👋 Hello everyone! Wild that we're almost in March... 🙃
I'm tracking multiple problems on the site that seem to come from the same place, and one that will only continue to get worse as time progresses.
We let players create 100+ pets which is great, and allows for creativity and characterization. Unfortunately, we're seeing the N+1 problem in a lot of these queries. In simple terms, that means that we're fetching an increasing and increasing amount of data on pages (think: training center, pet treasure, anywhere that we list your pets out for you, especially in a dropdown).
An example: Fetch all pets to display in "use item" dropdown → fetch minion information for pet → fetch books read information for pet → fetch battle status for pet → fetch treasure count for pet to see if they're over limit → fetching treasure count automatically fetches item information for each treasure item → etc
We cache as many separate pieces of these queries, and the total response, to the best of our ability but the query still has to run at least once when you first go to the page. We "warm up" the cache with your information as you take your first trip around the site for the day, and so those initial queries are going to be painful and slow, especially as you get more and more pets.
Obviously players with 100+ pets are some of our most passionate and engaged players, so we want to make sure that any changes doesn't hurt y'all, but makes the site actually playable.
So I'm proposing a pet farm (or some similar idea / name!). You can have 100 active pets at a time, that show up in dropdowns around the site, and any additional pets are on your farm, and you can move pets on / off the farm with a simple click, and no time limit. Think of it like "favorite pets", but just as large of a category as it seems like we can make without slowing down or crashing the site for folks with lots of pets.
Let me know what you think about this idea, or if you've got any other ideas that could lead to the same optimizations.
Update I posted this in another post here to clarify!
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I'm thinking it's a great idea -- and one you can limit by more than the proposed 100. I have 25 active ATM and I would be willing to drop it down to 10 if it meant the site would run more smoothly.
Will we be able to have LESS than 100 active pets and still use the 'farm'?
Maybe be able to store pets we're not actively working on in the farm even if we have say... only 10 pets total? I'd really love to be able to use this feature when mass feeding / reading / etc with my pets :)
((I literally cannot imagine having 100 pets to go through all those drop downs with. Lmao people are much stronger than I. lol))
As someone who doesn't have 100+pets, my feedback might be less valuable, but this seems really reasonable to me? Simple to switch them out and a HIGH number you can keep active! I'm surprised it's not like, 10 or 20 active pets that are being proposed!
What a glorious world where sending a pet to the farm upstate isn't a permanent situation.
Personally, I think this is a great solution. I don't think anyone is running around with 100+ pets that they actively engage with on a daily basis. Being able to store the excess somewhere would be a good workaround, especially if it helps the site run better.
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My only initial question is, would we still be able to see them all listed on the Pets page? As in, if it's a pet that's been placed on this farm would we still be able to add/remove things to the TC, edit their profile, add/change their minion etc? Because, as a person with 126 pets (and still want more), this sounds like a nice option but I would want to be able to edit stuff like that for any of my pets. Because new items that get released might be perfect for a tc of a pet that otherwise is done, to me. Hope that makes sense XD
That seems like an interesting idea. As some people have asked, would you be able to choose to have less than 100 pets that show up on these menus? That would be useful for people with readers and gourmands who don't want to accidentally use books and food on other pets, at the moment I'm using custom CSS to hide certain pets once they've read/eaten a certain number of books/food, and I don't have nearly as many as other users do.
I think this is a good idea. I wouldn't hate it even if we could only have 25 active at a time, but there was a way that someone could click and see all the names of who was "on the farm".
Sounds like a good idea, maybe Pet Society instead of farm? Club? Farmeta? :D
I had no idea you could have that many pets, but anything that helps the site function better is a smart move to me.
For those of you with less than 100 pets, but still want a cleaner "option" choice when seeing pets, yes you could move all but one to the farm theoretically!
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Interesting idea. So swapping which pets are active would be something that we could do anytime we want with no limits?
Maybe we can have still have links to access a pets' treasure chest or profile page even if they're in the farm? Personally I would probably just keep the pets that I train and read books to out.
As others have said, I'd like to know how limited your interactions with pets on the farm would be. I currently struggle to load the battle stats page unless there are <150 people online and I have less than half of the 100 pet limited discussed. I'm open to this if it means the site will work again for me. Just need a bit more info first.
I can see the farm being a good solution to the problem. I keep most of mine in the various Inns around the site so a location where they can live without having to put them into the inns every few days would be very welcome. There's a lot of potential for the kind of farms players can create and where they're located in the world of Subeta. Farm or home. Mansion maybe? It would also allow areas such as the Home Appliances to have an update, new purpose and maybe some stories if you decide to go in that direction. I don't mean anything like the house decorations you can do on other sites. More like how the toys work. You select the option to place furniture in the farm and the pets happiness goes up. You can place multiple pieces of furniture much as you can play with multiple toys. I'm curious to see where this idea goes. :)
This seems like a good train of thought to follow, the more y’all explain how the site works (eg, having to process all that information just to pull up the “use item” page).. well, the more important change seems!
Edit, I would 100% use a pet storage feature and I only have 10 of them. 2 of them don’t even have a TC or do any eating, reading or training, so there’s no point having them in any dropdown!
I have 91 pet slots with 89 pets at the moment. It is one of my favorite parts of Subeta. As long as it remains easy to move them in and out of the "farm", it seems okay. Having easy access to my pets and for others to be able to see my pets is desirable. They are a large part of my game play.
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I think this is a very reasonable proposal, and I think you could absolutely set the active pet limit to less than 100, at least down to 50. I can't imagine a lot of people are working on more than 50 pets at the same time, and if swapping them in and out of the farm is fairly easy, then it shouldn't be a problem even if they are.
Ohhhhh, that is really helpful, thank you! I'm tracking all of the pages on the site that make the ridiculous queries and found that most of the time 100 pets was the sweet spot where it'd still load. I'll probably ping you and ask if it's okay for me to take a benchmark of your account loading the battle stats page, since I imagine that is a HORRIFIC use of N+1 queries.
My (vague, since I don't want to propose anything too far down the road anymore) idea is that on any page that has a list of pets (so the stats page, for example) would just limit your "team" of pets, which you choose yourself and put any ones you don't need / want loading on those pages into the 'farm'.
You'd still be able to see all of your pets in the farm and take action on them there, basically the same things you'd do from your pet page (description, treasure, etc) without them all loading around the entire site.
Places where you need to decide on a pet (typically in a dropdown, or a list) would only show from your non-farm pets.
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