Discontinuing Fishing and Treasure Hunt Contests after 28 July 2022

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Winston, Jul 6, 2022.

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  1. Winston

    Winston A Data Guy Moderator SOTA Developer

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    I want to thank everyone who has participated in the Fishing and Treasure Hunt Contests over the past many months with Elgarion and me.

    Unfortunately, I must discontinue both Contests at the end of this release, R103, on 28 July 2022.

    As a data guy, I've enjoyed doing the automated data analysis and Statusboards to hopefully provide you more information while you competed! I've learned a lot and enjoyed working with POT Governors and watching the rivalry to catch the longest and gather the most!

    I hope you all continue to run your own contests whether fishing or PVP or see who can make the most ingots in one hour. It's all just data, right!?

    You can ask for Dev support for your own contests and events via this link:

    I'll be around gathering and analyzing more data to help us all, so keep playing and making data!

    -- Winston

    References:
     
  2. simon1974

    simon1974 Bug Hunter

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    Hi,

    is there a reason for this change?
     
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  3. Ysold

    Ysold Avatar

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  4. that_shawn_guy

    that_shawn_guy Bug Hunter

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    @Winston & @Elgarion thanks for the all the work on these events. I know how much time and work these events can take just to do one of them.
     
  5. Winston

    Winston A Data Guy Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Sure there is a reason:

    Resource Management (mainly my man-hours). The contests take daily work and manual time to set up, configure, test, announce, and do the prizes. They cannot be fully automated in all those areas, which would take more months to design.

    As a new guy/data analyst, I learned tons about data queries and automation (I use a lot of Python and Elasticsearch for those in the data world) to continue the contests after Elgarion departed, and to enable me to now do more/different things for the Team and players. So its been a privilege and honestly a great learning and community experience for me to participate in these Contests. I hope everyone had fun!​

    Great question and thanks for playing!
     
  6. Buzzard Bait

    Buzzard Bait Avatar

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    Winston, I hate to hear that news, but understand the time and effort involved. I had a really enjoyable time participating and want to thank you for all the time , work and effort you spent making it possible.
     
  7. Flair

    Flair Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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    GAH.. I come back and you stop it.. NOOOOOOOOOOO
     
  8. Rook Strife

    Rook Strife Avatar

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    Mistake to cancel the fishing contest entirely I think

    The normal monthly contest requires practically nothing to run.

    It's still reasonably popular and pretty much the only thing going


    Should just cancel the leaderboards if there's no time for them and reformat the monthly contest


    The leaderboards were actually pretty fun while they lasted

    Too bad they won't be continued
     
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  9. Winston

    Winston A Data Guy Moderator SOTA Developer

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    I do see the contests are still popular. That's great! Perhaps players can continue them and we see how it goes, particularly the fishing contests where fish trophies are date and location stamped. Players can request prizes/trophies from the devs for their contests of course.

    My leaderboards actually save me a LOT of time and inaccuracies since I do not need to manually query for any results through Kibana (a manual data query system that gives me client debug messages to sort through). All I have to do is enter the scenes list, start/stop times, and fish names. The results magically dump out for me and don't need verification.

    The time consuming part is picking the towns, testing the contest by catching one fish per scene, writing the announcements, verifying instructions, and make/rename the prizes by hand, etc. Actually, all this can be done by players, except the GM prizes.

    I feel really bad discontinuing these contests. I loved doing them! I want to do more/different contests, but can't right now either.

    I do really hope the community can run some contests and we see how it goes. We are all sort of in this together. This is the best I can explain.
     
  10. Rook Strife

    Rook Strife Avatar

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    The players do them but it's still good to have the main Catnip running. Player run + Catnip contests usually complement each other.


    Get rid of treasure hunt and all sub categories of fishing
    Remove weekly prizes and tracking



    Then this is all the work required



    Choose 1 Good Town for the Catnip Fishing each month
    1 minute of work


    FORUM - Edit a few lines of text in 3 forum posts each month

    Post 1
    change release #
    start / end date
    Town name / water type(s)

    Post 2
    Add zone to list

    Post 3
    Add winners to list

    The bulk of the forum posts remain unchanged month to month
    It's like 5-10 minutes of text editing work per release.


    INGAME
    add +1 to the release number text on the 3 trophies each month
    Pull winners list at end of release
    Send Mails to 3 people

    Another trivial amount of time



    For the amount of work required by a dev vs the people participating

    It would seem worth the effort to hand it off to someone instead of discontinuing the tournament altogether



    Also it is probably worth the experiment
    Eliminating all the excess zones funnels people into the same zone to fish.
    Instead of the usual empty zone after empty zone there is potential to create an area for Group Activity / Socializing / Whatever each month
     
  11. Anpu

    Anpu Avatar

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    I'll also point out, players, at any time, can create their own fishing event, with rewards. You can do this at any time.
     
  12. CICI

    CICI Avatar

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    Players do love dev events that when we see the most players in one zone :)

    back in the day... the devs live stream on twitch a fishing event and tons of ppl show up
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2022
  13. Winston

    Winston A Data Guy Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Yes! I remember those days watching the fishing live streams. Actually, there are quite a few "Shroud of the Avatar Fishing" YouTube videos by devs and players. Nice!

    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shroud+of+the+avatar+fishing

    Freshwater Fishing Contest, Livestream: Shroud of the Avatar, 24 June 2019 - Atos, Darkstarr, Dr Bob, Sannio



    Lava Fishing Contest, Livestream: Shroud of the Avatar, 26 July 2019.



    Release 61 Livestream, Lava Fishing, 21 December 2108



    The good 'ol days! Huzzah!

    I've seen players livestream their fishing contests too, and with the new "item link in chat", it's easier to see fish submissions live without putting the fish in a chest -- can be "submitted" via whisper or zone message. I like the live contest events too.
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2022
  14. Adam Crow

    Adam Crow Avatar

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    Maybe Catnip would accept volunteer(s) to keep this going ;) I personally wouldn't want to do it every month, it can be quite draining mentally to do repetitive stuff like this. Especially when ppl get upset if updates are late, incorrect, etc.

    If someone wanted to reach out to the team and volunteer to keep this contest going, I would gladly help out from time to time tho.
     
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  15. jrs99

    jrs99 Bug Hunter

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    Wasn't that the main reason Winston was brought on in the first place?
    Seems the monthly contest wouldn't be that hard but it's gotten over complicated with all the FishT stuff
     
  16. Sulaene Moon

    Sulaene Moon Avatar

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    Would be nice to get back to the basics. Have it only on the fishing island, everyone put the fish in the box, top 3 winners get gold, cotos, or mats etc. No need to have trophies, leaderboards, and revolving places.
    If people want to have it in their POT they can set up their own contest.
     
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  17. craftymethod

    craftymethod Avatar

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    Everyone should save energies for Fishing using Boats.

    *kicks a proverbial can further down the road*
     
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  18. Winston

    Winston A Data Guy Moderator SOTA Developer

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    I was brought on to be a Data Analyst. I did the fishing tournament to apply data analysis (DA) where it had not been applied before via Elgarion and provide automation for the contests' results. It was how I quickly learned (by doing) Catnip's ELK stack data system. So I supported Fishing contests, studied other potential automated contest ideas, like LB Castle, and also have about 5 other data-driven projects underway.

    https://sotawiki.net/sota/User:Winston

    I want to do more player-oriented things, but DA is needed right now for my man-hours and is what I mainly do (in real life too).

    Getting back to basics is a great idea. I hope Player Towns can do these things too with the tools they have.
     
  19. majoria70

    majoria70 Avatar

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    Well imo for the fishing contest to be reputable for some players who have some issues with player ran events why not whoever is doing the contest for that time send a dev request for a popup notice regarding the next upcoming fishing contest? Also whoever is doing the contest notify devs for prizes for the contest. It would then appear as a game contest verses a player contest even though the player would actually be doing all the work. I think Games that don't have events for its players are lame and missing important opportunities. I know we don't have the man-power to do much other than maintain and try to add content and game fixes so it imo is important for the game to have events in a manner that is inviting for players. I hope that makes sense and it is my opinion as always that many players shy away from certain things and interactions. So to have the fishing contest continue in a reputable, player inviting way a list of rules and instructions for players to hold events should be created. Of course imo too. Such as this example and its only an off the top of my head example:

    Player community events instructions and rules:

    1-Create event
    2-request prizes from devs
    3-request in-game notification or pop-up from devs such as: Catnip games is announcing the newest fishing contest and here is when and where and prizes will be offered. It could be any event though but putting it on Catnip games is great imo.
    4-list limitaions and exceptions if any


    Edited to fix typos and clarify
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2022
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  20. majoria70

    majoria70 Avatar

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    Also I want to mention the only imo totally amazing game/dev created event to ever happen in this game. It was a call for help for a dragon invasion in Desales. All those dragon's flying in the air had players come running. There was a big on-screen notification not something lost in our chat windows. It was totally amazing and fun. And you know what nothing like it's was ever done again. That has been very sad. Now that was one thing always missing. A call or plea for help in certain random locations. Sure we needed to include rewards because if I recall I don't remember any except maybe xp but at time there was so much excitement from players. That was what counted but for some reason our gaming partner who put on the event left. Anyway It was a sight to behold.
     
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