A Few Small Things

grimwood • 12 March 2019 at 12:25 PM

Hello all, I'm back again and this time, I'd like to bring some suggestions to the table. I'd also like to thank the mods and admins of the site for implementing the VEND machine. It has worked WONDERS so far by bringing down creature prices. Not drastically, but someday, we'll hopefully get to a point where retired creatures are easy to obtain. With that out of the way, I'd like to propose a few suggestions:

Search by species function
- Adding a filter to searches (namely being able to search by a specific species). This could be implemented by searching a term or name, and then clicking a drop down menu that contains all known species in ARK. It can also be implemented by clicking on the search bar, and a drop down menu appears with all of the species listed.

More Frequent VEND Machine Creature Rotation
- This doesn't have to happen right away, but it would be nice to see a more frequent creature rotation in the VEND machine (there's still a Halloween reward pool and it's nearing Easter).

Getting Rid of the 'All' Tab or Implementing the Ability to Hide Creatures from View
- This is a big one, especially for users who have specific creatures they don't want fed. Getting rid of the 'All' tab would theoretically save more code and may be easier to implement. Adding a 'Hide this Creature' function would be immensely welcomed (especially by users who want only a specific tab fed and don't want any of their other creatures to gain stats). How this could be implemented is up to the mods.

More Interesting Updates
- As of now, only four types of updates mainly appear on this site:
*Creature updates (Lottery, New creatures, Retiring Creatures, Double Feed Day, And once in a Blue Moon a VEND Update)
*Travels being added/retired
*Items added/retired
*Holiday events
And to be quite honest, it's gotten to where I simply don't care to check the site updates because there's nothing of interest. The only time I really look at the site blog is at the beginning of the month, to check for any interesting new creatures. I would absolutely love it if the mods could do some mini events, or at least something besides the 'normal' update.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and hopefully you'll consider the suggestions listed above.
Pings (I apologize if you didn't want to be pinged):
@dcmaster
@skyfall4
@immortalraven
@yts

yts • 12 March 2019 at 5:13 PM

Can't agree more

skyfall4 • 12 March 2019 at 5:51 PM

@grimwood
Oh my I’ve really wanted the option to search by species, as well as option to choose user or creature 😋 Same with strong room- if I can’t search for all my travels in one go it’d be much better than scrolling through the entire strong room 😊

I’ve always wanted a summer cup to take place in the summer months, because since nothing is happening then, lots of users take hiatus and end up missing September and October. Or maybe they don’t come back at all either. How the summer cup works idk, maybe participating in feeding and other daily chores will give you points? And you and your team work together to accomplish goals that give you prizes?

Edit: actually I might make a post about this! 😃

whitefire • 28 April 2019 at 3:09 AM

@grimwood
That all sounds fantastic! Especially the search by species feature. I was thinking that since renaming isn't in the town hall anymore, maybe there could be a Creature Directory there? Where perhaps you could see all the existing members of a species? I always prefer to get my creatures as eggs because I get more satisfaction out of evolving them myself, so it'd be helpful if I could look through all the members of a species to find out what portion of them are still eggs and if their owners would be at all willing to part with them.
An alternative option could be a sort of Advanced Search function--where you could, for instance, search for an exact name (especially helpful for creatures with short names that are often part of other names), all the members of a species, a creature of a specific species with a given name, members of a species of a certain gender/stage, creatures adopted on a certain date, etc. I would be happy with just the Creature Directory, though.

I also very much like the idea of being able to hide creatures. Because I have the Leaf of Vaka, my creatures are in no danger of dying, so it'd be nice to be able to keep the ones I don't want to evolve from evolving without having to freeze them. Especially given that one of the ones I want to keep unevolved is a view evolution.

I also think the more frequent VEND rotation is a good idea, within reason. Since the whole purpose behind the Quests is to put older, nigh-extinct creatures back into circulation without making them too common, it'd probably be a good idea to rotate them out more than once every five months (the example being the Halloween creatures). There should still be enough time for the average player to get at least one, MAYBE two, but five months is a wee bit excessive.

wigglytuff • 28 April 2019 at 12:53 PM

@grimwood I really agree with you!😊

And I think that maybe there could be some sort of a "lock" feature for some creatures that can lock and unlock their feed button, clicking and viewing so people who accidentally find the creature from the search bar can see it also ^^

whitefire • 28 April 2019 at 2:35 PM

@Wigglytuff
Ooh, I like that idea. Maybe an item you can use on a creature to lock its stats? It could either be a CSP item that locks the stats you want locked (i.e. lock all stats, lock clicks only, lock views and feeds, etc.), or there could be individual items for each stat that you could buy with EC and one CSP item that locks them all. I think if we do something to lock stats rather than hiding a creature from the cove it would have to cost something since freezes cost CC.
I know there's an item to freeze a creature at a given stage, but some people don't want it frozen, they just want to keep it from evolving for a while (because correct me if I'm wrong, but if you unfreeze a creature it evolves based on its total stats rather than collected stats since unfreezing), so I think we should have that option.

wigglytuff • 28 April 2019 at 2:59 PM

@whitefire I really like that!😃

Man, I've been wanting to have a creature search bar for such a long time.. that'd way, people could search up their wishlist creatures/creatures they want much more easily ^^

whitefire • 28 April 2019 at 4:09 PM

@Wigglytuff
It seems like a lot of people have, haha. I checked last night to see if anyone else had suggested it and it was one of the first suggestions in this forum. I think it'd be nice to have something like a Creature Directory or a Census to give the Town Hall some purpose again, too.

asrieldreemurr • 12 May 2019 at 12:43 AM

Nice ideas.