Suggestions

I can't be the only one frustrated with this. Why is this a thing?? Why are captcha dragons being pulled from actual accounts, therefore having apparel? I seriously can't see a legitimate reason why this is a thing vs pulling from scrying workshop or the pool of exaltees.

I can't tell you the amount of times I've had captchas that were unrecognizable as dragons. Apparel muddies up otherwise recognizable colors and genes. Biggest offenders have been bulky pieces like the cloaks, feathered wings, wolf capes, Sylvan set, lion headdresses, etc.

Couple this with plenty of familiars having dragon-like silhouettes (manticore, hippogriffs, etc) and images being flipped and it's stupidly hard to spot the dragon sometimes. The worst ones I've seen so far are captcha with both a male tundra wearing a headdress and wooly coat + a manticore with uncomfortably similar colors.

I've been stuck using mobile only for weeks since my laptop is in repair, and the amount of times I've had to hold the phone inches from my face to discern the dragon is ridiculous. The captchas are so frequent, too, especially when grinding in low level venues... And then there's the issue of tapping the derg right on its body, only to get presented with another captcha or two. Or three.

Not related to the apparel and flipping issue, but what's with the insanely busy backgrounds now? They weren't that busy during testing, it was just recolored venue backgrounds. Now though, there are super busy, mirrored images as backgrounds with multiple clashing colors that make it even harder to tell what's what. Botting isn't even a valid excuse imo, bots don't have eyes. Simply having the dragon in a different spot every captcha is good enough. There's no reason for things like this besides disorienting people who are trying to play, and I can't even imagine what this is like for colorblind people + other disabilities.

The entire reason the captchas became a thing is because of keyboard controls, too-- why not restrict them to only showing up with those enabled??? I don't even use em and miss the way the coli used to be, even with the old lag.

This kinda turned into a rant but ehh I needed it after the past few weeks, as coli is literally the only internet-related thing I can do until my laptop gets fixed.

The points you make throughout are scarily good.

I whole heartedly agree with you. The way they did the coli captcha is just so inexcusable. Especially since so many people were complaining about the captcha in beta and then they turn around and make it worse. It honestly just feels like everyone is being punished because a small group of people were botting...
I can't imagine what it must be like for new players and people with eyesight problems. :c

@EndraPhoenix

Ikr? :/
I really, really doubt botters were such a big issue, or at least one big enough to justify the captcha system. I know there are some people out there who haven't been able to use the coli at all since the update because of the captcha... And considering I have perfect eyesight and I'M struggling... Yeah.

It's also kind of inexcusable that the zoom button beside the captcha window doesn't actually increase the image resolution; it just magnifies the image, making everything blurry and therefore making it harder to tell if the silhouette is a familiar or not. The window should have been that big by default, I'm not sure why the tiny window is the default size lol.

The whole captcha system could have just been a single, unflipped dragon on a white or solid color background and that would have sufficed, so long as the dragon was in a different spot each time. That, and the frequency should have been massively toned down.


@RabidWhovian

Yeahhhh this has been something I've wanted to talk about for a long time now, ahaha. I've had a lot of time to think this stuff though.

Agreed on here. It's also a problem with laptop stuff since zooming in the browser is tedious and my up-close eyesight is awful with glasses on since my vision problems mainly stem from long distance issues. I can see where phone problems can stem from to, since sometimes when I'm zooming in to see text better I accidentally click links.

They could do the captchas similarly to Dappervolk and have a few basic gene dragons lined up and say "Click the Skydancer" or something similar. it'd be less disruptive to the flow of grinding as it would take less time, not to mention that wouldn't be a negative to people with color-blindness as it isn't color dependent (Though it would be nice to add something to fr to make it more color-blind friendly (a lot of video games have different color-settings) but just like night mode for the forums because the current ones are very bright we probably aren't going to get that).

Overall, the captchas should be simplified to just a "click the dragon breed" or finding a familiar among a series of dragon images that aren't on a busy background.

I agree, it just makes it even worse.

It would also be helpful to have the option to refresh the captcha without penalty.

Honestly, my system is: anything in a box is not a dragon; anything recognizably not a dragon is not a dragon. Anything left that is completely unregognizable is probably a dragon. UNLESS there is nothing left, but there IS a suspiciously large, dark empty space, in which case I should click on the darkness, because there's probably a dragon camouflaged in there.

That said, I atually find it easier to do the captcha on my phone, because I can zoom the screen, not the captcha itself, which keeps the image clear. The problem is when I don't remember to unzoom before I touch the captcha, because not only will it not "take" while zoomed, it won't fix itself until I refresh the page--so goodbye breath. :(

The captcha doesn't really bother me in and of itself, tbh, mostly just the actual execution seems a little wonky.

They are working on it. It's not a quick and easy thing to fix.

I also think that we have literally no idea how much of a problem botting is with or without keybindings. I can, however, say I know of both justified bans and that technically speaking a basic mouse-input bot is not difficult.

It ideally would be more difficult than unflipped on plain white background since that's also extremely easy to automate (MATLAB and python have plenty good enough image recognition libraries) but either way, let's cut the tiny programming team some slack, quit yelling and see what they come up with. They're in the middle of doing PvP too.

Just pull from exalted dragons only. Boom, much easier to see.