Updates to the pound!

[Pallastronomy]

Agreed with everything that’s been suggested so far; an easier way to mass donate to the pound/lost and found, removal of the delete this pet option, and potentially less frequent openings if it means a greater number of pets. I do feel like this kind of change would warrant its own thread for discussion though, and I’d be interested in seeing what other people have to say for or against it

[XxFlamepoolxX]

-snip-

- Remove the "Delete Pet" option. It's outdated and it was based on where people could adopt as many pets as they wanted, right? Instead, add the option to the same exact place: "Donate to Pound".

Have an option for people quitting to donate EVERYTHING to the Pound, both pets and items in a few clicks. Give them 1 week or so to reconsider (i.e. cancel their decision, like you do with the 10 hours already). A lot of people don't wanna deal with the pain of adding every pet to the Pound, so people just quit without doing anything, probably end up deleting pets in rage (I've had a lot of people tell me they rage-delete pets), or in the better of scenarios, they create a thread on donation centers, and have to constantly be accepting trades from people for days and days. If this sounds like pain, you got it right. It is pain.

Chicken Smoothie could just have these pets for Pound, and this would allow to make more interesting things with it for everyone. More people would be online outside of events. CS grows. Everyone is happy. Those pets from adoption centers of people quitting are better off with YOU, so you can do more fun stuff for everyone!

Flashbacks to the Skelebun in 2019 I believe? People wanted to artificially change the rarity of the Skelebun by mass deleting them for a joke that went too far. Now there are a lot less Skelebuns to go around.

I agree the delete pet option needs to go. A donate button and donate all option would probably help keep the pound full. Perhaps also an option to donate our items to the lnf? Lots of people just don’t get items because they have no way to get rid of them outside of trades. It makes those of us that do like items have to work a lot harder for someone willing to trade theirs.

[Nick]

You guys have 800k pets in the Pound

Yes, and the current giveaway rate has that total steadily decreasing.

The UR bee that was in the Pound the other day has been in the Pound since 2013!

Rarer pets are given away less frequently than the common ones, or else they'd all be gone in a month. This is because rare pets are donated to the pound very infrequently.

We are not adding bulk delete or bulk give to pound buttons, they're an attractive nuisance for people who get onto your account and want to wreck it as fast as possible.

A single "give pet to pound" option next to the delete option would make sense.

[Shooting Stars]

As far as I was able to detect, on this latest Pound opening after the fix there were zero deadlock errors and zero "There was a problem adopting that pet" errors. What did you guys experience?

Thank you very much Nick for taking the time to fix these errors, I appreciate it immensely. I'm excited for the next time I go to the pound, it'll be nice to not have to worry anymore.

I think pound openings with around 1k is perfectly fine, I mean I certainly don't want the pound to run out of pets! Something that could potentially help with the steadily decreasing amount of pets is increasing the time limit to adopt.
The limit was decreased when there was a couple million hoarded away, iirc. The 3 hour limit we have now doesn't really mean anything, since the pound doesn't open rapidly anymore.
I wouldn't be upset with a 12 or 24 hour limit, and it could give other less active people a chance as well.

[XxFlamepoolxX]

As far as I was able to detect, on this latest Pound opening after the fix there were zero deadlock errors and zero "There was a problem adopting that pet" errors. What did you guys experience?

Thank you very much Nick for taking the time to fix these errors, I appreciate it immensely. I'm excited for the next time I go to the pound, it'll be nice to not have to worry anymore.

I think pound openings with around 1k is perfectly fine, I mean I certainly don't want the pound to run out of pets! Something that could potentially help with the steadily decreasing amount of pets is increasing the time limit to adopt.
The limit was decreased when there was a couple million hoarded away, iirc. The 3 hour limit we have now doesn't really mean anything, since the pound doesn't open rapidly anymore.
I wouldn't be upset with a 12 or 24 hour limit, and it could give other less active people a chance as well.

This could be a good fix actually. I’m only on a couple times a day if that. I often miss the pound or catch it late. If there was more of a cooldown per player, there may be less issues with the pound running out before less active players can get any

[RockaGal]

Still disappointed with this new pound update as it has not made it any easier to get rare or even extremely uncommon pets - today they were, yet again, all taken which makes no sense. Need updating to spread pets out more so more rares and extremely uncommons are there over more pages rather than just the first or second page as this makes it too difficult and not fun still really, sadly. I hope that this will be looked into and all the great recommendations and feedback here taken into account to improve this major issue as it is not fair that only 1 or 2 people can get something good and mostly from the first page it seems from my testing of this pound over many weeks now since the update.

[Nick]

A cooldown that actually forces you to skip an opening is an interesting idea actually, I'll have to think about that one. It used to have a 24-hour cooldown and the pound opened at most once per day, but I think people really despaired if they just barely missed out on the next opening.

Looks like this previous pound opening also had zero deadlock errors. I'll check again next time it's busy during an event, but it seems to be fixed for now!

[ACat]

A cooldown that actually forces you to skip an opening is an interesting idea actually, I'll have to think about that one. It used to have a 24-hour cooldown and the pound opened at most once per day, but I think people really despaired if they just barely missed out on the next opening.

Looks like this previous pound opening also had zero deadlock errors. I'll check again next time it's busy during an event, but it seems to be fixed for now!

I'm not sure if this would be the best idea as it might still prevent people from getting any 'good' pets. For example if they caught the middle/end of an opening and snagged a pet remaining they then couldn't try again for another 24 hours. It might discourage players from adopting pets that aren't deemed worth it.

I agree with what other users have said regarding removing the 'delete' button and just changing it to send the pets to the pound by default.

What is the purpose of having a delete button nowadays? /gen

[XxFlamepoolxX]

A cooldown that actually forces you to skip an opening is an interesting idea actually, I'll have to think about that one. It used to have a 24-hour cooldown and the pound opened at most once per day, but I think people really despaired if they just barely missed out on the next opening.

Looks like this previous pound opening also had zero deadlock errors. I'll check again next time it's busy during an event, but it seems to be fixed for now!

I'm not sure if this would be the best idea as it might still prevent people from getting any 'good' pets. For example if they caught the middle/end of an opening and snagged a pet remaining they then couldn't try again for another 24 hours. It might discourage players from adopting pets that aren't deemed worth it.

I agree with what other users have said regarding removing the 'delete' button and just changing it to send the pets to the pound by default.

What is the purpose of having a delete button nowadays? /gen

Hmm I have very little coding experience but what if only users that got a certain rarity range of pet get the long cooldown? Like if you got a VR store pet, you have to skip out on the next opening for cooldown. If you just got a common, you don’t get skipped the next opening. Some sort of programming that does a sliding timer scale based on what you got if that’s at all possible

[Sunfyre]

As far as I was able to detect, on this latest Pound opening after the fix there were zero deadlock errors and zero "There was a problem adopting that pet" errors. What did you guys experience?

Thank you very much Nick for taking the time to fix these errors, I appreciate it immensely. I'm excited for the next time I go to the pound, it'll be nice to not have to worry anymore.

I think pound openings with around 1k is perfectly fine, I mean I certainly don't want the pound to run out of pets! Something that could potentially help with the steadily decreasing amount of pets is increasing the time limit to adopt.
The limit was decreased when there was a couple million hoarded away, iirc. The 3 hour limit we have now doesn't really mean anything, since the pound doesn't open rapidly anymore.
I wouldn't be upset with a 12 or 24 hour limit, and it could give other less active people a chance as well.

This could be a good fix actually. I’m only on a couple times a day if that. I often miss the pound or catch it late. If there was more of a cooldown per player, there may be less issues with the pound running out before less active players can get any

First, one has to note that the inability to catch the Pound doesn't necessarily say as much about someone's level of activity as it used to given Discord bots. You can be barely active otherwise and yet set remainders to Pound, hence why we have spikes in site activity shortly before opening. In theory, you can be also very active on the website and not use Pound as well, but seems to be rare as who wouldn't take a free pet, or at least have a shot at one (given failures in Pound dynamics described here, some of which have been addressed, like the question of Internet speed as a sole determinant of whether you will get a Rare pet or not).

Though, despite that, I would still say that Pound is one of main website drivers in activity overall - I know more than one person (including myself, who runs a small experiment of trying to catch every Pound this month, and this keeps me active at this website, in a way that nothing else could do in years - I was barely active for many of them) that checks out trades and trades with others more while coming to check the Pound. I would bet this would show in actual data, if such exists. And that's all even with Discord bots (perhaps they actually drove the overall activity levels higher, as now observing Pound times is much easier).

Second, the game that doesn't reward activity from their players usually doesn't live very long. Or at least lives very slowly (inactivity death). CS is already a game that overall doesn't reward activity much, hence it has drastic user count changes when it actually decides to do so (events, 18th December, pet releases each month) and is much more empty otherwise. When you decide to give "inactive users" a prize for inactivity anyway (so to equalize userbase), one of the main encouragements to be active disappears, because there is no game gain to visit this website up to a few times a day to check for Pound/L&F. The only option that's left here is trading and trading has several issues on this website as well, and is far less newcomer friendly than Pound.

This means that several of the actually active people today who see Pound as one of the reasons to come to the website will lose that reason. And it's not like people who are inactive are gaining any reason - they do however "get prizes" regardless of inactivity.

It's like approaching a swarm of vigorous Dota nerds and suggesting them that totally revamping the gaming system to suit "rarely playing players" so "they could have high rankings too" (eliminating the difference between someone who plays three times per day and three times in half a year) is a very good idea. Hint: it would kill Dota. Or like a teacher in a class who has two pupils: one who comes every second school day for a test and one who slacks and comes in every two weeks - who says that "Well, for you to have equal chances I'm going to make those tests bi-weekly so Simon can have a chance at equal grades. What do you mean Charlie, you don't want to come here as often any more...?".

In fact, the opposite should be approached: for CS to be more lively and have a more active, bigger userbase, and develop as a game, it should have more (both in amount and diversity), not less, opportunities that reward players for their activity. Right now from things you can do daily here there is Pound and potential gains from the trading system (I count pet, item and art trades in those). There is also a social side to the website, but this side is only somewhat connected to the game aspect (to the point that some people using the social aspect of CS aren't using the pet aspect at all), so I'm not factoring that in, although it is an activity drive semi-related to the game (but not the game itself, forums could function on its own, just with less activity). Events are irregular and pets adoptions are monthly, so those are not the reason for day-to-day gaming. By making Pound something "once a day" you will make many people who come here several times per day and drag activity alongside (consciously or not, with that bot timer or not) come here once a day at best (if not stop coming here because of how discouraging it is). CS should go to the direction of players - especially new players! - being able to expand their collections daily, to having more activities that people could find joy and participate in, and so forth. When you limit Pound, you limit one of the main ways - very few ways - for newer players to get over the account age difference (which is a huge factor in how much you have on CS), to have a shot at extremely rare pets (in fact, I would say that there have to be more ways for the newer players only that would give them somewhat more chances at doing so than for older players). And even for older players - if you have been inactive or someone stripped you of you treasures by ninja trading, Pound is the way you can catch up and make it up, if you have luck - though if you visit it often enough - as it's regularly open - you have more chances, and hence more chances for luck to shine. So your persistency and activity in that matter tends to get rewarded. And that drives all types of players in.

(This idea may cause Pound "clogging" as mentioned above as well. People just won't be willing to adopt more common left-over pets, fearing it will block their chances for more rare pets in the next Pound, and you will be stuck with Pounds with ~400 pets left going for ages. Now there is practically no drawback to go late and adopt that one Very Common, but with such changes there may be.)