Animal Crossing cleanup

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is currently on Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining because it has three overly-long and nitpicky subpages for negative audience reactions. War Jay 77 also told me that there's been an issue with Ensemble Dark Horse shoehorns.

My first goal is to cut down ScrappyMechanic.Animal Crossing New Horizons, which goes into Walkthrough Mode a lot and repeats itself several times.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Mar 23rd 2022 at 6:58:33 PM

Yeah, let's take a look at that page.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I did a look-through of one of its lists in the complaining thread, so here it is again:

I just realised that not only is this overly-long, it's badly-indented as well; it goes from being about giving villagers gifts to the way they decorate their houses. It feels like a Single-Issue Wonk that could probably be condensed into one paragraph.

As the creator of the Ensemble Darkhorse Page, I'm game to cut that down as needed. But as for the Gifting stuff, here's an abbreviated version:

• The gifting system has been praised for improvements, but also received criticism for various reasons:
  • You can't immediately give gifts to new villagers, requiring talking several days first.
  • Many situations prevent giving gifts at all, such as fishing or just sitting.
  • They won't ever use wallpapers, flooring, etc. The only way to customize their houses like that is to play through the Happy Home Paradise DLC.
  • Gifting most items can result in them replacing furniture or taking space in their house. This is considered so annoying that many villager traders will refuse any villager who's "Gifted", with "Ungifted" villagers fetching higher prices.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 24th 2022 at 10:24:50 AM

Thanks. What problems has Ensemble Dark Horse been having, exactly?

People would add specific villager types, such as entire personality types or species. Entire groups can't qualify, and the villagers are all just copies of the same few templates, plus no villager can really be said to be more major or minor than another.

Someone like Resetti, for example, is an actual character who plays a role and is an individual. "Dog villagers" aren't.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

i would argue that, considering the villagers as a whole are minor characters, an individual villager becoming significantly more popular than the rest is noteworthy on an ensemble darkhorse level. like for example marshal or raymond are significantly more popular despite being minor optional characters compared to, say, wisp, who is a major character that everyone sees often. I would definitely agree a whole category like "cat villagers" wouldn't count but on a one-by-one basis certain indvidual villagers can count

I have a basis for doing the Cat villager folder, they are disproportionately popular, but as it’s not the only factor at play I would be fine to dismantle that folder. I would stand by personalities though: They are a much bigger factor in why people like them. For reference, the top two tiers of the latest popularity tier list have 10 “normals” and 9 “lazies”, out of 40. That’s almost half with those two alone. People find certain personality types more endearing like said “normal” and “lazy” for being friendly and often having adorable designs. Others not so much, including “crankies”, considering potential lingering trauma from their sheer rudeness in older titles and being older in their designs with only 2 in tier 2, or “sisterlies”, which are generally more out-there design wise with only one in tier 2. It would also be a much messier page without some folders categorizing and explaining the disproportionate popularity of certain personality types. Nonetheless, I’ll accept if I’m overruled here.

Edit: I also trimmed another Scrappy Mechanic entry about finding specific villagers down to the following:

• Unlike New Leaf which had a megaphone system, this game has no way to easily locate your villagers. If they are not at home, you will either have to search your entire island (including the shops, museum, and homes of other villagers) or reset in hopes of them appearing in their home upon reload.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 25th 2022 at 1:05:59 PM

Sure, I could agree with that.

The issue is, still groups can't be darkhorses, and saying that some personality types are more popular than others... Well, that's a true statement, but that doesn't mean "Lazy Villager" is automatically an Ensemble Dark Horse.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 25th 2022 at 1:22:43 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I personally use it as much for categorization as anything. It's not intended to imply that every Lazy is an Ensemble Dark Horse, it was just to explain their disproportionate popularity and to sidestep any need to constantly re-explain that "They're popular because of their personality type". I'll put forth the following restructurings of the page, first with keeping the popular personality folders and no more cat folder:

Male villagers

Female villagers

And a version with only separation by gender:

Edit: I also took another shot at the Scrappy Mechanic page, this time the DIY stuff:

• Elements of the DIY system can be frustrating:
  • All conventional methods of obtaining DIY recipes^note Talking to villagers while they're crafting in their homes, popping balloons, or finding bottled messages with DIY recipes in them on the beaches of your home island each day or randomly during a Nook Miles island visit have a chance to give you recipes for items you've already learned how to craft, which becomes more likely as you fill up your recipe collection. The only uses are to sell them for 200 bells a piece or trade/give them to others. Also didn’t help that before update 2.0 they couldn’t be stored, forcing them to clutter the island to be kept for trades.
  • In a non-sensical design choice, the game does not give you an option to refuse to take the duplicate recipe from villagers, despite presenting that option to you if they offer to give you a recipe you haven't obtained yet.
  • Seasonal recipes may only be obtained by balloons while their materials are available, giving small windows as short as 2 weeks to obtain them.
  • Even if the DIY workbench you are using is in your house, the DIY system will not pull raw materials from your house's storage if you do not have sufficient raw materials in your pockets; you must manually transfer the materials to your pockets.
  • Items must be crafted one at a time, with no option to craft a chosen quantity.
  • Customizable DIY items cannot be customized immediately after crafting them, requiring exiting the DIY system and re-interacting with the workbench to do so.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 25th 2022 at 9:39:43 AM

Should the part about second-hand amiibo prices go? It's something outside of the game.

In the main description sure, since they’re becoming more about rarity now than popularity. I’d still keep the brief mentions for the popular ones from the Welcome Amiibo series, because it legitimate non-japanese copies (especially US copies) remain exorbitantly expensive.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 26th 2022 at 9:51:13 AM

I shortened it to:

The part about moving in the specific villagers you want really needs to be truncated, because it's huge.

I thought we were talking the Ensemble Dark Horse page. Shorten as needed as far as Scrappy Mechanic is concerned, so that’s fine. fair

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 26th 2022 at 12:07:08 PM

I don't really know what to contribute to the Ensemble Dark Horse discussion.

I've trimmed the "open-plots" one down to this:

• Open plots are needed to spawn random villagers on mystery islands and/or invite villagers moving out from other islands. However, the game only gives one guaranteed (or only if you play online) before it will auto-fill them, saddling you with a potentially unwanted resident who cannot be easily removed. It doesn't help that the system is never explained to players or that ones received from other players through this system will have whatever was in their previous home (unless one of their first 5), which could mean receiving a dreaded "gifted" villager.

Edit: The one immediately following that was trimmed to this:

• If the time limit placed by the "move-in queue" system isn't enough of an issue, villager hunting on mystery islands can add even more frustration:
  • You need to expend a Nook Miles Ticket to fly to a mystery island. If you're looking for a specific villager, you'll need a lot of them. The only way to get them is to redeem your Nook Miles at the Nook Stop, and there is no option to redeem multiple Nook Mile Tickets at once. Redeeming a single Nook Miles Ticket takes about 15 seconds worth of text boxes and animations, which will quickly add up if you're stocking up on tickets.
  • The mystery island algorithm selects a random species out of the 35 ^note Alligators, Anteaters, Birds, Bears, Bear Cubs, Bulls, Cats, Chickens, Cows, Deers, Dogs, Ducks, Eagles, Elephants, Frogs, Goats, Gorillas, Hamsters, Hippos, Horses, Kangaroos, Koalas, Lions, Monkeys, Mice, Octopuses, Ostriches, Penguins, Pigs, Rabbits, Rhinos, Sheep, Squirrels, Tigers and Wolves, and then it selects a random villager of that species ^note The current formula is thus 1 in 35 multiplied by 1 in the number of villagers of a species (minus the number of villagers of that species that are living in your island if there are any). Contrary to popular belief, the game does not take into account villager personalities when selecting a villager, nor is a specific time of day more or less likely to make certain villager appear on the islands.. This means you normally have a 1 in 140 chance of finding Octavian (4 octopuses), but a 1 in 805 chance of finding Raymond (23 cats).
  • Unlike with the campsite, the game doesn't keep track of the villagers you have encountered on previous mystery islands, nor the villagers who have previously lived on your island.
  • Any villager in the "move-in queue" will never appear on mystery islands or in the campsite. The only way villagers can be manually moved out of the "move-in queue" is by using their amiibo card or by letting resident villagers move out and leaving the plot empty overnight for them to move in — something that can only be done every fortnight without "Time Travel".

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 26th 2022 at 4:45:31 AM

I've gone ahead and dismantled the Cat folder on the Animal Crossing page for the time being.

Edit: Also reduced the campsite part to this:

• The campsite, which provides two out of the four means of choosing a villager to come to your island, has more than a few problems:
  • Once the campsite is built, a Smug villager will visit the next day. Accepting their move-in is mandatory to progress, so while you could get a sought after villager like Marshal, Julian, and Raymond, there's a high chance of being forced to accept an unpopular villager.
  • After a villager has visited the campsite, you are guaranteed to not get another campsite villager during the following two days. From there, it increases 5% each day until the sixth day, topping out at 20%. Bad luck could mean zero campsite villagers for weeks.
  • Only some responses give the chance to invite the camper, which include rejecting your offer, asking to play a 1-in-2 or 1-in-4 game of pure chance to move-in, or a mere 10% chance per invite that they will immediately accept your offer. Unlucky players could end up mashing the A-button for 20 minutes with no success.
  • Some of the random camper dialogue for "rejection" or "lost card game" is exceptionally deceptive, with lines suggesting that the camper will come back shortly after, or that something needs to be done to call them back. In reality, it's quite the opposite.^note Said villager will never be rolled to appear in the campsite as a random camper until every single villager of that personality type has been encountered in the campsite, or lived on the player's island..
  • If your island is full and you successfully invite a random camper from the campsite, they will randomly name a villager that they will replace. Rejecting the offer normally will lock their move-out choice. The only way to re-roll involves closing and reopening the game without saving at the right moment mid-conversation, then restarting the arduous invitation process.
  • Moving in an amiibo camper is more complicated than it should be. Unlike the one day in New Leaf, getting an amiibo camper to move in is now a minimum three-day affair. Each invite, an amiibo camper will request a random DIY item, which must be crafted and given to them within the day. If you can't obtain the materials, you're forced to invite an additional day. It also resets the camper algorithm.
  • At launch, having a villager in your "move-in queue" also disabled the ability to invite that villager to the campsite via amiibo until you moved them in through it. Unless you adopt that villager directly, the only way to obtain them was go through said queue, which could take up to 1.5 months to get a "gifted" version of the villager. This was fortunately fixed via a patch.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on Mar 27th 2022 at 10:10:58 AM

Gonna try my hand at the Bunny Day point on the Scrappy Mechanic page, which felt a bit bloated and overlapped somewhat with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:

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• The Bunny Day event saw a lot of negative attention for its mechanics, which were criticized as unnecessarily intrusive. Namely, the candy eggs that appear throughout the island take the place of other resources (e.g. fish, stones, and wood) and even show up on Mystery Islands, where their spawn rates are even higher. As a result, they can quickly clog one's inventory and make it harder to complete tasks centered around the materials they replace (including several tutorial sidequests). The event attracted so many complaints that Nintendo outright nerfed the spawn rate of eggs (except for on Bunny Day proper) and shortened the length of the event from 12 days to just 8 in later patches.

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Thoughts?

Edited by bowserbros on Mar 27th 2022 at 2:53:47 AM

Be kind.

Sounds good.

Alright; swapped it in and cited this thread.

Be kind.

Trying my hand at tackling the automatic flower breeding points:

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• The game's handling of flower breeding proved to be a very sharp double-edged sword. While the greater hardiness of flowers compared to previous titles gives players more agency in handling them, it also makes it easy for them to quickly overrun one's island thanks to rainfall and snowfall automatically watering all flowers at once, which results in more spawning the next day (even next to solitary flowers). Combined with how difficult it is to keep them confined (requiring the use of physical objects, patterns, or non-dirt paths), the lack of a hard limit on flower growth, and the fact that villagers will occasionally water flowers themselves, this results in managing flowers becoming unnecessarily difficult.

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Originally this was four interconnected points (the first of which was quite lengthy), when it can all be condensed to just one. Thoughts?

Edited by bowserbros on Mar 28th 2022 at 12:03:46 PM

Be kind.

Looks good to me, but I thought villagers couldn't water flowers in New Horizons? My only source for that is Tama's video about villagers, but she could've been wrong.

Alright; the rewrite's been swapped in. Regarding villagers, from my own experiences, they do indeed water flowers on their own every now and then, even in the most recent revision.

Be kind.

Further confirm, your villagers watering plants does happen.

I'm also shortening the following Scrappy Mechanic section.

• While you now have absolute control over whether your resident villagers stay or leave, getting rid of an unwanted villager is a massive pain in the rear:
  • Without an amiibo, there is literally no way to manually evict a specific villager. All the other methods (campsite, moving-out thought bubble, or not playing the game for too long) are random.
  • If you want to replace a villager with one of your choice, it gets even harder — you need that specific villager to be selected for a move-out request, which only happens every 2 weeks of the previous approved move-out. Certain criteria will also prevent a villager from moving out^note A villager will never ask to leave if they are the most recent move-in, they were the last villager who asked to move out but you told them to stay, their house is in the process of being moved, or their birthday is within the next seven days and no villagers will ask to leave on event days — including K.K. Slider concerts and villager birthdays. Also, only one villager will attempt to ask to leave on any given day, represented by them having a thought bubble over their head. Unless you know how to identify and manipulate this particular bubble ^note The "moving out" thought bubble is uniquely persistent — it won't disappear even if you enter a building and head back out. Save and quit, then reopen the game to re-roll villager positions and reset villager request cooldowns, which will eventually force the moving-out thought bubble to reveal itself. If the moving-out thought bubble is identified and it's on a villager whom you want to keep, ignore the villager for the day. They will stay and the moving-out algorithm will re-roll the next day., it will then take another 5 days after rejecting it for another to appear.
  • The algorithm for move-out selections can be especially annoying if you are gunning for all your villagers' photos. All that matters is friendship levels — lower levels make it significantly more likely that villager will be selected, with only a few exclusions (most notably, the last villager to move in and the last villager whose move out request you denied). It's possible a villager could request moving multiple times as you seek their photo.
  • The game makes it difficult to completely ignore an unwanted villager. Villagers cannot be fenced in, so you are guaranteed to see them even if you'd rather not. You must also talk to them at least once before they'll ever consider leaving. It gets even worse if said unwanted villager is the most recent move-in, as the last villager who arrived at the island will never ask to leave, so you'll either have to get rid of another first or hope that you get lucky or constantly re-roll the campsite pick.

I just trimmed a few more Scrappy Mechanic examples.