Charmic

I absolutely adore the whole Giratina fight and I think that it definitely adds to the experience of the original stories to attempt to return the sort of specialness the original games had before the addition of PokeMMO elements that made it easier like the GTL. Well, I say I adore it but it's more of an intense loathing at this point, because god damn if this fight isn't actually the most obnoxious fight in the game, and for one reason. It takes SO long to get back to Giratina. LIke, 5 minutes of redoing puzzles and making sure you know where you're going. I can absolutely understand why people hate Sinnoh and why so many people say the Distortion World was more of a pain and made the experience worse. If you just teleported us to Giratina straight from Spear Pillar after reaching it, this would literally fix the entire experience. Unless I'm missing something, there's no easy way to get back. Please, devs, add this, if even only this. I beg. If I'm missing a teleport to Giratina fight I will weep.

I enjoy the concept of having permanent decoration around but I think it could definitely use a rework. In multiple towns, the combination of Christmas decor and NPCs definitely gets in the way and makes me not want to have it around anymore. Maybe creating new areas in the outer areas of maps/reworking maps to move stuff around would be beneficial to making decorations a permanent feature? Also, using the event locations for something is a great idea. Maybe not something like the Hall of Origin or Sinjoh Ruins or any other small island given their size but I think it'd be a really interesting concept to explore if the devs started introducing new methods of making money or new Pokemon spawn chances with different held items or moves to try and make PokeMMO stand out and have many different unique concepts to explore that are built on top of what is as of right now a relatively basic and normal foundation of regular Pokemon games with incredibly few alterations. Definitely a good shot. I hope they see this.

I realise I made a mistake above by saying that the Premium Lures are only available via paying, which I kind of later disproved but I'll redo that point and say that not putting it directly in a shop is making contest entry mandatory for non-paying players to get it without relying on other players which not only makes the method of receiving it highly convoluted but also ends up yet again removing part of what makes PokeMMO special in that you can play it however you want, and forcing players to do one specific thing that's so secretly hostile and so desperately begs for your money is simply a vile way of making someone play and a terrible way of making players happy with the game as they'll feel limited to their options. That's not something you want to be represented in a fucking MMO, of all things. But what do I know. This is a very surface-level view. My play time on PokeMMO doesn't go over probably 70 hours. I've been playing for a week and I've not spent anything yet. Take my view with a nice, chunky mound of salt.

I think it matters less whether it is pay to win, or if it matters that it's pay to win. Personally, I would call it pay-to-win, because you end up gaining an advantage due to the paid aspect of the game. Cosmetically, obviously you don't. But as for the recent addition of Lures and obviously the Ocarinas existing, the ability to make all that cash nigh instantly using vouchers, etc., that certainly would make PokeMMO behave like a pay-to-win game, by the very definition of the phrase. You're paying and you're winning in the case where an unpaid player would find it significantly harder to win. Again though, what really matters here isn't that PokeMMO is pay-to-win. A lot of people tend to ignore the concept of whether or not it even matters to be pay-to-win. Usually, this doesn't end up mattering because lots of those sorts of games step over the line heavily and are intensely pay-to-win. But what about games that follow similar concepts of 'partial' paying to win, as someone else in this thread said? Take, for example, a game like Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go allows you to purchase Poke Balls, Incense, Lucky Eggs, etc. en masse so long as you're a whale ready to splurge on those sorts of items. The same is true of PokeMMO, except in the form of RP Vouchers. Both games follow this partial format but there's a very key difference between the two games. Pokemon Go has a 'set' way to progress. You catch Pokemon, with Poke Balls you get from Pokestops. There's two limiting factors there, one being how many Pokemon or the quality of which spawn around you, and the amount of Pokestops around an individual player. PokeMMO does not suffer from this issue. This is due to the numerous ways of making money, as seen on various guides on these forums and ingame. You could redo Unova, breed, farm Berries, rerun Gyms, rerun E4, participate in tournaments, flip, etc. and there's no limiting real world factor like money or time involved here. The way time is actually removed from the equation here is because flipping is possible, and there's already a complex and thriving economy at play. In Pokemon Go, there's a closed system and everything is made by you. In PokeMMO, if you really wanted to, or if you had the luck, you could find a Shiny or a high IV wild Pokemon and make just as much as someone making a single transaction on the game, potentially even more if you find a rare Shiny or something. When you have multiple players of a game able to create a financial ecosystem for other players to manipulate and benefit off of, the whole concept of pay-to-win becomes irrelevant unless the rewards presented by pay-to-win are so absurd that they knock the unpaid system out of balance. You can get practically everything without having to donate a single dime to PokeMMO, whereas with Pokemon Go, in order to get certain rare Pokemon locked behind Community Day passes or whatever, you might have to. The difference between having an open and fully functional economy to new players and being a closed economy game where the only real form of 'monetary' transactions is between you, Niantic and maybe if you're lucky any local players is staggering. That major difference means that whilst PokeMMO actually is technically pay-to-win, it doesn't represent it in the traditional, malicious form that modern entertainment companies like to present it as and instead portrays pay-to-win as a much more diluted form of the equivalents in other games with a lot less strength towards it. However, one change that I am absolutely against is the idea of Lures, specifically the Premium ones. Many players have brought this up in their comments on this thread and some are defending it but in my opinion, this is exactly the sort of path that modern pay-to-win tactics evolved through and used to manipulate their audiences out of money. My key issue with it is that it relies on the usage of monetary transactions for Premium Lures to exist. Personally, I would have literally 0 issues with it if they threw it in a department store in Celadon or something and priced it as it is on GTL right now. There would be nothing wrong with it and it would effectively remove the necessary donation requirement to receive it. However, because this isn't a thing, the price of Premium Lures, and their availability, is entirely locked behind a paywall which means that ordinary players have no method of receiving it other than from other players who donated. Whilst I did go on and on about the benefits of a large, thriving economy in that long drawn out paragraph up top, what I also mentioned is important for PokeMMO's continued lack of malice via currency is that paid players don't have a lot of swing. By that, I mean that they don't have a foothold of monetary power within the community where they are absolutely superior to the average unpaid player. An unpaid player is still capable of achieving, say, a Psychic Bird Mask, same as a paid player. The paid player might get it quicker, but they'll both very likely get it regardless. When it comes to something like Premium Lures, that's not a possibility. You're denying free players an item and instead placing control of supply of that item to a paying player. That is an incredibly dangerous and close-minded approach to this situation, because what the developers are welcoming here is the concept of exclusivity among paid players. Yes, free players could get it if they saved up enough, but only on the GTL. They're relying on paid players for access to that item, which makes it a very pay-to-win item in the more modern sense of evil business practices. You're preventing everyday players from receiving an item for the first time and that is completely overruling any previous notions that the developers may have created by making everything possible to get without paying, no matter how tedious or boring or timewasting it was to get. It was possible, but now that it's not, a precedent has been set that states that free players don't deserve the same kind of treatment as a paid player. People might argue that this applies to RP Vouchers as well, and whilst it does to an extent, there are also other ways to receive RP, specifically through contests. Those happen literally all the time. So long as you have even an ounce of skill or experience at competitive battling or even just catching Pokemon for the PvE events, you're guaranteed a good chance to get RP and a good chance to get it at least once given how often the events are. Whilst the RP can of course then be translated into Premium Lures, that isn't the point. A direct purchase is the only way to receive an object like Premium Lures which are so useful and are heavily sought after for the additional effects which they produce, as compared to something as simple as a way to fly without a Pokemon in your party dedicated to it (Fly Ocarina) or an easier way to EV train (Training Kit thingy). I also have to question the thought process of the developers who decided to apparently lock away certain starters and Pokemon behind this new Premium Lure. That's a foul idea and it should absolutely never be promoted or replicated again. You're removing content that was present for god knows how long simply to try and source another avenue for donations, but all this seems to tell us is that you're desperate enough for donations to start removing aspects of what made PokeMMO special and instead having to lock them behind a paywall instead of producing any new and interesting content to add to the RP Shop to keep players interested and willing to pay more. I doubt that there really was much good thought lying behind the concept when it was proposed, and I completely and utterly despise whoever decided that this was a good idea. What a joke. TLDR: yeah pokemmo's not really p2w but it's getting kinda funky recently

I'd also like to add here (given that there appears to be no edit function as far as I can see) that apparently the Town Map seems to bug out and you have to relog to "refresh" the status of an Alpha, or at least that's what I'm seeing in chat. The introduction of that Alpha news feed would hopefully solve that issue as well, as Town Map would become redundant and then you wouldn't have to introduce that message on there. Of course, it still might help people out if the sprite was left on the map screen so maybe you shouldn't remove that but what do I know.

So, we all (hopefully) know that the Town Map shows you where swarms are in each region. However, if you pay any attention to global chat (which I'm starting to see why many don't), during an alpha, you will literally get hundreds of messages along the lines of "Alpha check" "Is there an alpha?" "What's alpha mon?" and so on. These are the sorts of people evidently too lazy or too busy to check their Town Maps for literally 2 minutes or have the reading comprehension of a 2 year old and can't physically understand the words "ended" if they aren't literally the only thing in chat after having asked 4 or 5 times. I've already seen that one suggestion to add a Discord channel for alphas, and I assume that will be implemented at some point, because...why wouldn't it? It doesn't really harm anyone, isn't exceptionally difficult to create something for by the sounds of it and it just works nicely. However, I don't personally believe that this will solve that constant issue of asking for alphas. There's always going to be that small group that's even too lazy to go on Discord and click 3 buttons to see what an Alpha is. Therefore, I propose the addition of a "bulletin board" at the top of your screen for Alphas. By this, I mean the addition of a rolling text screen that tells you every now and then what swarms are where. That whole rolling text thing would probably mimic what happened for Unova every now and then, where swarms would appear on different routes like in those games and in those inter-route loading screen rooms, there would be that board with the rolling text that tells you that information. Whether or not this would be a difficult function to add in, I'm not really sure. It seems like a useful bit of GUI that wouldn't exactly be difficult to create, given that swarms are visible on Town Map as is. I don't know whether or not it'd be a good idea to have it work multi-regionally so that you can see, for example, alpha Milotic in Hoenn or something, but given that Global chat already calls out alphas like it's the end of the world, I don't see any reason not to. It might also be preferrable to make it toggleable given that not everyone wants that sprawling text to appear on their screen all the time...maybe a hotkey for it to appear, a bit like a "news feed"? This suggestion may end up being impossible or just straight up redundant given the potential creation of an alpha Discord channel, but in the events that something like that doesn't happen, I think it could be an interesting alternative to look into to avoid spam in chats as well as people who can't read. I think it would also be really neat if this showed up on the Unova route loading screen room's billboards, as currently they have no use and display nothing either, so it just adds that little bit of functionality back into the game. I dunno. Maybe it's impossible. But it's a neat idea nonetheless.