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

[LKP12321]

I say reinstate the 24 hour waiting period before being able to adopt again (this was years ago I think) and keep the more frequent openings so more people have a chance

[Darkcloud!]

whilst it doesn’t really affect me personally as i don’t seek out higher valued pets a majority of the time , the opening that was most recent was .. well , pretty awful rng wise .

i personally miss the thrill of racing for a more rare pet , but today i quite literally got all pets below rare on all pages , 4 of which only had pets ranging from 2024 - 2018 ish that were mostly uncommon - omgsc / unknown . whilst this isn’t really a huge issue for me , it can be a little disheartening constantly grabbing omgsc pets . (,:

i think personally a bigger opening but less frequently would be ideal , or somewhere in the mid ground [ e.g : 1.5k pets ] just due to the fact that players will specifically log on just for the pound , so the baseline users throughout the day isn’t really accurate to the traffic for the pound .

idk if this makes sense , or if any of this has been mentioned or suggested , and i might edit it when it’s n o t 5am lol ,,,,

This makes total sense. I am more than happy with mid to lower rarity pets from a pound if they are WL or something I can trade. Today and the past 6? 5? back to back openings for me have all been the same. Not a single pet from before 2012 despite there still being 10+ 2008-2011 pets in the pound still at 3 refreshes in. Miss the singular WL pet that MIGHT come up on refresh 4 and 5. All rares and extremely uncommons are gone now. I now have 1 refresh, if that, to try to grab something that I could trade before the pool drops to the common rats and horses and under, or nothing at all.

It's been mentioned that people might miss rares: I am a desktop user and I split screen the pound pet pool with the pound open to each page with a rare on it that isn't 2008-2012 or a december re-release/store (there are few enough re-releases/stores to commit to short term memory and as I have the valuable pets in those years memorized) and I can confidently say that I have NOT been shown any rares the last opens that were:

-past the first page and not already taken when the page loaded in when refreshing directly at open, as confirmed by the live taken update.
-above rare.
-from the years 2008-2012, or a store.
-that were not rats, horses, or chickens.

This is not indicative of a fair pool being shown to all users, at all. Already taken pets upon page loading should not count towards the rares shown to a user.

I'd like to see a shorter refresh time. I don't need to look at a page of taken pets and commons for 20 seconds.

[edited for wording clarity]

[avaloafe]

whilst it doesn’t really affect me personally as i don’t seek out higher valued pets a majority of the time , the opening that was most recent was .. well , pretty awful rng wise .

i personally miss the thrill of racing for a more rare pet , but today i quite literally got all pets below rare on all pages , 4 of which only had pets ranging from 2024 - 2018 ish that were mostly uncommon - omgsc / unknown . whilst this isn’t really a huge issue for me , it can be a little disheartening constantly grabbing omgsc pets . (,:

i think personally a bigger opening but less frequently would be ideal , or somewhere in the mid ground [ e.g : 1.5k pets ] just due to the fact that players will specifically log on just for the pound , so the baseline users throughout the day isn’t really accurate to the traffic for the pound .

idk if this makes sense , or if any of this has been mentioned or suggested , and i might edit it when it’s n o t 5am lol ,,,,

thats what im saying. there has never been a pound where i havent grabbed a rare before??? well, maybe a couple, but they would occur on especially unlucky days for me... nowadays getting a rare is HARD.

people who vote for more frequent pounds with less pets, are you really okay with this????? like this is just crazy. im pretty SURE im not the only one like this, i mean i talked to other people and theyre having the exact same issue.... Never would I trade consistent rares from each pound that happens once a day for A SMALL CHANCE to get 1 rare from a pound that happens twice a day......

i mean i voted for that one. i personally loved having more pets to choose from and to not feel the pressure of picking a pet before someone else. not to mention that the pound was literally the only thing opening today?? like what is that? why did we have so many pound openings and no L&F ones today? like what's the deal with that? why was it so inconsistent.

[pisto pesto pasta]

i mean i voted for that one. i personally loved having more pets to choose from and to not feel the pressure of picking a pet before someone else. not to mention that the pound was literally the only thing opening today?? like what is that? why did we have so many pound openings and no L&F ones today? like what's the deal with that? why was it so inconsistent.

no i get it, sorry if i seemed too agressive, i was mainly trying to speak up to people who called people like me ungrateful and entitled, ur chill

and yes i also noticed that😭 i would hope theyre not retiring l&f bc i love my items

[avaloafe]

i mean i voted for that one. i personally loved having more pets to choose from and to not feel the pressure of picking a pet before someone else. not to mention that the pound was literally the only thing opening today?? like what is that? why did we have so many pound openings and no L&F ones today? like what's the deal with that? why was it so inconsistent.

no i get it, sorry if i seemed too agressive, i was mainly trying to speak up to people who called people like me ungrateful and entitled, ur chill

and yes i also noticed that😭 i would hope theyre not retiring l&f bc i love my items

no no i didnt' think it was rude at all haha. <33

i don't think they're retiring it. mostly because this HAS happened before. it's just slightly? annoying? because they (cs staff) say it's at 2.4 times a day to be open. meanwhile today it was open 4/5 times. i'm just so confused.

[foxcloud19]

i mean i voted for that one. i personally loved having more pets to choose from and to not feel the pressure of picking a pet before someone else. not to mention that the pound was literally the only thing opening today?? like what is that? why did we have so many pound openings and no L&F ones today? like what's the deal with that? why was it so inconsistent.

no i get it, sorry if i seemed too agressive, i was mainly trying to speak up to people who called people like me ungrateful and entitled, ur chill

and yes i also noticed that😭 i would hope theyre not retiring l&f bc i love my items

no no i didnt' think it was rude at all haha. <33

i don't think they're retiring it. mostly because this HAS happened before. it's just slightly? annoying? because they (cs staff) say it's at 2.4 times a day to be open. meanwhile today it was open 4/5 times. i'm just so confused.

I’m actually legitimately wondering if they’re trying out the “open the pound more frequently with fewer pets” to see how it goes. Maybe they’ll test out fewer openings with more pets as well if that’s what they’re doing.

[RallraxAuri]

i like all the ideas. Alternating could be interesting. One day open with less pets more frequently then another day have a huge wait with a huge amount of pets. Maybe it can be scheduled. I don't know.

[First of Her Name]

I also enjoy all the ideas, adjusting the pound can and will be a huge step forward for this site. One thing I wanna say tho is I wish the Pound had a reminder system in place. I can be waiting all day for it to open to get to 1 hour left, just to miss it because i forgot or got a little busy and then having to wait sometimes 6+ hours for it to open again.

[Tailish]

I'd prefer to keep more openings with fewer pets, because this makes it easier for all users to catch pound openings that work for their timezones and daily schedules.

I'm also not convinced that adding more pets will make it easier to adopt """better""" pets, or that this is even a good thing. Here's why there never seem to be any rares late in the pound opening.

Also, there can be no future pound openings if those """bad""" pets are never adopted and the current run just never closes . It's impossible for everyone to get a """good""" pet on every opening, and for the sake of the pound to work I think we all need to be okay with that. So whenever I'm late to a pound opening and see only a single 2023 VC butterfly wolf, I simply think:



adopt it, and shuffle it straight into the commons/trade fodder group to be forgotten about.


smol text bc long math bit ahead and i don't want to clutter up the thread. This is an expansion of the post linked above, with more numbers and for the case of multiple sizes of openings.

Re: rarities, if I understand the pound mechanics correctly there isn't going to be a higher percentage of rare+ pets if the pound openings get bigger. It's still going to be a random selection of pets from the main pound group. So you'll be just as likely as before to see a rare on your first page as before. Here's how that math works:

Let's say that the number of """good"""[1] pets is #good, and the total number of pets in the pound is #total. The percentage of good pets in the pound is: (#good/#total)*100. The current pound has ~780,000 pets. If 50,000 of those are """good""" pets, then the percentage is: (50,000/780,000)*100 = 6.4%. This means that when you pick a pet at random from the pound, it has a 6.4% chance to be a """good""" pet.

Assuming that the pets selected to go into the adoptions group (so pets that will be in the next pound opening) are selected randomly, 6.4% of them are going to be good. It doesn't actually matter how many of them are in the adoption group! It'll still be 6.4%.

Sure, there will be a larger number of """good""" pets in a larger opening (1300*0.064 = 83.3 rep vs. 1800*0.064 = 115.4), but here's why I don't think that will matter.

Since everyone wants the rares, these are always the first pets to be adopted. You could argue that people will be more likely to get """good""" pets because there will be more of them in general, and there will be some left over to be shown on the second or third refresh. Here's why I don't think this will be the case with a 1300->1800 increase:

We know from Nick's recent pound updates that pets are now slowly released in the first minute of the opening. The first minute has 60/15 = 4 refresh cycles in it. Let's assume the pets are added in consistently, so there are 400 pets in the first batch, and on each refresh cycle 300 pets are added in (to make up the total 400 + 3*300 = 400 + 900 = 1300 pets).

A user who looks at the pound will be shown 25 pets completely at random (second confirmation), 6.4% of which are """good""" (that works out to 25*0.064 = 1.6 pets). Notice that the number of """good""" pets shown to users on a refresh doesn't actually change with the size of the opening.

So if 100 users look at the pound in its first refresh cycle, they'll see a total of 2500 pets. But there are only 400 pets in the pound... This means that some of the pets these users are seeing are doubles: these pets are simultaneously being shown to other users as well. So there's a good chance that multiple users see all of the """good""" pets in this first refresh cycle, and adopt them in this first cycle. This logic remains true for every cycle in the first minute.

So long as there are more than pound size/25 users on a refresh page, at least one pet has to be shown to multiple people. For a pound size of 1300, the number of users is 1300/25 = 52. For a pound size of 1800, the number of users is 1800/25 = 72. You may have slightly less competition for the """good""" pets with a larger pound opening, but it'll still be some. So it's always going to be pretty likely that the """good""" pets are spotted by someone on the first refresh they're show, and adopted on that refresh. Changing the pound size probably won't change that for the values talked about.

I don't have exact data on how many people attend a pound opening but >50 seems like a safe bet, especially in the peak hours. The pound size that would be needed to have a chance at showing every user distinct pets on the first minute of pound opening would be, for 50 pound users, 50*25*4=5000, which seems way way too high.

If it's been confirmed that all users are guaranteed to be shown a certain distribution of pets (e.g. at least one rare) on first opening, could someone point me to that post? That would obviously throw all of this math off.

[1] """"good""" meaning whatever a pet has to be to make you want to adopt it; age, rarity, ratness, etc.

[sm06sm]

Seeing the pound update live has really displayed the problems, although I love not having to constantly click on a pet to be taken to a page saying the pet is taken already. Last pound I was there directly upon opening, and by the time I loaded, half the pets on my page were gone. Now, I have a good connection and device. I cannot imagine those who don’t, because this really shows just how difficult it is when so many people come on and lag the site right at pound.