My main gripe is this. Exclusive Pokemon. More specifically, Event-Exclusive Pokemon. Can we get rid of them, the concept, and the practice, please? There should be no such thing as an event-exclusive Pokemon. I know some of you’re already clutching your pearls and crying “muh uniqueness”, but sorry, I feel that it’s bad design. A game like this one can’t afford to artificially lock off specific pokemon (currently Torchic, Gible, Lillipup, Audino, Deerling, Vullaby, Fennekin, Clauncher, Phantump, Pumpkaboo according to the Wiki) because you weren’t here on an arbitrary date 50 years ago and missed a one-time event, so now you no longer can get this Pokemon. Screw you for not playing the game 24/7 since 65,000,000 BC. Ayla was playing, why weren’t you?
This game is centered and predicated around a community, a community based on, making friends and joining/forming guilds with said friends, and conscripting your favorite (or all) pokemon to your team so you can play as your favorite pokemon as you scour dungeons with your friends. So, imagine my surprise when I finally have more free time, it’s about June or July 2017, and I decide to pop in and check up on PMU. Here I was, thinking “Now that Fennekin is out, I have a reason to play the game again.” But no, Fennekin is locked behind an event I missed out on three months ago, at that time. And to drive the nail into the coffin even further, I was playing fairly recently that Alolan Vulpix is also locked behind an event. Why are we locking all the pokemon that we knew everyone in the game wants behind one-time events?
So screw me and other players because we missed a one-time event? Why? This isn’t like TF2 or something, where I can’t play as a Spy in a whacky red, white, and blue tuxedo because I missed an Independence Day event. At least I can still play as a Spy. That character is still available to me, I just don’t have the glitter. I can live with that. This is far worse because every pokemon is like an individual character. This is like MvC4 coming out and being unable to play as Dr.Doom or Zero or Dante, some of the most popular characters in MvC, because I didn’t pre-order the game. Those characters are permanently unavailable to me and never will be available to me unless I fork over my wallet because they know that everyone wants these characters, and that’s gross.
So there goes my only real reason to even come back and bother playing, and who knows, that might’ve been a turn-off for other players, both new and old. While I’m dead I’ll probably miss out on even more pokemon because of a backward design choice. I have no reason to stick around and get to know new players or participate in events because the game doesn’t even offer anything I want anymore. At least then I would have a new pokemon that I like, and to train it I could go to a dungeon with a friend or some guildmates or some other random players. Other players might feel that way too. It’s a lost opportunity and as long as this philosophy is still in place it will continue being a lost opportunity.
Alright, because I don’t like to gripe without at least proposing a solution or two, here’s a few reasonable suggestions and a few anti-solutions I also want to knock down.
Wrong Solution #1:
Throw all event-exclusive pokemon in Holiday Cave and make them available once a year on holidays. This doesn’t work for a number of reasons. A little disclaimer, I’ve never been in Holiday Cave, and I don’t know exactly when it’s open, so I’m going to assume it’s open on most important US holidays. This means HC is open:
- [li] January, for New Years,
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[li] February, for Valentines,
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[li] March, for St Patty’s Day
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[li] April, for Easter
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[li] May, for Cinco De Mayo
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[li] July, for Independence Day
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[li] October, for Halloween,
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[li] November for Thanksgiving,
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[li] December for Christmas
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Which means HC is not open in June, August, and September, maybe January or December if you combine Christmas and New Years. Either way, not only do those months seem arbitrary, but having HC open for 1 week out of all those months kinda ruins the je ne sais quois of HC, and it’s just too much, at least in my opinion.
Even if you restrict HC to specific holidays, New Years, Easter, Halloween, and Christmas for example, it just means that I and other occasional players, have to wait every few months or so before playing the game again to get the pokemon we want and then going back to being dead for the rest of the time. This is not the goal if you’re trying to sustain a community unless you want a community that’s only active on holidays.
You want a community that’s decently and consistently active. Basing it on holidays and special occasions doesn’t forward that goal. You also don’t want to forward the notion that you can be completely comatose and still get whatever you want with little effort, because then regularly active players will feel cheated. Both regular and occasional players should feel like they have a fair opportunity to get what they want, and all this does is teach regular players that they don’t have to be active.
Wrong Solution #2:
Enable breeding and then have players sell Fennekin or other exclusive eggs for exorbitant amounts of poke. That might sound good to a newer player, but that’s because they haven’t figured out that the economy is so garbage that it has less value than its own currency. Money is literally useless to glorious 1%-er players like me. I’m obviously exaggerating for comedic effect here, but nevertheless, new players have to grind for money for so long that by the time they reach the point of distinguished bourgeoisie players like me, Fennekin eggs cost like 5 poke and they don’t have anywhere else to spend the 9,999,995 poke they have, and I still don’t have anywhere to spend the insignificant stash of 9,999,999,995 poke I have.
This might even sound good to veteran and older players because it’s “revitalizing the economy” and “It’s another money sink” and whatnot, but you might as well throw away all the relevance of exploring and going through dungeons with the exception of finding items to sell and finding money. Why bother making the effort to find the pokemon when I can buy it with poke and hatch it in a few minutes? This might forward a community-driven philosophy, at least in terms of going out and grinding dungeons for money or bartering with players for money, but it only exacerbates the already horrendous economy problem and arguably defeats the purpose of a core element of the game.
Reasonable Solution #1:
Because I know people are going to whinge about participating in an event only because of the availability of another pokemon, why not just lock the pokemon off publicly for 2-3 weeks? I’ll use Torchic as an example. Let’s pretend Torchic is coming out, so to celebrate you have an event where all participants are the first ones that get access to Torchic. After the event, other players that didn’t participate have to wait at most 3 weeks (any longer is pushing it) before Torchic is publicly available. These 2-3 weeks gives the active player mustard race just enough time to brag and lord it over other people that couldn’t participate because they have 9-5s, families, and other priorities that don’t involve memes, and it’s long enough for the fuzzy warm special feeling and hype to die down and stop being special.
If you want to bring up “Well, I’ll just die for 3 weeks and come back,” then fair enough. But unfortunately for you, I accounted for that. After 3 weeks pass, you can stick Torchic in the higher floors of Harmonic Tower or Inferno Volcano or some other difficult and/or obscure dungeon with a low but fair and non-obnoxious spawn or recruit rate. Don’t do both.
Staff can announce Torchic is out, but keep where it is a mystery. That means players have to go out and explore dungeons, aka play the game. Oh baby, playing the game, that’s a goal accomplished, this is sounding good, but it gets better! When players find it, they talk and interact with each other. Also, because it’s in a difficult dungeon, players might be encouraged to form parties with others or make guild expeditions, aka, they interact with the community. Aw yeah, this just got hot! Now we’re talking! Now we got players all going to this one or more dungeons, and now everyone can join in on the fun. That’s not even mentioning the demand increase for Friendship Bows and Golden Masks, but who cares about money having a use for a day, we established that money sucks.
Okay, so let’s see here, community-driven solution? Check. Current players are happy? Check. New and/or returning old players aren’t permanently screwed out of an opportunity and can get the mons they want? Check. Core elements and objectives of the game are still intact? Check! Sounds like a perfect idea to me.
Reasonable Solution #2:
Make all event-exclusive Pokemon available via eggs that cost Event Tokens. If you want, you can even split them into genders, i.e, a male Pumpkaboo egg for x tokens and a female Pumpkaboo egg for x tokens, where x is the cost of event tokens, and both cost the same amount of tokens. We’re all equal opportunity~ ;) Or not, I suggested this for me and all the other 3 people that care about gender for mostly RPing purposes. As long as they’re not essentially lootboxes, then I don’t care.
“What? But you just utterly demolished the idea of them costing poke! Whats the difference?” I see you typing on your keyboard. The difference is Event Tokens are worth a bit more, and while I concede that it might be a worthwhile money sink for poke, it doesn’t forward a community-driven philosophy. You can’t even buy and sell eggs so this point (and Wrong Solution #2) is kinda moot, but I’ll entertain it anyway for the sake of argument. If you buy it from a player, you interact with that player or a small handful of players that routinely sell things and you’re done. Nothing special. You don’t even have to participate in an event. Just let others earn the eggs for you, then pay for them yourself. Even worse if you can readily buy it from an NPC for poke, you’re not even interacting with anyone at that point. This is semi-acceptable for items, but this just brings us back to the money problem, and we would ideally want pokemon to have some sort of actual value.
“But Event Tokens are worthless too! I have over 300 of them!” Well, you got me there person that’s been playing and hasn’t logged off since the stone ages, but this isn’t about you as an individual. This isn’t an argument and that doesn’t make Event Tokens worthless.
Event Tokens are more worthwhile than poke because there’s only one way to get them: By participating in events, and thus, interacting with the community. So you have to at least be there to earn them. Even if you participate and don’t say a thing to other players, you still have to work together or compete with other players, and that’s more or less the point of these events, right? As for how much these eggs should cost, I say about 50-60 event tokens, but it’s ultimately up to you guys.
“What?! 50?! That’s way too much!” Well, any lower, and I think they lose their value. Globes cost either 25 or 35, I don’t recall the price exactly, so I just doubled that. I was actually going to suggest 60-70, but that would take upwards of 6 months minimum to get under the following equation. The idea is that you want these pokemon to require effort, but not take an eternity to get. Assuming minimum effort and assuming you get 3 or 4 tokens per event, that’s 16 weeks for 3 tokens/50 price, 12 weeks for 4/50, 20 weeks for 3/60, and 15 weeks for 4/60. That’s around 4 or 5 months assuming 4 weeks in each month. Seems reasonable to me, at least it’s better than half a year. Unless you want to hybridize this solution with Solution #1, and at that point, it’s just a shortcut for lazy people with an overabundance of tokens.
The point of this solution is to require some amount of effort on the community’s part. Do you want this pokemon? Better hike your pokebutt to an event and participate and socialize. At least then you’re still accomplishing a community-driven objective, even if people are doing it just to get the carrot you’re dangling over them. People respond to incentives, that much is fact. This accomplishes similar things to solution #1, it just takes more time, and is a little bit heavier handed.
I know my activity is sparse at best. Also, please feel free to correct me where I may be wrong. I’ve played PMU from about 2014 or 15, spottily during college, and about when I graduated college in 2017, then stopped playing regularly when I had to focus on my internship and career and finally land a job that focuses on said career.
Either way, the length of time and investment, nor my inactivity in this game is relevant to my point and to my argument, as this is aimed to improve the experience for all players both now and in the future. The specific pokemon and amount of pokemon locked behind events are irrelevant as well. I’d be posting this thread whether the pokemon was Fennekin or Klefki. I’d also be posting it it was just Klefki locked behind an event.
I tried to think of solutions in which some amount of effort was still required while keeping the game intact. Yes, I am still bitter about Fennekin lol. But, I didn’t just want to be another guy whining about how I can’t get a certain pokemon. I’m willing to put in some in-game work and interact with others if it means I have the opportunity to get it and other mons. This event-exclusivity practice is dated, it doesn’t fit this game, and it shuts out opportunities for both new and old players for no reason other than novelty.
If there’s still insistence as far as unique one-time awards go, I think novelty items would be much better suited for this kind of thing, so long as they aren’t egregiously advantageous over other items in the game.