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Staff Topic

Test Notes- 2 - 5 August, 2011

Post-Post test start update: Change in Meat and Butterfly Collector behaviours in your yard- see below!

Beta Testers! We are testing again- FOR YOU!

So, ok- we hear you on the collector changes! Here is the modified plan:

• One collector of one type is active at a time; when it is full, the extra goods will overflow to the next collector. (Not to two collectors, just one!)
• You can have any amount of milkers and collectors in the yard, however there will be a percentage of failures to collect in a time period as you increase the number of collectors there! Efficiencies will decrease.
• Meat collectors can now accumulate 60 meat and the Butterfly milker can accumulate 80 bottles, which is what the stack size is in your inventory.
•Those Butterfly milkers? They are valuable, right? So, they are now 400 currants to purchase.

There are not a lot of new things for you to play around with in the test (promise, more stuff will be in upcoming tests!), but we do have a few small changes to highlight.

We've made some physics change with ladder climbing. Your horizontal movement is prioritized over vertical now. This means that you shouldn't jump off a ladder if you had the up arrow pressed though you also had right or left arrows pressed (now, you should do a small jump of the ladder in the arrow direction you press).

Skills- Piety and Martial Imagination! We actually let people start learning these skills at the end of the last test, so if you missed that, you can now do so! And those skills and what you can do with them will become more clear for you... soon. ;)

There is still more client work for us to do in memory optimizations, and we'll be looking more at the issue where Chrome users on the Mac see their chat become very unresponsive and dropping letters whre t smetmes lks lk ths. Ahem. 

Races can now no longer be offered when you are in the fiery depths of Hell. Some of you might recall a bug striatic pointed out where two players who are in hell both "win" the race, and are plagued by repeating teleports to Burnabee. No more Hellacious races, as funny as they were! 

Gameshow wheels should now be properly placed in your homes, meaning- your trophy case shouldn't obscure them. 

(There were more things fixed -- honest!, but those were a couple of the more noticeable ones.)

Also, we also have a list of known issues in the Bugs Forum, we'll list if we need more reports on them.

Posted 17 months ago by kevbob Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

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  • And we're off!
    Posted 17 months ago by Bashere Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Wow! My Friedrich Nietzsche is actually a Nietzsche now and not a stoot head. :D
    Posted 17 months ago by JW Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Looking forward to challenging the sturdiness of this game and finding some bugs ;)
    Posted 17 months ago by Lepz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I've been to Burnaby - I always suspected it was closely associated with Hell. Think I'd rather stay in Hell actually :-)
    Posted 17 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @kevbob, Hi, I have a question - I submitted a bug report for something 11 days back and you sent me a nice reply that said "It's known, bug" So, I thought - okay, done. 

    But, my help section still says 1/1 - Awaiting reply from you (in green text). I'm assuming that means me? But, why do I need to replay when you said "It's being fixed".  Just to say - Cool, thanks! Or, did I really mess up and not concluded/fallow up in the right way?
    Posted 17 months ago by Sadie the Goat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Been to Burnaby myself, Snazzlefrazz. there was a Joe Sakic sighting involved. I thought I was gonna make water!
    Posted 17 months ago by malo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Sadie the Goat: When you see a help case in this state, you can just choose to close it with one of the options, like "I have the answer I need". You don't need to reply at all in this case.
    Posted 17 months ago by kevbob Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Hi kevbob, okay, thank you! :)
    Posted 17 months ago by Sadie the Goat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • T nks fr fixn the Mac Chrome lag. :)
    Posted 17 months ago by MrMatt Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Ouch... Kevbob... I will soon be dropping collectors anywhere I see you!!! Meanwhile, thanks for addressing the lag issue at my house in the process... sigh... collect, collect, collect, fast as I can!
    Posted 17 months ago by Dr007 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I will greatly miss my 2nd Meat collector - cannot imagine why you are eliminating it. This game is getting more like real life every day less "fun" more "work" - not a compliment. Sad .... the old guard will likely lay me out in lavender over any disagreement with Tiny Speck.................
    Posted 17 months ago by DTA Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yeah, this new update seems to giving me crazy memory leaks, slowdown, messing up the chat, etc. Mac Chrome user. Hope it gets fixed soon!
    Posted 17 months ago by nhex Subscriber! | Permalink
  • yeah, nerfing the collectors really really sucks.. that was the only thing i ever really used my house for - my pig and butterfly farm. even a house with 5 trees (which seems to be hard to find these days) hardly seems worth it.
    Posted 17 months ago by Cap'n Bob Subscriber! | Permalink
  • WHAT?! Why are you doing that to the meat/milk collectors?! GRRRRR!
    Posted 17 months ago by Lilith Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yeah, there goes my only way of making money... haha!  Had about five collectors of each type so I could save up for a new house. Bye bye dreams of running a Glitch Slaughterhouse & Dairy Farm ; )p
    Posted 17 months ago by Dorko Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I was able to pick up all of my "extra" meat collectors, take them out in front of my house, and, one by one, drop them, collect the contents, and pick them up again.

    At least I got one last "harvest". Now I have about ten meat collectors to auction off!
    Posted 17 months ago by Sly Hoax Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well, there was a way to wildly exploit the meat/milk collector behavior.  I just wish they had found a way to fix the actual issue, instead of just limiting us to one collector of each type.
    Posted 17 months ago by larky lion Subscriber! | Permalink
  • On the one hand I can understand. You get a house with a dozen piggies & half a dozen meat collectors and your meat income is sufficiently high that you have little need to generate income hands-on  - I guess it's the Glitch equivalent of The Four Hour Work Week :-)

    On the other hand, I was already feeling that I spent more time alone in the back garden of my house than I did interacting with other players - this is just going to mean I spend even more time in my garden and even less time with other players.

    TL;DR: seems sensible to limit collectors but maybe at 2 or 3, not 1 - or else we spend all our time alone in the garden with the pigs.
    Posted 17 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Working as a group to collect and feed many from one location is going to be impossible now unless I never leave my house. :(

    The whole pigpen is virtually redundant. What is the point in having enough space for a whole herd and remote herdkeeping if we can't collect the meat that they provide efficiently?
    Posted 17 months ago by Leithwyn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The milk/meat collectors limitation is not fun!  I understand limiting it, but just to one?!

    Maybe if you raised the amount they can hold... I mean, it's 50 and 50 while one full slot is 60/80... 

    Now to sell all my extras....
    Posted 17 months ago by Joy La Maru Subscriber! | Permalink
  • oh... Tiny Speck objects to battery farming, eh?
    Posted 17 months ago by shhexy corin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • crapola.....guano at 10 meat to get 3 guano???? Expensive! 

    This one meat collector makes it worthless to spend all that time learning remote herd keeping. Very expensive guano. Very expensive to garden. I guess we will all become miners. Yuck.

    Please rethink the one collector thing. 
    Posted 17 months ago by 1padme Subscriber! | Permalink
  • yeah,  it's the equivalent of a couple of super-harvests
    Posted 17 months ago by shhexy corin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Question you might not be able to answer yet: what will happen with # of collectors in group houses?
    Posted 17 months ago by girlhacker Subscriber! | Permalink
  • What I would ideally like is for the overflow bug to be fixed (so that you only collect meat/milk at the correct rate) and the limit on number of collectors dropped.
    Posted 17 months ago by larky lion Subscriber! | Permalink
  • With this limitation on collectors, what is the purpose of Remote Herd-keeping then? I was looking forward to learning that skill too. =/
    Posted 17 months ago by Eden Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Sounds like a few have found a way to exploit the milk/meat collectors and now we all have to suffer. Makes the animal pens/remote herdkeeping almost redundant, I had 2 of each and rarely got back home before they were all full. Soon I will be as housebound in Glitch as I am irl :(
    Posted 17 months ago by Teena Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh, the collectors change makes me sad.
    Posted 17 months ago by dopiaza Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This is my perspective.. [edit: on the collector limitation]  If I have worked hard enough to earn a 50k house with an animal enclosure, then I am deserving of the additional benefit of being able to acquire and use more than one meat collector or butterfly milker (even a chicken squeezer.. LOL).

    I'm entirely ok with a limit. both up and down scale.  Maybe with a 50k house, I can have 2 or 3, maybe with a 20k house, just one.. maybe with anything less than a 10k house.. no remote abilities at all.  I wonder, as a higher level player, assuming I get there, why I would want to bother with RMH at all with this arbitrary, seemingly random number of 1.  Is my reward for working to gain my most desired living space - just to have more space?  Is a farm a farm if you can sow (have the wee beasties) but you cannot reap equitably?

    If there is a bug, I never had the advantage of it..  I have had 3 meat collectors for weeks now.  With 8 piggies and 3 collectors, it typically takes at least 24 hours to fill all three.  That doesn't seem extravagant to me.  I'm sure I could collect more meat just wandering about the streets and nibbling in a far shorter time span.  But I work 60 hours a week in rl.. So, much as I would love to spend more time in game.. I often can't.  Being able to store up some nutritional supplies has been one of Glitch's more attractive features for me.

    I truly hope that TS's developers give further thought to the implementation of this idea.
    Posted 17 months ago by Joni Mitchell Subscriber! | Permalink
  • We didn't think this through all the way, it seems: the problem was the rate of filling (e.g., 50 collectors collected 50x as fast as one), not the excess capacity. We will change it again and make it such that you can have several (to increase capacity, so that you can have more when you return after an absence).
    Posted 17 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Ah, so now we understand how collectors work.  Can we get a clear picture on how speeding up learning works? ;-)
    Posted 17 months ago by Blitz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks Stoot, much appreciated :)
    Posted 17 months ago by Teena Subscriber! | Permalink
  • that's so not true, at least I have never noticed it. I have several collectors, I empty them all and go off to wander the world. I come back after some time and one of those collectors can be full, the other one half-full and another one could be almost empty. so I never saw "50 collectors collected 50x as fast as one".. was it just me?
    Posted 17 months ago by Posh Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks Stoot! Perhaps I shouldn't have dumped all those collectors on Kevbob now... sigh... Very happy to see, though, that you guys are thinking this through. It was definitely an exploit and should be addressed. I had wondered if it would also help with lag of having so many items to load in my house, but it looks like I'll be having that problem again!!! Whatever the math, I'm sure you'll make it fair. Thanks for doing such a great job!
    Posted 17 months ago by Dr007 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • There was apparently some strange bug with multiple collectors that was carefully mapped & explored (and exploited) by players a while back. I think it was more subtle than "50 collectors collect 50x as fast as one" (but stoot's the man... he should know). Regardless, happy to hear we're getting some balance.

    [ I only had 2 meat collectors myself... and glad I didn't throw the second one away quite yet :-) ... wonder if I could pick up a couple more cheap on the auctions from people who haven't read the forum yet... ]
    Posted 17 months ago by Snazzlefrazz Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I have four and mine worked like yours Posh.

    Thanks Stoot. :)
    Posted 17 months ago by Leithwyn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Stoot,  Thank you!  I am so glad you plan to reconfigure the collector dynamic :)  Obviously not everyone was taking advantage of some fluky bug.
    Posted 17 months ago by Joni Mitchell Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Posh, you had to arrange the collectors in a certain way to exploit the bug, and I think it was only possible in certain houses (e.g. Alakol worked, Meadow seemed not to).
    Posted 17 months ago by larky lion Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Wait... I'm still not certain about how the milk/meat collectors are intended to work, ultimately... but I suppose I'll figure it out in time.

    Also, stoot, completely unrelated and totally cryptic, but I haven't forgotten about you and don't want you to think you followed up in vain. I've just had a lot on my plate. I will follow up soon.
    Posted 17 months ago by Cerulean Subscriber! | Permalink
  • My milk collectors were stupidly fast. 

    *glugs*
    Posted 17 months ago by shhexy corin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Cerulean, here's a brief rundown:

    Naively, you would think that the collectors would fill at essentially a constant rate.  If you have 8 pigs, you would get 8 meat every so many minutes.  This happens if you have only one collector.  But if you have several and one of them gets full, the overflow behaves strangely (from what I can tell).  Say you have 48 meat in one collector now, and the next collecting run comes by, in which you would collect 8 more if you had space.  The almost full collector takes 2 meat.  You would expect the remaining 6 meat to fall into some other (single) collector.

    But what was happening was that the overflow would go into EVERY other non-full collector.  So, if you happened to have 51 collectors, you might get 50*6 meat from the overflow I described above, instead of just 6 meat.
    Posted 17 months ago by larky lion Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh no! all but one of each of my collectors (meat and milk) were all taken during a house party, I let it go thinking I wont need them. Now I have to buy again. SIGH.
    Posted 17 months ago by Aorta Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Alleeluia - Tiny Speck_Stoot you just rekindled my drooping spirits and faith in Tiny Speck . I was truly discouraged and feeling all the fun adn enjoyment was being sucked out of the game. Thank you for listening and for responding positively.
    Posted 17 months ago by DTA Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Has it been fixed yet? I picked up my "extra" collectors last night, and now I can't drop them back in my yard. 
    Posted 17 months ago by Lilith Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Nooo!!!! Meat collectors and butterfly milkers nerfed!!!!  :((
    Posted 17 months ago by roderick ordonez Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Just getting adjusted Roderick!
    Posted 17 months ago by Pirate Apples Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I was going to post something probably tl;dr but this from Stoot "We didn't think this through all the way, it seems..." is good enough for me to wait and see. Thanks.
    Posted 17 months ago by Gloopy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thank you for thinking this through. I am sure you can come up with a solution that is much more in keeping with the overall resource plan. I do realize it is difficult to balance all the resources, but I'm sure the awesomers at Tiny Speck are up to the task!

    Thanks!!!!
    Posted 17 months ago by 1padme Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Darn, I knew I shouldn't have been so quick to give away/auction my extra collectors. At least there weren't that many, so no biggie for me to buy more when the time comes.
    Posted 17 months ago by Live Your Dreams Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I was strangely depressed by the change to allow only 1 of each collectors in our home!
    I am super glad to hear,we will be able to keep more again asap,tyvm for lifting my spirit back up. =]
    Posted 17 months ago by ~Scilly~ Subscriber! | Permalink
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