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Population Control: A NEW Catching Contest


Enchant

Question

An eccentric billionaire has a private island with all kinds of different Pokemon running around, but with so many Pokemon, it’s inevitable that one of the species will start to get out of control every once in a while! He needs trainer’s help urgently to catch some of the Pokemon overrunning his items to bring back to the mainland Not only that, he’s even willing to pay if you catch something amazing on your trip!

Catching contests are basically the equivalent of the bug catching contests from GSC/HGSS, and are a super enjoyable part of the game. I did my first one yesterday and had a super fun time. There are just a few problems that I have with them:

  • You have to progress in all 4 of the regions to get to all the places necessary to catch any given Pokemon during a catching contest.
    • While I can see some efficacy in this, in that it encourages people to progress in the game, I do have another solution to this which I will explain a bit later.
  • They take up a lot of mod resources.
    • Mods have to be online to receive potentially hundreds of submissions, and go through them, and dole out the prizes. This is a lot of work to do every day and they don’t get to participate themselves.
  • You have to PM a mod to submit your submission.
    • This is impossible to do on some devices (Android TV etc)
    • There is a large learning curve to this for some users, whispering people isn’t very straightforward on Android devices and a lot of people don’t like to ask for help.
  • You can only submit one Pokemon.
    • While I conceptually agree with this as a whole, it kind of sucks that you have to submit either the highest or lowest Pokemon, and you could submit a Pokemon towards the highest and lose but unknowingly actually have the lowest Pokemon and could have won 4th place instead of nothing.
  • You have to be online at a certain time to participate in them.
    • This one is self explanatory, a lot of people are working at the time that these catching contests and miss out on the opportunity to take part.
  • They add new rewards points to the game, I assume artificially without a member buying them.
    • This costs the server a lot of money over time, and could mean that someone that was going to buy RP won’t now.

 

The new catching contest is even more similar to the bug catching contest from Johto than the current catching contests are, with a few key differences.

  • A man with an Abra in the Pokemon Center would teleport you to the location necessary to catch the Pokemon. This man will give you a Key Item that will contact you with a popup whenever a contest is about to happen.
  • Each region would have a new map added to it that is similar to the Pal Park go to for the contest. Because there is a Pokemon Center in (almost) every city, everyone will be able to participate in the contests. The only progress lock there is to participate in every region’s content is getting far enough to travel between all of them.
  • If you are in a contest that requires you to surf, you will be teleported in on a surfing Pokemon for the duration of the contest, so you do not have to bring a surfing Pokemon (for those that are early in the game, this is a good way to get a water type Pokemon.)
  • There is an entry fee which the devs would decide upon. This is to offset the great Pokemon that you can find in this area which could help you progress in the game, and a stipend of pokeballs (type and amount would be decided by the devs) that are given to you before the contest. These aren’t the only Pokeballs that you can use here, but they will help new players to be able to participate in the event, without giving them something potentially valuable for nothing.
  • Every Pokemon that you catch would be automatically scored for you and sent to your PC, this means that players no longer have to go through their PC and flip between the screens to find their best/worst score.
  • After the event, the prizes are doled out to the winning attendees, even if they caught the winning Pokemon and left the event. The prizes would come in the form of Pokeyen (amount to be decided by devs), and potentially other items like cosmetics or special Pokeballs (cherish ball pls).
  • Whatever the main Pokemon is for the contest will have a large swarm in the area you are teleported into, this will function the same as in the overworld. These will mean that everyone has a fair chance to get a good IV Pokemon, and will allow those who don’t have time for the full contest to quickly hop in, toss the dice a few times, then head back to whatever they were doing.
  • You would be teleported to a certain section of the map and walled in to finding one type (not species) of Pokemon. Lots of different kinds of Pokemon will spawn, so finding the one you are looking for will be rare (more rare for some species than others), but the swarm should help offset that slightly.

The benefits that I am seeing from adding this are:

  • A new activity to participate in to earn money in early game all the way to endgame.
  • A fantastic money sink.
  • Would ease the difficulty curve slightly because you will be able to get all different kinds of Pokemon from different contests.
  • Does not add new RP vouchers to the game, but does allow they winner to buy them from the store if they win enough. This starts decreasing supply, which increases demand and could sell more RP vouchers for PokeMMO.
  • Eliminates the need for judges to be on standby and check through tons of submissions.
  • You are scored for both highest and lowest, so you don’t miss out on winning one just because you submitted for the other.
  • I think a lot more people would take part in the catching contests if they were low stress and didn’t require you to interact with people to do them.
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23 minutes ago, Poufilou said:

Every once in a while, a new player discovers the awesome potential of this game, and how it could be way better, and come up with creative ideas. 

 

Then they get their dreams and hopes crushed realizing this game is almost never updated with something new added to the game. 

Definitely not new lol, been playing since 2012. Just came back from a several year break. That said, I think this is something the mods could push for to save them a lot of work.

Edited by Enchant
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5 hours ago, Enchant said:

You can only submit one Pokemon

I think they did this to not make it seem like 2 contests at the same time( i.e one contest for the highest iv and one contest for the lowest iv pokemon in one catching event). Inaddition to this it ensures prizes for the event go to as many people as possible whilst stopping one person from winning twice in one catching event.

 

5 hours ago, Enchant said:

You have to be online at a certain time to participate in them

While I understand we aren't all free at the same time if you take away this aspect of catching events you would have essentially drained the soul out of catching events. People being online at the same time at the same location has a certain sense of community feel about it. It helps bring people together to socialize with other people they otherwise wouldn't have met. Playing a pokemon mmo with other people online - I believe that's Pokemmo at its core ..thats essentially what it is . So reducing player to player interaction takes away from that here.   

 

5 hours ago, Enchant said:

There is an entry fee which the devs would decide upon

This means you want to change a completely free option with a pay to play option... Some tournaments do the same but they require bps and not rps or ingame pokeyen. There's a big difference between the 2 besides tourneys actually depend largely on skill to win while catching events are mostly rng. Its not fair for anyone to pay rps esp for an event they have little to no control on their chances to win. 

 

5 hours ago, Enchant said:

Every Pokemon that you catch would be automatically scored for you and sent to your PC

This is a very good option if your pc is empty and you don't mind wasting time searching for trash pokemon in your boxes to clear them out. The current system allows you to release the pokemon before they go into you box provided you have a fully party. I think the current system is better in that regard.

 

 

5 hours ago, Enchant said:

Each region would have a new map added to it that is similar to the Pal Park go to for the contest.

If you take note of some of event locations you will see that they are held in places where people don't normally go to. I think this is an excellent way to showcase locations in the game that would otherwise be ignored cause people have little reason to go there (e.g the seaform islands). Implementing a pal park would take away that chance to show case these areas at the same time restricting events to the same general areas which is bound to get boring after some time.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Enchant said:

A new activity to participate in to earn money in early game all the way to endgame.

You only earn money from catching events if you either :

            a) win the event and or

            b) Get catches that are good enough to sell 

There are not guarantees any of that will happen. This gets even worse when you have to pay an entrance fee you mentioned earlier. Having an rp based entrance fee means you have to sell a lot more pokemon to make a profit.

-I'm assuming the entrance fee will be rps based on the fact that you said people in the early game would be able to pay the fee and that this new system would inject rps into the game.

 

In this case the notion "Changes that make the game easier for everyone should be welcome" should not be supported at the cost of turning the game into a pay to play. If new players want to access all catching event locations they should just complete the game. If you feel stressed out about interacting with people just go dnd or play the original version of the games offline.

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2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

I think they did this to not make it seem like 2 contests at the same time( i.e one contest for the highest iv and one contest for the lowest iv pokemon in one catching event). Inaddition to this it ensures prizes for the event go to as many people as possible whilst stopping one person from winning twice in one catching event.

You can still programmatically do this, if someone wins a higher value prize, they are ineligible for the lower one, and you assign it to the next closest person.

2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

While I understand we aren't all free at the same time if you take away this aspect of catching events you would have essentially drained the soul out of catching events. People being online at the same time at the same location has a certain sense of community feel about it. It helps bring people together to socialize with other people they otherwise wouldn't have met. Playing a pokemon mmo with other people online - I believe that's Pokemmo at its core ..thats essentially what it is . So reducing player to player interaction takes away from that here.

Minigames in other MMOs kind of nix this point, I've met some fantastic people playing Soul Wars or Barbarian Assault in RuneScape - and to add on to this, you can still host events at this minigame for additional prizes. An original thought I had would be to have a weekly event for a much bigger prize.

 

2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

This means you want to change a completely free option with a pay to play option... Some tournaments do the same but they require bps and not rps or ingame pokeyen. There's a big difference between the 2 besides tourneys actually depend largely on skill to win while catching events are mostly rng. Its not fair for anyone to pay rps esp for an event they have little to no control on their chances to win. 

I'll answer this one here, and ignore the last part. I never mentioned RP. My original thought was 10,000 pokeyen, but I'm not a developer so I wanted to take my thoughts on balancing out of the equation. This is cheap enough that newer players can join, catch several Pokemon that they can sell, and have some they can keep for playing through the region. "Completely free" - except the Pokeballs you have to use to catch the Pokemon, which would be given to you in the minigame. Plus, since a swarm would be involved, you're likely to get at least a couple worth more than your entrance fee.

 

2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

This is a very good option if your pc is empty and you don't mind wasting time searching for trash pokemon in your boxes to clear them out. The current system allows you to release the pokemon before they go into you box provided you have a fully party. I think the current system is better in that regard.

I never meant that it would take away the normal autonomy of whether you wanted to release the Pokemon or not - in the Bug Catching Contest from Johto, you had to choose one Pokemon to enter, and couldn't keep the other ones. I just meant they didn't vanish into oblivion once you caught them.

 

2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

If you take note of some of event locations you will see that they are held in places where people don't normally go to. I think this is an excellent way to showcase locations in the game that would otherwise be ignored cause people have little reason to go there (e.g the seaform islands). Implementing a pal park would take away that chance to show case these areas at the same time restricting events to the same general areas which is bound to get boring after some time.

That's a fair enough point, but adding more swarm locations can do the same thing. Also, this Pal Park would have multiple maps and would rotate every time there was a different Pokemon to catch, there's no need for it to get stale. (PS, I definitely understand the sentiment. I've been stuck in the safari zone for 3 days now.)

 

2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

and that this new system would inject rps into the game.

Never said that, I said the old system injects artificial RP into the game.

2 hours ago, BrokenJoker said:

If you feel stressed out about interacting with people just go dnd or play the original version of the games offline.

Couple points to this one - I am fine with interacting with people, but doing so on mobile is not a fluid experience. There's no "always on" chat, it's hidden behind an icon. I miss out on most swarms because I'm not constantly tapping into the chat, and finding a GM to whisper is a chore. Tapping on their name to trigger the whisper is hard too.

 

Secondly, Pokemon has an undeniably high percentage of fans that are on the autism spectrum - myself and my boyfriend included. While it's easy enough to say "go play offline", being in a living Pokemon world is fantastic. Being able to sell my caught Pokemon on a marketplace is A+. Being able to farm items and sell those, I love it. Like I said, I'm completely fine interacting with other people, but for a lot of other people on the spectrum, it's not as great, but they still want this fresh new Pokemon experience like me. Who am I, and who are you, to deny them that?

 

In summation, I agree that community events are great, but so are minigames. This is an easy shoe in for a minigame, and other community events can be figured out. Maybe PVM raids with lots of other players. Maybe Team Rocket invasions that people need to work together to defeat. These sorts of things wouldn't need mod supervision, and would encourage more communication, teamwork, and camaraderie than a catch event. I didn't see one person talking to other people in the area during the catch event, and Global was even more quiet than usual during it. 

 

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