Poufilou

2 years and you still asking for this Im genuinely curious to know if you finished all regions by that time and if you actually do something in the game if you did finish all story lines. I don't know what's more shameful, struggling that much to finish stories or not learning to get better if your thing is to re-do them.

It's actually not that hard to do - the only thing that needs to change is the leaderboard scoring system, not the event itself or any kind of checkpoint. Introduce a scoring system where additional points aren't counted if they were obtained after x hours. That will reward players optimizing strategies to be as fast as possible, reward smart and fast decision-making in an event where you need to make a lot of them, and also it will encourage playing as 4 actual players instead of alts. It will maintain competitivity, have a decent learning curve as event goes on and would make a general better experience for all 4 players in a healthy duration of game time. It still allows players to go as far as possible even if they don't score extra since the event goes on forever with more rewards, it doesn't change the event itself. I've asked for the same thing in 2022 here though so I don't know if they're going that direction. @Kyu Is there any plan to make co-op event competitivity a healthier and more enjoyable endeavor ?

You can still do that though, for any other items. I feel like Doubles in PokeMMO is in this awkward spot where it borrows core gameplay mechanics from different formats. It seems hard to agree on what should be the PokeMMO Doubles experience because of this - and this discussion is nice to have. The flashing mechanic, even if "fan-made", does make sense, for King's Rock and Quick Claw it gives more autonomy to the player, obviously because of the item reveal but also because these 2 items rely on RNG to be good, flashing something that makes strategies % to succeed is essentially removing the "unealthy" and not fun to play against aspect of gambling by making the risks of that gambling known - since Cloyster nerf, we generally accept them as it's not super strong. Flashing is a good mechanic for that reason (nerfing uncompetitive strategies while allowing their niche usage), I think, and maybe the discussion should stay on whether the unealthiness of Covert Mantle is resolved by that mechanic or if it shall be resolved in another way, but from the arguments people brought up on the effects of it, it does "nerf" the unealthy part of the item while keeping its main use. I think the arguments in favor of "no flashing" should indeed be arguments on why this item is healthy as is or unhealthy for the metagame at all.

Just learn to read messages before reacting to them. Literally all my interventions here talk about this specific interaction. This is an assumption of IA behavior that if, even true, still remain the problem of the inconsistency of the behavior. Maybe Whimsicott can survive a Seed Flare and we're assuming IA sometimes does Seed Flare because it wants specifically to break sash with 1HP remaining, so what of other Focus Sash pokemons that you cannot escape the RNG of undecisive IA with super specific spreads ? I do not think IA always wants to do max damage, for example if you use Air Balloon Heatran, Shaymin will use Seed Flare instead of Air Slash to break the Air Balloon immunity. In the end, we can always try to assume what is IA behavior but the point remains that it will always be through an un-intuitive process that should not be a part of strategy-making. The game needs to show clearly what is the challenge you are facing and these things don't help it and are unwanted, even if in the end we find the pattern it's not fun, because we want the thing to give us a challenge that mimicks what a smart player would do (for example, consistently use the best move adapted to the situation, and not 30% of the time) so we can try find ways to outsmart it. Outsmarting technicalities in IA code especially that deal with RNG are just the most boring thing ever.

Yes, that is what we eventually end up doing adapting pokemon order and all but we couldn't avoid not using sash and that would be fine if IA would 100% Seed Flare on it because then we would have understood some intent about how to handle the raid (the game design saying us clearly : you will be punished using sash). Instead, it just says to us contradictory messages (sometimes AI react one way or another with same situation) that are frustrating to deal with and that we took for simply part of the experience (this feeling of "they added RNG difficulty" inherited from past events). It's better to know from your perspective that this issue falls on IA and isn't an intended design choice though (intently having Seed Flare proc % of time under same condition is a super bad design). Thank you for taking the time explaining your process designing these. Please work towards making these raids a permanent feature that we can all appreciate without a time limit. No, IA choosing Seed Flare over Air Slash on a Whimsicott 50% of time has nothing to do with damage calculations. I have no idea why you are trying to explain something that is irrelevant here. The problem in this context lies in the AI choosing to do different moves in same situation - ideally, it should always recognize it is not gonna OHKO the sash pokemon and do the according better move (Seed Flare in this situation). Or always do Air Slash or always something else it doesn't matter. The indecisive behavior makes any strategy-making a bit frustrating, especially when it takes time to figure out exactly what is triggering the different behavior when it is not explainable by normal pokemon battle standards (it's not intuitive to know what's wrong with what you did to have Shaymin use a grass move on a x4 resistant pokemon).

I agree but then I don't think you've read the message above where I mention which RNG part of the raid I found problematic - Shaymin selecting Seed Flare as move when efforts were made during teambuilding to use pokemons that do not trigger AI to do it (unless for some reason it is holding Focus Sash and then it becomes a coin flip). If "adaptability" is not being able to use Focus Sash, the most useful and common item to gain value from pokemons surviving as you say, then I don't know if it's well designed that RNG punishes the attempt at gaining value. All in all, most players will have different experiences since everyone use different pokemons because we have different resources and this is probably an unwanted AI behavior that procced for some reason but I wanted to know if it was designed that way intentionally (% chance of Seed Flare on sash pokemons that are always killed with no Seed Flare without sash). I also think it may be a case of tunneling vision from both players and designer - we found a way to not proc Seed Flare at all (if no mons are holding sash) while you designed for players to try to get around it selecting moves, playing with survivability and not during teambuilding. It would be fun and valid if the drawback of our strategy had "fair" RNG as drawback (something we can understand and know what risk we take) but the drawback here was purely random and made no sense and felt unfair. Adapting to something you do not understand is not very fun when IA just doesn't follow the basic behaviors of a pokemon battle and is random (you can't learn from what reacts differently with the exact same settings).

Okay ? I mean I'm just making a feedback of my experience of the raid, I generally enjoyed doing raids overall, but I think it could be better and I'm sharing the aspects of the raid I didn't like. Usually devs are using some RNG elements to "balance" difficulty of boss battles such as Halloween Pumpking, where they add layers of RNG whenever players find reliable strategies to farm Goodie bags so it regulates a bit the acquisition of it. Most of the times it feels "unfair" because the "nerf" on the useful mechanic is nerfed through RNG - sometimes it will work, sometimes it will not (or sometimes it will work less efficiently etc). It feels annoying to play but since it's a grind it's eventually ok because there is incentive to repeat battle, it's a farm, in the end we don't actually care of the actual fight being 100% fair to play. But raid battles aren't a "grind" or a "farm" in the same way that Halloween Boss is, it is actual PvE content that feels interesting to play together, are nice challenges. And I feel like using RNG the same way than Halloween boss (making something strategically demanding but should work having % of suceeding) to alterate simple mechanics (such as use of Focus Sash item) is NOT a good way to go for the raids. I have no idea if the issue I raised is actually intentionnal or not though because as we all know, this is BugMMO. If @Rachecan enlighten us on that specific thing and on the vision they have on difficulty balance through "unfair" RNG for raids.

I also think Seed Flare RNG (context for everyone : when a pokemon holds Focus Sash, even if it resists grass x4 and usually is killed by AI with any super effective / neutral move, the AI has like 50% chance of hitting Seed Flare on that pokemon to break Sash. I have no idea of actual chances but in my experience we reran 50% of our runs because of that, while changing the Sash pokemon so it's not really a matter of species) was the only thing that felt "unfair" in this raid for multiple reasons : - Choosing pokemons that will not trigger Seed Flare is ALREADY a limitation in the strategy (so it feels unfair when it uses that move when you specifically chose pokemon to not deal with it) - The 1 item clause is also ALREADY a limitation (only 1 pokemon can hold Focus Sash so you shouldn't nerf it more it feels unfair since we play by the rules) - RNG obviously matters a lot in these raids but most of the times it's """fair""" or along the premises of a pokemon battle, here it doesn't feel fair at all because the Seed Flare just happens or don't while 1) limited your teambuilding around not triggering it and 2) rerunning just because of something that can happen or not is dumb when it's not because of a failed or not optimal strategy - but because of the use of 1 item that is super useful in general and fair to use within the difficulty of the raid. "Punishing" the use of that item through RNG is stupid and RNG should never be the thing that balance difficulty. If you don't want us to use Sash in this raid, introduce a mechanic where it punishes the use of Sash and let us find ways to go around it. But being forced to go through RNG is bad and feels bad to play.

Now that I have devs attention, please add ANY fishing encounter here so we can fish in the most relaxing place ever

That would be kinda useless since the only incentive to re-play raids is helping your friends complete it (so you're already in a link not matchmaking). This suggestion however is super good to improve the issue at hand https://forums.pokemmo.com/index.php?/topic/186222-instanceraid-ready-check-concepts/

Welp, when sarcasm is believable, I guess it shows this community embraced these arguments to the core.

So true! OP is just mad he isn't a VETERAN gamer like patrouski I pray every single day for a game with only the highly skilled professionals they are the only ones that can actually enjoy the complexity of this game. Don't ever dare trying to play this Pokemon game if you think this is just a game. This is serious adult shit.

It evolves Eevee into Wisheon duh

No, there are not missing points, once again, you're portraying the criticism as people "complaining" of whatever difficulty/grind, this is not the issue. The demand is less limited content in the form of raids / and others FOMO-based content and more permanent features and content that everyone can play and enjoy. Your reaction ("people is getting used to get everything served") is a (childish) interpretation of that demand whose reasons go beyond personal greed and that you cannot seem to hear or understand. I expext grind on a MMO-RPG but I do not expect an increase in limited content that capitalizes in FOMO more and more. This is NOT a MMO standard but just bad game design and ethic. If you are unbothered by this ethic because the way you play the game allows it, it's fine, but don't reduce criticism as people who are "missing the point".

Nah, it is valid, these werent the only cases and not particularly "bugs" or "exploits" just very effective strategies. PokeMMO have been doing that for a while and Halloween boss is probably the biggest example known for that every year. I don't want to sound rude with this, but who is the real loser when what you say is basically "I am proud to be addicted to this game" ? All the arguments you say comes from the position of a player that accepted mentally that when he's going to play this game, he's gonna have to prepare beforehand any event to play the new content that is also limited and exclusive sometimes and actually find this gameplay fun because woohoo all the efforts didn't go to waste. There is a fundamental divergence of opinions regarding raids criticism in this community and it's not a question of which players are lazy or complain or whatever, it's a question of who is fine with the mental burden of limited content or not. Seems like you are and it's fine. Don't paint others as players who are missing on something or just too dumb to not breed pokemons. They just are not fine with this. There actually exists a game proposition where raids are not a content limited in time and are actually end-game content that everyone can reach and play and toy with. It is clearly not what devs have been offering so far. They did say (for more than a year now) that they justify the limited content behind "its a preview of the actual thing" but now that they added species that are tied to the exclusive limited thing we know that is not true. This should be fair to criticize aswell.