Kyu

I'd like to, but again, people seemed a bit disappointed last year, so I'm not sure it's worth the time when it could be better spent on real end-game content. We're also really, really late with this update and I don't think we'd have enough time to iterate on NP's maps properly.

This is the third time we've gone dark for >8 months. After a while, people don't really accept "yes it's coming, no we don't know when." When we go into these long dev cycles, it's easier to just demo via the PTS than make a community announcement half our players can't read, so it seems a bit pointless to me to make frequent announcements which summarize as "we worked on the thing some more." I think we did better this time than last time though, personally. We wanted this out in June, and at this point, we felt polishing new content was a better use of time than a recycled event.

PokeMMO, as a project, has around 40 people contributing regularly. As we use a rolling release model for the project, it is continuously developed by people within various roles, and I consider our Translators, Tier Council, Moderators, and Game Masters an extension of us. Within that team comes people from all skill levels and skillsets, from all around the world, who are all potentially untrustworthy and malicious. But I'm assuming you mean "the Administrators" by this statement. Each Administrator handles several roles within the organization, ranging from: Sysadmin, with around 15 services which we launch/maintain ourselves in production for Development/Public use Management, with each "team" typically ranging from 10-20 people, with various specializations Game Development, of which the main contributors have a minimum of 5 years of experience, some of them a decade, and which encompasses a written-from-scratch game client/server, custom toolsets, and an entirely rebalanced game experience tailored for an MMO format This doesn't include the role of "SGM" which is essentially a pseudo-admin and manages recruitment of people to the GM/Mod teams as well as the daily tasks of managing the GMs/Moderators. Both of them have their own specialties which feed back into the project in various ways as well. None of the people who I just described are easily replaceable; everyone has known each other for years, most of them have at least 3 years of experience in their own specialty, and every one typically works 6-10 hours per day on whatever is a necessity for the project. Each of the GMs and Moderators typically spend 4-5 hours a day just making sure that everything within the game goes alright too, and the people who are entirely volunteers tend to spend all of their free time within their roles if we request it. I'm assuming that, as "a database admin," you're familiar with the concept of "Software as a Service." It seems you don't fully understand what "HR" does for you though, and that's fine; overly specialized engineering roles don't typically handle public-facing services or recruitment except from already vetted candidates. So, to give you a bit of a taste of what we deal with on a daily basis, I'll tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a Game Master within our game who didn't like what we were doing. It was during one of our long-ass development cycles, just like this one, and he thought he could do better than us. He obviously didn't have source access or anything, but he decided he would copy the game as best he could, and subsequently failed miserably after a month of hype. During that time he tried to damage the project by taking whatever he could and claiming it was his own work, as he had access to the bug tracker we use internally to propose ideas for feedback from the feedback team. His problem was that he didn't respect the development process nor did he fully understand the necessities of an online service, or even that of a community. That ignorance is pretty common, and I can think of a dozen people during my own time as an SGM who got upset and tried to leave with a bang due to not gelling well. The reason I'm telling this story is that you're taking two major things for granted within your company: The ability to pay people for full-time work and the accountability of an identity. The majority of people who contribute to the project do so out of kindness or satisfaction. Most of them entered as a blank slate and were trained over a period of years. We don't have any interest in knowing who our pseudonymous contributors are, and we're not going to change that, so there is no accountability to be had by an NDA. Ignoring how an NDA doesn't actually prevent problems (at best it provides discouragement), if you seriously think that an internationally-enforceable NDA would be worth the legal trouble or financial cost, then it seems clear to me that you've never been in our situation and don't have anything to say on the topic which needs listened to. All of that is why your lecture, which boils down to "just hire more people lul," is useless; situations vary, risk tolerance between different people and companies vary, goals of a company vary, willing applicants vary, expected knowledge sets vary, expected skill sets vary, and expected compensation varies. If you think every situation is the same as yours, you are incredibly naive. To everyone else, I apologize for derailing. I hope you enjoy the PTS.

Hush, Gilgar

2 weeks™

Just ask in the TC forum and one of the Mods will look it up for you

We're considering not running it as it seemed everyone was kinda disappointed last year and it wouldn't have any new vanities. At this point, we're not willing to do a live server update purely for a Halloween event (the data structure for many things which would be required, such as the character addons, have diverged so significantly in the past year that I'm not even sure we have the tools to backport things to live's branch), so you'd either have literally the same event as last year with all of its cosmetics duplicated, or nothing. I'm not sure which is better, personally; since we put a lot of emphasis on yearly-exclusive vanities for holiday events, duplicating them would set precedent that holiday vanities aren't really exclusive, and would screw with the vanity economy a bit, pissing off older players. Although I also understand that newer players, or just people who are bored waiting, would look forward to it. Dunno

Altered states of consciousness are typically regarded as symptoms of disease or inebriation, as they're just a less functional version of our "normal" brain while we're awake. To state that dreams are methods of releasing consciousness beyond the body would imply that a soul, or some other manifestation of self, exists beyond your brain. Due to the limitations of the universe as we know it, i.e. the four dimensions defined by spacetime, this would imply that the soul is able to either: 1) Traverse the fourth dimension, time, in order to visit different worlds within the universe; or 2) Traverse a plane beyond that of our universe, i.e. a multiverse or 5th dimension. While the very basic reasoning for sleep within mammals isn't fully understood (as far as I remember, simpler animals don't sleep nearly as much, and simple molecular organisms typically just rest?), as our brain activity fluctuates while sleeping, I would regard dreams as nothing more than natural hallucinations as a result of the heightened brain activity during REM sleep. The absence of certain neurotransmitter activity during REM sleep seems that it would produce a delirious state, similar to psychosis or schizophrenia. As well, while the brain is growing in children, hallucinations are common, so they are an established part of a normal brain's lifespan and it would imply these altered conscious states would be a byproduct of evolutionary flaws / cellular exhaustion. But anyway, assuming that consciousness is structured in a way where it can pass through a multiverse which then creates another universe which the consciousness "visits", yes, it would be incredibly cruel to "steal" that as it would imply the destruction of a universe. As animals in our world dream, it would also assume that all beings of higher consciousness behave by the same rule, and thus pokemon would.

While we appreciate the concern, because most of you and us are not lawyers, this isn't a topic which we encourage layman speculation on, as the idea of "takedowns" tend to scare people. But the gist of it is standard for all established game companies: We don't distribute content in violation of copyright law within the game client (i.e. things which would qualify for specific legal action, such as "DMCAs"), and we do our best to ensure that our practices of product distribution/release/management are in compliance with the law. Sorry that I can't go into more detail.

please enjoy this piece of a riveting monologue about friendship and growing up while Mike melds with the singularity

Hardcore "I won't play anything else but Gen 3" players aren't an audience which we are willing to cater to, and we do not believe they represent a majority of players or the potential audience to the game (if they were, I think they've already played all we had to offer over the past 5 years.) I had stated this fairly early on in this cycle's development blogs, but GBA ROMs are extremely difficult to work with and hold us back as a Dev team, which is why they are being moved to "optional content." Because the maps will exist within the same world as Gen 5, Gen 3 areas will be updated for economic balance's sake, so that they are not outclassed by new species or team builds. This means Gen 3 areas will be rebalanced with Gen 5 builds in mind, although they will keep the themeing of the areas ("Kanto species stay in Kanto").

No, you're not going to get an old broken down version of the game where you can't talk to other people because a quarter of them speak Portuguese, a quarter speak Spanish, a quarter speak Mandarin, and another quarter speak English. The reason these features exist is because there is literally no way to sift through thousands of trade entries via /tr // the Forums, or for tournaments to scale with GMs running them. Reverting these would cripple the potential of the game and would ensure that it can never scale past your group of friends. The question you should be asking is "How do we make these features more social, so that I can feel more connected to other players?" As I've referenced in the past, de-anonymizing the GTL and bringing back globalized /tr is one of the main ways we plan to establish communication between buyers and sellers. I've also stated that we do plan on helping to socialize automated tournaments through spectator chat as well as a 'spectator arena' which players are moved into to give a more similar feeling to the older tournaments.

Its entire purpose is a playground so that people can either play around with builds or dip their toes into PvP without impacting their main rank. The main issue with Ranked is that there's a severe disparity between "really good/old PvP players" and "new PvP players". What this means is that we have severe issues when trying to convert players coming from the Storyline into PvPers. This is partially due to the lack of opportunity provided by the game itself to learn how to play the end-game (due to a lack of end-game PvE), partially due to the immense burden of knowledge required to play this game competitively, and partially due to the amount of time required to build a competitive team in the first place. What that means is that there's not enough PvPers in the first place to allow an unlocked system without BP abuse occurring in Ranked (people rigging matches to farm BP between themselves or teammates), and until the game gets better in general at promoting end-game content, I don't think that's going to change. The way we're trying to handle this problem is by working to make the end-game harder to teach players mechanical skill, as well as trying to create an environment where players naturally gravitate towards teams to share the burden of creating new competitive mons. The guild system is something which is underimplemented though and fails to accomplish the goal (lack of free information trading between guildmates aside from /t), and the game itself doesn't promote teamwork, which is why co-op content is a priority over the next year. We don't necessarily want to buff the creation of competitive mons through breeding because the system is inherently inflationary, so it's fairly fragile economically. Yes, I don't think we're accomplishing this properly either. Imo the ELO compression doesn't work quickly enough, but tbh, I don't think it was a good system to begin with. I think something like Overwatch's "seasons" is more appropriate for our game and this type of ranked reward, but there's also a lack of inherent reward to the ranking aside from epeen, so that'd need to be addressed too. I haven't given a lot of thought to this problem though. The main issue with this is that there wasn't really a "tournament" map which was suitable, aside from Emerald's Contest map, but since we now have that with a Black base ROM, I think that'd be the most suitable place to warp players into when spectating. Imo the only real thing we can get done before Unova would be a spectator chat, but that doesn't really accomplish what you want, so it's pretty meh.

Since this is probably the 4th rant I've heard over the past year on the same topic, one of which you were even involved in but seem to have forgotten, I'm going to help you out by drawing you a picture so that you can understand my response: Now, I'm going to need you to do me a favor: Save that picture. Look at it when you're feeling glum. In fact, just take a screenshot of this entire post in the case that the Forums are down for maintenance and keep a copy in your obligatory "Kyu<3<3" folder which I know you have in your Pictures directory. I know it's been a very long year, and we're all kinda tired of working on the same things, but I want you to ask yourself a question: What was the purpose of this thread? If the only reason it exists was to express your displeasure at the current state of the game (which I entirely understand, because most of the points you have are valid even though they have a severe rose tint to them), instead of waiting a page, I'd like you to write out your rant in the first place so that you can get a proper response quickly. To say that we're not ever going to take time to work on these problems, and that we don't care about them at all, is a very naive attitude considering we've historically been pretty good at dealing with issues related to grinding/breeding. We're not very stubborn people, and while @Darkshade likes to tell you all "No" pretty often, if we truly believe there is a problem with progression or social activity or whatever, we'll do our best to resolve it. You also seem to be under the impression that "Unova" means "Gen 5 region and that's all you get go away" even though this isn't true, and I've said so in public in the past. We do intend to try to get the market things we've discussed out at the same time, or shortly after depending on how much remains within our time budget. After its release, we'll also be shifting into a housecleaning cycle which means we'll be looking to address those flaws and nitpicks you have, which we couldn't get done in the main release. So, if you have any suggestions for what you want to see addressed (besides these), please take the time to write them out in the Suggestions Box. If you feel like that's just too much effort or that they're super important and we may not see them, you can drop a list of things you think would be important directly to me in a PM or email.

No, rate limiting will be done in a similar manner to E4 with per-player cooldowns or innate limitations to a dungeon (e.g. key item requirements).

Yes, I think so. Otherwise it wouldn't really work. We haven't worked on the breeding complexities yet, so I don't have a good answer for you. Sorry.

When I said "stagger them," I did actually mean it. I don't know how long it'll take to release the first set (we're trying to have the first one released 3-4mo after Unova), but this isn't something which we want to release all at once. No, we are not intending to give HAs to already existing mons. This is still preliminary, but we're trying to treat HA species like an entirely new release rather than an upgrade to existing work. This means we're going to release them very slowly, and to make sure we don't screw with balance too much when we do it. That kind of upgrade is something which could be possible, but it's too early to give definitive info on the instances' reward systems. We're still at the very early stages of designing and it's not a problem which has been thought on yet. Edit: And yes, I do recognize this system will probably result in complex bans for HA'd species. It is a problem which will need to be addressed by TC & the limitations of Matchmaking.

Unfortunately I was told "grandfathering" them in was dumb, so for now, we're intending to assign them as dungeon rewards. This is for a few reasons: So that we can provide more uniqueness to a dungeon's rewards (in addition to both the Legendary and the monetary rewards, certain areas would have certain species with certain HAs under certain conditions) So that we can stagger their release and make sure that we still have new carrots, aside from Legendaries themselves, in order to fuel desire for new dungeons as well as to make PvP's evolution over the years more interesting. We don't believe that the Legendary may be enough of a reward for the end-game PvE I want, and it'll become more clear why when it begins to be shown. This means that, while they may be implemented on release, they won't necessarily be available until our end-game PvE is more properly fleshed out.

Since I forgot this: We're aiming for a release within the next 2 months. If that changes I'll let you know.

Well thank you for that. I know everyone's frustrations are getting pretty high because ours are too, but this is the biggest risk we've ever taken in the development of this game and we knew what was going to be required of us. That's why I don't like showing my own tiredness and negativity to everyone. I do feel a bit sorry for the other guy though, because that kind of betrayal is what turns you cynical, and I don't think there's anything we could do to change his opinion.

I gathered, but it's a rant, and I'm not really proud of airing dirty laundry between former/current staff. Nobody really cares about us or our personal lives, and that's fine- we're just some boys making some video games, and while I appreciate you taking the time to try to explain it, I think people just view it as excuses since this is a pretty damn long patch cycle.

you ok there bud? Don't take my salty rant too seriously btw. I love you all the same regardless of how much you get on my nerves.

I'm sorry everyone. I tried. I really did. But sweendog wasn't the man I thought he was, and that's my fault. I thought he would be able to withstand the pressure, to be able to help us finally fix the tournament system, and to make this game truly great, but I was wrong. sweendog, I hope you come back some day, because I know the kind of man you are, and you're what we need. I know your potential, and I know you can help us.