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Returning Players Perspective on PokeMMO


Clutchism

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In a world where every gaming experience and the gaming fanbase is becoming more and more about social experiences, PokeMMO is the culmination of nearly every Pokemon fan's biggest dream. I know since the day I touched Pokemon Yellow on my old gameboy Christmas day that I dreamt up prototypes in my head of the modern day Nintendo Switch and PokeMMO. For reference, I played through Kanto years ago and more recently returned (last week) and have 4 badges through Unova. I've been doing a lot of reading through the forums, subreddits, youtube videos and comment sections, and just everywhere I can find PokeMMO discussions. I've researched the money making methods, the endgame, the breeding system, and have talked to players in game. I've so far found the community to be very friendly and helpful. I am a little concerned about player retention. All MMO's seem to screw up one thing. Player Retention.

 

PokeMMO as an MMO thrives based on it's community health. In order to have a healthy community base, you need a few things. You need an intake of new players, retention of those players, and new content to keep everybody satisfied within your game. This is largely based on my own opinion, but PokeMMO is great at finding new players because the Pokemon IP is so large, the game looks well polished, there is enough beginning content to really draw players in, and the familiarity of the games is retained while still making the game an MMO. PokeMMO is also great at creating new content for players. There are still a few regions to bring to the game, with now storylines, landscapes, pokemon, and challenges to provide. The content needs to be developed, but it doesn't really need to be thought up, it's readily available. Player retention is the most difficult issue to an MMO and it is largely obvious with PokeMMO that this is the final piece to solve. Player retention is never fully "solved" and can always be improved upon. I think there are several details to look at when it comes to player retention within PokeMMO.

 

When it comes to PokeMMO retaining players, we should look at the context. I'm assuming these players have completed all regions storylines and don't know what to do next. We can look at the following: Battling, PVP, Trading, Breeding, Money/Wealth, Community, Social Interaction, Content Reuse. Battling is taken care of by rechallenging gyms and the elite four. Some players will like this, other will find it tiresome and repetitive considering they're playing and MMO. That brings us to PVP. If you don't have a competitive team, you'll need one. A lot of players will find that obtaining a competitive team is too confusing with EVs, IVs, Natures, and Movesets, so they'll just call the community elitist/toxic and move on to the next shiny new game. To be clear, you still want these players to play your game, you just want them to find something else that they can enjoy. Trading, the GTC is great, I applaud the devs on that, I'd add a filter to search for pokemon that have a specific move learned though. Next is breeding, it's unfortunate that the changes need to be made to have a stable economy, but it's true and I agree with the current state of it. The only other way would have been to have nontradeable pokemon from eggs you raise, but even then ehh. Next we'll look at the Money/Wealth. Incurring wealth is done a multitude of ways and I applaud that approach. I think there needs to be more ways to do this that have you interact both with the world and with less repitition than currently exists (I'll get to that in a minute). Community, I've seen only positive feedback on the community events, so great job there. Social interaction, this is the second biggest complaint I've heard about PokeMMO. The biggest complaints I've heard are grindy repitition and the feeling you are playing by yourself surrounded by others. I've sought out social interaction and finally after a few hours had a great conversation with a long time player and enjoyed that very much. I think this is due to a lack of a social center in the game. My runescape players can think about the GE in Varrock. Content reuse, reusing the elite four and gyms for continued battles and runs for money is a great feature. Good work.

 

This is by far the best Pokemon MMO I've ever played or have ever found. I think it also has limitless potential and an amazing Mobile App for Android. I do have a few features I would like to suggest in order to help with the potential player interaction, region fluidity (living world instead of segmented and stale), and with the grindy reptitiveness of the endgame. What I think needs to be realized, is that this MMO can and should do things that never would be done in the original games. There are balance, social, economical, and sometimes just cool/fun factor reasons for certain features that wouldn't work or be done in the originals for a multitude of reasons.

My smaller impact suggestion would be to allow fly to look at all regions at once, it would first show you your current region, but you could click to switch regions (requiring you to have unlocked fly in that region prior to this use).

 

My larger impact suggestion involves the repetitiveness of the endgame and would hopefully help with player retention and satisfaction. This feature would introduce a new way to make money, as well as playable content that is slightly repetitive with infinite scale but with variety as well as reusing all the existing content. If you've ever played runescape before you'll be aware of a skill in the game referred to as slayer. It is the most popular skill in the game and contributes to player retention greatly. The basics converted to PokeMMO would be after completing a region you would get a letter. It would invite you to speak to the Pokemon Ranger Master in the region. Each region could have a different Ranger Master. You go speak to this NPC and he gives you a 'task.' A task can consist of catching a pokemon from a specific area, battling a certain trainer/gym leader/elite four, 'taming' a legendary pokemon that is causing distress to a certain area (just catch the legendary but you don't recieve it into your party), or any other piece of content the devs could come up with that would contribute. After performing your 'task', you go back to the ranger and he hands you your reward (and you also get rewarded for task streaks). For instance, I go speak to the Kanto Ranger and he tells me to pay Misty a visit. I defeat Misty and return to the Ranger. I get $5,000 and am given my next task, defeat the Unova Elite Four (must have region completed to unlock tasks from other regions). I return and am given $5000 and am told I have a task streak of 2, my next task is to catch a wild Machoke from Victory Road. Task streak of 3.. 4.. Tame the legendary Zapdos, he is causing problems at a local Kanto powerplant. Task streak of 5, you are awarded (random assortment of 10 berries). Every 5 task streaks you are awarded an assortment of 10 berries, every 10 task streak you get a random TM instead, every 25 a random hold item. These numbers and rewards could be balanced. This adds variety to the grind as well as allows for reusing content without appearing to be entirely repetitive. It also doesn't allow for a 'meta' to develop of just repeating the exact same task over and over again as you are asked to complete an assortment of tasks in order to proceed. If wanted you could even have a reputation level as a trainer that would give you certain benefits such as more PC storage, higher chance of legendary tasks, higher chance of gym leader/elite four tasks, higher chance of good rewards, etc.

 

I realize this isn't an original Pokemon idea, but I do think that it would feel at home in PokeMMO and help the game and economy in a great way. People would be given tasks to travel through the regions all over again and there would be more fluidity to the regions. This would be a new way to make money without injecting high IV pokemon into the game or too many more items. This concept is proven to work in the MMO environment and I'd love to see it in PokeMMO. This is much longer than I intended, if there's any support for it I can remake the post with just the Pokemon Ranger idea and better explain how it would work and why it would be beneficial.

 

TLDR: Inject the Runescape skill slayer into PokeMMO as an endgame concept for cross-region content and economy balancing.

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I think you made a solid analysis concerning the problem of player retention and developed interesting ideas.
Just some hopefully helpful remarks on certain points:

The suggestion to fly between regions has been denied in the past. I don't know if it would be feasable now though.


The idea of daily tasks/quests to make grinding/playing more interesting has been demanded by players several times in the past.
Besides the time needed to develop such a feature I think a core obstacle has been how to reward something interesting enough for people to play while not valuable enough to affect the economy.


Concerning other endgame content, you may also want to look at the concept of dungeons.
There are unfortunately not that many newer infos about them, but you could give one of the many older posts about them a read (just linked you one, there are several more).


Also, don't take jokes that suggest you to leave (while you still can) too seriously
That is just the voiced frustration from waiting for updates (for example with content you proposed)
 

Spoiler

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Edited by Anthrazit
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1 hour ago, Anthrazit said:

I think

 

Actually I didn't suggest and won't suggest dailies. I don't think they're actually healthy for games. The tasks that I mentioned aren't a daily thing, they're missions that you can request at any given time and complete in any timeframe whether it's 2 minutes or 2 months. That was a helpful reply though, a lot of good stuff in there.

 

Also about the get out jokes, I already had left for years at a time so I'm not really worried about staying or leaving. I'll stick around as long as I'm having fun.

Edited by Clutchism
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11 minutes ago, Clutchism said:

Actually I didn't suggest and won't suggest dailies. I don't think they're actually healthy for games. The tasks that I mentioned aren't a daily thing, they're missions that you can request at any given time and complete in any timeframe whether it's 2 minutes or 2 months. That was a helpful reply though, a lot of good stuff in there.

 

Also about the get out jokes, I already had left for years at a time so I'm not really worried about staying or leaving. I'll stick around as long as I'm having fun.

We're soon (like in 2027) getting dungeons, which should at least provide extra content to the game. With that said, I cant really disagree much with your point of view, some sort of mission system would be cool, hunting would be boring, but idk, they could definitely explore more the game.

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