Hey everyone! Thanks for participating in Canvas. I wanted to make a thread to collect together suggestions people have that can be worked on before the next Canvas.
Feel free to also throw in suggestions for future Events we can build and run for the fediverse.
Ill be collecting suggestions together and making issues for them in the repository for myself or some other contributors to work on (the projects open source so anyones free to contribute! https://git.sc07.company/sc07/canvas Feel free to reach out to me and I can help get you set up with the codebase)
Escalating timers are an antipattern. It punishes anyone who looks away for more than thirty seconds - and thirty seconds per click is not exactly a brisk pace for maintaining attention.
Other than that, good shit, well done. Undo was a welcome surprise. Ditto the repetition prevention.
No wait, one other thing. (Complaint sandwich!) Scaling should be in integer powers. Everything but fully-zoomed-out and extremely-blown-up looked lumpy and distracting. Especially with all the pixel art going on.
I think it was 30s between every pixel at the start.
It was sort of, but it was a bug. If you just left them, you’d get one every 33ish seconds until you had 6. But if you had 2 then used one, you’d have to wait 66 seconds until you got another, unless you used your last one then it was back to 33.
It was fixed partway through to be as originally intended.
I think I agree on the cooldowns. Often times I wanted to step away and let the pixels accumulate, but it’s hard to resist when you realize you’d be missing out on double or triple the amount of pixels you could be placing. If the goal was to reward the player for actively placing pixels, all I can say is it didn’t feel very rewarding.
I kinda disagree about the integer scaling. 1x to 2x zoom is a very big shift without any in-between. It would also feel strange on pinch-to-zoom on mobile without in-between. I think instead it could snap to an integer scaling, or have a zoom slider that works to integer scaling. Overall though I agree, having a way to snap into integer scaling makes the pixel art look better
Have whatever between 1x and 2x, but the desktop scroll-wheel options cannot be 1x, 1.6723x, πx, and so on.
I like the escalating time, but the pacing issue is a fair point.
So perhaps the escalation could be delayed? Give it a tiny larger timer (let’s say, 40s?), and make the second pixel take as much time as the first. Like this:
This way you’d be only getting less pixels per minute after 80s of inactivity, not 30s.
Longer waits would be worse.
It should be one every thirty seconds until you hit some limit. Do not incentivize continuously staring at a timer. Do not incentivize obsessively checking a timer. Just rate-limit people in the simplest way that could possibly work.
I get why you’re saying this, and I agree with base reason. However, I feel like fixing the problem by removing the feature is not the way to go, as I think that active playing should be rewarded.
Regarding the base time (30s vs. 40s): I proposed 40s because the total waiting time would be roughly the same. It could be also 20s, if necessary/desired, up to the devs.
Additionally it would be great if there was an audible “ping” once you get a new pixel. Then regardless of the timer or how it progresses people would feel freer to do other stuff while checking the canvas.
One literal pixel every thirty seconds is not “active.”
You went people to drool when a bell rings.
Encouraging users to obsess or react is plainly an addiction mechanic. In a collaborative MS Paint session. Tweaking the details of it misses what’s wrong with it. It’s an antifeature. It’s a mistake.
Just give people one pixel every thirty seconds. “Active” means they check at least every couple minutes, at their convenience, where they will have up to six. If they step away for an hour they don’t get hundreds.
One effect of this is that someone steadily editing got more pixels than someone editing in batches, which felt like a feature when defending against trolls.
Except when the trolls have more free-time than oneself and so can place every 30s while oneself want to get other things done and so would prefer placing in batches.
Encouraging anyone to stare at a screen for two actions per minute is brutal. Especially when those actions, to be optimal, have to happen the moment the timer rolls over.
This is an addiction mechanic.
This is some free-to-play mobile-game nonsense.
No matter how good the motivations are, no matter what narratives we can build around casual versus attentive use, this is a bad decision for software. It is deliberate manipulation of the user’s incentives and habits for destructive patterns of behavior.
I didn’t love it tbh. I had the canvas up in half of the screen and was doing something else but would look over too early then just be waiting for x seconds for my next pixel.
Same. Watched some streams and found myself listening distractedly while staring at a window with nothing happening. It is, perhaps unfortunately, plenty of time to reflect on why, and to ask whether this is desirable.
The worst example of this accidental mistreatment (in my personal experience) was the idle game The Idle Class. From the genre and the title, you’d figure you can just leave it running, and come back whenever. But the dev added e-mail events that give a huge bonus if you catch them within thirty seconds. I cannot overstate - that is a Skinner box. That is operant conditioning on a random schedule. It’s how brains develop obsessive habits, and eventually, superstitions.
Now that everyone’s been exposed to real-money video games and at least acknowledges some of their tactics are criminal, we should all be mindful of how software influences people. Problems don’t need to be malicious or complex. Reliable incentives over time are profoundly influential.
Thank you, very clear! I suggest to add one pixel every 30 seconds, plain and simple. If a modifier to this timer is required for reasons, that could be based on the number of pixels placed during the past x minutes or so.
I’d rather not discourage consistent use, either. One valid purpose for modifying the rate could be soft botting prevention. Instead of handing people CAPTCHAs, just string them out on 40 seconds, 50 seconds, etc., as suspicion dictates.
What’d be great - and what I think would prevent some botting - is an official queue function. When I was filling in teal for half an hour at a time, I would have preferred to click a few spots in a row and let my browser do them for me. Automating an entire image would be ruinous. That’s just a bot war waiting to happen. But if I could leave a dozen pixels floating, at any given time, I wouldn’t give a damn when the timer says they’ll get placed.
thank you (and everyone else in this thread) for the constructive feedback!
i’ve added the timers as an issue in the tracker to help with keeping track of everything
i think i got the main points given in this thread, but if theres something you think is missing feel free to reply to this so i can add it 👍
i’ve also added the weird zooming issue also
So much went right that all the negatives are nitpicky.
i’m glad :) it was very fun to run after all