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@butcherbaby I just made an edit to my previous post about this train of thought.

To summarize: some of the staff likely do have their own accounts and play regularly. They have their own play style. You genuinely can't expect nor demand them to somehow mimic the play styles if THOUSANDS of other players. Do you???

@ValidEmotions
We're not asking them to mimic thousands of players. We're asking them to engage in the game in even a similar way that the actual players do so they understand our concerns. Using the forums sometimes, having to use the marketplace, the AH, using the Achievement system, having to bond with all their familiars, etc, etc. As it stands they make changes and seem just... blind sided?? that we would react in X negative way. Which if they spent any amount of time playing with the game mechanics themselves they wouldn't be so shocked.

I love the pinglist feature but I agree with many others that this is going to cause a huge amount of major gameplay issues for people. I have some thoughts...

Perhaps pinglists can be toggled to be public or shared by the owner, either shared/visible to specific users, or shared/visible to everyone as a few options.


I am not entirely sure where the privacy issues stem from, in my experience, but having privacy be optional in pinglists might be a good thing.


Also the pinglist per user limit is still a bit low for folks who have shops!

I love love LOVE the new ideas for skins and accents you have, they'll be so helpful for people!! However, I'm not a fan of how you're planning to do on-site pinglists. As many people have mentioned, the limits on customizability, who can ping a pinglist, and the amount of users in a mass ping would have huge ramifications for the community. Sales pinglists such as GASP and ODCA, community pinglists for things like flight dominance efforts, notification pinglists such as the ones for marketplace flash sales and Swipp, large hatcheries, and so many more would be severely negatively impacted by these changes. I run an auction service that heavily relies on these large community pinglists like G1 Hoarders, ODCA, and SIDHA. These changes would make it impossible for me to use these pinglists, thus almost certainly killing my business. There's many other like me such as artists, skin and accent makers, and hatchery owners that would suffer similar devastating effects to their businesses on site. I strongly strongly strongly suggest that you reconsider your pinglist feature and the limitations of it. Thank you so much for your dedication to the well-being and safety of your users!

[quote name="Chimalus" date="2023-10-26 17:57:44" ] Word of advice for people dreading the loss of mass pings: do your business on Discord instead. There are great servers for art, skins, nesting, and all the rest. [/quote] This is NOT the answer, I'm sorry. I've seen this happen with mods on Nexus, mods in WoW (like ElvUI), and the death of forums on the internet is a very real thing. Forums maintain a thread/archive of responses that other people can go to for similar issues without adding their questions to a continuous flood of conversation that is hard to archive/wade through- and frankly, some discord servers are full of THOUSANDS of people (like with ElvUI/Skyrim Mods) and some of them have very toxic/elitist users that make it hard to simply ask a question without being harassed.) Folks don't WANT to join discord servers that are ridiculously busy, just to ask a question or sign up for a single accent, etc- especially since Discord is Off Site, and therefore, any sales, harassment, or bad faith trades are no longer covered by site rules. If an accent maker decides to only do their pings/sales through Discord, I will simply wait to buy their accents off the AH or through secondary sales. There simply isn't any insurance for bad faith sales/trades through off-site methods.

[quote name="Xaz" date="2023-10-26 19:56:06" ] @ValidEmotions We're not asking them to mimic thousands of players. We're asking them to engage in the game in even a similar way that the actual players do so they understand our concerns. Using the forums sometimes, having to use the marketplace, the AH, using the Achievement system, having to bond with all their familiars, etc, etc. As it stands they make changes and seem just... blind sided?? that we would react in X negative way. Which if they spent any amount of time playing with the game mechanics themselves they wouldn't be so shocked. [/quote] @Xaz I just mentioned exactly why people could still be "blind sided" despite being players. Until this thread, I didn't even know GASP existed, let alone what it was. And I've been on this site since 2014. I use nearly every feature of this site (except the custom skin submissions). Again, some of the staff have personal accounts, I'm certain, and play regularly outside of working on the site. They're human though. You're expecting that they just know everything about the player base.

So excited for the reprints thing! I remember seeing it suggested quite a few times so I'm glad it's gonna be implemented

Although with the end of mass pings I'm worried about how GASP will be affected, I can't see it ending well for the system

I've only read about 20 pages of replies to this, but I'd like to bring something forward for consideration. I've added myself to the G1 collector's pinglist for specific hatch dates (primarily) and 2 specific color combos. With the site reaching 90 million dragons (congrats!!!), it'd take an innumerable amount of hours to sift through the auction house with any regularity for these dates. The colors are easier with the search function, but I can't use the search function for hatch dates. The pinglist is the only way I can find the dragons with these dates anymore. I simply don't have the time to sift through 90mil+ dragons to narrow down an ID range for the dates I need, then sift through the AH for dragons in the range of those IDs.

Please, please, please. Admins, please consider situations like mine. I've seen other people looking for specific dates as well. If these pinglists go away, could you please consider adding a search by hatch date feature?

@ValidEmotions
it's their game. Yes I expect them to know more about the player base than the normal person. Like??? That is their job. If they are blind sided then they owe it to themselves to learn why. And just because you don't use GASP or engage with the UMA part of FR (which judging by your lair and mostly fest skins you don't (this is not a condemnation merely an observation)) doesn't mean it's not a truly HUGE part of the site overall. It is a major part of why FR has such a robust and stable economy.

Sometimes people on FR (I'm not speaking directly at you) act like it's such a burden for staff to do X when X is literally a normal and expected part of their job. It is a fully normal and expected part of a game devs job to play the game they are making be it a small indie company or a big company like Bungie.

I like that we are getting on-site tools for pinglists; it is, generally speaking, a good thing for a game to support itself within its own ecosystem, rather than force users to look for resources off-site from third parties. It makes it easier to access, easier to standardize, easier to address potential misuses. So I am not opposed to FR having a new tool to handle what has for years been done by a third party, with its own issues related to player privacy, accessibility, etc. But I am concerned that this pinglist feature as it is currently described will not fully and successfully replace the way that offsite pinglists are operated in some key ways that I and many other users currently make use of.

Example: Some of my favorite hatcheries have dozens of pairs of dragons that, while very lovely, I'm just not interested in every single one, and thus those hatcheries have made specialized pinglists per pair, so I know when I get a ping from Example Hatchery 1 that it's because the specific pair I was interested in has hatchlings available. Being able to have such granular control over what pings I received, when offered by the hatchery owner, made me more likely to catch the ones I was interested in and therefore buy the dragons I wanted. Replace dragon pairs with specific skins/accents and it's the same thing; I might not want to be pinged every time an artist has an update, but I do want to be updated for Skin A, Accent B, and "New Accent Releases." Again, this is granular control that can be achieved with offsite pinglists, but with the FR pinglist limit at 50 and no ability to delete an existing pinglist, this would make FR pinglists an insufficient replacement.

I feel that more work needs to be done with site-hosted pinglists to fulfill as much as possible of the flexibility that is currently being met by pinglists organized on offsite tools, and I would like reassurances that the team is working on that before sunsetting mass-pings as they currently exist.

Things I would like to see:

- A timeline for sunsetting mass-pings as they currently exist. Few things instill more user panic than "this popular feature will be ended soon" with no more specificity than that. I want to know what the timeline is, even if it's very much up in the air. Will we get about 6 months to adjust to FR pinglists and changes made to them? Will we get about 3 months? Will we get 30 days? Even if the timeline is vague and subject to a lot of change, it really helps to get a better idea than "in the near future" with how unspecific that wording is.

- More than 50 pinglists per user. Users who have large hatcheries, do many skin/accent sales, do both, and other cases of "power users" would quickly run through that number if they tried to simply migrate their existing offsite pinglists into FR. If this tool is meant to be a replacement for that, it hinders their site usage in their years-established playstyle, and affects the people subscribed to their existing pinglists who could make their subscriptions very granular ie specific to this dragon pair, or this skin/accent, so that they would know that a given ping is actually of interest to them.

- An answer for the current usage of shared pinglists. Some current pinglists are shared, not just a thread owner who needs sole control of the pinglist, it's the people subsrcribed to the thread who are also contributing to the ping use. Examples include G1 sales, subspecies sales, nest rentals, specialized parts of domination pushes. I would like to see FR pinglists have permissions to allow other users to utilize them. In some cases, that could be managed with a function to give specific users permission to also use a pinglist, but in other cases, a limit on who can do the pinging would eliminate a current use case entirely. I appreciate that you want to limit the ability for people to misuse pinglists, but this would be a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (or hatchling out with the eggshells?) by how it eliminates ways that some pinglists are currently used and ends some well-entrenched methods of play.

- Better tools for pinglist management. Users have reported in this thread that currently, created pinglists cannot be deleted. That combined with a 50 pinglist limit really hobbles the way those hatchery or skin sellers use theirs; pairs and skins are retired frequently, those pinglists deleted. With that 50 limit and no ability to delete, that means running into a situation of being at 50/50, having need for a new pinglist, having an old pinglest that isn't in use anymore, and having no ability to just delete that old pinglist and make a new one.

- A timeline for the addition of new features. If any of these use cases will get some better tools/management options based on user feedback, I'd like a timeline for that, and for that timeline to work with the mass-ping sunset timeline. If users are going to face a situation where a current pinglist usage is no longer available to them as they current have the ability to use it, but a solution is in development, knowing that there will be a gap and how big that gap will be will help users manage that. Ideally the tools and features that are being requested would be implemented before the sunsetting of mass-pings, and if that would be the case, knowing that would reduce the anxiety level on users who have relied on them for years.

So to sum up: I think the concept of on-site pinglists is a good development. I think the feature as it exists currently does not address enough of the usage cases that have been fulfilled for years by offsite pinglists. I think the announcement of mass-ping sunsetting is too vague and too likely to cause additional frustration. I think any development of new features for pinglists should be announced, especially if those features would not be implemented before the sunsetting of mass-pings.

Thank you for listening to player feedback, I hope that the format I've provided mine helps.