Pound "very rare drought" discussion

[Katsumi-Luna]

Support/marking because I love reading what people have to say about this

I agree that the pound should be closed while the issue is resolved (VRs/Lag/Bots if any). This is also a great time for the banned account pets to be brought over to the pound and put back into circulation.

[duckblind]

I think the L&F could finish faster AND be more fun if people were allowed to take 3 items every 3 hours instead!

agreed, i don’t even really do dressups but i love items cause i find them cute to collect haha. i’d love to see a more even balance between pound and l&f and have l&f improved with quicker cooldowns and/or increased selection. i’ve mostly been having issues with pound via lag coming out of nowhere and having a hard time clicking as well as not being able to see much outside of very very recent pets

[raccsnax]

edited my original reply to add this. i know this thread is specifically about the lack of rare+ pets, but a temporary closure would allow for staff to figure out a solution to the botting/lag issues (which i personally believe go hand-in-hand, but some of the lag can also be chalked up to how old the bones of this site are)

ETA - lil rascal mentioned a temporary closure to address the lag and potential script/botting issues as well as what i mentioned and i support this too 100%. there's a lot that could be tinkered with in that time and it all seems to be a net positive imo

as for being able to pick more items from a single l&f opening, i don't think it's a good idea until we know how many items there actually are in storage. even if there's like a million items i wouldn't support being able to pick twice/thrice unless there's at least a 1 hour+ cooldown between grabs, just so that the same handful of people who get there upon openings don't grab up all the better items immediately and leave the specks for everyone else

[Juliamon]

I think a 1-hour cooldown for L&F would be fine. Since around December I've noticed that the L&F openings have dramatically shortened, with 1/3 of the items claimed within the first 20 minutes. It slows down quite a bit after that, but it's pretty clear that people who are only there for the valuables rush it like they do the Pound. By the time an hour's passed there wouldn't be anything of interest to them.

[Shadow Milk]

Would randomizing the order of pets help with botting? So they aren’t organized old to new? I don’t know how you’d stop people from creating scripts that have image recognition (either by url or visuals) but that might work for basic autoclickers. I don’t want them to do that but if it helps with botting… idk.

[[ r a t ]]

... support, anything to fix a potential problem with bots.

I don't frequent the Pound as much due to the mysterious lag, but when I do I only occasionally find a pet I'm missing (and those are the common/below pets). That's fine with me, I'm just chill with making do with what I got. But inorganic activity on a pet site and seeing how it impacts people's gameplay bugs me.

If anyone here's seen how Neopets is, there's users there who use bots to automatically buy rare/expensive items to hoard and use to artificially inflate prices. It's different with CS obviously, but it's kind of in a similar situation: artificial activity in which normal users have a much smaller window of opportunity to get something nice.

People who (potentially) use bots are most definitely going to scrape the Pound for hoarding and/or fodder. Nothing wrong with either of those things when done normally and manually (trading or even hunting the Pound). Not fair when it's bots because... obviously. Whether or not someone has a problem with availability of rares in the Pound, if there's users pushing scripts, that's a concerning thought no matter what (unusual traffic, possible security concerns, so on and so fourth).

[softpaw]

Pets need to be moved from banned accounts to the pound and that is really the only way to fix this issue besides a complete overhaul of the system that would most likely require pet generation. Individual user donations will sustain a week’s worth of pound openings unless every rich user feels like draining their account for no discernible profit.

Has this not been happening lately? I remember around when I first joined it seemed like users who got banned would have their accounts cleaned and pets sent to the pound almost instantly. I do know of a few users who got banned in the last two years who still have all of their pets on the account, but I always figured these were outlier cases/not permanent suspensions. I always assumed that banned accounts were still having all the pets still sent and that the issue was that there just weren't enough people being banned to keep up with demand. I think if this demand can't be met by the current system pet generation would be a good solution (if possible, I admittedly do not know the logistics behind something like this and it is probably a lot easier said then done)

I've said pretty much all I had to say about this topic on other threads, but yeah the current state of the pound makes me pretty sad. Didn't vote in the poll because I think the issue is pretty complex and honestly I'm not sure what the best thing to do would be. But I am glad to see people talking about it.

[heepheep]

hi I was one of the voters who chose to shut down the pound entirely but I think commons only is a fair compromise. I mainly want to get the botting situation sorted.

I'm not well versed in how to solve bot issues besides captchas lol, but I saw in the other thread someone reccomended adding another layer to the adoption process , or longer cool down times for the pound. while the longer cd won't get to the core of the issue it'll block some botters from the next opening

I don't know the capacity of this website to handle something like this, though. maybe rather than build all of these precautions, focus should be devoted entirely to script detection and punishing (assuming it's just a handful of people)

@rare drought (sounds like a cool user)
i'm neutral on it. once they unload the banned accounts everything should be ok, i'm not too worried.
i agree a lot w/ lil rascal's take. this dwindling rare pool is awful but it would be awesome if there were more opportunities to move up the food chain besides the pound and dec. 18th. inflation is an interesting beast here. the pound wasn't intended to serve as a crutch for it but there's not much else unfortunately

[Cactus Dog]

I haven't been back on long enough to know much about what's going on with the pound, but i am getting frustrated with the lag and then only being able to grab whatever is left after it finally refreshes. I got lucky a few days ago on page 3, but thats the first time in months ive gotten above an uncommon.

Maybe have lower rarities for a while, and then make it so you can only get one pet in a 24 hr period or something instead of once every 3 hrs if it's open once it's built up higher rarities.

[Rylf]

... support, anything to fix a potential problem with bots.

I don't frequent the Pound as much due to the mysterious lag, but when I do I only occasionally find a pet I'm missing (and those are the common/below pets). That's fine with me, I'm just chill with making do with what I got. But inorganic activity on a pet site and seeing how it impacts people's gameplay bugs me.

-snip-

People who (potentially) use bots are most definitely going to scrape the Pound for hoarding and/or fodder. Nothing wrong with either of those things when done normally and manually (trading or even hunting the Pound). Not fair when it's bots because... obviously. Whether or not someone has a problem with availability of rares in the Pound, if there's users pushing scripts, that's a concerning thought no matter what (unusual traffic, possible security concerns, so on and so fourth).

((Note: Copied and edited my message from the previous thread))

This. Very much this.

Throwing my two cents in here. I’m very much in favor of temporarily having pounds with no rare+ in them. There are so many lower rarity pets worth grabbing and it would (hopefully) discourage some of the possible botting going on until things are sorted out. I would be very disappointed to have pound be completely closed, and I feel like this would be a lovely compromise. Having it close completely will likely result in a decrease in CS traffic and may even result in players quitting.

Also in favor of the cooldown being longer. The previously mentioned 12 hours sounds reasonable to me, personally. Or being able to adopt only 1-2 pets per CS Rollover. This would not only help with preventing a possible bot user from getting the good pets every single opening, but it would likely help fix some of the lag issues as well.

On an opposite note, I think a SHORTER cooldown on L&F would be incredibly beneficial. It is insanely frustrating to see 300 specks, pebbles, and icing decorations sit in pound for over 3 hours. Lots of people are willing to collect their ‘speck’ to get L&F to close because almost no one actually wants those items. Someone recommended an hour and I think that’s perfect.

I also kind of like the idea of mixing up the pets on the pound page so they aren’t lined up by dates anymore. I know it will make it harder, but if it stops the bots, I feels worth it.

Throwing a new idea out, but completely unsure of how it would work. A newbie-only pound with older/rarer pets. We all remember what it felt like to be new to CS and with the possible bot issues, it’s even HARDER for new players to get started. This would obviously have to have some restrictions so people don’t just create accounts to get better pets, but I feel like that would be very beneficial to them. I can’t be sure, but I feel like attempting to cheat this system might be more obvious for staff and mods to notice and resolve.