Cap the number of bees a person can have

[Mouse]

Having several hundred bees in one place lags the shit out of my client if they all do things, such as aggro, be sad when their master dies, be happy when their master stops being dead, dance, etc.  It's fucking ridiculous and lately it's been happening every round more or less.

[RSG250]

I agree, cap the number of bees 1 person can hatch, that way at least people can still hatch there own bees.

and FYI, its not always me doing massive amounts of bees.

[Gerhazo]

Any solution is more complicated than that,
more specifically: just having an arbitrary check that says "no" when a person tries to hatch over a certain amount of eggs is very clunky and more of a band-aid.

Suggestions on how to solve the root issue: whether it's eggs being too accessible or the process of a bee growing requiring no effort are very much welcome, be it increasing costs, reducing their availability, requiring extra steps etc.

[Trustworthy]

Yes yes yes and once again yes. Its ridiculous when theres so many bees I nearly crash three fucking times in a minute. I'd support capping the total number of bees as well, not just how many one person can have. Its overpowered, crashes peoples clients, and can lag the server in high enough amounts. You don't need 300 bees.

[saccharineChampion]

I don't believe capping the number of bees a person can hatch would help - you can hatch them by launching them too, and that's what I usually see mass-bee-hatchers use. (Stack of eggs on a graviton, activate it, instant larva swarm.)

Maybe have a global bee counter where, after the counter hits a certain amount if you break an egg the egg stays unbroken, it disables manual hatching, and disables bee spawning from the bee disease?

EDIT: Gerhazo and Trustworthy's posts appeared between the time I started this post and the time I submitted it. In response to Gerhazo, I don't see how it's clunky - there's only so many ways bees spawn, and things like the manual hatch can just use an if-statement and fail into a "The bee egg senses overpopulation and refuses to hatch!"

I believe making it harder to acquire/grow bees is more of a bandaid than restricting the number of bees beeing able to manifest.

[Gerhazo]

We can agree to disagree, but personally not being able to buy hundreds of eggs in the first place due to their availability/costs versus buying hundreds of eggs and having an arbitrary message saying you can't do anymore, I feel out of the two the first feels more fluid while the latter very much feels like a band-aid.

That, or having the actual growing a bee process more involved and replacing the ability to hatch copious number of bees by instead making it take effort and reward the player with a possibility of the various special bee-subtypes depending on their job in a potential bee rework of sorts could maybe work.

[Flaborized]

I'd rather there be a limit to the number of bees one could acquire practically or something to make it much more difficult to get a million billion bee eggs than to change the behavior of all the methods that can spawn bees to keep it under a certain threshold. Why do we need to be able to buy huge batches of eggs super quickly and cheaply from bombini when we can already buy them at a reasonable rate from QM or use chemistry to produce a bunch of them? It always stuck out to me as being weirdly not cost prohibitive at all. Maybe giving them a limited stock that you could deplete (but still make more through the other slower means). I think it'd just feel kinda inelegant and weird for an items use-case to change based on something that's seemingly unrelated to it (bees not hatching because there's too many bees)

or we could make large crowds of bees much easier to destroy 

[saccharineChampion]

The reason I feel like making acquisition harder is the more band-aid solution is because it doesn't futureproof, while the bee limit does. You would need to make sure nobody in the future implements new easy ways to get bees, even long after this decision is made. A hard limit communicates much more effectively "hey, don't touch this."

Note that even "abandoned" hatch-and-leave bees feed back to the initial issue, specifically the aggro and dancing. Bees will aggro when you hit other bees and dance when anybody, not just when their cared-for human dances.

I don't believe making bee crowds easier to destroy works either, in part because it's already so - just fireball a place and the bees are helpless and die without even aggroing. It's not uncommon to see such happen, either.

[UrsulaMejor]

Maybe we could make bee eggs splat messily on the floor when thrown (you MONSTER) instead of hatching, and always come in boxes, so at the very least you have to painfully open and up and twist each one individually?

[aft2001]

Alternatively, change vendors so that they draw from a stock of goods that is limited and replenishes, say, every 20 minutes?

So Bombini could only sell, say, 30 bee eggs every 20 minutes, severely limiting the amount of bees that you can buy.

[Frank_Stein]

Require bee eggs to be properly incubated gradually over time in a warm environment

[Drago156]

~~no one has caught onto bee spawns from Sea4, perfect!~~ ok yes seriously, I've seen people doing it for the 4 years I've been here, and it is seriously ridiculous every time, not only does it lag people out, it makes it impossible for anyone to do anything through the bee sprites blocking everything.

maybe remove the honey production kit from cargo or limit it to traders only and apply what aft suggested, limiting the total number of bees a round from just mass buying them. In regards to chems I mean, outside of Sea4, Initrobeedril, and Royal Initrobeedril, you still have to consume a bee egg to make one, abusing that any further with chem duplication just seems like the duplication means itself should be addressed, also maybe blacklist bee egg from smokes and such.

[vampirate]

Have eggs cause severe organ damage... they are after all using your tissue to grow.

[zjdtmkhzt]

I feel like the bee sneezing pathology symptom often also causes some lag issues with this.
How about making it so there is a global "bee counter", if a bee is spawned when this is at the cap, the bee instead just goes the the "bee dimension" to live out a happy life there. (Just generating some flavour text or something rather than actually creating a bee, or maybe creating a bee and instantly removing it in a friendly manner.)

[vampirate]

Could it be coded so that a group of three or more bees close to each other become a "swarm" and add any bees they touch up to ten? Making multiple bees a single sprite again?