We have decided to place the issue of Vote 2 back into staff hands; it is clear that staff needs to come together to find a more nuanced approach.

This issue has been taken down from the voting docket, and all votes for this issue have been cleared.  I apologize for the switch in plans, but the way it was presented and handled was doing our community more harm than good, and it is clearly not appropriate for a community vote.  What will happen is this:

• For the time being, the rules on this issue will stay exactly as they are. For discussion posts, moderators will exercise judgement in keeping the peace. For creative posts, unless creative content breaks our current rules (i.e. sexually explicit or in explicit violation of 2.4), or contains adult themes and is not tagged as mature, then it will be left as is
• For the future, once we have a better system in place to deal with the nuances here, we will implement it then

The discussion thread on this topic has been locked — for the most part, it was becoming unproductive and hurtful to many of you. If you want to discuss the remaining options, I encourage you to start a new thread.  Remember to keep these guidelines in mind as you discuss:

• It’s easy to tear something down, and a lot harder to build something up. If you disagree with something propose an alternative that you think would be better.
• If somebody has already said something similar to what you want to say, feel free to express your support but keep it brief: It will not help the discussion everyone has to read pages and pages of what is essentially the same stuff. To avoid restating what other people have already said, feel free to link directly to the posts that you agree with.
• If you disagree with somebody, do so respectfully. Nobody here would like Mycena Cave to become worse. If you read something somebody writes or suggests and think it’s a terrible idea, keep in mind that somebody who has thought about it for a while thinks it’s a good idea. Try to understand why they think it’s a good idea before responding.

I love our community, and part of what makes Mycena Cave unique is that people from all walks of life and of many different opinions come together and interact peacefully in our little world.  This will only continue to be the case if people remain respectful toward one another despite differences in lifestyles and opinions.

Finally, remember that no circumstances whatsoever give you the right to abuse staff on this site and that you must follow any instructions given to you by a moderator. It doesn’t matter if you’re angry, or if you don’t like that staff member. Sending abusive messages to any member of staff, for any reason, is sufficient for us to permanently ban you from Mycena Cave.

On the gift-custom topic, I think custom gifting would still be allowed, just maybe the receiver can’t have a custom in the queue already, or if they did upon the gifts completion they would have to cancel /resubmit their own order. That would keep people from complaining/plotting of Line Skipping?

I bought a friend a custom awhile ago as a surprise, it was sent right to them and wasn’t an issue because they didn’t have a order already in the queue.

Foxcat & Rhyme:  In both voting options, you can surprise a friend with Custom Credit, but not the custom itself unless you were willing to pay the transfer fee (this is the current situation) or wait X days to be able to transfer to a friend (the other vote option).

I know it’s kind of gross to not be able to do a nice thing like gift a surprise custom, but there’s really no way for us to put a check in place that the person you’re ordering for doesn’t have a custom currently in the queue that isn’t invasive to the other user (for example, if you were to put the ID of the receiving user in, the form would have to let you know whether they had an order in the queue or not which becomes a privacy issue if users can just randomly check whether another user has a custom in the queue).  Another sticky situation arises if more than one person wanted to get a custom for the same person; this would be hard to check for as well. Gifting Custom Credit route is a much more feasible solution (though also more boring, haha), and keeps everything a little more fair, I think. :)

Alternatively (and this may not be feasible for everyone or feasible period anymore?? Mylar let me know if this is not okay going forward LOL) I know one time i wanted to surprise gift Crow and knew she had a spot in queue… so when I knew she was getting close, I asked Myla if, upon acceptance, she could just direct the payment at me. I paid, it was still Crow’s queue slot so it wasn’t a ‘extra spot in line,’ and it was still a nice gift / surprise. :D

That… might be kinda hard to do a lot so again ignore me if Myla says we can’t do that again. Aha. 8D’

Dove:  The way we did it before Custom Credit (and a couple of exceptions after since they’d already been in the queue) was through form switching, so I would go into the database and switch the form from one user’s account to the other (sneakily), and the other user would pay.  This is also how we used to split payments before Custom Credit.

We implemented Custom Credit originally so we could avoid situations like that where I had to manually switch the forms to different users accounts since it was time consuming & prone to Errors of the Buffalo.  Also, allowing different users to see and access the original user’s forms/artists choices/etc. wasn’t ideal either since I didn’t exactly have permission in the cases of people surprise paying for another person’s custom >>;;

So, in short, that option is no longer feasible and was the workaround we used before Custom Credit!

I made my votes on it.

Though to be honest for the chat room it doesn’t matter what you block off for conversations or not there’s still gonna be someone offended by something.

My own complaints (and the others I saw) were never about allowing “scrabble words” like ‘aa’, but legitimate words that people recognize and use frequently (e.g. “biome”). I guess maybe I’m just whinging because I feel misrepresented here and the question feels like it shouldn’t have been asked at all, based on the staff’s feelings. (ie saying the expanded dictionary makes the game less satisfying because the words in it aren’t “real” and the wording surrounding lowered payouts).Jacq

We don’t intend to sway things one way or the other, although I can certainly see where you’re coming from. The wording of that option is less a reflection of staff views (we actually don’t particularly care which way it goes, so long as we reach a definite resolution of the issue), but rather a reflection of players’ feelings as reported to us after the last Summer event when we used the Scrabble dictionary for word verification. I apologize that the wording made you feel misrepresented :(

In any case, if you know of a wordlist that has a “complete” set of frequently used words (e.g. “biome”) that also does not have “scrabble words” like ‘aa’ (and is also not illegal to use due to copyright), I would be more than happy to look at it. The same caveat would apply though — if you’re playing a game whose payout was tuned with a small dictionary, and we swap it out for a large dictionary, the payouts are going to drop accordingly.

Myla
Awh, bummer. But that makes sense. ^^;
Won’t stop me from hoping there will be a way to go with the more exciting option somehow though. >w<
If the no fee and custom cooldown option won… What if I had a custom made for a friend and asked you to hold onto it for two months or more and then transfer it to them? Having to wait would probably be unbearable, but I suppose that way it could still sit through the cooldown without being seen by them. Would that by any chance work or would that be too much of a bother to schedule customs like that? o:

Myla
That’s lovely! Glad there’s going to be a way, for when I’m able to do such thing. *w*

As someone who does order customs as gifts for friends the way the “cool down” is set doesn’t make sense to me as a deterrent for “queue jumping”.  The queue is long as it is, and people are happy to wait. Having to wait to more months to get your pet from the person who held it isn’t that bad, and certainly doesn’t do anything to deter the person who put in the order for them. They just get to “borrow” a custom to decorate their profile for a bit. And actually, by leaving those customs stuck on someone else’s account you’re now giving the “buyer” the perfect chance/excuse to buy another players slot in the breeding queue. The only people who are actually inconvenienced are those of us who actually are making a surprise gift because we either have to ruin the surprise by keeping someone’s present for two months, denying our friend the ability to show it off as their avatar or making them possibly have to miss out on a chance in a breeding raffle because their custom was on someone else’s account. It also makes more work for Myla because if people are asking her to hold customs till after the cool down then she now has something else too keep track of. And besides, if that’s an option what’s the point in the cool down anyways?

If you are going to propose a “cooldown” to deter this kind of loophole, hit them where it hurts. In the queue. Put a waiting period on the ability to slap a new order in the queue. Because now the buyer is going to have to wait on their mules to even get an order in, and now the mule will have to decide if they really want to be put out of the queue.

This would also have the additional benefit of giving the artists a chance to clear out some backlog in orders.

Two months is a bit long in this sense. After all the idea is to deter and inconvenience not punish. Something closer to 3 weeks, probably not more then a month but that is all debatable and up to admin. But by putting the cool down directly on the queue you make that slot more valuable to a player and make them have to consider if they really want to put themselves out and give up their spot in the queue for a business transaction

Would it be possible to have a Gift Option when placing the order with a place for the persons ID to go? Maybe an account cant receive a new custom until the custom cool-down period has ended- whether or not it was a gift. I don’t know how hard it would be for glitch to make a code for that or something. That way it can be a surprise, but the receiver would still have a cool down before getting another custom? The only problem I can see is that if the receivers order came up in the queue and artist would have it stuck in their inbox-thing until after the cool-down….

Also maybe customs could be account locked, and only a mod/staff can take the lock off so it can be traded to minimize abuse of the cooldown period? :O *shrugs*

As someone who has several customs I’d like to get and the financial means to pop back into queue pretty much asap, I would really hate to have to wait even longer between getting my babies because of some sort of queue cool-down. I don’t mind waiting however long the queue naturally takes, of course, but basically being told I’d have to wait a few more weeks further tacked onto that is off-putting to me.

Of course, I have no idea how many others tend to follow the same trend as I do, or alternatively, how many players trend towards regularly gifting customs instead, but I guess… what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think even a queue cool-down would deter those players who buy queue spots from others and would instead just inconvenience others like me (of which there must be at least a handful).

There are plenty of people on the site who can’t afford to get a custom at all, so not everyone would be concerned with weighing between putting their custom in queue vs. putting one in for someone else. I feel like no matter what sort of cool-down is placed on what aspect of customs, people will continue this behavior if that’s truly how they want to play it, which is also pretty frustrating as someone who basically lives in the custom queue.

I agree, Crow, that I don’t really see how any cool down is going to deter this. To be honest I didn’t even realize this was really that big of an issue. Glitch himself even said

customs are comparatively rarely traded, and almost never within the first couple months.glitch

The problem though is that with the way the vote is there is going to end up being some sort of cool down because that issue is tied to “should there be a trade fee” instead of being it’s own separate question. But again, making customs sit on someone else’s account (or in a folder on Myla’s computer) for two months only opens up the possibility of additional abuses (aka queue hopping in breeding queue) and creates more work for Myly if she’s going to offer to hold onto customs till after the cool down period and in a way defeating the purpose.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really want to be kept out of the queue either. Giving gifts would inconvenience me by making me have to wait longer to get my own customs and mock ups through. But I would much rather have to wait a little longer to get my own custom then have to sit there and look at something that I created for someone I love sitting in my account unusable for an avatar or a breeding raffle. Or have to keep hounding Myly how much longer till I can get my gift for my friend. The feeling is akin to “Here! I bought you this pretty dress but you can’t have it. You have to watch me wear it first for two months then you can actually have it. Hope you like it!”

And as I said, at least this way there would be the positive of slowing the backlog in the custom queue. Yes they are in the process of hiring new artists, but that won’t be fully finished for some time. I am not pushing for two months, thats way too long and unreasonable. Two weeks or so wouldn’t be that bad. But again that wouldn’t be my call, it’d be up to admin if they would even consider this option

@Glitch
Personally, I’d still be okay with the expanded scrabble one. Mashing in collections of 3 or 4 letters really only gets you so far - eventually you have to start getting creative with morphology anyways. The game itself, with the randomly generated board, isn’t really “skill-based” in the first place, so I don’t see a problem with expanding what’s allowed.

I understand that there has to be a balance between scores and payouts. I may be in the minority, but I’d take a lower score per word found, if it meant I wasn’t constantly butting heads with the dictionary (which is why I stopped playing Spellstones a while ago). But as far as wordlists… I usually use MASC for work, but I don’t know if you can extract wordlists from corpora easily. I do know it’s free.

The only other suggestion I’d have is the “Master Dictionary”
http://www3.nd.edu/~mcdonald/Word_Lists.html
Thre’s a write-up about it here. It basically is the 2in12Inf list with some extensions. What’s nice is it’s updated every year based on frequency. (I like frequency counts a lot actually, but I guess they are not important for word games lol).

I think there is perhaps some confusion on the custom trade embargo thing. Maybe a concrete example would help:

1. A custom order gets placed on date A
2. This order gets claimed by an artist on date B
3. The resulting pet ID X is delivered to the buyer on date C
4. The trade system will not accept a pet whose ID is X until the date C+60

There is no “queue cooldown”, no account restrictions, nothing that prevents you from re-entering the queue as soon as you receive your custom. It is simply an attribute of a pet which prevents it from being put into a trade until a certain date (C+60), after which this attribute evaporates and as far as trading is concerned the pet is a pet like any other.

i’m a bit confused on two fronts:

1) if customs are almost never traded within the first few months, then is this really a major issue or problem? it seems like it would cause a lot of users inconvenience in order to deter a very small portion of users. if that’s the case, it seems like the solution would be MORE harmful to the queue and functioning of the site than the current problem.

2) is it against the rules to pay someone to wait in the queue for you? i feel like there was a discussion in the chat about this a while ago and it was said that it’s not against the rules, and i don’t see it anywhere in the rules (but my attention is notoriously bad so i may have missed it)?

I agree with Lady Hawkwing, that it’s more of a fairness issue than a rules issue. The queue is limited to one order per user at a time for a reason.

So so far I’ve seen a few options listed for Custom Trading:

1. Queue-entering cool down (not favorable to people who order a custom right after theirs is completed)
2. Cool down from time pet is delivered to user before a pet can be added to a trade. (not favorable for custom-gifting)
3. No cool down of any kind
4. No restrictions of any kind for custom trading

And for Regular/General Pet Trading:
1. No fee
2. Smaller Fee
3. Current Fee
4. Larger Fee

(Did I miss any anywhere? I didn’t include my suggestions because they seemed to be unfavorable haha)

Are we as a community saying that custom trading and regular pet trading should be on 2 separate votes?

Are we as a community saying that custom trading and regular pet trading should be on 2 separate votes?Foxcat

In my opinion yes, because people aren’t voting for it because they want a custom trade hold, they are voting because they don’t want to pay a trade fee period. I don’t blame them, I don’t want to pay the trade fee either.

Also, baekhesten. I found this in the Rule 8.2:

“Any intentional action which results in you having an unfair advantage over other players is considered exploiting the site.”

I believe most users would consider paying/bribing other users to wait in the queue for you (general you) as an unfair advantage. Someone please correct me if I am mistaken!!

edit: I believe we need an official Mod ruling on if this does or does not violate site rules. So… (I’m so glad I saved this lol Thank you orignal poster!!)

edit: I believe we need an official Mod ruling on if this does or does not violate site rules. So… (I’m so glad I saved this lol Thank you orignal poster!!)

We do not consider being in line for someone else as breaking the rules, exactly. In the same way as signing up simply in order to sell your freebie pet wasn’t breaking the rules. However, it’s something we would like to discourage or prevent if possible, hence the trade fee or the embargo. The thing is that it is impossible to differentiate between “I agreed to wait in line for that player” and “This was a surprise gift for that player” or “I just bought it, but then I changed my mind and sold it”. So if we “prevented” people selling custom-queue-slots by making a rule against it, the only people that would be affected would be the ones who decide to out themselves. The reason that these two issues are lumped into the same vote is because they really boil down to one notion, which is: “hey if we can solve this stand-in-line-for-someone-else problem then the trade fee has pretty much no purpose anymore… lets get rid of it”

We’d been talking about this issue among staff for a couple weeks now, and throughout the discussion have discussed the pros and cons of pretty much every scheme imaginable (set a dozen people on the task of brainstorming the solution to one problem for a couple weeks and you get a lot of ideas) — pretty much anything from making it impossible for a player to acquire more than one “custom”-type pet per month, to munging the ordering of the queue based on trade results, and so on. At the end of the day, the most effective thing we could come up with that simultaneously had the least unpleasant side-effects was also the simplest: requiring that a custom have existed for at least [roughly the amount of time that an order spends in the queue] days before it can be traded.

EDIT: because a “queue cool-down” appears to be a popular idea with some people in this thread, I figure I should say a few words about it. I think I am perhaps not understanding the idea: say I want 5 customs and pay 5 people to place orders for me. I’m never even in the queue, so a cool-down wouldn’t affect me in any way. Unless I’m misunderstanding what people are referring to by a cool-down, it seems to me that it has a fairly negative side-effect (preventing people from rejoining the queue after they leave it) while not actually having a positive effect on the issue at all.