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Encouraging users to breed useful eggs, Or just increase egg diversity in general
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Tyranisaur
post Sep 27 2016, 10:21 AM
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Go to Stats->Pokémin Counts then click on the header called "Users Breeding", which sorts the list of pokemon by the amount of users that are currently breeding each pokemon. That is in decreasing order. The numbers of users are representing the amount of users that have been active within the last weeks or something, and the numbers are maybe correct, I don't know. Is it useful to know that some users are breeding Manaphy rather than just listing them as breeders of Phione? Not really.

Anyway, what you are going to see on the list right now is that out of the top 60 most bred eggs, 50 of them are novelties or the non-novelty counterpart of a novelty. I am just going to state that this is not healthy for the site. The amount of breeders for the top 60 range from 240 to 24. The remaining 308 pokemon on the list then have between 24 and 0 breeders, with 33 of them having 0 breeders. The problem isn't necessarily that some eggs are being bred more than others, if there are people picking up those eggs. Luckily for us we have numbers on how many hunters there are for each egg. However, we are still not in luck, because these numbers add up to total number of active hunts on the site, in other words, they are not limited to users who have been active in the same window as the breeders. That means that we can't necessarily draw accurate conclusions from comparing the amount of hunters to the amount of breeders, but let's try anyway.

Cross plotting the numbers and finding the line of best fit gives bad results, because the line doesn't fit particularly well with the not very correlated ratios of hunters per breeder, but never the less, the line says there are on average 6.5 hunters per breeder plus 107 hunters from the get go. Take that as you want, I think it's bad, but I'm not going to think to much about it, mostly because it's inaccurate for most data points.

Now onto why it is bad to have too many breeders breeding the same eggs. It's because most of those eggs don't get picked up. Meanwhile some users would have liked to pick up other eggs. That is particularly bad for the site when users who want to pick up some set of eggs are not picking up other eggs instead when they don't find what they want. This leads to them being less active on the site, and the site dying slowly of ever reduced traffic. What you actually want is to always have users who want to pick up eggs to get some eggs they want, either by motivating them to pick up more common eggs, or by providing more of the eggs they want. Providing more eggs people want doesn't necessarily mean that more eggs need to be produced, we just need to reduce the amount of eggs that are being bred but are not getting picked up. Or at least spread these eggs across more different types of eggs. In an ideal world we want to have a tighter correlation between the amount of bred eggs and the amount of eggs that get picked up for each individual specie. Keep in mind that there can't be more eggs picked up than what is produced for any individual specie.

Now back to why mass novelty breeding is bad. And feel free to call me a hypocrite for saying that novelty breeding is bad while I'm doing it myself, but don't say that I'm wrong because I do it. Let's be real here, you breed novelties for the sake of the novelty and not the non-novelty counterpart, which you breed all the more eggs of. If you are hunting the novelty, which a lot of users are, then you are going to produce that set of eggs for a long time, where only a small amount of the eggs are eggs you actually want. Do other users want the rest of the eggs you are producing? In an ideal world they do, but only so many of them are needed. If many people are hunting for the non-novelty egg then that's cool. However, this brings me onto the topic of SWSH novelties. Most new novelties we get are after a SWSH, where the novelty is most of the time just a novelty of one of the pokemon we just hunted in the SWSH. That is bad in the long run because a lot of people will then just have hunted the pokemon that is now going to be mass produced by the users that start breeding the new novelty. This is obviously worse than a scenario where most of the time the new novelties we got were versions of pokemon that have few breeders, and could use more breeders. Now, some numbers. My current breeding pair has these numbers:
19,938 children
5 shinies
522 novelties

As you can tell from that my hunt is longer than average. There are some shines in there, none of which were the novelty, because it's seemingly impossible for me to not grab novelties bred by my pair because pairs seem to never produce more than 2 novelties at a time, and I can just use one of my many heart sweets when they do produce two novelties. Now, attention to the amount of shines. Given the big amount of total eggs bred, the amount of shines should be closer to idk, 66. The fact that it's an order of magnitude lower simply means that the amount of eggs that not picked up is probably an order of magnitude higher than the amount of eggs that do get picked up. In practice, this simply means that me breeding all these Larvitars is helpful to very few users.

It's not that I want to deny people the option of shiny hunting for breedable novelties. It's that I think it would be healthy to breed more eggs to have a broader selection of eggs you can practically shiny hunt. When Alex and Thomas stopped breeding, the amount of species in the shelter seems to have gone from around 300 to around 200. In practice this means that one third of all breedable species are missing.

Now onto actual suggestions to how to encourage users to breed more kinds of eggs.

First off, what about having an additional daycare. By having two breeding pairs at once rather than one, you can breed more kinds of eggs. I would suggest that the breeding time for your second daycare to be on the other side of the hour compared to your standard breeding time. So Wulfenite would breed at 52 and 22, Azurite would breed at 12 and 42 and Malachite would breed at 32 and 02. Additionally I would suggest that only one of your daycare pairs is allowed to have "common" pokemon in it. Conceptually the daycare manager says: "Sorry, we are currently breeding too many of these pokemon, so we can't allow you to breed more of those." Where the choice of common pokemon could be something like the top 50 most bred pokemon or something like that. Maybe also a restriction that makes it so you can only have novelties in one of your pairs at a time. Of course having a second daycare with the current breeding output would just be way to much, so cutting breeding output in half when you use two pairs seems like a good idea. Note that when breeding a novelty in one of these pairs, I think it would be fair to breed the same amount of novelties as before, but only reducing the excess non-novelties.

Another suggestion is to reward you whenever anyone hatches a shiny bred by you. The point here is that the amount of shines that are going to get hatched out of your offspring is basically just a measure of how many of those eggs get picked up, with some randomness thrown in there for good measure. Being useful and ending someone's shiny hunt seems like the thing you could be happy about anyway, why not make you even more happy by giving a reward. The similar alternative is a rewards for all picked up eggs. However, in that case the reward needs to be smaller because it's going to happen a lot more often, thus less eventful.

A related suggestion would be to make the lab better. Fact is that an order of magnitude more eggs get adopted from the shelter than the lab. The lab is less convenient than the shelter because you look at 5(withe the item) eggs at a time from a pool of between 400 and 1200 eggs depending on how big the multiplier is. In the shelter you look at 60 eggs at a time from a pool of however many species there are in there at the given time. Right now it seems to hover at around 200 because the diversity is bad, but it could be around 300. If you are looking for one egg, then in a full shelter(300 species) it has a 20% change of appearing at the next refresh when we assume a uniform distribution. If there is one egg out of 400 you want in the lab, then the probability of it appearing on the next refresh is 1.25% If you don't know if the egg is there, and you refresh for while, how many times do you need to not see the egg until it it likely that the egg is not there? The answer is 120 times. Which is 24 times higher than in the shelter. On top of this, if you want to hatch lots of eggs quickly, then you generally avoid the lab because it's hard to tell how long the eggs have existed. Meanwhile int he shelter you mostly get eggs that are at worst half a hour old, but the more general worst case is 40 minutes when eggs are evenly distributed among the affinities. Mostly though, the lab is just bad because it has too few of the eggs you are hunting. Maybe you can use hunt power and get one or two batches out the lab, but not much more. The lab would be better if it had more eggs, you could look at more eggs at a time and if eggs weren't dropped into the lab instantly when they get created. Importance in that order.

If you want me to explain something further, point out that I'm wrong about something, discuss some of this or make your own suggestions, then those are the kinds of things the reply button is for.


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DrSnap
post Sep 27 2016, 10:57 AM
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QUOTE
Mass novelty breeding is bad

I totally get your feeling and you're right, but it might not only be the users' fault.... Who added novelty hunts in the Recorder ? Who added an achievement to complete five of them ? Who disabled Alex and Thomas and their infinite daycare ? I think the main problem is there...

QUOTE
Additional daycare

That would be a sweet addition indeed ^^ A bit cheaty, maybe... The reward thing is a good idea though.

QUOTE
The lab would be better if it had more eggs

Oh please no... Summonning is already such a pain..... And it's the only purpose of the Lab in my opinion, so, yeah... I mean, why read a few definitions at a time when you can actually see the eggs you are looking for, huh ?


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Tyranisaur
post Sep 27 2016, 11:16 AM
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In regards to summoning, I will refer to this suggestion. I think summoning is broken already, because you have a conflict of interest in terms of summoning on multipliers. On one hand there are more eggs in the lab, which means you are less likely to find your summon. On the other hand you want to do it on multipliers, because then you hatch your summon quicker, and summon eggs generally take a lot of maturity to hatch. By using a separate random number generator to potentially insert summons into the batches of eggs you see in the lab, you can for one keep the chance of finding a summon at a reasonable level regardless of whether the lab has 400 or 1200 eggs, but secondly you allow for a bigger design space for what you can do with the lab without having to keep the summoning mechanic in mind.


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DrSnap
post Sep 27 2016, 11:40 AM
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Yep, totally agreed. There are always 400+ eggs in the Lab.... Also no new summoning items since 4th gen, too.


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D E A N
post Sep 28 2016, 03:28 AM
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Adding a second daycare sounds like a good idea. Especially if you can't put a novelty in the second daycare [even if it isn't on the top 50 (or so) most bred pokemon.]

I'm a little curios on what the rewards for someone haching a shiny bred by you and the all eggs picked up could be?


This post has been edited by D E A N: Sep 28 2016, 03:30 AM


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DrSnap
post Sep 28 2016, 07:04 AM
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A Scratch Card, that would be super cool =D


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Tyranisaur
post Sep 28 2016, 11:08 AM
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QUOTE(D E A N @ Sep 28 2016, 10:28 AM) *
I'm a little curios on what the rewards for someone haching a shiny bred by you and the all eggs picked up could be?

The reward is not for whoever hatched a shiny bred by you. It's when anyone(yourself included) hatches a shiny bred by you, you yourself then get a prize.

I'm mostly omitting my own suggestions for these prizes because by doing that I don't suggest something that is on the "do not suggest" list. But also, because it's not important to me exactly what the reward is, the only important thing is that it's going to motivate some people to breed more useful eggs. I'll leave it up to staff to think up a reasonable reward scheme. Who knows, maybe they can think of something new that isn't on the site already.


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Luxrayx
post Sep 29 2016, 11:51 AM
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I adore the thought of a second daycare! There are so many pokemon I'd like to hunt that aren't very popular, but I can't breed them myself because my daycare is permanently reserved for novelties. Still, I think the simplest solution would be to have Alex and Thomas breed again... Say, do we know why they stopped?
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Cycloneblaze
post Sep 29 2016, 01:31 PM
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QUOTE(Luxrayx @ Sep 29 2016, 05:51 PM) *
Still, I think the simplest solution would be to have Alex and Thomas breed again... Say, do we know why they stopped?

Basically their enormous Daycare and Heritage lists were what had the site so slow a while back. Staff are still trying to figure out how to let them breed so much without causing lag and errors, Spades mentioned it in some thread a little while ago. It's not like they just forgot to turn the bot back on.


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DraconicDM
post Oct 6 2016, 12:39 PM
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From those few breeding numbers the problem is already obvious.
You have 19,938 children with 5 shinies while breeding one of the more commonly bred pokémon.
And I have 667 children with 4 shinies breeding Snorunt. (there are only 3 other people breeding it).

I think that the Lab is a separate problem from the Shelter, and I kind of like how it is right now. If you could see more than 5 eggs at the same time, it wouldn't help since you would need much more time to identify whether there is any that you need or not. Unless the Lab gets completely reworked.
For example you could highlight a few specific words in the descriptions. (maybe this suggestion is worth a new thread)


I also like your idea about a second daycare pair. It seems like a good solution, though it probably needs some polish. Maybe instead of top 50, it could be a limit like "more than x% of all people breeding this"

Another solution would be to add eggs to the Shelter in a manner similar to the Lab. After all, they don't have to be bred by someone.
Just don't fuse the two together. I would cry. I dislike pokémon bred by other people, so I try to avoid them (thus I don't use the Shelter much).


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Ariento
post Oct 6 2016, 01:41 PM
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QUOTE(DraconicDM @ Oct 6 2016, 01:39 PM) *
Another solution would be to add eggs to the Shelter in a manner similar to the Lab. After all, they don't have to be bred by someone.
Just don't fuse the two together. I would cry. I dislike pokémon bred by other people, so I try to avoid them (thus I don't use the Shelter much).


Alex and Thomas (NPCs) used to breed pokemon to balance the shelter out, but it caused too much lag and was disabled.

I agree with you on not liking pokemon other people have bred. I do grab them, but never to permanently keep. Mostly I grab them for achievements and explorations, or to get novelties that I can't get an unbred one of.


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DraconicDM
post Oct 6 2016, 06:30 PM
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QUOTE(Ariento @ Oct 6 2016, 08:41 PM) *
Alex and Thomas (NPCs) used to breed pokemon to balance the shelter out, but it caused too much lag and was disabled.

I agree with you on not liking pokemon other people have bred. I do grab them, but never to permanently keep. Mostly I grab them for achievements and explorations, or to get novelties that I can't get an unbred one of.


As I understand, the lag was caused by the huge heritage and daycare offspring lists. But why couldn't they just add eggs to the shelter without those eggs having parents? Since the Lab can have legendary eggs bred by prof Cypress, the Shelter could also have eggs not bred by anyone.


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SawkItToMe
post Oct 6 2016, 09:54 PM
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I do quite like the idea of a second daycare, I feel it would definitely help when it comes to even egg distribution in shelters. It's a neat idea.


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Tyranisaur
post Oct 7 2016, 05:03 AM
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QUOTE(DraconicDM @ Oct 7 2016, 01:30 AM) *
QUOTE(Ariento @ Oct 6 2016, 08:41 PM) *
Alex and Thomas (NPCs) used to breed pokemon to balance the shelter out, but it caused too much lag and was disabled.

I agree with you on not liking pokemon other people have bred. I do grab them, but never to permanently keep. Mostly I grab them for achievements and explorations, or to get novelties that I can't get an unbred one of.


As I understand, the lag was caused by the huge heritage and daycare offspring lists. But why couldn't they just add eggs to the shelter without those eggs having parents? Since the Lab can have legendary eggs bred by prof Cypress, the Shelter could also have eggs not bred by anyone.

The heritage lists wasn't the problem. The problem was the huge amount of pokemon A&T had, which all could breed with each other. The amount of possible breeding pairs that needed to be considered scaled through the roof. Meanwhile Professor Cypress is still breeding eggs that get dropped in the shelter. Long heritage lists are(or were?) really on demanding on your end, when you try to look at the entire list. When the system adds new content to the list, then most of the time, it doesn't need to look at the entire list, just add the new something at the end. I say most of the time, but that's only due to a quirk in the way lists are implemented on computers.


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Spoovo The Pirat...
post Dec 4 2016, 10:04 AM
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...okay, I didn't read all of that, but I get the gist of it, and totally agree. We need something that encourages users to breed more obscure things. Alex and Thomas at least help, but they're in no way enough.

Even if it was just something as simple as a point bonus for breeding... I dunno, Doduo or something. Or maybe the lab should spawn extra of a given type every week or something. Just anything that'll help us finding really obscure ones that people forget about. I've lost too many shiny hunts to a sheer lack of available eggs. sad.gif

(For the record, I try my best to breed obscure things too. I always crossbreed, and I try to make the pairing as rare as possible. At the moment it's Bastiodon x Slowking, for example).


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Tadpole
post Dec 7 2016, 12:33 AM
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I like the second daycare idea. I have a suggestion: The breeder cannot claim any eggs produced by the pair, they must all be donated. This would encourage people to use this daycare just for increasing shelter diversity, not for personal gain. This may need to be tweaked, because people rely on self bred pokemon for obscure hunts, but I think the trade-off would be fair.

That way it would kinda be like bringing Alex and Thomas back, but it's the responsibility of us users to produce eggs in need. Maybe even make it a somewhat expensive account upgrade. So people would have to be a little experienced and aware of the egg economy to access it.


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DraconicDM
post Dec 7 2016, 06:57 AM
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QUOTE(Tadpole @ Dec 7 2016, 06:33 AM) *
I like the second daycare idea. I have a suggestion: The breeder cannot claim any eggs produced by the pair, they must all be donated. This would encourage people to use this daycare just for increasing shelter diversity, not for personal gain. This may need to be tweaked, because people rely on self bred pokemon for obscure hunts, but I think the trade-off would be fair.

That way it would kinda be like bringing Alex and Thomas back, but it's the responsibility of us users to produce eggs in need. Maybe even make it a somewhat expensive account upgrade. So people would have to be a little experienced and aware of the egg economy to access it.


This would encourage most people not to use this at all.


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Shauntal
post Dec 30 2016, 12:21 AM
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The second daycare idea would be amazing. I had so many struggles when it was only me and 1 other person breeding Smeargle (at times, I was the only one!!) But I think it would have to be a rather expensive account upgrade, something for more experienced/dedicated players? It'd also help get rid of those points that people seem to have so many of (and have nothing to spend them on lol)


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