Thread:BonesMcGee/@comment-5303258-20120911213223/@comment-5477177-20120911232448

PEEK Efficiencies. no, not peak, i did not turn off spell check. i mean peek, as in peeking, as in hurry hatching. it has become a dirty word and is almost treated as a vulgarity. in order to clarify the matter i am responding to something i could interpret as a muzzle [sorry, no better word comes to mind], that i should not discuss peeking. what i especially want to make clear is that i understand we are not to disclose the mechanism of peeking but i expect we are free to discuss the phenomenon as described in hatching reports.

i gather that the general consensus among admins has been that this topic is considered a game spoiler. a blind eye might be turned to furtive hints in chat but other postings were discouraged and removed. nevertheless many senior players were able to benefit from that knowledge and it does not appear to have spoiled the game for them. instead, from the barrage of recent requests to explain matters of hatching hints, interest in the mechanism of peeking may be peaking.

i believe that the matter now can give many players in-the-know an unfair advantage. it has also become a matter more of scale and not secrecy. now that more than a few have been told or have worked it out - it is only a matter of time before the web outside the dark corners of our wikia knows the spoiler too. other lesser matters have eventually been posted on this wikia as bugs which are technically spoilers of this sort but which have a lesser impact on gameplay. i do not think i need to list them here but i would like to point out that i could not find our public policy on spoilers - aside from our common sense reaction that they can harm the gameplay of others and that costs us Fun.

this has been under the protective guidance of admins who have a great deal more experience in the game than most of us can appreciate, effectively they are experts. sadly this saddles them with the burden of being paternalistic to the rest of the community. that is all that this boils down to: "...it does not belong in the public part of the Wiki..."

let me also say that at the time of this writing i have never peeked, i hatch some eggs, i break many more - at my own expense, but i was not a peeker before i wrote this. furthermore, the principles employed in peeking strategies do not seem to apply only to peeking at eggs. a player could do almost anything with impunity in the game if the actions were reversed when the game restarted - and so the only benefit is knowledge and the only village risked is one's own. one could just as simply rearrange a village or inventory as a test of appearances or one could test different chaining strategies. the consequences are not much different from running the game in a virtual machine. therein lies the power of the peeking mechanism.

another spoiler/bug that comes to mind gives a countable benefit yet we sanction it. we have tools outside the game which we employ to increase the game experience, such as this wikia or a spreadsheet or a virtual machine on other hardware. some players even run more than one village to experiment with the game. in one way peeking is different in that it can cause the player to spend crystals "unintentionally" if done incorrectly, but that is within gameplay as set by the publishers.

so i have to wonder, no disrespect intended to wikia admins or members, if the time has not come for an open discussion of the general issue and of this trick in particular. when i first saw the postings above i was actually editing text on my own pc to raise these issues in a blog, and i have a brief fiction written that left little to the imagination - which i hoped to vet with admins in chat, but this cat really seems to be out of the bag. i will refrain from blogging the matter until senior parties have ample time for private discussions.

in closing, i would like to point out that i believe many players of TV have had an opportunity to peek and did not know it; the fault for those circumstances lies with Tinyco and not our community. it was not our intention to be in that position, it was discoverable. one cannot hide for long a secret that is in plain sight. thanks for reading this far...

p.s. if this reply disappears i shall take no offense, i understand that much about the site, someone has to make decisions if we cannot be unanimous.