[Espy]

I highly doubt Coda meant "moving around the screen" when said said "roam". That'd be too distracting.

What we had in the past was as long as you were actively browsing/posting, every five minutes, on your next page refresh, you'd get a tiny (about 50x50px) pop-up somewhere with event currency. But if you missed that one, I think it would keep showing up on all the next pages you clicked on.

[ml1201]

Ah, yes, that's a good one to have then. XD I'd love to make a firefly for that. OWO I've never done a bug before though, but when the semester ends and no one has done the image yet I could do one or try to anyways. XD

[Coda]

Originally Posted by ml1201

OMG! That sounds like a good idea! But please if we need to click on them to 'catch' them please do not do on Aywas and make them go fast-slow-fast-slow or just fast in general. I nice slower speed, kind of like an ant crawling I'd say, would be a good speed if they do move around. Also, please don't do this silly think where you have to wait X amount of time before you can click another. If you want a timed interval between collection you could try doing like knuffel does and have these little captcha things pop up saying that there's a firefly on the page just so that they don't click past it.

And just for those who are done and don't want to collect anymore, maybe have a thread people can post in saying they don't want to see the fireflies anymore so that it can be locked for them? I honestly have no idea if this would be possible or not to accomplish, but I figured I'd toss my two cents in. x'D

Ah... I'm afraid I WILL be having the timer in there. :x Now, if the timer is ticking, it won't make any NEW fireflies show up, so that largely minimizes the occurrences of encountering that message, but for people like me who open a dozen tabs all at once and work through them, the possibility exists that two pages might both spawn a firefly, but you can only redeem one of them.

An additional reason for the timer is an anti-cheating mechanism. If an unscrupulous user were to figure out how to trick the system into thinking they'd clicked a firefly whenever they wanted, the timer prevents them from being able to get currency any faster than someone playing legitimately, thereby negating the incentive to cheat.

A third reason is simply server efficiency -- when we first developed this system, the Trisphee server was having a LOT of problems keeping up with the load, so I did as much as I could to minimize how much work the server would have to do in order to manage the event. The timer is a very cheap way to do it in terms of database access because it only has to do a tiny amount of extra work per-page-view and can save the expensive stuff for when you've made a successful click. (Oldbies will be able to tell you how bad the first Taskal War was in terms of lag.)

Originally Posted by Espy

I highly doubt Coda meant "moving around the screen" when said said "roam". That'd be too distracting.

What we had in the past was as long as you were actively browsing/posting, every five minutes, on your next page refresh, you'd get a tiny (about 50x50px) pop-up somewhere with event currency. But if you missed that one, I think it would keep showing up on all the next pages you clicked on.

Actually I DID mean moving around the screen. And it was going to be slow, and they'd have a pretty forgiving hitbox.

It didn't show up on ALL of the subsequent pages, but the probability was fairly good that it would reappear soon.

[ml1201]

Sorry Coda, Espy explained that to me already and I said that was fine. XD Just Aywas would do crazy time things like waiting a freakin hour between each one. I'm not going to keep track to get something in another hour. >_> And the hit box being forgiving is good, in some events that I've participated in the site would constantly have the pace of the thing change and it would get annoying, and it would also constantly change direction. Though as a suggestion, have it move around in slow loops then? It just seems appropriate to do that to me. XD

[Coda]

That's more or less what I had in mind.

[Illusion]

Originally Posted by Coda

Ah... I'm afraid I WILL be having the timer in there. :x Now, if the timer is ticking, it won't make any NEW fireflies show up, so that largely minimizes the occurrences of encountering that message, but for people like me who open a dozen tabs all at once and work through them, the possibility exists that two pages might both spawn a firefly, but you can only redeem one of them.

An additional reason for the timer is an anti-cheating mechanism. If an unscrupulous user were to figure out how to trick the system into thinking they'd clicked a firefly whenever they wanted, the timer prevents them from being able to get currency any faster than someone playing legitimately, thereby negating the incentive to cheat.

A third reason is simply server efficiency -- when we first developed this system, the Trisphee server was having a LOT of problems keeping up with the load, so I did as much as I could to minimize how much work the server would have to do in order to manage the event. The timer is a very cheap way to do it in terms of database access because it only has to do a tiny amount of extra work per-page-view and can save the expensive stuff for when you've made a successful click. (Oldbies will be able to tell you how bad the first Taskal War was in terms of lag.)



Actually I DID mean moving around the screen. And it was going to be slow, and they'd have a pretty forgiving hitbox.

It didn't show up on ALL of the subsequent pages, but the probability was fairly good that it would reappear soon.

If they are moving around the screen you should have another rare gold one that is uber rare and can be redeemed for a large set of prizes. But I don't mean rare as in lke every other second event currency we had, I really mean RARE. 1/1000 chance to see spawn. And making them self redeemable for another set of prizes rather then be currency themselves. :O


Oh but one thing. Can we PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE have a scoreboard for the event to make things interesting this time around for the most dragonflys caught? So the event is somewhat interesting.

[Coda]

I can do a leaderboard.

[ml1201]

I like the idea of a leader board, but something to add to this. Please do not give out prizes based on who's caught the most. But what you can do is have like a contest thread where if people say they want to participate in something like that then you guys can have something like that run for say the week days and weekends to give several people a chance to win if the event runs a couple weeks (and also because people tend to have more time on weekends than week days). This thread would have to be run by a mod or something, and the time for the day ends would have to probably go by server time (which I have no idea when that is ^^; )

[Quiet Man Cometh]

There often games and such that happen during events so there is often more than one chance to "win" something.

Some things also don't need to be strictly done by staff. For example, trading/gifting event currency is something users often to with each other when someone has spare, there's no need for a staff made thread for the purpose. Users can make interactive rp threads and such too, and they do. It's just not necessarily considered 'official.'

[ml1201]

Ah, well I wasn't sure if a user would want to run one like that, though I was just more concerned about it being made as part of the official firefly collecting thing. A site I was on did that but didn't announce that they were doing that, just told us to collect these things. So the top ten collectors got something special, everyone got a 'consolation' prize, and then there wasn't even anything that could be done with the junk that was collected. It just sat there for almost two weeks before it was removed from user pages. The consolation prize I don't even remember if it had a use, it basically just sat in your inventory doing nothing because it was a 'collectable item' with nothing obtainable from getting it.

[Coda]

I don't like the idea of giving out rewards for leaderboard rankings anyway. I like keeping incentives around for people who can't dedicate huge amounts of time.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

I can agree with that. Wouldn't want people who simply don't have the time to feel like they are missing out, or that there wouldn't be any point in participating.

[ml1201]

That's why I only mentioned it as being something people can do if they wanted to, not forcing them to do so. Which is way leaving it as a user thing like Quiet said is probably the best idea to be honest. I personally don't like games that do that myself.

[Illusion]

Originally Posted by Coda

I don't like the idea of giving out rewards for leaderboard rankings anyway. I like keeping incentives around for people who can't dedicate huge amounts of time.

Give the winner bragging rights, and a... I just thought of a cool idea!

You know our titles under our names? Is it possible we can make them colored? Make them some sort of status?

What if we give the winners the option to change their titles to any color they want? It's no item, rune, or anything sort of materialistic. And you can bring it back whenever you want for contests, and it would be a cheap award saying "You did a thing."

[Coda]

We've discussed fancy title-based rewards before. The answer is that it's technically possible to do it (remember the Corrupt/Divine stuff from the first Taskal War?) but we haven't decided what we want to use it for or what kinds of things we want to offer.