Display rarity in-game next to pokemon locations when using /list command.

thunderclap

Youngster
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
462
Points
63
I suggest that the rarities should be listed next to the locations in-game when using the /list command for a particular pokemon.

Furthermore, the easiest locations should be displayed at the top, using (without revealing) actual spawn rates:

For example if a pokemon (eg. Staryu) is Tier 2 in two locations but spawns at 1/75 in the first location and 1/120 in the other, the easier location should be listed first. Staff has said they don't want to reveal actual spawn rates, but this would be a very good compromise.

The motivation? Currently when you type, for example, "/list Staryu", you get a list of 10 locations where Staryu is catchable...

..In order to find the best place to find Staryu, you then have to do a /list command for each of those locations, which is very tedious. You also have to remember or record a lot of information in order to compare rarities, because when you scroll down in-game (if the chat is active) the chat constantly scrolls back to the top. Even after typing those 10 commands and comparing everything, you are still left wondering which Tier 2 locations are the easiest, or if they're all the same..

The wiki is well known to be out of date for this kind of information and can't be trusted, even if it's sometimes correct. In some cases it still lists rarities in the old C, UC, R, VR, HR system. This suggestion would pull catch rarities directly from the spawn system (and regularly cached for fast retrieval and low server load), so it would stay up-to-date.


An optional addition:  the listed locations could further be numbered and/or grouped, so that multiple locations with the same rarity are obvious.  This way, a player can smartly decide not to hunt in Safari if it's the same rarity elsewhere.
 
For example "/list Staryu" could give this result: 
The Pokemon Staryu(120) can be found on these Maps:
1) Union Cave B2F, Johto Safari Entryway, Johto Safari Seaside (Tier 2)
2) Olivine City (Tier 2)
3) Route 34 (Tier 2)
4) Route 40, Route 41 (Tier 3)
5) Cherrygrove City, Cianwood City (Tier 4)


With or without the numbering/grouping, this suggestion would be a big improvement to the game. It would remove some of the shroud of mystery to pricing in the economy which can confuse new players.

Thoughts?
 

Jinji

PWO's Resident Gengar
Staff member
Administrator
Joined
Aug 15, 2011
Messages
7,412
Points
113
Website
jinji.gamescodex.net
I fear this would make the command a lot heavier on the database; though I am not a DEV and wouldn't know what kind of performance hit it would cause.
 

thunderclap

Youngster
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
462
Points
63
Jinji said:
I fear this would make the command a lot heavier on the database; though I am not a DEV and wouldn't know what kind of performance hit it would cause.
Thanks for your thoughts Jinji.

The rarities could be cached, as long as there's a decent (semi-automated) way for staff to update that data when rarities change. The objective of this suggestion is for players to readily have access to reliable, transparent information, which currently the wiki doesn't provide.

If the rarities are cached this suggestion should actually reduce server load, since players wouldn't have to repeat the "/list" command for each location a pokemon can be found in. I edited my first post to specify caching.

If it's easier to put this same info on the wiki, that would be just as good, as long as players could trust its accuracy. This generation wasn't raised with MS-DOS and probably doesn't want to use text commands anyway.

I do try to make my suggestions with server load and development difficulty in mind, but is server load even a big consideration these days? We have at most 50 players online at once, and usually half that or less..
 

HitmonFonty

Youngster
Game Moderator
Joined
Oct 17, 2011
Messages
6,202
Points
38
This just sounds like another way of asking us to pin down actual rarity rates while saying you aren't asking that to be honest. ;) Also I'm not sure that caching rarity rates would be a good idea if it's what I think it means. Rarity rates should be current at all times, otherwise there will be discrepancies arising over time unless you add in extra work for the mappers and event makers every time they have to tweak a rarity. So as Jinji says the effort the server would need to retrieve location and rarity data for /list rattata could be fairly significant for example.

Working out which maps are best to hunt which pokemon on was always meant to be left to player research and experience- not just handed out by us.
 

thunderclap

Youngster
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
462
Points
63
HitmonFonty said:
This just sounds like another way of asking us to pin down actual rarity rates while saying you aren't asking that to be honest. ;) Also I'm not sure that caching rarity rates would be a good idea if it's what I think it means. Rarity rates should be current at all times, otherwise there will be discrepancies arising over time unless you add in extra work for the mappers and event makers every time they have to tweak a rarity.

Working out which maps are best to hunt which pokemon on was always meant to be left to player research and experience- not just handed out by us.

Even if all that is true, you should at least display the basic rarity tier next to a pokemon when using the /list command, without the sorting and everything else. The basic tier is already in the system, just not accessible in a reasonable way. So doing that wouldn't be any extra work for event makers.

Why should rarity rates be so secret anyway? Other than the "this is how it has always be done" argument that I'm anticipating. Knowing a pokemon's current rarity is only a small part of the challenge - you have to know its historical rarity (and price history) to determine its current worth. Historical swarm/event rarity is another weak point of the wiki. I sense that you want to preserve the skill level associated with trading and accumulating wealth, but doing so has never been more difficult in the history of PWO. Old players became massively wealthy almost by virtue of being old players. It took a lot less effort back then. There was a huge ignorant playerbase back then to rip off.

We can't base all the decisions of PWO around strictly maintaining the status quo of old players staying rich. They are generally speaking not active, useful parts of the community - they just log in once in a while to show off their impossible wealth. With a couple positive exceptions like Kingstone, they don't buy or sell, and their wealth doesn't trickle down. Lots of them have stopped playing precisely because the game has stopped being challenging for them. That's just an impasse. PWO is far too challenging for 99.9% of players. If we want the game to be more active, it can still be challenging, but it needs to be more fair for new players. Someone could play for 100 years and not be as rich as ElectroFreak. As old-IV shiny prices rise, he's actually getting richer. The least we can do is give players some tools to help them understand why they are hopelessly poor. And if we allow a couple of ElectroFreak's exclusive pokemon to be caught, boo-hoo for him. He can always play in any swarm/event or with whatever new bonuses/boosts we devise, if he decides to be active again.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughtful responses Fonty, and I didn't mean to launch into another rant. As a function of my own frustration I've been having a hard time seeing these issues from other perspectives.. but that's probably partly my fault. I don't deny that there are merits to what everyone says... so I welcome discussion, even if the length of my rants might stifle discussion..
 

HitmonFonty

Youngster
Game Moderator
Joined
Oct 17, 2011
Messages
6,202
Points
38
Discussion is always welcome, and although it may not seem so at times a lot of our development and updates comes from discussions like this.

We didn't decide anything based on what came before- quite the opposite. The Spawn Project where these tiers were originated were developed because the system before them was flawed. So we basically created a new system for rarities from scratch.

The reason exact rates are kept secret is a lore reason and also came after careful consideration. In our game world we wouldn't automatically know what pokemon are where or exactly how many are in the area and what their likelihood of appearing is. That information would likely be available from locals - knowledge gained by other trainer's experience there.

We did in fact discuss having a system revolving around this idea whereby you don't automatically have access to /list at all but have to talk to NPCs about that route first and/or actually find them yourself- so your knowledge of the area would grow naturally as you explored it more. This kind of system could even be expanded to give more information than we have displayed now, but it is a complex idea to implement. Another way would be just to do it via the pokedex, so as you add more pokemon to your dex their global information becomes available and along with it the /list data.

The point is though that however it is done the player would have to work for it somewhat. It is unrealistic in a game world like this to expect information to just be handed out that wouldn't be that easily obtainable. That's how I see it anyway.

So there is room for improvement of course, and maybe some leeway to give you guys more information, but realistically that information should come with some effort, not just given away. The information we already provide is a lot already and nothing is needed to unlock it. Rigaudon has actually given a smidge more than we've yet made public in the other post you made(nothing major of course), so you got lucky there somewhat with her memory and gained 'some' new knowledge for free from making these posts. lol
 

Isguros

Youngster
Joined
May 9, 2013
Messages
736
Points
63
In a world where alledged weight issues concerning the edatabase didn't matter, displaying rarities while using the /lis command for a specific Pokemon would make it a lot more convenient for players. Instead of using the /lis command 17 more times and scrolling down the chat for what seems an eternity (only for it to default to the top every time someone puts something in the chat) just to find out in which places Onix is a Tier2 and which places he isn't, now you'd have the information you needed without being forced to ask the chat for help and possibly receiving conflicting answers.

If this indeed causes issues: fine, we'll just have to deal with it.

However, hiding behind "lore" as a fallacy to not have to explain anything or work out the kinks is a whole pile of horse manure.
 

thunderclap

Youngster
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
462
Points
63
It'd be kind of neat if the pokemon in an area and their rarity was only discovered after encountering the pokemon, but since that's not feasible, I'm all for freely giving away more accurate rarity information. We have full tutorials to all the quests on the wiki, and a list of all the pokemon the gym leaders use including which levels - doesn't that ruin the lore worse?
 

Bluerise

Youngster
Administrator
Joined
Aug 14, 2011
Messages
8,915
Points
63
Hello

The server already stores the basic information to calculate tiers and we would not need to involve the database to display the tier level for the /list filtered by Pokemon. It looks like it could be something we could enable...
 

thunderclap

Youngster
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
462
Points
63
Sounds good, thanks for the response Blue :).

As for "lore", what about advanced statistic tracking? Stats could be stored offline (client-side).

For example:
-Number of wild pokemon encounters past 24h (Total)
-Number of wild encounters past 24h (Current map)
-Number of (list each current map spawn) encounters: Number and percentage
-Number of wild pokes fainted past 24h (+ pokedollars gained)
-Number of shinies encountered (percent)

etc (this is barely scratching the surface of possibilities :))
 

thunderclap

Youngster
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
462
Points
63
Bump. Looking back, this was a solid suggestion and still much needed. New players are massively disadvantaged in the current system.

Regarding Fonty's reluctance to hand out info and preserving mysique/lore: I'm not against making players work to uncover the spawn rates. Advanced statistics like in my previous post would help nail that down. It could even be another membership perk. My statement "accumulating wealth has never been more difficult in the history of PWO" has never been truer.

I still think, at the very least, the basic tier should be displayed next to the locations when using "/list Pokemon". No sorting/grouping necessary if that's too generous. This won't give people any additional info, just make it much easier to access (thus reducing frustration and server load). There is still be a LOT to learn in order to trade smartly: historical rarity/prices/swarms/swarm history (# caught at said lower tiers)/battle feasibility, etc, which all affect prices.

PS in the next client update please remove the auto-scroll-up of chat. I'm sure it's just one line of code :). Thank y'all for your continued work on PWO and have a nice day.
 
Last edited:

Prof.Rygar

Youngster
Joined
Jan 2, 2014
Messages
497
Points
63
All I really want is for the Rarities (T1/ T2/ T3/ T4/ T5) to be displayed when I use /lis (pokemon name). That's all. No need for sorting, since my brain can sort that information itself. This wouldn't take too much extra effort on behalf of the system.

I fear this would make the command a lot heavier on the database

Not nearly as much strain on the system as me having to go:

/lis (pokemon name)

to get 10 different locations, then go:

/lis location 1
/lis location 2
/lis location 3
/lis location 4
/lis location 5
/lis location 6
/lis location 7
/lis location 8
/lis location 9
/lis location 10

so I can see each location specifically just so I can see the tier of ONE POKEMON on those maps. Which spams up my chat and ticks me off. It's a System Message, so it spams up EVERY Chat. A Tab dedicated to System Messages like that would be nice, but also a problem since most players would miss important messages, so that's not viable.
 
Top