Announcements & News

so happy!

I love that the Encyclopedia articles are being updated, and that Harpies' Nest finally has some gorgeous bird bosses. Really some fantastic additions to site lore in the past few Coliseum updates.



Also I know that the coders worked hard and it would be a while (if ever) before you make changes, but I'm afraid I also have thoughts on the new Crossroads system:

One-Way Item Delivery
The new interface is wonderful, but unfortunately Messages are still the most reliable way to send one-way packages of items and treasure/gems! Honestly not a large problem as long as Messages still have attachment function, but I believe that it undercuts the Crossroads assumed function as a one-stop trade centre with transaction receipts. Specifically for one-way service transactions such as paying for an art commission, adoptables, or some other service.

It appears that items only leave the sender's hoard after the receiver has accepted the trade, which works well for dragons where both parties have finite lair space, but not so much for items or currency. It's very easy for the sender to accidentally sell/vault/spend the items in the one-way trade package before the receiver has a chance to accept. Less of an issue when sending 1-2 high value items, but it can be easy to forget when sending 30 cheaper items in various quantities, or multiple treasure/gem transfers at once. Especially if the receiver is unavailable to accept right away.

I'll get the hang of it but it looks interesting 0____0

The new crossroads looks so cool :D

Yesssssss I suggested a Roc familiar as a boss for Harpy's Roost once a long time ago, and I am so satisfied to finally see not only one, but two!

I really couldn't agree more with @azurillturtle. It actually bothers me that the most efficient way to use Crossroads now during dominance efforts is two 1-way trades, [b]defeating the purpose of having secure trading.[/b] [quote name="azurillturtle" date=2016-03-20 05:52:30] @Xhaztol All right, having had a little time to unwind after the chaos of last night, here are my thoughts on CR 2.0. Apologies if my essay here is meant to go somewhere else; I'm not sure else where to put feedback on the new system. I was receiving for the Ice buy thread, and as one of those offering the highest payouts, I got a lot of CRs in the last few hours. The real chaos started at 22:45. In the one hour between then and when dom was tallied, I received 307 notifications, most of them CR-related, and completed 132 CRs. The long and short of it is that, for dom battles, one-way CRs work great for specific purposes. Two-way CRs are unwieldy and inconvenient in comparison to the old system. Detailed breakdown below. One-way CRs For most of what we used them for, these were great. In-flight programs, quickly ferrying adult fodder to trainers if you didn't worry about payment, sending to art shop -- it worked well for all of these. For accepting dragons from out-of-flight… mixed feelings. In this case, I would accept one-ways CRs of dragons, the sender would comment with how much I owed them, and I'd send a one-way CR with payment. This was pretty convenient for large batches of dragons, where I'd only have to send payment once. But when most people were sending two-way CRs, this broke up the flow of accepting and receiving. Two-way CRs Most of the trades I received were two-way. That… did not go so well. With the old CR system, it would take me three clicks at best to accept three dragons. With the new system, it's one to open the trade, one to click messages to see how much I owe, another (double-click) to close the message box and type in the currency box, a second or two to type out the total, click to send trade, click to confirm, for a total of five clicks and however long it takes to input the amount. That's a lot more time on my end. The person who sends the trade does not always accept in a timely manner, effectively clogging up your CRs. Whereas in the old system, the trade speed was determined solely by the person receiving the CR, this system demands that both people be paying attention, which doesn't always happen. In addition, I heard that the funds you've dedicated to the trade are "withheld" until the trade is complete. For people who are relying on exalt payouts to keep on buying, having this money held in limbo can be a problem. You have no control over when the dragons appear in your lair. People who send many dragons at a time will often provide final confirmation all at the same time, effectively causing a giant influx of dragons. I was going through many CRs at once; I was always afraid that I'd finish confirming a batch and then go back and find ten sellers telling me they couldn't accept because my lair was full. In this way, I much prefer the old system, where I would be the first to know if I didn't have space to take more dragons. This also locks out people with small lairs from receiving dragons for public buys or raffles -- if they only have three empty spaces and someone tries to do a final confirmation on two trades at once, they're out of luck. We relied heavily on the message system. This is both a good and bad thing. Good, because we could easily tell someone if a dragon was still in coli and we couldn't accept the CR. Bad, because we also relied on them to tell us how much to pay them. When sellers didn't give a total, I had to ask them to provide it, because I had no spare moment to do the math myself. This is another huge slowdown, and that leads me to my next point. Not being able to request something of the other person is a pain. This is true for both one-way and two-way CRs, actually. While I appreciate that no one can send unsolicited CRs for my dragons, I was often in a rush and it would be easier for the other person to request something of me than for me to provide it to them. If they need adult fodder, it saves time for me if they can find the dragons and send CRs instead of making me hunt through my lair. If they want payment, they have to tell me via message, and I have to spend a bit more time checking the total rather than simply clicking one button to confirm. And this is more related to the bugs than the new feature, but I heard that sometimes pending CRs would disappear from the list in main Crossroads. When I'm going through trades too fast to even check my notifications, that is a big deal. I don't think I had this problem, but I wouldn't notice if I did. I almost never had the free time to go through the notification links. Those are the major complaints. Though the message system is great, there is a lot of slowdown and inefficiency compared to the old system. I had a lot of space in my lair and a lot of funds, so I didn't run into all of these problems, but they can be a huge inconvenience for other users during big dom pushes. General comments Dragons appearing at the end of your lair is great. No more hunting through my pages of permas for stray fodder! Three dragons at once is great. It's a bit of a strange cap, since often we'd want to send fodder in groups of two or other even numbers. Initially we were wondering why this wasn't set higher, but because we can't control how many dragons come into our lairs at once (as that's reliant on when the original sender provides final confirmation), a lower number is possibly better. Being able to jump to lair pages by clicking on the number is amazing. I used to have to tab through nine or so pages of permas to get to the dragons I wanted to send out. No more of that! So many notifications. So many notifications. I understand the necessity of getting pings for new CR, new message on CR, and CR complete, but still -- so many notifications. I think mine broke, actually; the counter froze at 60-some last night, but every time I went to Crossroads, I'd have another 5-10 trades waiting for me. This meant that any non-CR stuff got completely drowned out. If someone tried to ping me, I probably never saw it. Since most of that was related to the push, that's bad. The message system was useful. Unfortunately, with the limited time I had during the push, I often didn't get to reply or really read what people said to me. There's a little bit of oddness when clicking dragon images in trades. Sometimes it leads to the dragon's page in the other person's lair; sometimes it's in yours. It depends on the stage the trade is in. I preferred the old system, where clicking the dragon's name gave you their permanent page, independent of lair. Overall, for dom pushes: one-way CRs are great, two-way CRs are horribly inefficient compared to the old system. I've heard a lot of complaints and frustration from receivers. This has been your report on our experiences yesterday. o/ Ah yes, and something else I just noticed: under the new system, it is now impossible for me to send CRs for the @Icewarden. very important feature lost, please fix. [/quote]

ohhh

Thanks for all your hard work! This is going to come in handy!