THANK YOU! Testing is complete -- I've disabled the ability to join a new group. We'll be back on Monday with this in production!

LINK TO MYSTERIOUS MELODY. CLICK ME TO TEST.

🏅 Hello users with gold accounts! It's been a bit since I've had something new to test with you -- but we've got some exciting stuff coming up that I'll need a lot of help testing.

For today, though, we're testing Mysterious Melody! I took this feature down a few years ago when we just got tired of the ticket center being almost entirely MM related throughout December. We'd get tickets that someone got paired up and the other person didn't send anything, sent too many things, spammed with low quality items, etc. Last year I went on a mission to try and salvage this one-to-one, daily experience.... and didn't end up with much luck. I tried scoring algorithms, and it just all didn't work at the end of the day.

So, I'm back this year with a new attempt that is something like the combination of secret santa and white elephant, with Melody thrown in ;)

LINK TO MYSTERIOUS MELODY. CLICK ME TO TEST.

• Now you'll be put into groups of 4 users, with melody joining each group to give items.
• Groups form every ~5 minutes, or when there are 4 users who are waiting
• You can add an remove up to five items throughout the day. Melody will put in up to 8. This limit is so that no one feels compelled to add hundreds of items, and it's achievable to send that many items daily
• All groups process at midnight, with items being distributed evenly (hopefully) among the users in the group

Melody Agent This is my first pass at a 'NPC Agent', that can navigate the site and do some of the same actions as you, the users! The Melody agent has a very specific set of commands:

1. Look for items to add to each of the pools that she is in
2. Search for items on wishlists of people in the group (she can see who's in it ;) no one else can!)
3. Purchase those items from user shops, going for the cheapest.

She can tell if an item is priced just to get her to buy it (she makes sure that it's similar to other prices) and looks for some other shenanigans that I won't get into :P When she purchases, it's the same flow as a user, so it goes into the shop logs and till just like anyone else.

Melody has a limited amount of sP (just like a normal user!) that we can fill back up, but it means she can't run away and purchase all of the items in user shops :P

Testing Details

• The code that makes the group is running every minute instead of 5 minutes
• The code that completes the day and closes all the groups is running every 30 minutes
• This is a test. Don't put in items worth millions of sP.

I'll be running the group and complete-day code over the next three hours, so you'll get messages that your group has finished. You're welcome to join another group ;)

I'm aiming to launch this officially, to the full site and with regular time limits on Monday.

Known Issues

• Melody and her text sometimes fly off the page when you scroll up. I'm working on fixing her directly to the page :P

Admittedly my favorite feature is how I'm hiding who else is in your group

Ohhhhh nooo! It didn't know what to do with 62 people in the queue, and had a little bit of a fit. Working on fixing this now, will ping again when you should join :)

🙃 okay, I reset it entirely. You'll have to join the queue again, but it should work 😰

Sorry about that!

Wow, it really wasn't prepared for that many groups in one day. Thanks for testing everyone! I just pushed out a fix, so you should actually see your groups now.

Glad I tested with y'all!

The first round of resets just happened, so you should be able to view the "history" page, and see what was donated.

Is there anything else you'd want to see on that page?

It will be :) It'll be reset at midnight, but for now I'm running it every 30 minutes

I suspect people are approaching this as a testing mechanism, like I'm asking everyone to. We're working out bugs and kinks, I don't want any rare items to vanish. I'll make a note of that in the first post.

Some immediate thoughts:

This will be running on a full day timer, typically. Right now it's resetting roughly every 30 minutes, which might not even give people an opportunity to put in items. If someone doesn't add items, they're automatically forfeit for the melody items (Melody buys up to 8 items for the group through the day). Unfortunately, if you're the ONLY person who puts items in, you're at a "disadvantage" because it prefers, strongly, to not give your own item back to you and will try to avoid that at all costs (by giving those items to people who didn't put anything in)

And, you're given a score at the end of the day by Melody. How many items did you put in compared to everyone else? What was the relative value? Those scores won't matter for the first ~10 days, while Melody collects a list of who is naughty or nice, but after that she'll use that to calculate her groups. So you won't see your groups average out until we have the details needed to make that average happen (which will not happen during testing)

hehehehe perfectly following up with my first point ;)

Yup, it'll be on the full day timer when we're out of testing with GAs.

That is.... really weird. There should always be 5 people in the group (four users, one melody). That's a bug! Will take a look 👀 It looks like you're also missing the Melody NPC!

You might have been in the first group during the errors in page 1-2 (that's why we're testing!), before I reset the progress. Go ahead and join the waiting room again :)

e@Contemptress I think you're in my group and I'm the one who broke it 🙈 But shhhh 🤫

The reset just went through, and cleaned up 66 groups 😭 😭 Thank you all for helping me test, and also, lol, Melody has spent about 8.5 million sP!

Great question! I'll be resetting everything completely before we launch this to the full site, so you'll be starting from the same position. This is a chance for me mostly to get a peak into how the system works with more groups than I've been able to get internally ❤

4 users and a melody!

She struggles with items that are all the same ☠️ I've tried to make it a little better, but she does end up sending them back more often than not. Will add that to the list to dig into!

Melody is doing a little bit more than randomly jumbling up the items this time around, and trying to give them out, fairly, to users based on a few values (is the item on their wishlist? what is the value of the item? how many of the item are on the site? etc). So while you should expect a roughly even number of items based on how many go in, that won't always be the case.

It also prioritizes giving items to people who put items in, and not folks who put 0 items in, so there are circumstances where you might get 7 or 8 items back, depending on how the whole round went.

I need to write more at the top, but like before, this is meant to be an exercise in gift giving. These are three other users you're giving items to, not a bunch of bots that are going to give you more sP back than you put in.

There are still going to be days where you feel like you've given more than you got, and if that is going to bum you out, this probably isn't ever going to be a feature for you.

😮‍💨 ANOTHER RESET -- that one went out way earlier than anticipated, but got fired off by a chain event. That time, I don't think Melody got to buy items for every group.

I'm going to do one more round and reset, and then close it off and look at the feedback given. Thank you everyone for testing, I really appreciate it and it clearly helped work out a ton of bugs that we would have faced on a public launch.

I'm really excited to start bringing more things here at a faster / more regular pace ;)

We're just testing the feature now - no worries! If there is anything i can make more clear for you, please let me know.

If you go to the front page - here is the link you should see a button to join the "waiting room". We need to have 4 users to make a group, so you'll likely wait a few minutes.

Once you're in a group, you'll get an event linking you back to the page. You'll be able to see your inventory (and some cool information about the group) and add items to the pool of items.

When this is released normally, at midnight the groups will reset and you'll get items from your group - hopefully one or two from your wishlist! Right now this is happening more frequently.