Single post in Captain Narflunk's Log

I think I'll write my thoughts on the announced "reboot" to Pokéfarm, since the announcement thread is locked.

First things first, I am not a programmer and don't know what goes on behind the scenes. I completely realize there are things that have to happen behind the scenes that are invisible, and what we see on the actual site is only the top of an iceberg that extends deep underwater. If the underlying code that makes the site run needs to be reworked, optimized, and streamlined to allow easier additions or changes to it later, it probably is easier to just start from scratch than to try to change everything one line at a time. This might also improve other things, like lagging, errors/bugs, or other problems that sometimes appear. I'm all for it. One of the key points in my feedback review of the site was how hard it was to learn things, so I'm really glad the tutorial is being revamped. Unless you take the time to go through all the different pages, exploring and clicking on things you have no idea what they are, you will never learn everything the site has to offer. More guidance to differen aspects is a big plus. I disagree that the site is not a 'game'. The definition of a game is "an enjoyable activity played according to rules, governed by skill and/or luck". This site is enjoyable, has (very vague) rules, and is governed by luck. Even if it doesn't have a story or any real structure doens't mean it has to in order to be a game. The mindless clicking is part of the charm and appeal of it for me. Granted, I really love the idea of adding quests, and this will greatly help people find things on the site beyond what the tutorial guides you to. I'm hoping they aren't just one-and-done too, that you can do some of them many times. Repeatability for fun quests is too often ignored for new and fancy content. Having things to do other than click may also be a good thing when the site activity is low. There are times when I have clicked the party of literally every person online, and I need something else to do. Based on the one image we got, the site looks so empty. I hope as more aspects of the site are unlocked they will fill more of the space, so we will have to wait and see. I'm not sure what I think about the menu. It will be good to have eveything accessible from the same menu, but it might get cluttered and confusing (especially without labels. What do all the symols mean?). I'm on the team that prefers the exact numbers for experience rather than a percent. With the exact numbers I can roughly estimate how long until things are finished based on the rate of increase, but if that is turned into a percent I won't be able to tell as precisely. Those new type symbols are great. However, some of them look too similar. Poison/Ghost, Flying/Fairy, Normal/Steel, and Bug/Rock/Ground could easily get mixed up (in my opinion). All in all I'm looking forward to seeing what the new site has to offer. My biggest concern, however, is how it will incorporate the progress I've made on PFQ. Pokedex completion, wishforge level, customized data (dress-up, descriptions, etc.) are all things that are very important, but if the site is a complete wipe and start over, that will be frustrating. Since I have no experience with programming and data collection I don't know how feasible it is, but it seems like it could be very possible for System Sally to "read" our progress here on PFQ and transfer it to the new site. Things like items are just numbers, so all it has to do is see how many of each thing we have and copy/paste it. Progress in the pokedex or wishforge could be seen as more of a presence/absence or yes/no. Then when you sign up for the new site, you are given the option to transfer over your progress or not. If you want to completely start over, that's great, just decline to have your PFQ profile translated. If you don't want to lose that progress, then the system will be able to read your profile here and transfer the data over. Somethin similar is already done when a back-up is taken, so I feel like it could be a relatively straightforward process. Whatever, those are just my thoughts. Wanted to write them down so I wouldn't forget.