Suggestions

Forgive me if this suggestion already exists, I didn't see it in the sticky or a quick scan (currently at work, because ya know, I'm a productive employee).

So, I know you can save a search in the AH to make it faster, but sometimes I kinda forget that I was searching for a specific dragon (ie Robin/Aqua/Honeydew Female Plague Tundra) and then don't remember to do it again for a week or more. At which point I may have missed out on a gem.

My thought is to have the option to get an alert when a dragon matching your saved search criteria lands on the AH, so you can be like "aha! my dream dragon has appeared!" and snag if before you forget about it for another two weeks...

I'm not a coder, so I don't know how this would work in practice (or how obnoxious it would be to implement) and I don't think it would be practical for anything except dragons (and maybe skins?), but as someone with ADHD and a busy life it would be awesome to not miss out on a dream dragon because I forgot to search for a week lol.

Thank you for your consideration <3


ETA:
There's a lot of responses to this that come down to the same thing - unwanted alerts, so I guess I should have specified that it's only if you choose to be alerted when a specific combo comes up.

The point was to have it for specific dream dragons, not every Spiral that gets listed lol.

Also, in regards to abusing it - that's why I specified that it would probably only be practical for dragons (and maybe skins?). Especially if not having a list price option in the "search alert" was a thing.

And if you're concerned about getting 3billion notifications - it could work the way the AH already does, you get *one* notification alerting you to the dragon. But again, if you have a search for a very generic dragon, say any dragon with Crystal, well you don't *need* an alert for that, there's currently over 2k dragons on the AH right now with that, so why would you ask to be alerted when one was posted?

I guess what I'm getting at, is that I don't think I explained myself very well lol. It's not supposed to be for every saved search, just those dream dragons that you sporadically check for because you're not on all day long. It's supposed to be a convenience and a support for those of us who are only on once a day or so, but are invested in finding a special dragon, not just *any* dragon.

I do agree with the issue of lag, which is why I mentioned not being sure how this could realistically be implemented.

The idea of being limited to only 1-3 "search alerts" at a time is a good one (thanks ThePlasticYam and Anchoram!

While this could be useful for very specific combinations, i can see it causing issues with more broad searches (i.e. i have one that’s just mirrors with crystal, and another that’s just mint stained)

Using dragon search can alert you to any dragons you may have missed and if they’re freshly hatched or clearly fodder you can offer on them

While this would indeed be useful and I'd probably like it, I have to wonder if and how much lag it would cause. It would have to check every single posted dragon (or, in the case of dragon search, hatched dragon) against every single alert list we might have. It just seems like a lot of checking happening all the time. Maybe it's less complex than I'm thinking.

Though I can see the utility, I think this idea also might leave avenues open for misuse. It's not uncommon for people to mis-post expensive things (listing a 500g item for 500t, for instance, or leaving off one or two zeros by accident); from what I can tell, there's a pretty robust culture of AH purchasers who will return the accidentally-sold items to the seller as long as proof is provided that they're the seller. But someone who wanted to profit off this pattern of mistake listings could save a search alert with the parameters "egg" and "30g max" (or "6 digit" and ballpark fodder price) and intentionally snap up the accidentally lowballed items with some regularity if they got pinged every time one was listed. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems like it would open up an obvious way to make some unscrupulous dragon cash.

This could be helpful when you’re looking for that right color combo or that rare familiar, but I’ve seen that AH saves are usually more… result-heavy. I don’t want 1000 pings for dragons I’m looking at, and I doubt the site does either. The backend of this would be a lag nightmare.

No support, but I see what you mean

I agree that this would be great (alert me to that obscure colour combo I need before it gets exalted as fodder!) but I also don’t see a way to implement it without causing massive lag.

I have 100 saved searches (and would have more if that wasnt the maximum) and one of them is all adult dragons listed for treasure. imagine getting a notification every time someone lists a dragon for treasure......

i use my saved searches as bookmarks of things i will look at once in a while, or as shortcuts for things i look for often e.g. fodder adults, fodder hatchlings up to a certain price point, all unhatched eggs etc. so i can get to the results with just a couple clicks.

if i got notifications for all of them i could never do anything on FR again lmao

I think this is a great idea! But since people are rightfully concerned about spam and lag, maybe instead of sending notifications for everything on our "saved search" list we could have a separate "alerts" list with a limited number of slots. This way they could also have it so you can't set prices as a factor, so that it wouldn't be misused in the way wolffia pointed out.

I think a lot of the concerns mentioned could be avoided if we had as ThePlasticYam mentions some sort of 'Subscribe to search' option.

To prevent lag I also think players should get a limit of maybe 5 or so searches that they can subscribe to at any given time (like there's a limit to number of saved scries and dressroom outfits). That way the people who've subscribed to an item in the hope of an accidental cheap mispricing, which I don't have strong feelings for or against, would also only be able to subscribe to a few items at once. It also keeps to the spirit of the function to primarily be a way to find 'that one specific dream dragon' or 'that one usermade accent'.

So overall support from me, just limit number of allowed searches with alerts and have it be an active action on the user's side to ask for alerts for a given search.

A subscribe to a saved search for alerts would be cool! An automatic alert for any saved search would be disastrous for me, I've got a saved search for all adult dragons for gems and a second one but for treasure just so I don't have to find the search boxes. I would never not have an alert lmao.