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