I like a lot of what is said. (This is my first time reading this fyi, and my background is I played back in like 2014, and then came back as new account in 2019)
I agree that you cant make the shiny rates too much higher because if every one is just hunting for themselves then yeah that is fine, but when you have an economy of 80+ active players that are all having the chance to catch shinys at such a high rate then the whole multiplayer part of the game is pointless. So I think the parallel is older players will never want the shiny chance to be bumped up because it de-values what they have and they know that the end goal is to have more players playing and once we get to more players playing, shinies will be getting found too easily (because all of these shinies were found before without the shiny chance being bumped up, so why change now?). And new players will always want the shiny chance bumped up because it gives them a better chance to get something that they dont have, makes the game easier, and the fear is that if the game is too difficult for new players to ever realistically become a part of the economy, then they will always just quit after 16 badges and it will be a never ending cycle of just no new pokes ever being caught in the current maps and old players just sitting around waiting for new material.
So I say the clovers is going to be a tough sell.
But I think something along what Thunderclap is saying about turning in pokes for shiny chance should be implemented. The big thing I have noticed is that back when there were tons of players online I felt the shiny rates with membership were fair. Now they feel unfair because not as many play anymore and so for example a shiny t2 poke: yeah I think it is unrealistic for me to expect to set out and find one without an immense amount of hunting (i.e. like 5 months like Ramen said or to get dumb lucky), but the real bummer (and why it feels like the shiny chance is really low now) is its not even really possible to buy one either. A couple of likely reasons for this are not enough players play, so none are being caught, because these shiny rates were more meant for a server with 100 people hunting all over and probably 10-20 people in one location. Now outside of events you are probably going to be all on your own hunting, so realistically these pokes are not being found anymore. It seems like every rare poke that is being traded on the market, is typically an old poke from years ago (outside of events). Which means nothing new is being caught. Another possible reason is along the lines of what thunderclap said; it is not possible for a new player to ever get the money or even to really get a lucky catch to get the money to buy any pokes of interest because these players with massive accounts are now affecting the economy between these smaller accounts. I am not saying that there should not be trading between massive accounts and smaller accounts but the economy really needs to be kept moving with small accounts selling mediocre poke to other small accounts who are interested in these mediocre pokemon (and medium size accounts to medium size accounts, etc.). The problem is there is none of that. The big accounts sell everything and set the price for everything so obviously they care about the price of poke that are going to make them millions but then the poke that they dont want to spend the time trying to peddle to players of interest to make 100k sell this poke for 2k and just assume whoever wants it can have it. But there is so much of that, that smaller accounts can no longer sell anything to other smaller accounts and keeps them at the mercy of whatever they can buy with their 80k-100k that they obtain beating the 16 gyms and then when they realize that they cant get anything else and cant sell anything, they quit.
While I will say a lot of these problems also stem from not having as consistent of an influx of players starting the game new, I think these massive accounts are killing the middle and lower economy because they just stockpile these pokes with nothing to do with them, and so now the economy consists essentially of either its a pokemon with perfect IV's and it has value to one of the big accounts or it is virtually worthless. It used to be that the pokes being traded had a gradual decline in price depending on attributes, but I think this is one of the biggest changes in the market from when I used to play to now, that makes it really tough to start out (and when I start out I mean become active in the marketplace, because I understand you can technically play this game forever and sell and buy nothing as a solo game, but I am going under the basis that this game's niche over emulators and pokemon games is the multiplayer battling, trade market, comradery, events, etc.; so my assumption is if you cant get started in these things then this game is no longer interesting and therefore new players will quit)
I really like Thunderclap's idea because it kind of takes the massive accounts out of the lower priced economy and allows new players to set more realistic prices and slowly build up the middle economy again. I think without adjustments like this I just dont think players will stick around. Before when I played, if you played even just 50 hrs you could at the very least catch something that might improve your account value by even 100k but now you could play 200+ hrs and will probably never catch something that would ever be worth more than 25k.
It is true that everything is in perspective; if everything is cheap then everything is differentiated on a cheaper scale and everything is fine, but when you have no differentiation in the bottom market (because again the massive accounts set the price) and then you hit a certain near impossible to catch by yourself iv spread and all of a sudden it is a part of the high end market, then there is no longer a challenge to work towards or a steady progression to make you feel like you are successfully completing the game. The game as is, is you can successfully catch or buy pretty much any pokemon with bad to mediocre ivs with no effort at all, but will never be able to move beyond that unless you make that 1 in a million catch. Which again, to catch a pokemon with these kind of ivs should take months and years as it is end game material. Unfortunately this is not on a realistic time scale for a player looking to find the game interesting, so think there needs to be something more enticing to keep a player playing rather than the fact of the only interesting thing you can find requires months and years to find. The idea is not to make hard things easier to catch so that lower players still have no leverage (because the bigger accounts are big for a reason, they usually play the most and are the best hunters), the goal should be to make the lower to mid range pokes more desirable to new players, while making another aspect of the game more desirable to the older accounts rather than selling lower to mid range pokes for irrelevant amounts of pd.
The factor I really like about TC's idea is it is trading something that is worth nothing to big accounts into something (that is artificial value so it is not inflating the market) but is now increasing the value of account and value of low to medium catches for smaller accounts. So while trading in an S raticate for shiny chance would have more value to an end game player. To a player starting out, the pd is a big deal and hunting for hours and even days and to end up only finding an s raticate, it is a huge help for them to have that s raticate go up in value on the trade market and to sell it for pd rather than trading in for shiny chance.
The key to this working is that the s rares, s VR's, and S HR's cannot become nerfed in value too much otherwise Jobey's fear of everyone having every shiny will come true. The key has got to be that the increased chance is enough to entice the massive accounts to throw away shiny and non shiny pokes that are irrelevant to them and in its place is an opportunity to win big. But "the house" always has to end up winning. The game has to swallow up more poke than it spits out, which this is just going to have to come with tweaking the percentages obviously. I do not know exact numbers but I would start at a small number and if it is not making a difference maybe consider bumping it up. If anyone is good at doing the math on a macro scale, maybe come up with different possibilities like if we bump up the shiny chance by 5% or 10% or whatever the number is, how many more shiny encounters occur when 5 people are hunting in the area, 10 people, etc. there has to be a happy medium where people want to get rid of low economy pokes but everyone isnt ending up with t3 shinies (just a better chance to
. Another idea I had been mulling over (kind of a spinoff of this topic) also is how to get new players buying and selling with new players. Because most of the buying and selling is done on the playerdex now (which is different from back in 2014 when everything was sold in the trade channel). But most new players seem to not know about the playerdex or never log onto it, or just dont get it, and trade channel is usually not doing anything so it is tough for a new player to get in contact with other new players for potential buying or selling. Idk if there should be more of a push for the players to learn how to use the playerdex, a push to join a guild where someone might help them, or if there should be a trade channel meant for new players, idk. Any thoughts on this?
This is again I believe an idea that is more beneficial obviously to new players and the lower economy. I would like to think that this would benefit the higher end economy but there is no possible way to boost the lower and not nerf the top a little. I think in the end though, this solution would have a better impact than most as at its core its not necessarily a direct 1:1 giving money from the top to the bottom but is allowing the top to gamble with what was previously dead commodity into an opportunity to win big while giving the bottom economy more value.
I think in the end anyways, the only way to keep big accounts interested is to add more gameplay (new maps, pokes, events, etc.) and while no one wants their account's value to be nerfed I think the big accounts don't care as much about the current value as they would just like something new and interesting to play. So this change would not be a major impact for the upper tier as I think a lot would be annoyed if they trade in a bunch of poke for shiny chance and didnt get the shiny that they want, but I think this change to the economy will have a massively positive impact for new and middle of the road players while it will have a minimally negative impact on end game players (who in the end are really just waiting around for new content anyways). I know the fear is that when the new content comes all of these big accounts want to have enough value to buy everything that they cant catch themselves but I dont think a change like this will have a major impact on the value of their accounts as they are mostly throwing away value that is minimal in comparison to the total value of their account (but again, what they are throwing away will have a much larger value impact on a smaller account). I think it will give them a little bit of new material to get excited about (higher chance for shiny) and would hopefully have a huge impact on the new and middle players so that the economy gets more activity and the game overall gets more activity.
Overall, I liked the post, hope you get some more conversation on this TC!
And I know it sounds like I'm ragging on the big accounts in the game, but I'm not, I love you all! I know a bunch of yall host events, give pokes to new players and endure so many endless questions about the game and just try to help everyone. I just thought this was a good idea, but dont want to offend anyone with my opinion
-UM