We need your feedback: Bigger, less frequent pound openings?

[teddy]

-snip-

I don't think I ever said I expect them to materialize, but from your response I no longer want to engage in this discussion with you. Appreciate you taking time to respond.

i don’t believe that this response is particularly necessary. i also just wanted to say that i completely agree with cloverstream’s point about people who don’t put any energy into this game wanting to be rewarded for their lax efforts. if you want to get “rare,” take a few minutes to bookmark horror’s list and build good trading habits such as utilizing the free adopts forum, setting up a C$ shop, etc. the pound is a fun mechanic but it should not be the one thing you rely on to build fodder. if you do wish to use it this way, be prepared to at least set a timer for it. i would also like to say that your opinion on hoarding only emboldens my opinion of certain players who want to punish experienced and high value traders who do what they wish with their own pets.

[The Grey Stuff]

I understand this point, but also a lot of experienced players can recognise rares and such on sight, we’ve just been here for longer. if anything, letting people see the pets beforehand means newer players have a chance to familiarise themselves with what pets are rare.

i understand the argument that maybe making the fact you can see pets beforehand a bit more clear, but then again sometimes people should just have a look around? it sounds harsh but spoon-feeding people is a bit much. I know it took me months to figure that out and I only learnt that the pets are organised by date a few months ago.

there’s also no harm in a system that slightly rewards more active players/players that have been here for longer [which is kinda what the pound is because as said before, we can recognise a lot of pets] it’s not something we were just selected to be able to do, if anyone is active enough or is here for long enough, eventually they’ll learn too.

maybe I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but sometimes I think we’re getting too “soft”, I say let it keep being a free for all. People learn with time.

This. Thank you. Exactly this.

It’s not “unfair” that older players have an advantage, because they earned that advantage through the time they spent playing the game. Any newer player can become just as familiar with the rares as anybody if they put in the time. The archive is right there for them to study.

I think a good thing to keep in mind also is that nobody is entitled to the rares in the Pound. It’s a privilege to even have the chance to get them. They aren’t owed to anyone, whether newbie or veteran.

I’m totally in favor of more openings as opposed to fewer, for the reasons people have mentioned. It seems more fair, given how many different timezones and schedules people are on. Why not maximize the chance to attend an opening?

[avaloafe]

The only advantage (leveling field) that i see here is FOR the newbies. Ive been on this site 10+ years. I know most of the rares if not all. So taking the option of looking at whats in the pound away is only going to hurt newer players. They can look in the pound beforehand and instead of memorizing 15k pets right away they only have to remember what a few look like (if they didnt add them to their wishlist.)

I agree that maybe its not known by the whole community, maybe they could add it to the “did you know” spot in the forums.

Sure but this was a suggestion for compromise, wherein experienced players aren't as blinded as newbies are, but still can't know exactly what's coming until they get their pool.

I'd really prefer that :) NO ONE can see any of the pets and it's completely random. That's what makes random draws fair, it's how lotteries work, and it's been working on other sites for a very long time.

except this isn’t a lottery OR random. december 18th is a lottery. the pound is where you pick a pet you want. or pick a valuable pet if you’re lucky. but it’s not a lottery nor should it ever be. you don’t go blindfolded into a pound and say, “i want this pet” no you go in and look at them then make your decision. i’ve been here since 2012 and i still don’t know what all the pets are and what rarities they are. that’s why i like being able to see the pets in advance and say, “oh, i see some valuable pets id love to try and have the opportunity to get!” all in all, the pound is an opportunity to get a valuable pet, or even a wishlist pet. it shouldn’t be a random pet given to you. it shouldn’t be a mystery.

[Silver Tiger~]

why is everyone acting like being able to see the pets in advance is the problem. y’all DO REALIZE that’s been a thing for YEARSSSS. it isn’t new. it isn’t the cause of what everyone is saying. it’s not something that just magically happened during the update. IT ISNT THE PROBLEM.

It's also been a problem for "YEARSSSS"! We'd be better off without being able to see any of the pets, and distributing it randomly like a lottery system. That's what 'fair' looks like- equal chances for everyone, with no ability to predict. Then, the redistribution that is the goal of the whole thing works just as it should, but experienced players have the advantage of knowing what they're looking for taken away.

I'll make another analogy.

Imagine, there's a bowl of candy and two players in a carnival game. There are a bunch of random colors in there, but one player has been to the same event every year and knows "the green ones are the winning ones, I'll grab that". The other player is at the event for the first time, or has come every year but never played this game before. The less-informed player thinks they'll just grab randomly, while the experienced player has a plan. The experienced player sees a green candy at the edge of the bowl and when it's their turn, they go right for it. The inexperienced player reaches in... and maybe they'll accidentally get a green, but they aren't aiming for it, so with 10 other colors at least they're very unlikely to grab the winning one.

Now imagine the same game, but now they are both blindfolded before they reach into the candy bowl. Either might grab green candy, the winning color, but with 10 other colors at least they are both as unlikely to grab one, and have an equal chance to win.

Now which of those sounds more fair?

It's not the first one.

From your analogy, you clearly want all the pound pets to be covered by blankets and people grab randomly and hope they get something good.

I mean it would be an interesting experiment. The whining would be through the roof.

[exile.]

This is an amazing post, thank you for taking the time to put all this together! I couldn't find a good place to snip it, because it's all so good!
With your points-
I think the pets are definitely being shown to at least 5 people at a time right now, based anecdotally off seeing a pet on my page + seeing who got it + who then posts about having also seen it. Having it up to 20 wouldn't be bad- after all, that's still better then odds you face when a user posts in the adoption forums that they're quitting.

When I mention seeing 2-3 rares, it would be over the course of the delay + pages, so the pool of users would go down as pets are claimed, meaning that the second or third rare that player sees, the chance rate of grabbing it would be (minimally) higher.
I agree that we'll never end up seeing exactly how the pound works, but knowing what the code-method is for choosing who gets the option to try for rares would put to bed a lot of the accusations towards individuals and speculation around botting.

i'm glad you found it usefull ^^
to be totally fair, i cannot confirm all of the math there is correct (as someone has already corrected it), but it was very interesting for me to try and piece it all together.

the amount of people is still a mystery, as we cannot gather that data for the entire pool, thus we can't know if every pet is shown to the same number of people or if it varies per pet.

as for the second/third etc page rares, i don't actually think the chances go up much, if at all. yes, the amount of users gets slightly smaller (though some people can come into the pound a bit late), but so does the pool of pets, especially rares. the 20 pet pull for the second page will likely have a very different pool composition than that of the first page as the percentage of rares gets lower relative to non-rares. while it is probably less drastic of a change with the waves, i still suspect that out of wave one most rares get picked out rather quickly while other rarities don't, leaving wave two rares among a higher relative percentage of below rare.
the change of the pool over time, however, is very user-dependent and probably uncalculable as it would require very large and fast tracking.

interestingly this is not quite true. the odds of seeing a rare pet in a sample of 20 are MUCH higher than the odds of an individual pet being rare (that's the beauty of factorials).
let me try to compute it!
there's currently 1322 pets in the pound, 97 of which are rare (only 7.3%!!).
we can't account for any unnatural distribution or the fact that rare pets are now scattered throughout the first few pages, so assuming your first page of 20 pets is a truly random sample, you can find the probability of seeing a rare pet as follows:

# of ways you can see NO rare pets: c(1225, 20) = 1225!/[(1225-20)!20!] = 2.04 x 10^43 (giant number btw)
# of ways you can see pets: c(1322, 20) = 1322!/[(1322-20)!20!] = 9.46 x 10^43 (even gianter number btw)

now we can take a percentage by taking ways of seeing no rare pets/ways of seeing pets which gives about 22% of seeing no rare pets.
yup, that means there's a 78% chance of seeing at least one rare pet

this makes sense if you think about it because 20 pets is kind of a huge sample. 1322/20 is 66, which is less than 97, suggesting a distribution of more than 1 rare to 20 pets. the reason it's so hard to snag one is because tons of people are seeing the rare at the same time, so you have to be quick to snag it.

this does seem to be quite a big number, so in reality it's probably lower because of the behind-the-scenes manipulation of page distribution. and the new feature that spreads rare pets out is going to further make this number lower because it cuts the pool of rare pets available on the first page down quite a bit.

i also think our perception of pound rarity is skewed because most users probably just don't recognize many rares when they see them. like, did you know this chicken was rare? i certainly would have missed it.

however it's definitely true that the odds of seeing more than one are MUCH MUCH lower than the odds of seeing one. for example the odds of you getting a page of 20 rares is 135114119146959387435/94575315226397539842194003664749840563259356, which ends up being 0.00000000000000000000014% lol. so basically it's never going to happen.

(also, you said it doesn't mean that 13% of the pets on your page are rares: it actually DOES mean that. if the sample of 20 is truly random, it should represent the whole, meaning 13% of the pets on a page of 20 should be rare+ and 87% should be below rare, the same way 13% of the pets on a page of 100 or 200 or whatever number you choose should be rare+. of course it's unlikely you would get that exact distribution but it should be the average)(but then again it's prob not a random sample so)

if anyone wants to check my math please please please feel free!!! math was never my strong suit so i could have made errors.

thank you for the corrections! the last time i did math on this scale was like seven years ago and my brain cannot compute those formulas anymore.
good to know that the percentage is much higher than i initially thought (it did seem suspiciously low to me)!

to the last point - i totally agree that on average it should represent the total percentages, but as i mentioned in my first post, if we get a random 1000 samples out of every possible combination of 20 out of 1300 pets (which is basically your second giant number, much much higher than a 1000), there's no way every one of those samples will get that distribution, which is why it can't be expected that every person out of that 1000 sees 13% of rares on their page. some surely will, and the average distribution might align with the number, but each individual page will vary wildly, so my point was more of a "not every individual page has this percentage". then again, i could be totally wrong here - me and math never got along :3
(and yeah there's probably some coding to prevent wild extremes and such so we can't really know for sure)

-

and as for the skewed perception, i very much agree with that.
i know i have missed rares in the pound because my brain didn't register them as such. it once took me a whole minute after the fact to realize a random wishlist pet i saw dated december 2021 was in fact an er re-release and not just an advent pet i missed that year lmao. in the same way, i stared at a store pet bunny which wasn't on my wl and dismissed it as an easter pet i must have already had.

honestly, having every rare on you wl is much bigger of an advantage than looking at the upcoming pound pool as it does actually help you spot them quicker, but i don't see people ganging up against that even though it's a more widely known and used feature.

[Xiao_Jian]

I voted to keep the pound the same.

Making it more frequent won't change the wacky CS economy that has made the 18th and the Pound many user's only way to get rarer pets. Not sure what would fix that, but this suggestion just seems like another band-aid attempt that won't actually help anything.

It would be nice to make the pet selection non-visible before the opening. I just kinda wish the pound could be a fun way to get random pets again.

[-Shadow_Thorn-]

It seems to be a common opinion among people who think the pound should stay the same that it makes them feel bad to miss a lot of pounds and therefore it should stay frequent. That's interesting to me because imho, it feels worse to show up for a lot of pounds and never get anything decent because everything good gets snapped up within the first 30 seconds. However, would adding pets fix that? I'm not sure. I'm not going to vote on this, my opinion is that we should trial this to see if it lets more people get pets that they're happy about before we vote. As I see it, it's the option of getting more chances for good pets vs. better odds of snatching one when the pound does open, but we don't actually know if somewhat bigger openings will improve players' experiences.
That was a bit long, but the bottom line is that I think we should trial bigger openings and then see how we feel.

[The Grey Stuff]

I personally think attending Pounds in itself is just… fun, regardless of whether I get something good. That’s why I like how frequent they are. The point of the Pound isn’t to be a rare dispenser. It’s to pick out a pet that you like, and maybe if you’re lucky you get a rare. It just kinda feels like this is turning into a discussion of “how do we make sure everyone gets at least one rare from the Pound” but I do not think everything else needs to bend to that one singular directive. There are other things to consider. Like I said, I think Pound openings in and of themselves are just fun and exciting no matter what I grab.

[catplushie]

i like smaller but more frequent openings. i work full time and don't always have a chance to make it to a pound opening on time, and i'd be pretty bummed if i had even fewer chances to adopt from the pound during my work week. it is frustrating not being able to always get a rare+ pet, sometimes i miss every single rare on my page and leave the pound without adopting anything, but i do still enjoy it! even if i grab just a cute omgsc, it's still a free pet that i got to choose myself. there's always other openings to maybe get a nice rare+ from!

and for people saying it's "unfair" to be able to look at what pets are going to be in the pound before it opens, i still don't understand how that isn't fair. just because i look through the pound's adoption folder and know there will be a dragoncat pps for example, doesn't give me an advantage to adopt that pet. there's a chance it won't even show up on my page, or if it does show up on my page i might not be fast enough to grab it. i think that's part of the fun, i literally get a rush of excitement when i see something valuable on my page, even if i'm not the lucky one who gets to adopt it. if you want to have some kind of "advantage" for the pound, take the time to add older rares to your wishlist, familiarize yourself with what pets are rare or not, set a timer so you can get to the pound the second it opens. doing that still won't guarantee you'll get a good pet of course, but you can try to boost your chances. i've been here for so long i tend to recognize rares right away, but that doesn't mean i'm always fast enough for them. it's all up to luck, that's part of why i love the pound the way it is, especially after these last few updates!

[sxtxrn]

more pets. both pounds ive done today by the time i even LOADED IN 1/3 of the pets on the page were gone. by the first refresh only 900 pets were left. it’s ridiculous.