Pixel Progression #13

Welcome to the Pixel Progression #13, guest edition.

We'll get right to the meat and potatoes of today's main story, which is the upcoming release of the fishing odds simulator, for those curious on how to min-max fishing.

Writing the following section for us today is the developer who implemented this from top to bottom, Badosz!

The Website

In our upcoming 3rd season we are making the "fishing simulator" available for everyone! (we previously had our own internal very technical version of it). You can think about it as a pretty advanced loot table visualizer that is generated based on different settings and scenarios.

In the main "chances" section you can see all the possibilities based on your current fishing setup. To make things easier (especially with all the variations of skills) we made it so it defaults to your current fishing state when you are logged in (your location, tool, baits and skills). You can change this to simulate anything else as you'd like.

To make things extra clear, you can hover over a specific fish to see detailed odds for different variants the fish has. Did you notice, in this image, there is 0% chance for high quality variant? It is because I have deselected the required skill to unlock high quality variants while fishing.

There is plenty of settings to play with, and this will always be up to date with the bot's content. Feel free to experiment with these settings and see how it affects the outcome. Maybe you will be able to optimize catching your dreaded chroma Jormungandr?

How it works (Technical)

To make this possible we needed to make a lot of changes to our backend fishing logic. Initially the entire logic was strictly tied to the bot's fishing system and the "internal" simulator that Mel used to balance things was always running behind when we updated things. This was because the logic code was literally copied over and modified from the fishing system into the internal tool. When Mel decided that we want to make a "public" version for you to enjoy, it was time to refactor things.

First the function to generate "possibilities" had to accept all possible settings separately instead of relying on a single user's existing data. Previously it also built the loot table and just returned a random outcome. To share odds per variant in the simulator I had to make it return the odds in serializable format as well. Unfortunately fishing logic is pretty complex and every little change is always quite a bit of work!

Our website codebase and infrastructure is completely disconnected from the bot, so when you load the simulator it sends a request to the bot's internal API to get all the necessary data used to simulate. This is things such as names and images for the locations, baits, tools etc. This way we can always have up-to-date information. If user is logged in, it also sends their current fishing state to set the initial settings when the page is loaded.

When pressing calculate it asks the bot to make the necessary fishing logic calculations and returns the odds for everything. Then we simply put that data into an easy to read format for the user.

For our website, we use Next.js for rendering and Tailwind CSS for the styling. Don't let anyone, especially garden gnomes, fool you into thinking tailwind isn't a good tool. It powers our entire site, and is very quick to load while also easy to write with.

Conclusion

Overall I think the fishing simulator being public is a great change. Not only can all users now see odds for a pretty advanced system (not plausible on Discord), but also it makes it easier for Mel to balance things. Our internal simulator (the previous version of this) was quite limited and was not always up-to-date, it didn't even support visualizing the effect skills had.

Thanks!

Today we pushed a survey out via the alerts system. We've hit (and WELL surpassed) the 250 response goal to get some extra drops scheduled!

If you check the drops command by this time tomorrow (3/28/24 @ 9pm EDT), you'll find a few drops that weren't previously scheduled. Thanks for your feedback to help us improve things <3

We're taking some time to read through those right now, but overall the sentiment is fairly positive as a whole, and there's LOTS of helpful feedback and some good idea we may implement from what I've read so far.

A lot of feedback so far has been around the badge requirements for angler, specifically also when talking about skills.

Another trend I'm already seeing is people talking about the command needing more profit. With the AMOUNT talking about it, it's clear we need to do better showing people how profitable it can be. Anyone who's played even f2p fully knows it's a snowball of profit, the longer you play and the more you unlock, the more profitable it is. This is partially for us to educate better on, and some of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as we said at the launch of fishing 2.0 that this isn't not MEANT to be purely for profit, but primarily for fun. We'll workshop a few things here.

Unfortunately I can't keep delaying this PP post to read more feedback, so I'll stop here for now and continue the post.

I'd like to take a moment to just get something off my chest.

In a game where nearly everything is competitive, I've seen some really great standouts in community teamwork and comradery over the past few weeks. We'll be rewarding and empowering this going forward in both DMC and in how we design future aspects of this bot, which you'll find out more about very soon.

But with that, there's also been an alarming amount of people showing some true, and bad, colors. Please make sure you're using the report system for people who are playing the game in a way that negatively impacts the community at large, specifically talking about toxicity, threats, and unsportsmanlike conduct.

At the end of the day, whether you pay for premium or gems or you're fully f2p, this is a video game meant to help people have fun and unwind doing something they enjoy while making friends. It's just pixels. While things can be frustrating in a game you care about, taking it out on the community, volunteer moderators, or developers, isn't the way to go. We will not stand for abusers making the community feel less welcoming, and we welcome the help of the other part of the community to keep them in line.

This is to give information on ongoing known issues or common points of confusion.

Known Issues

These are issues we know about, and don't need reported right now.

• Time keeper and prismatic has some bad interaction with tools breaking
• There are some rendering bugs with pet coin ranges
• Get the full list here: Public bug tracker

Continuing from last week, we aren't shouting out anyone here.

Starting now, posting on reddit with the phrase #PixelShowcase in the title will give you a chance to be here.

We want:

• Fan art (ZERO ai art is allowed)
• Community made resources
• Concept/Suggestion posts
• In depth feedback
• Funny/Awesome moments

Anyone who gets selected (2-3 per week) will earn EXCLUSIVE rewards, including a title, some gems, and an item that we'll showcase next week that can ONLY be earned from winning this and is non-transferable. A true flex of flexes.

We want to showcase you guys, but lets empower you to post high quality content in the first place <3

Drink your WATER or 1000 hours of negative 2XP.

See you next week!