[X] My Assistant

[Layn]

The short explanation of this is, please do something to make bonus xp multiplier days stop happening so frequently. I THINK they're happening more frequently because there are fewer people on this site to click eggs so something needs to be done to make the eggs hatch at roughly the same rate they hatched when there were more people to click eggs each day, but this is having unintended consequences elsewhere.

As I am sure everyone knows, summoning a legendary egg when the lab has more than 400 eggs in it makes it extremely hard if not impossible to find the legendary egg in the time alloted. Since there are more eggs in the lab on xp multiplier days, you're kind of supposed to wait until a day without a muliplier. Great. I have no problem with this setup, and I like the challenge of trying to find my legendary before the timer expires.

However, we've been having so many multiplier days lately that I don't think the eggs in the lab on the last (day before yesterday? Or the previous day?) non multiplier day ever dropped below 500.

I don't think the original intention with regards to summoning legendary eggs was to make the eggs impossible to summon as bonus xp days became more common. Bonus xp days weren't common at all years ago when the legendary summoning rules were designed. They were really uncommon events and people were excited when they happened, and if they happened to fall on a day when you wanted to summon a legendary, well, you just waited until the next day. Now, waitimg for the next day is quite likely to lead to yet another multiplier day the next day.

Is it possible for some way to be implemented to not necessarily make summoned eggs easier to get, but makes them more along the lines of the same difficulty to get as when they were first implemented? Because it really seems like the features that are implemented to make people happy because they can hatch eggs faster are having the side effect of making legendary eggs much harder to get than originally. Maybe having days where the xp mutiplier does not affect the number of eggs in the lab if having fewer multiplier days is not an option?

This post has been edited by Layn: Mar 16 2016, 02:11 PM

[Csxhseft12345]

While I would like something like this to be added I also think its not needed.

You have 5 minutes to find they legendary egg, 10 minutes with the pass power. Lets say you refresh the lab eggs every 5 seconds to find it. Thats 48 eggs, 60 eggs with the account upgrade, every minute. Thats about 240 eggs without the account upgrade and 300 with the account upgrade, 480 and 600 with the pass power. When those times have passed an other person wont immediatly find it, so you have some extra time but to be fair I didnt include that.

From my personal experience the 5 seconds to check which eggs are shown and to refresh is high, so the amount of eggs you see might be higher. I think thats enough to find your legendary egg. Summoning legendaries through lab have always had a risk in it, and never was guaranteed to work in your favor.

Even with lab with 500-600 eggs its still doable, I do agree that with high multipliers, that we somethimes have for example 3.14 on pi day, that the lab egg amount can be higher. But I think you should just wait by then.


In short, it might be nice to be added but I also think it isnt needed since I think we have the pass power for it.

Edit: removed some typos

This post has been edited by Crasyforce: Mar 16 2016, 02:12 PM

[Layn]

There's a difference between "risk factor" and "impossible". My problem is more the fact that days with no multipliers seem to be less common than days with multiplers now. The "level of risk" was designed when days with multipliers WERE EXTREMELY RARE.

This is like sticking a frog in a pot and slowly raising the temperature. The frog stays because the temperature rises slowly, and then the frog is cooked. Multiplier days have gradually been getting more and more and more common but when anyone points out that this has a correlary effect on difficulty to get lwgendaries everyone says "but there has to be some risk level". I am perfectly okay with some risk level. I am not okay with the fact that the risk level has been gradually increasing as multiplier days get more common. I understand that with falling user numbers multiplier days are needed, otherwise no one would be able to hatch their eggs, but this is having really annoying effects on the legendary summoning process, effects that I don't think asking for them to be examined counts as lowering the risk level.

Literally anything that made the risk of getting a legendary the same regardless of the effect of the multiplier would be okay. When an egg is summoned randomly generate a time after which the egg will always be one of the visible lab eggs and if that happens after the timer to see the egg exclusively expires and someone else grabbed it too bad? Great. Make multipliers not effect lab eggs? Also great. Reduce the number of multiplier days so that there are more days when the eggs in the lab reflect the conditions that existed when this was first designed? Yet again, great. The problem is the fact that the risk scales with the presence of something that's becoming increasingly common, not the risk itself.

This post has been edited by Layn: Mar 16 2016, 02:25 PM

[Csxhseft12345]

I do agree with you on the fact that the lab is getting alot of eggs these days, summoning legendaries and finding the egg with 500-600 eggs isnt impossible.

I want to repeat that not every summon is ment to be succesfull, I myself have failed 2 out of the 4 summons I did the past 2 days. I get thats its annoying, but its part of the risk if you ask me.

This post has been edited by Crasyforce: Mar 16 2016, 02:21 PM

[Layn]

But it wasn't part of the risk when it was first designed. That is my problem. On days when there is no multiplier I lose maybe one out of every three eggs, and that is fine. I don't mind that. I don't mind losing eggs when it's normal. But this isn't normal and it hasn't been normal for at least a year.

How can something that didn't exist when this concept was designed be "part of the risk"?

[Csxhseft12345]

In the past, before we had alot of multipliers, summoning was easier. Heck there were even days were the lab was, or almost, empty. Though what I mean is that it isnt impossible, I guess the 'risk' is higher then it used to be.

And to answer your question, when summoning was made the coder did take in ment a lab with alot of eggs. Since when there are alot of eggs there is an warning message shown. Though I agree that when it was made that multipliers were more rare.

[Aragarthiel]

While I see your point, multiplier days are not meant to hatch eggs. Most of the multiplier days we get are the result of people donating to the site. If people stopped donating, the site would have to shut down, and we don't want that.

It is totally possible to not miss a single summon on a day with 1000+ eggs in the Lab. In fact, my personal luck makes me more likely to find my summons on those days.

Like I said though, I can see your point. Pluses do have a one-day cool-down, giving us one non-multiplier day for every three, but that doesn't account for things like Aurora or the Pass Counter reaching critical mass, or even staff birthdays. There's not really a good fix for it, unfortunately. We could require a mandatory cool-down for Pluses but that might affect donations. We could keep multipliers from overlapping, but when it comes to things like a Plus (meaning donations) coinciding with Critical Mass (which is the result of everyone's hard work), there's not really a fair solution. We could decrease the number of Lab eggs in general, but that would make summoning on non-multiplier days almost too easy and some Pokemon are hard to find in the Lab as it is, despite being of Common or Uncommon rarity.

It looks like fixing this one problem would have a domino effect across the site that just might not be worth bothering with.

[Csxhseft12345]

Maybe an idea would be to increase the summoning amount by an x amount of time depending on the multiplier?

[Cycloneblaze]

We could decrease the number of Lab eggs in general, but that would make summoning on non-multiplier days almost too easy and some Pokemon are hard to find in the Lab as it is, despite being of Common or Uncommon rarity.

It looks like fixing this one problem would have a domino effect across the site that just might not be worth bothering with.

Perhaps the lab could be stricter about culling eggs when there's a lot of one species in it, so decreasing the number while not cutting out rarer eggs. But, then that makes rarer eggs less rare, and sometime you would need a lot of those common eggs...

Maybe an idea would be to increase the summoning amount by an x amount of time depending on the multiplier?

This makes sense, actually - the summoning time could be increased depending on the multiplier, which is a very natural solution. Of course spending half an hour refreshing for your egg isn't very enjoyable, is it?

Really I don't agree that this is a terrible problem. I've never had trouble waiting and I don't think summoning is too risky - if you choose to summon on a day with 500 or 600 eggs, that's your choice and you knew the risk.
It is a valid point that summoning successfully has been made harder by the abundance of multipliers, but I would add that it was already made easier once, by Summon Power. So the argument that the level of risk, so to speak, has never been changed doesn't exactly hold water.

[Aragarthiel]

Perhaps the lab could be stricter about culling eggs when there's a lot of one species in it, so decreasing the number while not cutting out rarer eggs. But, then that makes rarer eggs less rare, and sometime you would need a lot of those common eggs...

The problem is, the number of species you can find in the lab is what, 400-ish? (I'm not actually going to go count so don't assume the math is right, just the logic behind it.) Even on days when the Lab has 1200+ eggs, that's an average of only three per species. Even accounting for harder to find eggs like legendaries and Unown, the problem is more the number of Pokemon there are than the number of eggs of any particular species. We can't make it so that only one or two of each species can be in the Lab, especially because there are plenty of Pokemon out there that more people are hunting than breeding, forcing them to rely on the Lab. And if we set the upper limit to only 10 of a species (outside SWSH), that's still a (very slim) possibility of there being 3000+ eggs in the Lab at once, which doesn't solve anything.

While the idea is great, I don't think it would work in practice.

[Cycloneblaze]

The problem is, the number of species you can find in the lab is what, 400-ish?

The number of eggs is 400-ish. But I'm not sure there's even 400 different types of eggs - discounting Novelties which can't appear and Legendaries which are so rare they may as well not appear, there's enough space for one of each egg. Trouble is there never is one of each egg, only a bunch of a common few and a few of an uncommon bunch, if you get me. The idea is to cut out extras so that there can be some (not necessarily only 1) of each species in the lab. I don't know if that'll happen because it runs counter to the whole common eggs are common, uncommon eggs are uncommon and rare eggs are rare thing.

[SilverPT]

I THINK they're happening more frequently because there are fewer people on this site to click eggs so something needs to be done to make the eggs hatch at roughly the same rate they hatched when there were more people to click eggs each day, but this is having unintended consequences elsewhere.

However, we've been having so many multiplier days lately that I don't think the eggs in the lab on the last (day before yesterday? Or the previous day?) non multiplier day ever dropped below 500.

Like Aragarthiel said, it's because people are donating money. And we can't ask people to stop donating money that's keeping the site alive, can't we?

While I don't mind some solution like increasing the summoning time, saying that we're having many multiplier days lately is not true. People donate when a competitive event is going on, such like the Coin event last month and the SWSH this month. That's why you don't see many multipliers on Scavenger Hunt months. Besides, the problem is not just the multiplier itself. When those events are active, a big influx of eggs (in the current case, Togepi, Drifloon and Dedenne) are dropped on the Lab. Even without a multiplier, there would be a lot of eggs there.

[Synx Itax]

SilverPT made the point that I wanted to make about all this. It's not just us staff putting out multipliers for special occasions or whatever; people donate a lot and therefore end up making many more multipliers happen. Not to mention that the increased number of events we've been having to make the site more alive have called for more multipliers whether through donations or through activity.

I never had issues grabbing summons with 500+ eggs, personally. Summon Power is a huge help.