This has been discussed on and off on the SB for ages and I thought I'd finally make a suggestion thread for it. There are a couple of parts to this so I'll go through them one at a time.
As a general note, I'm writing this with the assumption that moving forward event items will be more unique or maybe even not found in shops at all. Possibly ephemeral things that only exist for the duration of the event. If not, then that all will have the "event" rarity and be limited to 1 per purchase, as has been discussed many times in other threads.
Captcha
No one said the old captcha was good, and I know we've been told it's not coming back, but this new one can be absolutely infuriating. There was a time when at least the first few purchases were captcha-free but at this point I haven't bought anything in over a week without having to put in a captcha. Sometimes the captcha is one or two sets or a quick set of fading images and then it's not an issue. However, sometimes it takes 5+ seconds for the "fade" to happen to make sure you can click "verify." Other times I've gone through 9+ screens of "select all" while being 100% sure I clicked all the relevant things and it says "nope, you failed, do it again." The number of times it has decided that something is what it's not (it thinks mailboxes are parking meters, rumble strips/turn text is crossings, vans are busses, etc) is incredible. One time when it was really bad it took me almost a minute to make a single purchase. Not to mention most recently when I was really on a roll trying to restock for quests it decided I was a robot and had to wait 3 minutes to try again.
Suggestions:
- A res-specific captcha. Maybe you have to type in the name of the pet species, click on all images of a certain pet or a certain color, etc. It can just be reasonable pieces of the pet image even. This is a lot more coding, I know, but it's a potential solution. (This was not my idea, it was thrown around several times on the SB before and I cannot remember who brought it up.)
- If there's a setting that can be tweaked with the current captcha we have to make it less sensitive or remove at least the slow fades that'd be a start but I don't know if that setting exists though.
- Only have a captcha for things rarer than "uncommon." The common and uncommon items are rarely the issue when restocking or trying to find them, so there's not a huge reason to worry about bots "hoarding" them and I think they were never the main concern when the captcha was introduced in the first place. This means that event items, legendary, special, rare, very rare, whatever other rarity we create, all can keep captchas, but things that are "common" and "uncommon would not have them. Not only would this make for easier/less annoying purchases to restock on food or quest items but it'd probably make the captcha not lose its mind with how intense it gets for longer because it wouldn't be being used. It can be argued that you can't set that with the current system, but just have 2 different versions of the modal that pop up depending on rarity, one with the captcha attached and one without. The "purchase" button would just be instantly clickable and there would be no captcha portion on the less rare items.
All of these might cause an initial surge of people buying and it will feel like the problem isn't fixed or even worse, but once everyone manages to get what they want initially it'll calm down and everything will be far more reasonable to purchase.
Stock
Right now, restocking for quests is absolutely awful. I only do 2 quests because I can't stand restocking and if I tried to do all of them I'd never get done. It can take literally 8+ hours to restock what you want and you might still not finish restocking because the "very rare" items never show up and when they do it's 1 at a time. "You don't have to do the quests." While this is true, we have been constantly told by multiple staff members that the best way to make TU is with quests. We are always pushed towards quests when it's brought up. If everyone starts doing quests, there is absolutely no way the shops will be able to keep up, even with the current userbase, let alone if more users start joining. They can barely keep up now. Many items aren't stocked in user shops because it's too hard to keep them there and, if they are, then it's at insane prices. I am fully aware that I have some overpriced items in my own shop, but that is 1/10th of the minimum price I saw in shops when I originally stocked them (haven't checked since, just dumped and left them). Especially items of Very Rare rarity, some of them I can barely keep any stock of for quests. One example is the Ghoul for the weapon quest. I hear a lot of complaints about that one but it's not the only one.
As always, I point out that this game is frequented by people who have lives and things to do. I work from home so I have some leeway but many people do not have that freedom and simply cannot devote their time to this. I'd rather a dozen people played my game for an hour and were happy and kept coming back than have one person focus it for 8 hours while the rest got frustrated and quit, which is what I often feel like doing while restocking.
Suggestions
- Nothing that can be asked for in quests should be stocking 1 at a time, especially if it is a rare item. Make the minimum 3 or even 5.
- For common/uncommon items, make them infinite stock while they're in the shop. This might not be feasible with the current system, so set the minimum stocked to some stupidly high number like 100 or more.
- Some people have discussed not even having "stock" for anything that's common or uncommon and just having those in their own section where you can buy them whenever you want and the rare+ rotate, but that's a much more complicated suggestion to implement and I'm only listing it here for completeness.
As with the above, some of this might cause a bit of scarcity initially but very quickly it'll become much more reasonable to do anything in terms of shops once the initial rush calms down.
Edit: There is no more captcha (not sure if that's staying or not but that's lovely. It's actually making Very Hard stocking even harder though right now). For the rarer items, the captcha removal really really needed to go hand-in-hand with higher base stock so this is very much still relevant.