Rache

Evil devs were the real raid bosses all along.

There's a non-0 chance that we'll consider this further down the line, but it's a not a small hassle unfortunately. It's a colossal amount of work as it requires redrawing hundreds of vanities for every new pose.

Next update the hotkey will display the highest remaining PP of any individual party member instead of adding multiple users together. For why we opted to deduct PP from all of them, the goal was both to drive the Leppa economy and to prevent players from needing to carry Sweet Scent across their entire party to play optimally. A minor issue is still a flaw that makes the game feel less polished.

This restriction was put in place due to abuse, it was faster to relog than to manually leave a spot to heal while shiny hunting. We don't really want this to be the optimal way to play the game.

This should be resolved next update.

Right now this mostly applies to event boss fights and existing lv100 rematches, but raids are an upcoming feature as well. One of the goals of raids is to give gameplay value to a large variety of species that aren't currently relevant / optimal for anything but that have a combination of traits that makes them stand out. Often this is their ability to do damage, which many of the strongest legendaries do better while also lacking the flaws (usually poor defenses) of their alternatives. While we could simply blacklist them from all content intended to be difficult, this would be disappointing and overall poor game design. I was referring to PvE.

We decided to exclude "uber" legendaries from permanent ownership due to the significant power gap between them and their non-legendary alternatives. This doesn't really matter in a single-player game, but this is a setting where optimal team building is encouraged and rewarded. Having options that are strictly better than almost everything else negatively impacts the variety of species and strategies which are effective enough to be considered viable. On top of hurting variety, if we balance difficult postgame content around these legendaries, it becomes harder than intended for players who aren't using them. If we don't balance around them, it becomes too easy for players who do. Both of these outcomes are detrimental to the game. We may consider alternative ways to obtain them temporarily, but not permanently.

Good question. Can't promise a "Gold server" though.

Wonder Guard was weakened due to how effective it was in a variety of cheesy AI abuse strategies which were detrimental to the health of the game. The alternative requirement for each strong postgame trainer to have 5-6 mons that can deal with it is unreasonable when designing battles so we opted to nerf the ability instead. Without a significant AI rework, it won't be returning to full strength. The restriction doesn't apply in PvP where it's still infinite. Splitting the ability's effectiveness depending on whether you're facing a storyline or postgame trainer is needlessly confusing though, so we would prefer not to do that.

The cap is higher than each leader's level to allow less skilled players to grind past their problems. Although the game is intentionally harder than the originals, we don't want to make it so difficult that players are expected to hit a wall they can't overcome without changing their team. Usually this is so frustrating that they'll quit instead. If you want to make subsequent regions feel as challenging as your first, it would be best to avoid pulling out high leveled mons until you reach an area with wild encounters that are on par with them. That should give you the experience you're looking for, the average player running a team of 6 that they started using at "natural" levels shouldn't be hitting the caps without excessive grinding.

Is it not more selfish to want to remove customization options that other people enjoy? Mods refresh and enhance the experience of playing the game for a large number of players, we have no intention of taking them away.

Yes, they will include other drops as well.

CNY raids were an early preview, they will be returning as a permanent feature with a variety of rotating bosses for each ✫ tier in a future update.

The intentions behind the harder storylines were to make them a (generally) more enjoyable experience for the game's older audience compared to the base games, as well as to allow us to create harder postgame content without it being as big of a difficulty spike. Struggling a bit in the leadup to it better prepares players to be able to overcome it. While we could introduce an easy mode, it's better suited for single-player games. This is an MMO with an economy shared by all players, so an easier setting would need to be less rewarding to prevent it from becoming optimal over normal mode. This puts less skilled players at an even bigger disadvantage when they reach the postgame as they would be lacking in both the skills and the resources needed to beat more difficult content. We'd prefer to use the storyline as an opportunity to make players better at the game instead, aiming for a "challenging but fair" level of difficulty for less experienced players.

We're not interested in introducing fakemon-esque non-canon abilities or moves to existing species, we try to stay as faithful to the mainline games as we reasonably can. Directly selling shinies would also immediately kill hunting for them as an endgame goal. Their desirability comes from their rarity and the effort required to obtain them.