Really not liking level caps

[Kyu]

5 minutes ago, atlasstar said:

NPC buyable items, the rest is fine for the most part.

One of the main problems with buffing NPC-sourced items is that it invalidates Crafting as a part of the game, which means that end-game players lose a potential money source. What I'm trying to do with healing items is to make the player-sourced versions a much better choice in terms of cost efficiency, although there are a lot of flaws with the berry system currently implemented on Live which stifle that a bit. That is a topic for another day though.

 

After the upcoming crafting changes are implemented, the money gain throughout the storyline is reviewed, and it's given a bit of time to settle, I'll review NPC healing item prices to see whether it's a necessary change.

[atlasstar]

Great, I'll be happy to see how the game changes.

[Raichuforyou]

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

One of the main problems with buffing NPC-sourced items is that it invalidates Crafting as a part of the game, which means that end-game players lose a potential money source. What I'm trying to do with healing items is to make the player-sourced versions a much better choice in terms of cost efficiency, although there are a lot of flaws with the berry system currently implemented on Live which stifle that a bit. That is a topic for another day though.

 

After the upcoming crafting changes are implemented, the money gain throughout the storyline is reviewed, and it's given a bit of time to settle, I'll review NPC healing item prices to see whether it's a necessary change.

What I'm noticing though is that a lot of crafting items are really dependent on berries. And the berry system right now is pretty unforgiving to people who work a decent amount, because I feel I literally have to dedicate my day to Pokemmo/set alarms on my phone just to get online and harvest berries. Not to mention when freak events happen that can cause you to miss watering or harvesting.

 

Not looking to start anything, but I am definitely the type of player that needs to rely on buying these items because berry farming isn't feasible for me outside of pickup.

[Roundabout]

3 hours ago, XelaKebert said:

There is one problem though if the players are still learning basic game mechanics by the time they reach end game content then the storyline itself has failed to fulfill its obligations in teaching the players how to play the game. 

 

3 hours ago, Darkshade said:

I'd like to try and clear up some confusion, as this isn't the message we're trying to get across.

 

The design philosophy behind the level cap is to teach players about how to counter certain strategies and help them improve upon their current battle knowledge.

The base game does this on some level, by teaching players about some of the more basic mechanics , such as type advantages.

 

However, in vanilla, the jump from simple storyline battles to slightly more in-depth knowledge, such as simple strategies used within competitive play, or planned later end game content is rather huge.

This is a problem for the design of the game, because instead of encouraging players to 'climb to the top' where the game increases in difficulty as players begin to overcome earlier obstacles; the difficulty remains the same throughout and players are then thrown off when it comes to anything past that.

 

We'd like to prepare our players for the content that comes after the main storyline is finished, and the way we've opted to do that is by creating this 'slope mentioned above.

One of the early ways we did this was with Artificial Intelligent or 'AI'.

 

The way the AI is designed is that it is only as good as the team given to it, it is equipped to use strategies at hand, but if it does not have those strategies available to it there is very little it can do.

 

You can see this in the difficulty difference between standard NPCs and Gym Leaders/Rivals - with the latter naturally being harder.

 

More recently, we looked at redesigning our important storyline battles with this difficulty slope in mind, with early Gym Leaders having basic strategies, and later Gym Leaders getting slightly more challenging.

 

It turned out rather well, although in the testing phase, we quickly realized that players were able to arbitrarily bypass this level of challenge by simply overleveling the Gym Leader.

This posed a problem, as it encouraged some to spend more time grinding to overcome the challenge of the gym leader, rather than identify their strategy and use this knowledge to beat them.

 

This is where the level restriction came into play, and we decided on 'caps' for each badge level, which ranged from about 6 to a couple of levels above the gym leader, depending on how far into the storyline a player is - by this time it is expected that players will have picked up on some the core strategies to battling, such as being able to switch at the appropriate time, and potentially predict what an opponent might do, thus we chose a level cap closer to the gym leader.

 

We don't want to push players away with any of these changes, but rather try and prepare them for what it is to come.

We want to help build the PokeMMO community and the game further, and we are unable to do that if players who go through the storyline by overleveling their opponents are faced with later-game content and decide to leave due to a spike in difficulty that we hadn't prepared them for.

 

We're always open to feedback - and if you're struggling with any battles in particular by all means let us know which those are.

 

I hope this helps to clear up some of the misconceptions regarding this decision.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

but what if casuals aren't interested in competitive play and/or in new PvE content such as the legendary dungeons? Why do you want to force them to learn/get good if they just want to play the game as breeders, shiny traders or whatever?

Edit: even if you guys aren't making a casual game, there is more than one manner to play a MMO, not everyone must be a competitive player

Edited December 6, 2017 by Roundabout

[Malorne]

7 minutes ago, Roundabout said:

 

but what if casuals aren't interested in competitive play and/or in new PvE content such as the legendary dungeons? Why do you want to force them to learn/get good if they just want to play the game as breeders, shiny traders or whatever?

Technically, they're not forcing anyone to do anything. That is what they've envisioned so far to create end-game content aside from PvP. You're free to participate in it or simply not.

[Roundabout]

3 minutes ago, Malorne said:

Technically, they're not forcing anyone to do anything. That is what they've envisioned so far to create end-game content aside from PvP. You're free to participate in it or simply not.

I know, and I'm saying that (IMO) it's a bad idea to make the storyline harder to make players do better in competitive play or whatever end-game content they're doing, because these players might simply have no interest in taking part of these. There is more than one way to play this game. and they're basically excluding people that don't want to do comp.

Edited December 6, 2017 by Roundabout

[Raichuforyou]

3 minutes ago, Malorne said:

Technically, they're not forcing anyone to do anything. That is what they've envisioned so far to create end-game content aside from PvP. You're free to participate in it or simply not.

But... let's be realistic. You need to beat the Elite 4 to have some benefits for breeding like access to other areas, Pokemon, items, and availability to grind for money even easier.

[Malorne]

Just now, Roundabout said:

I know, and I'm saying that (IMO) it's a bad idea to make the storyline harder to make players do better in competitive play or whatever end-game content they're doing, because these players might simply have no interest in taking part of these. There is more than one way to play this game.

 

1 minute ago, Raichu4u said:

But... let's be realistic. You need to beat the Elite 4 to have some benefits for breeding like access to other areas, Pokemon, items, and availability to grind for money even easier.

Then you gotta suck it up and beat the game no matter how hard it is.

[Roundabout]

Just now, Malorne said:

 

Then you gotta suck it up and beat the game no matter how hard it is.

Thats how it is right now, and what I'm trying to say is that it just shouldn't be that way, its stupid.

[Malorne]

Just now, Roundabout said:

Thats how it is right now, and what I'm trying to say is that it just shouldn't be that way, its stupid.

Well, you can try to be a proper player for a short amount of time to beat the storyline then continue whatever noobish fantasy you wanna venture onto. We all gotta sacrifice y'know?

[Roundabout]

12 minutes ago, Malorne said:

Well, you can try to be a proper player for a short amount of time to beat the storyline then continue whatever noobish fantasy you wanna venture onto. We all gotta sacrifice y'know?

Its not as easy as you think, it actually takes a lot of work to learn and beat the storyline as it is now, which isn't worth it to some people that just don't want to do comp and thats why they end up quitting the game, which darkshade said is unwanted, but will happen inevitably (probably already is happening - people start playing because of the new region, hit the difficulty wall and leave)

[Malorne]

Just now, Roundabout said:

Its not as easy as you think, it actually takes a lot of work to learn and beat the storyline as it is now, which isn't worth it to some people that just don't want to do comp and thats why they end up quitting the game, which darkshade said is unwanted, but will happen inevitably (probably already is happening - people start playing because of the new region, hit the difficulty wall and leave)

Not really, took me like a day. Note that i had 0 stuff when i started unova.

[Roundabout]

4 minutes ago, Malorne said:

Not really, took me like a day. Note that i had 0 stuff when i started unova.

thats because you're experienced.

[Malorne]

Just now, Roundabout said:

thats because you're experienced.

Nah, thats because i dont limit what i can do to what i've been doing in all the handhelds where i baton pass shit to a magikarp and flail my way through the E4.
There is a level cap, yes. But there is also the knowledge of what gym types, E4 types you will face on your way. Which you can easily asses the situation and rotate your team accordingly. If anything, the level cap will actually help you to prepare yourself, considering pokemon of E4 will also change the more your level scaling increases, where you will be caught off guard.

[atlasstar]

 

 

7 minutes ago, Malorne said:

Nah, thats because i dont limit what i can do to what i've been doing in all the handhelds where i baton pass shit to a magikarp and flail my way through the E4.
There is a level cap, yes. But there is also the knowledge of what gym types, E4 types you will face on your way. Which you can easily asses the situation and rotate your team accordingly. If anything, the level cap will actually help you to prepare yourself, considering pokemon of E4 will also change the more your level scaling increases, where you will be caught off guard.

I just came back to say I'm pretty bewildered that this looped back around to an argument that was already talked through.

Saying "I did it, now you do it" is never going to help or change anything dude XD

[Malorne]

1 minute ago, atlasstar said:

 

 

I just came back to say I'm pretty bewildered that this looped back around to an argument that was already talked through.

Saying "I did it, now you do it" is never going to help or change anything dude XD

Bottom line is, it can be done. Just not the way you're doing so far. Its not like moves hit more when you're an experienced player.

[atlasstar]

2 hours ago, Malorne said:

Bottom line is, it can be done. Just not the way you're doing so far. Its not like moves hit more when you're an experienced player.

Actually that is almost literally what that means, you have better IVs/EVs and better movesets.  But I want to say again, I didn't personally have any trouble.

Everyone who is having trouble knows it *can* be done. That doesn't mean they currently have the knowledge or resources to do it themselves, or do it easily.

Edited December 6, 2017 by atlasstar

[Malorne]

33 minutes ago, atlasstar said:

Actually that is almost literally what that means, you have better IVs/EVs and better movesets.  But I want to say again, I didn't personally have any trouble.

Everyone who is having trouble knows it *can* be done. That doesn't mean they currently have the knowledge or resources to do it themselves, or do it easily.

 

3 hours ago, Malorne said:

Nah, thats because i dont limit what i can do to what i've been doing in all the handhelds where i baton pass shit to a magikarp and flail my way through the E4.
There is a level cap, yes. But there is also the knowledge of what gym types, E4 types you will face on your way. Which you can easily asses the situation and rotate your team accordingly. If anything, the level cap will actually help you to prepare yourself, considering pokemon of E4 will also change the more your level scaling increases, where you will be caught off guard.

 

[atlasstar]

I really don't get this joke that there's no difficulty, even the devs have agreed there's a very distinct and at this time somewhat glitchy difference in difficulty of the gyms and e4. Such a change in difficulty that it's been said before in this thread but it would probably hurt the less experienced or casual players time in the game.

The devs don't want that obviously, and have said they're looking into how to make it more balanced in a lot of ways.

 

There's a pretty glaring difference between a rival battle where they switch a lot and have decent pokemon to a gauntlet of five battles with a level restriction where they have perfect pokemon with comp builds.

[Weedle]

Some points were made, and I just wanted to point out that even before the difficulty revamp I knew numerous players who had trouble beating the gym leaders/e4. Ofc they quit after they beat the storyline and realized post game was grinding hours to get a comp team, but still the changes won't be well received by poke-noobs.

Edited December 6, 2017 by Weedle

[XelaKebert]

8 hours ago, Roundabout said:

 

but what if casuals aren't interested in competitive play and/or in new PvE content such as the legendary dungeons? Why do you want to force them to learn/get good if they just want to play the game as breeders, shiny traders or whatever?

Edit: even if you guys aren't making a casual game, there is more than one manner to play a MMO, not everyone must be a competitive player

You're right that not everyone must be a comp player. I'm about as casual a player as you will find on staff. When it comes to comp knowledge I have some understanding, but it may as well be 0. I know how STAB works, type effectiveness, and EVs/IVs. That's about it. I have 0 clue what can check certain Pokemon and what can counter certain Pokemon. I have 0 clue what the most optimal build is for a given Pokemon. Theorymon pretty much causes my eyes to glass over.

 

That being said, there are other aspects you can look at in MMOs aside from playing competitively. At this point there is only breeding and Berry Farming, which is a bit offputting, but there will be other aspects in the future. Once Hidden Abilities begin to be released you can start farming up Pokemon with those Hidden Abilities and selling them for a profit. Not everyone will want to farm for them and not everyone will want to breed for them. You can just hunt shinies at any point.

 

7 hours ago, Roundabout said:

I know, and I'm saying that (IMO) it's a bad idea to make the storyline harder to make players do better in competitive play or whatever end-game content they're doing, because these players might simply have no interest in taking part of these. There is more than one way to play this game. and they're basically excluding people that don't want to do comp.

The dev team wants the storyline to at least reflect a bit of what the end game will eventually look like. As I said, if players don't have a basic understanding of the game by the time they reach the end game content then the storyline has failed. The purpose of the storyline for any MMO is to teach the players the basic mechanics.

 

7 hours ago, Raichu4u said:

But... let's be realistic. You need to beat the Elite 4 to have some benefits for breeding like access to other areas, Pokemon, items, and availability to grind for money even easier.

Please read the above again. You are not locked out of stuff completely until you beat the Elite 4. The only things you are locked out of for not beating the Elite 4 are areas you already had to beat the elite 4 to go to in the first place. You can just gain 8 badges in each region and never finish the storyline.

 

Please bear in mind that this game is still in active development so not everything is in place yet. The dev team has a vision in mind and they are working towards that vision.

[Bearminator]

To add to this as Player, I was so bored in pokemon Sun and other games,  felt like I can finish game with 2 pokes. Pokemmo was same.

 

With new difficulty I actually enjoyed unova  [my less liked region beating just hoenn] a lot.

 

Ofc its sudden chance but I saw my cousin beating storyline putting only so me Time into making team without my money/pokes help. I think it might be a little better balanced but Im fine with what it is now. 

 

 

[atlasstar]

11 hours ago, XelaKebert said:

You're right that not everyone must be a comp player. I'm about as casual a player as you will find on staff. When it comes to comp knowledge I have some understanding, but it may as well be 0. I know how STAB works, type effectiveness, and EVs/IVs. That's about it. I have 0 clue what can check certain Pokemon and what can counter certain Pokemon. I have 0 clue what the most optimal build is for a given Pokemon. Theorymon pretty much causes my eyes to glass over.

 

That being said, there are other aspects you can look at in MMOs aside from playing competitively. At this point there is only breeding and Berry Farming, which is a bit offputting, but there will be other aspects in the future. Once Hidden Abilities begin to be released you can start farming up Pokemon with those Hidden Abilities and selling them for a profit. Not everyone will want to farm for them and not everyone will want to breed for them. You can just hunt shinies at any point.

 

The dev team wants the storyline to at least reflect a bit of what the end game will eventually look like. As I said, if players don't have a basic understanding of the game by the time they reach the end game content then the storyline has failed. The purpose of the storyline for any MMO is to teach the players the basic mechanics.

 

Please read the above again. You are not locked out of stuff completely until you beat the Elite 4. The only things you are locked out of for not beating the Elite 4 are areas you already had to beat the elite 4 to go to in the first place. You can just gain 8 badges in each region and never finish the storyline.

 

Please bear in mind that this game is still in active development so not everything is in place yet. The dev team has a vision in mind and they are working towards that vision.

This would all be fine, except there's an active level cap in every region now so you *are* locked out of having Poke above 56 in any region if you can't beat the e4.

Breeding is available in 2 of 3 but the breeding system is much harsher now and frankly it makes no sense to take the users pokemon, and of course there's the current issues with money.

If I didn't see this difficulty spike as unbalanced and needing at least some adjustment I wouldn't say anything.

But this spike affects not only anyone playing casually but even using high level pokemon in the region.

As a final point I want to say that the other regions are generally alright for their first E4 battle but Unova makes you face all of the elite four, and then n and ghetsis.

Is everyone just supposed to use all of their money on items or making comp pokemon?

This is a problem because the level cap is way lower than the level of N and Ghetsis, even lower than the champion.

So for me this needs the most balancing since it locks end of main game content behind a difficulty wall.

Of course again, it's being worked on and balanced, so these are just my current thoughts on it as a long time player of pokemmo.

Edited December 6, 2017 by atlasstar

[russianboxer]

Its true that in unova you have to beat 6 trainers in elite 4.But it still is easier because you only need to beat 4 and you pick the order which helps a lot.

Then you also don't need to beat N again if beat him alredy tho you need to catch zekrom again when you fight N or ghetsis.

 

Ghetis best pokemon is hydreigon that is level 54.Level cap for unova is 56.What do you mean level cap is lower?

Edited December 7, 2017 by russianboxer

[XelaKebert]

1 hour ago, atlasstar said:

This would all be fine, except there's an active level cap in every region now so you *are* locked out of having Poke above 56 in any region if you can't beat the e4.

Breeding is available in 2 of 3 but the breeding system is much harsher now and frankly it makes no sense to take the users pokemon, and of course there's the current issues with money.

If I didn't see this difficulty spike as unbalanced and needing at least some adjustment I wouldn't say anything.

But this spike affects not only anyone playing casually but even using high level pokemon in the region.

As a final point I want to say that the other regions are generally alright for their first E4 battle but Unova makes you face all of the elite four, and then n and ghetsis.

Is everyone just supposed to use all of their money on items or making comp pokemon?

This is a problem because the level cap is way lower than the level of N and Ghetsis, even lower than the champion.

So for me this needs the most balancing since it locks end of main game content behind a difficulty wall.

Of course again, it's being worked on and balanced, so these are just my current thoughts on it as a long time player of pokemmo.

The level cap is in place in such a way that you literally have to go out of your way to have any Pokemon disobey you. Whether or not these levels get adjusted is a topic for the dev team to discuss. You are exaggerating the limitations of the level cap. The only Pokemon you cannot obtain because of the level cap are Volcarona and Hydreigon. Aside from that you aren't locked out of areas that you weren't already locked out of in the base games. To say that you are locked out of more than that is a gross exaggeration. You also misread the patch notes as well. If you go to say Kanto, for example, your maximum obedience level with 8 badges is 62. Darkshade posted a chart here outlining the obedience levels by region and how many levels above the next Gym Leader's highest leveled Pokemon you can reach before hitting the cap.

 

The breeding system exchanging 2 parents for 1 egg is done so that there is an outflux of Pokemon from the economy. If you were around for the "cloneMMO" days you should know how much of an unmitigated disaster that was and how badly that system damaged the economy. @Darkshade could shed more light on this matter.

 

Kyu has already addressed the money issue as well as plans to address the difficulty curve.

 

For your final point, the answer is no. You are not being forced to invest in competitive Pokemon. This was the exact reason for me bringing up that I am using a full team of only Spinda. If this point were even remotely close to true then I should not be gearing up to face the 8th gym in Unova with that team. Has it been easy for me? Absolutely not, I am at a point where I am losing at least 4 times before I can land a win, and even then I have to seek out some assistance to gain that win. If you are having some trouble with a certain battle in particular you are free to seek out help. If you don't want the help and would prefer to continue playing in the style you have chosen that is fine, but your claim that players are being forced to learn comp couldn't be further from the truth. There is a lot more to comp than just EVs and IVs.

 

The biggest question that needs to be answered is how difficult is too difficult? The other side of that is how easy is too easy?

 

You cannot make the storyline too difficult because then you drive players away. If you make the storyline too easy it becomes a large joke and you also risk losing players. There is a sweet spot somewhere between Dark Souls and Red Light Green Light in terms of difficulty.

 

Just now, russianboxer said:

Its true that in unova you have to beat 6 trainers in elite 4.But it still is easier because you only need to beat 4 and you pick the order which helps a lot.

Then you also don't need to beat N again if beat him alredy you only need to catch zekrom when you fight N or ghetsis.

 

Ghetis best pokemon is hydreigon that is level 54.Level cap for unova is 56.What do you mean level cap is lower?

The level cap changes depending on the region you are in. See below.

 

• (Badge Count: 0/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/Post-E4)
• Kanto: 20/26/34/38/46/48/50/52/62/100
• Hoenn: 20/24/28/32/34/38/44/48/60/100
• Unova: 20/24/28/30/34/38/42/46/56/100