Xivv

I think we should work towards having a new seasonal tournament event. The automated tournament system can really afford a great opportunity to limit time investment by staff to make this event a reality. There could also be a theme to help guide prizes. How I would foresee this happening?
 
32-man qualifying events (2 per week x8 weeks, make sure to have rotating days and times to accommodate different time zones, emphasis on weekends)
1st Place: Invite + RP 2nd Place: Invite 3rd/4th: Reserve  
32 man finale (in-person, double-elimination)
1st: First choice Shiny Pokemon + RP + Champion Signature 2nd: Second choice Shiny Pokemon + RP 3rd: Third choice Shiny Pokemon + RP  
Prize options: Three top tier prize Shiny Pokemon. I don't even know what these would be today, options might include: Volcarona, Rotom-Wash/Mow, Milotic, Scizor, Chansey, or to a lesser extent Salamence, Dragonite, Tyranitar, Breloom, and Skarmory.
 
Seasonal tournament events are always a great way to reward the competitive community and build interest in the game. Streamers record matches and post them on their respective streaming/video platforms and that is free advertisement. It also shows a healthy, active game that attracts more players. In-person events while taxing on staff, are also a throwback to an older time that might attract older players that want to be seen. It would also attract older players that want attention and fame. 
 
We can then recreate this format for other tiers during future seasons.
 

Hi, so there is a good explanation for this.
 
Almost all hats have something called a 'Hair Mask' .
The Hair Mask is made up of magenta colored pixels surrounding the hat.
Any pixels of hair underneath the mask is told to render as transparent - this is done to maximize compatibility among all hairstyles, and to make things look 'clean'.
By 'compatibility', I mean that players are able to equip the hat without the hairstyle they are using needing to be swapped out due to pixels being cut off, or things looking particularly messy etc.
 
Here is an example of a hair mask:
 

 
As you can see, it has a particular cut off point around the ears, and also cover the face.
This is also the case for the Jester Hat you are using above.
 
The issue here is that the Cursed Mask is categorized as a 'Hairstyle' rather than a hat.
The reason for this is because in its initial design it was much larger, and when the player faced forward, if it was categorized as a hat its pixels would have overlapped the hair when facing forward (which would look very weird, because of course if the character is facing away, the hair should be in front of a mask on the characters face).
 
As such, it is being affected by the Hair Mask on the Jester Hat.
 
In the more modern revision of the Cursed Mask, it has been consolidated down, and it's now possible to categorize it as a 'Hat', as intended.
 
However I have been requesting this change for some years now, and it seems it has been lost on the backburner, so I'll try and poke the relevant people to get it changed.

Let me start off by saying that the PvP update about a year ago was a good step towards the right direction. The effectiveness of the update can be seen that it resulted in people playing Underused and Neverused tiers at least sometimes, which is something that before never happened before. In addition, the inclusion of Doubles to matchmaking has been successful for the most part.
 
The problem with the Matchmaking system is that it is still not rewarding enough. To be honest, it's not even close. In addition, the foundation of PokeMMO economics are broken or at the very least unfair to competitive players. The casuals (or "farmers") are the suppliers and competitive players are the consumers. The problem is that for the most part, this works only in one way. For a healthy MMO economy, both of these groups have to have something that the other group may desire in order to make the endgame economy balanced. The problem is that competitive players have no commodity to sell to the casuals. The seasonal vanities are untradable, the vanity prizes are untradable, the shiny prizes are untradable, even the budget comps from matchmaking rewards are untradable. Everything that is tradable from the matchmaking rewards are something that the casual players could already get with minimal effort, besides PvP Mystery Boxes and Battle Point purchasable items which are pretty much the only exception to the rule I'm saying right now. (And ironically the people desiring the Battle Point prize items are other PvP players). And what comes to tournaments, the only tradable commodity is the Reward Point prize reward which even though is nice and useful is definitely not fair in terms of difficulty-to-reward, considering how difficult it is to win 64+ player tournaments against the best PvP players in the game (unless you have thousands of hours of experience).
 
In my opinion, the fix for the economy would be to have more competitively obtainable prizes that are 1) desirable 2) unobtainable by the non-PVP playerbase with minimal effort. This would balance out the economy by making the demand two-way and thus make it more fair for competitive players. It is important that it is viable to increase your wealth by both playing casually and also by playing PvP events. Currently it is (still) not that way. It is quite saddening to see that most competitive players are getting resources by selling their old time limited vanities because these are the only commodities the casual playerbase is interested of buying from competitive players. This is why we need something else to sell to casuals - if tradable shinies are completely off-limits it can be useful tradable items (such as shiny charms) to tradable desired vanities, for example. This way the casuals would supply competitive players with competitive Pokemon/breeders/useful battle items and the competitive players would supply the casual playerbase with desired items and vanities. I think this would highly balance out the PokeMMO economy by making the demand two-way. Looking forward to hear your opinions.