Disobedient Pokemon

[LordNunu]

I would like to hold an open debate with someone, or many, regarding the OT's Pokemon becoming disobedient upon entering a new region. Obviously people who have finished all 3 regions won't ever have this as a problem, but it was raised as an issue when a friend of mine swapped before finishing a region and he was really hoping he'd be able to blaze through the region and get to end game there. 

 

My starting point

I find it quite odd that the strongest argument I've found from admins on global chat is that it would be easy to finish a region as a new player. Considering rebattling is by far the most time efficient way to make money and exp (or so I've found, I'm more than happy to be proven wrong as a counter-argument point), being able to shred the new trainers isn't really much of a cheat at all. I've done playthroughs where I literally just bought pokemon as I needed them and the game was completely trivialized. Why try to regulate the difficulty of a new player when the game isn't even hard to begin with? I'm very open to the idea of being proven wrong, as this could just be my ignorance on game mechanics showing.

 

-Also, I've been made aware that this has been tried before. I don't actually know how it was implemented, so I'd love a history lesson.

[Toupi]

9 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

Why try to regulate the difficulty of a new player when the game isn't even hard to begin with?

Good to hear someone complaining about difficulty in a different way than the rest of ppl. Most ppl complain on obedience because they can't faceroll with their overleveled Charizard.

 

11 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

I would like to hold an open debate with someone, or many, regarding the OT's Pokemon becoming disobedient upon entering a new region.

This is false. You can still train and catch pokemons from other regions. They will stop listening only when they are above obedience level.

Disobedient pokemons are feature in handheld games, here they make you unable to overlevel by accident (as long as you progress through the region, you have to go extra mile to make pokemon disobedient).

Why obedience is a thing even here? Because 1shoting everything is boring and they want to keep you engaged to play their game. And what is the best way to engage players? let them learn how to play pokemon.

[LordNunu]

2 minutes ago, Toupi said:

Good to hear someone complaining about difficulty in a different way than the rest of ppl. Most ppl complain on obedience because they can't faceroll with their overleveled Charizard.

Yes I disagree with that complaint.

 

2 minutes ago, Toupi said:

This is false. You can still train and catch pokemons from other regions. They will stop listening only when they are above obedience level.

Disobedient pokemons are feature in handheld games, here they make you unable to overlevel by accident (as long as you progress through the region, you have to go extra mile to make pokemon disobedient).

I'm going to have to submit a gif (NSFL) of a thief committing suicide as proof of this phenomenon happening. This tragic occurrence took place after my buddy swapped from kanto to unova the first time. He just pulled the bandito out of his storage and tried to use him because he was the OT and.. Well, you know.

[razimove]

36 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

Considering rebattling is by far the most time efficient way to make money and exp

well, experience yes, not money. But that's a different discussion.

 

8 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

I'm going to have to submit a gif (NSFL) of a thief committing suicide as proof of this phenomenon happening. This tragic occurrence took place after my buddy swapped from kanto to unova the first time.

This happened due to what Toupi refered as faceroll through the region. If you start with a lvl 36 pokemon, you faceroll through every region.

Previous to this cap, there was a money making method, named alt running, pretty much, you'd make alts, faceroll hoenn in 6 hours, and you'd make in average 1.1m/run, which was by far the most efficient method. This method was possible by starting with a lvl 15-20 starmie with Psychic/Surf/Tbolt/Icebeam and faceroll all gyms, then grabbing a lvl 100 starmie and facerolling e4.

Edited May 3, 2018 by redspawn

[LordNunu]

1 minute ago, redspawn said:

well, experience yes, not money. But that's a different discussion.

I think that's a strong point that has everything to do with this discussion.

 

2 minutes ago, redspawn said:

Previous to this cap, there was a money making method, named alt running, pretty much, you'd make alts, faceroll unova in 6 hours, and you'd make in average 1.1m/run, which was by far the most efficient method. This method was possible by starting with a lvl 15-20 starmie with Psychic/Surf/Tbolt/Icebeam and faceroll all gyms, then grabbing a lvl 100 starmie and facerolling e4.

So what's stopping people from doing that now? You can use a level 20 starmie right out of the gate as is, and exp is stored when you get capped, so why aren't people running alts anymore? The game is still extremely fast to complete.

[razimove]

3 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

I think that's a strong point that has everything to do with this discussion.

 

So what's stopping people from doing that now? You can use a level 20 starmie right out of the gate as is, and exp is stored when you get capped, so why aren't people running alts anymore? The game is still extremely fast to complete.

Heavily nerfed, lots of items made untradable, and e4 has obedience cap, doens't allow you to use lvl 100 starmie.

[LordNunu]

2 minutes ago, redspawn said:

Heavily nerfed, lots of items made untradable, and e4 has obedience cap, doens't allow you to use lvl 100 starmie.

http://simplybred.blogspot.com/2017/06/money-guide-npc-rematch-payouts-part-2.html

 

A guide I found that may indeed be outdated, but the numbers he's pulling are statistically more efficient than alt running, and the link I show is quite recent. It seems like they didn't know how to handle the influx of currency from people min-maxing and making more money, so they targeted something that made the experience less diverse for players new to the mmo, and not Pokemon as a whole. Restricting how people play the single player portion of the game because it provided experience players with a MARGINALLY more efficient grind route seems like bad management of the economy and it reflects poorly on the team.

[razimove]

4 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

http://simplybred.blogspot.com/2017/06/money-guide-npc-rematch-payouts-part-2.html

 

A guide I found that may indeed be outdated, but the numbers he's pulling are statistically more efficient than alt running, and the link I show is quite recent. It seems like they didn't know how to handle the influx of currency from people min-maxing and making more money, so they targeted something that made the experience less diverse for players new to the mmo, and not Pokemon as a whole. Restricting how people play the single player portion of the game because it provided experience players with a MARGINALLY more efficient grind route seems like bad management of the economy and it reflects poorly on the team.

It's not that simple.

This has to do with economy reasons.

If there's a huge influx of cash into the game, economy will become broken, not saying it isnt, because now is slightly past the point of repair, but, it would be waaay worst than it currently is, if they didn't fix some stuff. Just from Gyms alone, you can make 100m a year, is not much daily, ok, but it takes like 1 hour to clear gyms and the reward is 280k total(including that 20k npc).

While with other stuff you make money 'indirectly' by selling items/pokemons to other players, this ones, don't require interaction, they only affect the economy.

 

I do agree however that they should provide us, some fixes regarding the economy state, and the breeding costs if anyone wants to get into competitive, because that's where you really notice the impact of having low cash 24/7.
 

[LordNunu]

4 minutes ago, redspawn said:

It's not that simple.

This has to do with economy reasons.

If there's a huge influx of cash into the game, economy will become broken, not saying it isnt, because now is slightly past the point of repair, but, it would be waaay worst than it currently is, if they didn't fix some stuff. Just from Gyms alone, you can make 100m a year, is not much daily, ok, but it takes like 1 hour to clear gyms and the reward is 280k total(including that 20k npc).

See this is where I disagree. When you take away an easy way to make money, people will just immediately hop over to the next strat that makes just as much money. The economy is bad because it's too easy to make money, and taking alt running out didn't change that. I'm sure there are some people that said, "Oh alt running is out? GG I'm broke now and it's impossible to make money in this game made for 400iq geniuses with economics majors," but let's be honest, the vast majority most likely just moved on to the next thing that gave the same income. Not only did this change not fix the economy, as changing the source means there's still a source, but it also harmed the quality of life of the players that want to play the way they intended.

 

Edit: Thank you for having an actual discussion with me btw, and nice flair.

Edited May 3, 2018 by LordNunu

[LordNunu]

Feel free to chime in, people who are just seeing this. I'm more than happy to continue with this.

[Darkshade]

On 03/05/2018 at 1:15 PM, LordNunu said:

See this is where I disagree. When you take away an easy way to make money, people will just immediately hop over to the next strat that makes just as much money.

You're making the assumption that there is one of the same capacity.

 

The economy was not the only reason we decided to introduce effective badge caps though, it was also because we wanted the gameplay to have some depth - while also teaching inexperienced players how to improve their battle techniques with the help of the AI.

 

While the intention is obviously not to wipe the player out at every given opportunity; one of the best ways to help a player improve is to beat them, so that situation can be avoided or countered the next time they come across it.

 

We don't have all of the content there yet (with the exception of PvP), but we will be introducing more end game content of a harder difficulty -  and we need to prepare the playerbase for this also.

 

The vanilla games have their problems in an MMO environment (in part because they're designed for children), and this is one of them.

The storyline itself has been trivialized over time, likely due to how many times people have run it before; but PokeMMO is intended to be a different experience from vanilla in this regard.
It's not something that you're able to win by blindly mashing Earthquake on every opponent, and similarly, our future end game content, as well as our current (PvP) will/is not completable in that same manner.
The gameplay needs to flow, and it is important that we set a precedent for the type of difficulty the player should expect.

[LordNunu]

20 hours ago, Darkshade said:

You're making the assumption that there is one of the same capacity.

There is, and I linked to it in the replies above. 

 

20 hours ago, Darkshade said:

The economy was not the only reason we decided to introduce effective badge caps though, it was also because we wanted the gameplay to have some depth - while also teaching inexperienced players how to improve their battle techniques with the help of the AI.

I reject the notion that this is teaching inexperienced players to improve their battle techniques as I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't just run the same team with their favorite pokemon in the second region. What depth would restricting a player add? 

 

20 hours ago, Darkshade said:

While the intention is obviously not to wipe the player out at every given opportunity

The game isn't hard enough for this to happen outside of the elite four and clearly one sided gym battles where you take pokemon with weaknesses to the leaders.

 

20 hours ago, Darkshade said:

We don't have all of the content there yet (with the exception of PvP), but we will be introducing more end game content of a harder difficulty -  and we need to prepare the playerbase for this also.

I fail to see how this argument holds any water. You're "grooming" new players for harder content instead of letting them learn how they want? This just assumes all the new players coming to your game are inept and have no ability to adapt to a harder end-game situation. Why make the early game needlessly restricted when the end-game is going to be more difficult? 

PS - Where's my Little Cup PvP >:(

 

20 hours ago, Darkshade said:

The vanilla games have their problems in an MMO environment (in part because they're designed for children), and this is one of them.

The storyline itself has been trivialized over time, likely due to how many times people have run it before; but PokeMMO is intended to be a different experience from vanilla in this regard.

It's already a very different experience even without your restrictions. The battles, while not hard, are harder than the vanilla games, and the only thing that differentiates you from the "children's design" is the gym rebattles that are doubles instead of singles. I think this gym rebattling system is fantastically well done by the way.

 

20 hours ago, Darkshade said:

It's not something that you're able to win by blindly mashing Earthquake on every opponent, and similarly, our future end game content, as well as our current (PvP) will/is not completable in that same manner.
The gameplay needs to flow, and it is important that we set a precedent for the type of difficulty the player should expect.

I don't have a problem with you not being able to blindly mash earthquake on every opponent. I just think that this was a really poor decision. Instead of having the trainers level scale with you like they do in gym rebattles, you restrict the player and make them use pokemon they most likely don't want to use. When my bud swapped to the new region, he figured that his gym badge obedience level would carry over and the trainers would just scale to him. It actually sounds quite fun, the way he worded it. Make gym badges count towards a global player card and have the obedience cap raise as your total count raises, that way you can switch to a different region after 4 badges and not be stuck starting from scratch. Obviously I have no idea how difficult it would be to implement this, but it sounds a lot more fun than the way it's set up now.

[Darkshade]

4 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

There is, and I linked to it in the replies above.

They're not really comparable, and it is dependant on how quickly you run through the storyline.

Money wasn't the only thing you were able to pick up on a storyline playthrough either - you used to be able to (and still can for some items) gain items that would sell for a fair amount, making it even more profitable.

 

5 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

I reject the notion that this is teaching inexperienced players to improve their battle techniques as I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't just run the same team with their favorite pokemon in the second region. What depth would restricting a player add?

I mean you can reject it if you want but they can't run that same team in the second region up until they are able to get them to obey.

More to the point though, it's not about which team members a player uses, it's about how they use them and whether they're able to overcome the challenges that are thrown at them with each NPC/battle strategy.

 

8 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

The game isn't hard enough for this to happen outside of the elite four and clearly one sided gym battles where you take pokemon with weaknesses to the leaders.

Yes, the Gym Leaders/E4 are the primary focus of this, but you at least have to 'pay attention' to some of the NPCs to avoid taking too much damage, whereas beforehand you would not.

 

8 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

I fail to see how this argument holds any water. You're "grooming" new players for harder content instead of letting them learn how they want? This just assumes all the new players coming to your game are inept and have no ability to adapt to a harder end-game situation. Why make the early game needlessly restricted when the end-game is going to be more difficult? 

PS - Where's my Little Cup PvP >:(

That is how video games work.

You don't just allow the player to cruise through the entire game at the same difficulty pace and then slap with them with a hard final boss.

You owe it to them to teach them what is expected from them beforehand, and this is what makes it rewarding.

 

Most players also aren't looking to 'learn how they want', they're just looking to win.

 

Little Cup is likely to come with the introduction of Eviolite, which has an ETA of "I don't know when" unfortunately.

 

11 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

It's already a very different experience even without your restrictions. The battles, while not hard, are harder than the vanilla games, and the only thing that differentiates you from the "children's design" is the gym rebattles that are doubles instead of singles. I think this gym rebattling system is fantastically well done by the way.

I appreciate the compliment, although it's not the only thing that sets us apart - we also have a more advanced (although unfinished AI), and we've removed the ability for players to switch mons before the opponent does, so that their decisions hold some weight.

 

12 minutes ago, LordNunu said:

I don't have a problem with you not being able to blindly mash earthquake on every opponent. I just think that this was a really poor decision. Instead of having the trainers level scale with you like they do in gym rebattles, you restrict the player and make them use pokemon they most likely don't want to use. When my bud swapped to the new region, he figured that his gym badge obedience level would carry over and the trainers would just scale to him. It actually sounds quite fun, the way he worded it. Make gym badges count towards a global player card and have the obedience cap raise as your total count raises, that way you can switch to a different region after 4 badges and not be stuck starting from scratch. Obviously I have no idea how difficult it would be to implement this, but it sounds a lot more fun than the way it's set up now.

Not as easy as you'd think.

While I do understand the enjoyment that could potentially come with level scaling (and the issues that come without it), after the second region you'd just find everything to be at the same difficulty and same level; this also means you'd miss 2/3 of the evolutionary forms as you travel throughout the regions, which might also get a bit boring.

It was generally seen as easier to implement and more diverse to require the player to travel through the region from the 'start' (along with also making the most sense).

Players 'mons are deposited into the PC upon region switch, so if they choose to bring 'mons from other regions and use them, that is entirely up to them.