You don't need to make a thread about it, stop being butt-mad. If you're going to stay butt-mad go the player report section with it.
Edit: Not like there is anything worth reporting.
We'll be offering RP refunds for players who purchased donator status due to misleading text in-game which implied a higher benefit than given.
Make a support request, include the name of your account (which you login with) and we will process it for donations made from 01/01/2015 until 17/06/2015.
The endgame system in PokeMMO is currently broken. Like, straight up broken. The justifications used by staff for the current system, consequently, also make no sense. At least, they would if the systems existed in isolation, but the way everything is put together at the moment makes PokeMMO endgame a gigantic mess.
Let's start with your statement about official events not being a primary source of income, which brings up a question: Why not? I have never, in my life, played an MMO where the end game was also not the primary source of income. Once you reach cap in an MMO, what do you do? The high end content of course, such as raids. Usually you also do daily quests, assuming there are those; why are dailies used, exactly? They give players an incentive to keep logging onto the game regularly, while controlling the flow of whatever reward they give into the economy. It incentives players for logging in while allowing developers to more or less limit the flow of resources into the economy. It seems like a logical system, however, PokeMMO doesn't really have dailies. I do think that tournaments are a nice parallel; They're endgame content that incentives people logging in regularly to attend them...and that's where the analogy stops.
Daily quests have a promise of reward, and usually give a pretty decent reward. Tournaments in PokeMMO promise you nothing since only 1 person will actually get a prize for several hours of time, and I'm not even sure you could argue the prize is worth the time invested to play in the tournament. Let me repeat this; Not even accounting for the time that you spend making all your comps, getting items, etc., the 3+ hours you spend playing in a tournament, even if you win, is not a good return on investment for your time. Let's think about this; Comp gift shinies are worthless because 99% of them aren't worth playing. Why? Lack of certain moves, hidden power, and a mediocre EV spread is bad enough, but even for pokemon who don't have this issue you're faced by the massive obstacle of how easy it is to scout. Sure, you might not need a certain egg move on your shiny gift pokemon, but the fact it's a shiny gift pokemon tells your opponent you don't have it, so even if you didn't want it, you're at a disadvantage. Same applies to hidden power. 20k battle points? You're probably better off grinding the battle tower during the time you would have spent in the tournament. The reward might not be as much, but you're guaranteed a decent payout from the battle tower anyway, so it's still probably a better idea. I'm not even going to comment on the secret base decoration lmao.
As much as you like to compare comps to equipment in other games and PvP as the endgame, the analogy doesn't work. What kind of MMO has an endgame where the endgame content isn't where you get your rewards? Sure, there's shit like profession systems; "You need 500 shiny rocks you get from mining in the ogre's nose mine for 10 hours while having max mining to upgrade your Hambat", but really, what would a person who's doing endgame raids do? They'd do a fucking raid, get some loot, and sell that shit to buy some shiny rocks. Except we can't do that, because our high level endgame content offers no actual worthwhile reward for some reason, even if you win, which you will not a majority of the time.
So, the "endgame content" has basically no reward. But what about the barrier to entry? Surely if competitive pokemon is to be the endgame equipment parallel that you describe Darkshade, it'd make sense that they require a fair amount of work to get? The answer is no, because of the previous point of tournaments offering basically no reward. Why? Well, riddle me this; Once you reach level cap in a game such as WoW, what do you do? The answer is that you start raiding. Why do you raid? To get better equipment. What does getting equipment let you do? Do harder raids. And so on. Comparing competitive pokemon to high end equipment in other MMOs doesn't work for this reason. How do you get better pokemon in PokeMMO? Engaging in a long, tedious grind that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual end game you want to do.
For other MMOs, once you reach cap, the grinding you're doing for the "endgame" is endgame content itself. While legendary equipment might be a pre-requisite for the hardest raids in the game, you build up for those raids by doing easier raids. In PokeMMO, it's more like "okay, you wanna do high level raids? go kill some boars for 50 hours and come back". The parallel which was drawn with the original breeding system of Pokemon being equipment you improve doesn't work, precisely because of the way you get the resources to improve those pokemon. It's not at all the same. We aren't doing "endgame content" to get pokmeon, we're intentionally engaging in a tedious, boring grind designed for no purpose other than to timegate us because of the absolute lack of real endgame content in the game other than the sparsely occuring tournament scene.
And now, my friends, we have arrived at why PokeMMO is fundamentally broken at the endgame. The grind to actually play the endgame isn't designed to be entertaining, it's designed for the explicit purpose of making things take time to obtain, not for any entertainment value. It exists for no reason other than to cost time for players, because of the logic that time should be wasted to get to the endgame. And this would be fine, if this grind was fun at all. It's okay for other MMOs to timegate players from the hardest raids by forcing them to play another raid 50 times first, because realistically, while the raids themselves are different, they're the same type of content. Sure, there might be no "practical" reason to stop a player from playing the mega hard dungeon at first other than wasting their time, but the other raids they're doing are also fun, and if they don't find that fun, they probably won't find the harder raid much fun either.
So, why are raids enjoyable? Aren't they the same "brainless grind" as we have in PokeMMO? Well, aside from requiring slightly more thinking and planning, raids touch upon the key experience that makes MMOs appeal to players, the cooperation. The many people working together to achieve one goal they can't on their own. That's the strength of MMOs as a genre. In PokeMMO, this doesn't exist, and it certainly doesn't exist when you're sitting around in an empty channel grinding for breeders to minimize lag because there's no benefit in other people being there, it just lags your client. The grind is in itself just tedious, and it doesn't have the strength of involving the cooperation of people to encourage players to stick through it, it's a purely single player grind with no end. Why do you think that new players can't even enter the tournament scene and have a shot without joining a bigger team first? Not only do they need help with getting the resources to make comps and the knowledge older players have, but the fact that not having team chat open to talk to people while doing this shit is fucking unbearable, and the regular chats are so shitty that they aren't acceptable either. The problem with PokeMMO is that you're designing it as if it's an MMO because you don't want "Firered Online", but you don't have the main strength of an MMO, which is where many people can work together for one objective. No group PvP, no raids, nothing, but you're designing it with the grind of an MMO. The only reason the grind of an MMO is tolerable is because people don't play MMOs for the gameplay, but for the people, but you're missing the people so the terrible gameplay is inexcusable.
And this is the critical design flaw in PokeMMO, and why people will always complain about the grind. It just so happens that the grind is so awful right now that people are especially mad about it. With that being said, I'm not done, because this design flaw is especially abhorrent in the context of how negatively it affects the competitive scene, because trust me, it really fucks it up.
So, let me start this by stating that Pokemon is the competitive game with the biggest barrier to entry that I have ever seen. It's absolutely disgusting. This isn't the fault of PokeMMO, it applies to regular pokemon as well; You need to learn how natures work, the existence of IV's/EV's, have an understanding of how egg moves work and chain breeding, and beyond these more complicated concepts all the basic stuff as well; each pokemon's abilities and what they do, type matchups, a rough knowledge of the base stats of each pokemon, and of course understanding what the fuck base stats are, and of course whatever bans/clauses are currently active in whatever format they're playing, plus there's all kinds of more subtle bits of knowledge such as burn cutting attack, secondary effects of moves, the % chance of various things to happen, etc. This is a massive amount of knowledge any would-be competitive pokemon player must learn before even beginning, which is what makes Pokemon have such a high barrier of entry competitively. PokeMMO basically looks at this, thinks about it for a moment, then stacks up even more shit that a new player must do in order to play. Sure, there's some minor improvements--listing EVs, IV's, and explaining natures upon mousing over them--which help, but there's also a bunch of other shit. Players have to figure out how event moves/tutor moves work, since we have them added in a pretty clear way which is never 100% explained. There's of course the breeding system, which a new player really isn't going to figure out exists until they try breeding and realize something's off, at which point they have to figure out how the fuck the system works, after which, they have to figure out the optimal way to use it. The grind for shards, for BP, chaining egg moves when parents die, and of course during all this you somehow have to keep up a steady supply of yen when you barely even know how to breed at this point.
PokeMMO has an even higher barrier of entry for comp than regular pokemon, but it doesn't take much of an initiative to help lower this wall other than the few luxuries I mentioned earlier. No real tutorial, not really pointing players towards the competitive scene, pretty much nothing, players have to figure things out themselves then participate in the infinite grind. And of course, even once these new players manage to make a (shitty) team of 6, they'll proudly march into Vermillion, lose, then realize that their team is shit and have to breed some new shit, except they still don't really know what's good. At this point, the only real way for a player to actually improve before just quitting because game2hard, is to join a large team with players that can teach them. At this point, they go through the massive grind again, make a halfway decent team, then decide to try to join a tournament. They fail at even joining the first few tournaments they try to participate in because all signups are filled 2 seconds after they start, but eventually they get into one, aaaaaaaaand they lose. They have to adjust their team, keep grinding new pokemon, etc.; Do you get the picture? They do this enough times, and they might win a tournament and get a shitty prize after spending shit tons of time in a tedious grind almost nobody enjoys. This is all just for learning one tier, by the way.
And you might have read that all and thought that it was fine, it shouldn't be easy to win a tournament. You're probably right. With that being said, look at that and ask yourself; why would anyone go through with all of that? Why would they have not just stopped playing 300 hours ago? If winning a tournament is supposed to be this difficult, then why is the prize worthless?
And that, my friends, is the long and short of the massive flaws in the game. Competitively, it is a mess, because the way the game is designed and what the game actually is clash in a way which is god awful. The barrier of entry is too high, the reward for getting past it is non-existent, and the actual grind that is the gameplay isn't enjoyable, nor is it designed to be from any perspective that I can see.
jayfeatskydd got a reaction from SirDusty in Pokemmo Broscars