Kyu

No, they're not really randomized right now. It's just buggy. People don't even know how to handle typings or how to weigh healing item purchases, I don't think they can cope with actual strategy yet

Well, we sprinkle Nuggets around like they're candy at the moment, but if it's not good enough, we'll make it better I guess. There's a pretty high incentive to "100%" the region with visible/hidden items (although the latter is completely reliant on guides due to ItemFinder literally never working), but if players refuse to do it, then I can buff the initial Gym Leader payouts I suppose. It doesn't. If players have already cleared a region, then the only thing which really changes is that their untradeable items are now unlocked for sale. If we lost players due to the high difficulty and buggy overworld, then oh well, that's our fault and there's nothing we can really do to change it. We'll just keep trying to improve it for the next batch of players. The problem is that the end-game is so difficult compared to the storyline that we have severe issues with end-game adoption. We've seen it for years, we know it's an issue, and we think it's primarily because the storyline doesn't represent the difficulty of the end-game and the lack of general end-game content. For example, with existing end-game content like the Battle Frontier being much more difficult than the "normal" Emerald storyline, players very often got stuck in a place where they couldn't complete the Battle Frontier, and they were stuck grinding out trainer rematches in Kanto/Hoenn until they could build a team which could beat it. Then they got frustrated when they saw the amount of BP required to obtain some simple moves/items, and the list goes on. I agree that the social aspects of the game are something we're lacking on at the moment, and they're a priority over the next month or two. Unfortunately, people got really mad about money and breeding, so we had to fix that first. With regards to 'advanced strategy', I don't think the storyline requires the depth of the end-game. I've already listed the advantages we give, but our failure to teach players hidden mechanics like STAB via the UI is also something we're working on. I think a lot of the perceived difficulty is unfamiliarity with underlying mechanics of the game (as well as the much easier expectations of PvE set up by B/W as an NDS game), but we'll see.

The end-game is never going to be easier than the bosses which are Gym Leaders. So with that being noted: that is the summary of the problem. Do we create a storyline where the difficulty tries to represent the brick wall which we place at the end of the game, or do we create a storyline where "casuals" have a grand old time, hit the brick wall, and then never come back because they have no idea what to do due to us failing to prepare them? I don't think that an MMO is the type of game which is playable by everyone, because there are fundamental differences between PokeMMO and portable console games. It's not even something you can "win" in a traditional sense. So, with that being noted, I think we'd be doing a disservice to our audience by making the basic game not representative of the end-game and the level of knowledge/time which is required to play it.

We're really not making a casual game, so, tough luck I guess. I like hard strategy games, so that's what we made. I know it's a little too hard right now, which is why we're buffing everything which isn't builds. We don't want to make the builds easier, and we already give players a significant advantage through leveling ahead of NPCs, the near unlimited use of healing items in-battle, and the ability to straight-up revive everything in-battle. If, after all that, we still have issues with the general difficulty of the game, sure, we'll consider reducing the difficulty of the builds. But you're sitting there getting mad about something which isn't even done so I can't really take your reply seriously. Sorry.

We're not making builds easier, except for cases where the difficulty spikes are obviously bugs (where the NPCs exceed the level cap for no apparent reason). This is a strategy game, stop expecting to be able to faceroll your keyboards with Earthquake. What we're doing instead is making healing items more prevalent in the game, and giving more money throughout the storyline so that players can purchase them more frequently. This is partially broken right now with untradeable items not being sellable, which is already fixed for the next update.

This thread is what happens when you decide to read literally nothing about what you're complaining about while simultaneously complaining about the lack of reactionary changes. If you took the time to read the thread you're complaining about, you would see what changes I'm keen on and what I'm not.

We are buffing breeding because it's too hard. We don't want to give out free HAs right now because we don't think that's good. We're not releasing them all at once anyway. If we think that HAs are so fundamental that you literally can't play the game without them, we will buff them too. But we don't right now. If we are wrong, we will fix it.

I don't think that HAs are "not a problem", I just don't think that a direct upgrade from a comp to an HA is the proper way to handle the issue. I think ideas like: are a much better way to approach the problem of comp creation being too tedious, because it allows older PvP players to convert their PvP wins into something usable for the new metagame, and for future metagames. I don't want to provide free upgrades to existing comps because I don't think most of them need it. Many species are viable without HAs (@Senile feel free to yell at me if I'm wrong), and although some of them are outclassed by their HA variants, players can still carry over their work through IV inheritance. I don't think it's good for the economy either, since it removes a sink of a breeder when players "upgrade" through a non-traditional path, and a direct NPC upgrade/item removes player interactivity via the GTL. I think that the majority of problems in this thread stem from the idea of rebreeding, and how tedious the process of breeding is, not from the idea of HAs. If that's the case, then I'd rather just make breeding easier, because then we don't have to create weird shortcuts for old players, and it allows opportunities for new players to get involved in a competitive scene which already requires an immense amount of knowledge/time to master. That's why I don't take threads like this at face value; typically they represent a more underlying problem to the game, which players don't always understand how to fix. I'm not ignoring the problem, but the question which I posed earlier, being: is what directs the process of how the problem is fixed. If players can gain more money, and they can gain breeding consumables through alternative methods which are more fun, does this cease to be a problem? How does this "shortcut" affect the rest of our plans, and do we need to re-evaluate our dungeon reward schemes? How does this affect the longevity of the game? are all questions which I ask when something dramatic like this comes up. If it's still an issue when we get there, we'll make it better. But for now, because we haven't even finalized the methods of gaining HAs, and we don't know what the game's money/breeding situation is going to look like by the time we get there, and when, realistically, it's a minimum of "3-4 months" away, I'm really not going to care about HA details. I'd rather tackle the problems of breeding.

Yes, we were trying to get it out last week, but we had some significant changes which took longer than anticipated

They've been increased by around 20% for the next update, which should put it around 79k-ish I'm being conservative on this for a few reasons, those being: Gym Leaders aren't a directly comparable value to balance against in my opinion. The nature of the two sets of fights are different, primarily due to the cooldowns (where Gym Leaders are a once/day per character win, E4 can be won on a 45m cd timer). We're going to be implementing some significant changes to the crafting system which affects healing item availability, reducing the overhead of running the instance (increasing its profit margin), while also making it available to players who otherwise wouldn't be able to run it As these changes have potential to cause inflation in-game, I'll be more comfortable buffing this further after these changes have been tested, if it's still necessary.

Theoretically, we can do whatever we want, including adding Protozoan Kecleon. The question is how weird we're willing to get.

I'd prefer not to give the Life Ball treatment to Protectron, Crush Munch, and Competitor if possible. That was a really hacky way to try to deal with the overly-defensive meta when we really just needed Legendaries. Backporting new abilities/typings is something which can be done, but it's too early to decide whether it's necessary. We talked about it with the Fairy typing due to continued concerns about Dragons, but it's one of those things which you can't take back, so it's a last resort. Yes, that was one of the proposed solutions (HA status being an inheritable flag whereby Roselia would gain Leaf Guard, and if it were evolved again, Roserade would gain Technician.)

That's a very good question which I don't have the answer to. The way we'd probably handle it would be either: The child is created with its own HA, and when it evolves, its evolution also has its HA if applicable. The child is created with a special flag which denotes that the evolution has an HA, but the child does not. Either way, we would try to preserve the HA status across breeds.

For GBA areas, the former. I'm not sure on NDS areas. We may need to resort to the latter there. Yes, we're starting with GBA areas as we haven't developed map building tools for NDS areas, and it's a very difficult process to work with 3D areas on a fundamental level (polygons+textures/map vertices vs tilesets on a 2D plane). Later on, once we've developed the skills required to build more complicated areas, and when we've built the tools required for 3D, we'll be looking to make custom NDS areas. I expect the first one to be really, really rough. It's going to take a while to figure out how to make co-op good in this game. Hope we don't disappoint too much

Sure I'm pretty sure we're going to have to expand these over time regardless of Sinnoh's implementation, because we're going to have to deal with the problem of "Mythicals" eventually.

We're not making an NPC for it. We've already explored all aspects of the economic/gameplay implications and I don't think it makes the game better.

If it's the same reward then what's the point of making an NPC for it ;^))) No I guess if your time is completely worthless, you fail to factor in wild IV randomization, and you don't apply any special rulesets to HA captures, sure, you can look at it that way.

I don't want to treat HAs that way. They're special because I want more dungeon rewards. Darkshade's list isn't all-inclusive as to the reasons we're doing HAs this way. It's a complicated problem which hasn't been fully discussed, and can't really be summarized in a dumpster fire of a thread like this where everyone just wants to vent. You're assuming that the availability of a breeding partner is a constant, but breeders are priced based on the amount of people generating them and market demand. They're not like NPC items where there's a 100% availability to items. As well, HAs aren't valued equally across all species in terms of competitiveness (see: the argument about Blaziken's HA earlier), which makes a static pricing inappropriate to me. This isn't in reference to a specific part of the post or anything, but I'm just going to note: While the idea can theoretically work, I don't think it's good. The reason things like Ability Pills exist is because we couldn't figure out a better way to do it, or we thought the alternative was too complicated and we needed to increase malleability of stats on a player's work. I'm pretty sure we're going to provide HA-specific buffs to breeding anyway, so I don't think it'll be too bad regardless of how we do it. So maybe just chill for a while until we actually figure out what we want to do, then you guys can be mad.

I misread the original post and thought this was meant to be the only way to obtain an HA or something. But this is a really convoluted method of creating a "Hidden Ability Pill", and I don't want to do that. Static money sinks aren't an accurate representation of value when: Players decide the pricing of the breeding system's results (i.e. no NPCs define the price of a "comp", so it is worth what the market decides). The value of money differs depending on the amount of money the world creates. If I went and implemented this suggestion from an hour ago, your 100k is now worth less, because more money is generated in the world. If I wanted to create an HA pill, I'd do it in a manner where it requires certain objects from within the Dungeon to function as crafting materials, because I want this function to be exclusive to Dungeons.

You're providing a shortcut by creating an NPC which skips the breeding process, which means the current plans and your proposal are fundamentally different. We don't want to provide a shortcut in this manner (primarily because skipping sinks in an inflationary economy is a Bad Idea™ and we don't want to devalue the work of people catching breeders), so no, we're probably not going to do your idea. Sorry.

You're kinda missing the point in that we don't necessarily want to provide a direct upgrade path for existing comps to HAs. But thanks for the effort I guess?

I'm concerned about BP gain being a little too good right now, especially via Ranked, but additional consumables via BP are something we'll consider. Thanks Yes, I agree that it's too hard to bootstrap yourself at the moment. With regards to Gym Leaders, I think the worst flaw of them is that they go on cooldown when losing, which we'll be changing during the next update. We're also working on some additional money methods for the Unova region which should help alleviate the problems.

I'm pretty sure we'll do it anyway because otherwise Rachel will get mad at me

I honestly find it hilarious that people would do this, so I want to leave it in as a tactic to see people build databases of which players have which balls

It's not a policy which we're going to change unless we're proven that it's the wrong way to do things, and I don't think it is. When things which are designed to be overpowered exist, with the highest base stats, better-than-normal movepools/abilities, etc., they become the objectively best choice to handle any situation in the game, and you are crippling yourself by playing any other way. This hurts our ability to create meaningful PvE content, because we have to design PvE around the best species, otherwise it's able to be facerolled by those overpowered species. This game does not, and probably will never, have any form of meaningful overworld "actiony" gameplay due to the limited movement systems, so we need to try to make battles as interesting as possible to keep player interest. It also creates an even higher barrier of entry to PvP due to having to play around complex rulesets designed by fans which don't play the same way as the base game. No, "complex banning" isn't a good way to handle problems. If you have gotten to the point where you need to ban out a certain ability/move from a species in the game, you, as a game designer, have failed. There is no excuse for having to complex ban things in a digital game, because we don't have the same limitations as something like Magic: The Gathering where they can never "unprint" cards. If we want to, we can just delete it from the possible moveset, which is basically what we're doing by never releasing certain combinations. There is nothing meaningful in-game which denotes "competitiveness." IVs & Tierings are metrics by which NPC rewards could be measured, but I think that would rig the market in a way which wouldn't be enjoyable, so I'd prefer to handle the problem of "trash" catches not having any value instead. BP provides moves, items, and EVs to players. The only thing really missing there is an IV gain method / unlocking new species / egg moves. Because the game puts a huge amount of emphasis on stat refinement, I'm not sure the ability to "PvP into PvP" is something which we can provide, because one of two things will happen: We release a "rentals" system which is good enough to where nobody has to refine anything, then players stop refining things because there are no other carrots in the game (aside from future Legendaries) We release a "rentals" system which sucks enough to where players can't really compete and they just feed the first round of 128-man tournies or tank their ELO in Ranked. Maybe something like a temporary boost to stats sourced from BP or something could work. Don't know. -- On the topic of "grinding" new comps: Is the issue that the game's money systems are stingy, and that there isn't much variety in money gaining methods, or are you taking issue with the idea that new things are being released? A lot of people seem to be mad about HAs because they'll have to make something from scratch, and while I agree that it's not fun to have your work invalidated, is the idea of a game where none of the "gear" ever changes really better? Most of the people prior to Gen 5's release seemed to agree that the game was stale, and if we're going to be stuck with Gen 5 for the next 5 years (or so), I don't think we should rush their release. To be able to release something new every few months is, in my opinion, one of the boons of HAs, and I think staggering their releases is the best way to do it when we have a hard, finite set of content which we can release due to the limitations of B/W as a ROM requirement. I don't think that being able to upgrade existing comps to an HA is necessary if we introduce them slowly, and continue to work on making money generation less painful.