being able to get all of the pets at the end or something. We get a lot of new users every year, so a yearly reminder might be necessary at this point. (Every time I see someone say "this is my first [type of event] on CS" i internally squeal... I've been doing a lot of squealing)

(Although it's probably just a band-aid when a lot of event veterans are also voicing concerns about the event)

[Burrito Bunny]

I think another part of the issue might be what someone mentioned earlier about how users are now expecting most token pets to be rare.

Does this mean that the token calculations are made with that in mind?

Because that doesn't seem to mesh with what seems to be a common desire to always be "caught up" with the event, to be able to get all or almost all of the new pets and items soon after release. Kinda like fear of missing out or something? I don't know about the non-active posters, but from what I can see in the posts in the discussion threads, it kinda seems to be the "norm" to "keep up" with the event.

If the token calculations were done so that the token pets will likely end up rare after the event, then of course users who want to keep up with the event will be struggling to do so.

I don't think we can change the mindsets of a mass of users, so... I was gonna suggest that maybe starting next year, token calculations should be done with the expectation that token pets would be uncommon instead of rare, but I feel like that's going to lead to backlash even if you stick a giant announcement on every single event location. I think there's a lose-lose situation here. We can't all be happier about "keeping up" with the event AND have the event pets turn out rare. The easier it is to keep up with an event, the less rare its pets are. Which is the lesser of the two devils?

This is a valid point too. People were outraged when the store gryphons turned rare. Rarity is calculated by the numbers and enough people bought them to turn em rare, even the exclusive. People do get angry when they put effort into a pet and then get a lower rarity than expected.

I don't the average player plays to collect. Kids just like to go after the "cute" ones, or the "pretty" ones. So I think the average amount of tokens one gathers should be enough to keep them satisfied. I know I was happy with very few tokens on my first event because I only wanted a few pets to start.

[Celozon]

Right now, each banner is a chance at a chance to get a pet. It would be one thing if you got two tokens per banner-- perhaps one of the game tokens and then some variety of food/sapling. But the fact that there is only a chance to even get a chance at one of the chance game pets is very frustrating and tedious.

I like CS items, but the consolation prizes lose their charm after turning in your tokens so many times. At least with normal turn-ins, if you don't get the pet outcome you want you can always try and trade it with another player. But I don't foresee these consolation prizes having much sway in trades when they're much more frequent to come by than the pets themselves it seems.

Just wanted to comment on this bit that the chance games are still very new, only got them for the first time last year and people enjoyed them, thats why they were brought back.

That said, I would point out that every other trade-in requires 3 tokens, ie, 3 banners. The chance games only take one, and though I could prob do some statistics on it, the chances don't seem that bad. I got the idea that the duck race was about 33% chance at a pet, and the golf course seemed more like 50% to me, though I might just be lucky with it. Even if its closer to 33%, thats the same number of tokens spent as the rest of the trade-ins.

In addition, there are people more interested in the prizes, or having trouble getting all of them. I know I for one am happy to trade my bird ponies for plushies, so its not necessarily difficult to trade the prizes for pets if you're having trouble, I know the plushies at least a lot of people like. I just suggest visiting the swap thread.

honestly, i wouldn't be as vocal about this if we knew 100% without a shadow of a doubt the tokens were weighted by their groups and not individually. also apologizing for bringing up the loot box Thing but in my eyes and generalizing it, yeah, it's loot boxes. money might not be exchanging hands to get to the loot boxes (trade-ins) directly, but it's still a very gray form of gambling since you don't know what you're getting (would be nice to just have basic "a rare has x%, an uncommon has x%" with them? event pets usually end up rare etc but like, it's the thought that counts).

Wanted to mention, if you haven't already seen it, I've complied data from over 800 banners and what tokens they gave here. Its still a small sample size relatively speaking, but Its fairly even between the groups. It seems pretty clear that its not an equal chance between each individual token.

[troyards]

Pets do not have a set rarity as rarity directly corresponds to who many people adopt from a box. CS cannot guarantee a rarity for any non-retired pet. To release something saying "this box has two uncommon and a rare" would be either impossible, or an empty promise. Releasing percentages will get players splitting hairs about value, or older users using math to take advantage of the younger ones.


The only problem I see with the posting suggestion (beyond spam) is that it would be unfair to COPPA users, as they cannot post freely. If it was limited to oekaki drawings though, that could work, as COPPAs can post there. And maybe, if you are caught spamming to abuse it, the moderators could disable the option for you.

i'm going off of how animal crossing pocket camp does their fortune cookies, but it's just. a three star item has xx.xx% of cropping up; doesn't matter which one, all of the three star items have the same chance. the value doesn't have to be attatched to a specific outcome. since rarities aren't calculated until after things stop being available, i guess this isn't that viable? shame, really. would love to be able to not have to do the math on the probabilities after the fact but whatever. that would require the exact number of pets which iirc staff has said they're never going to release. which is fair, just makes my stats brain a little Sad.

maybe releasing the number of outcomes in a given trade-in would be a compromise? people will still a little angry over getting more of one outcome than another or start chasing one as their white whale, but we usually figure out how many there are within an hour of rollover if it's pets and a couple of hours for items.

honestly, i wouldn't be as vocal about this if we knew 100% without a shadow of a doubt the tokens were weighted by their groups and not individually. also apologizing for bringing up the loot box Thing but in my eyes and generalizing it, yeah, it's loot boxes. money might not be exchanging hands to get to the loot boxes (trade-ins) directly, but it's still a very gray form of gambling since you don't know what you're getting (would be nice to just have basic "a rare has x%, an uncommon has x%" with them? event pets usually end up rare etc but like, it's the thought that counts).

Wanted to mention, if you haven't already seen it, I've complied data from over 800 banners and what tokens they gave here. Its still a small sample size relatively speaking, but Its fairly even between the groups. It seems pretty clear that its not an equal chance between each individual token.

fairly even with a slight skew towards the saplings, which could just be within the standard deviation? i'd still like some actual hard numbers from the staff at this point but eh, i'll take it.

[Susiron]

I unfortunately missed nearly all of the last summer event so I didn't get to see any of the chance games for it personally. But as someone who doesn't usually have a lot of free time to find a bunch of banners anyway, I'm not a fan of an additional chance element personally.

Granted, I could be personally jaded with this event seeing as I've probably spent close to 9 tokens on the golf course and have only won it once. Not sure if it's just bad luck or low odds, but it's gotten me a bit ruffled at this point @ _ @

Really though, I wouldn't mind these chance games so much if there were less token varieties in the banners-- or possibly a chance to get more tokens somehow, not including trading for them.