PrinceDaisuke

Join me in congratulation to team [OpTc] Optic, our Team of Year 2022!
During 2022 they went to impressive 4 final matches which secured their win. Good luck in 2023 edition as well!
 

  Name of the Team Champions 2nd Place Semifinal 3rd Round 2nd Round 1st round Won fights Lost fights Penalties Points nr of TTs Points / TT 1 [OpTc] Optic 1 3 0 1 2 5 51 42 0 35 12 2.92 2 [SLSY] SoulSociety 2 1 0 0 7 2 59 36 0 34 12 2.83 3 [VGC] Vermilion Golden Champions 2 0 1 2 4 3 55 40 0 32 12 2.67 4 [Aw] Asgard Warriors 1 1 1 3 2 4 55 35 0 29 12 2.42 5 [HDLM] SonsOfTheDeath 1 0 3 0 4 4 46 38 0 26 12 2.17 6 [SIÂ] Sic Itur Ad Astra 1 0 2 2 3 3 51 33 0 25 11 2.27 7 [LO] Romantic 1 1 1 1 0 4 34 23 0 23 8 2.88 8 [VOW] Solemn Promise 0 1 2 3 2 3 48 33 0 23 11 2.09 9 [läva] läva 1 1 0 2 2 6 44 35 0 23 12 1.92 10 [LØRÐ] TheLordsOfTheHax 0 1 1 2 4 2 35 34 0 19 10 1.90 11 [EØS] EagleOtlawSports 1 0 0 3 3 3 29 30 0 19 10 1.90 12 [K̇ÏNG] Kingdom Of Doom 0 1 0 2 3 5 29 33 0 14 11 1.27 13 [HØRÎ] Culto del Victomy 0 0 3 0 2 5 31 32 0 14 10 1.40 14 [NORE] NoRematch 0 0 3 0 1 2 28 20 0 13 6 2.17 15 [VØS] Vila Oculta Do Sal 1 0 0 0 3 7 27 27 0 13 11 1.18 16 [BR] Brasil 0 0 1 3 2 6 30 33 0 12 12 1.00 17 [ZËRØ] Elitewarriors 0 0 0 4 4 4 34 29 0 12 12 1.00 18 [SÃT] 𝐒Ã𝐓Ü𝐑Ñ𝐄 0 0 2 0 2 3 26 19 0 10 7 1.43 19 [CØRË] CoreSeven 0 1 0 1 1 5 19 23 0 10 8 1.25 20 [BSDO] Bushido 0 1 0 0 2 3 16 17 0 9 6 1.50 21 [NazC] NAZARICK COMFORT 0 0 1 2 0 6 22 23 0 8 9 0.89 22 [RyFu] RapidashYFurio 0 0 0 2 4 0 22 20 0 8 6 1.33 23 [LÂB] LabËxperiments 0 0 1 1 1 4 17 22 0 7 7 1.00 24 [Líve] Little Veterans 0 0 0 2 2 4 19 23 0 6 8 0.75 25 [NoHa] NoHands 0 0 0 2 2 2 18 18 0 6 6 1.00 26 [Kult] Team Kult 0 0 0 1 4 7 16 35 0 6 12 0.50 27 [PÖTÖ] Potoapapacho 0 0 0 2 1 3 18 15 0 5 6 0.83 28 [LÄB] LabËxperiments 0 0 0 1 2 0 10 11 0 4 3 1.33 29 [Fv] Fv 0 0 1 0 0 0 7 5 0 4 1 4.00 30 [CøT] CaøsTone 0 0 0 2 0 2 9 9 0 4 4 1.00 31 [LAB] LabExperiments 0 0 1 0 0 2 10 8 0 4 3 1.33 33 [MÅD] MÅDÏEVÃL 0 0 0 0 3 4 13 17 0 3 7 0.43 34 [RMW] RedmarkWarriors 0 0 0 1 1 9 16 26 0 3 11 0.27 35 [ENIX] Phoenix 0 0 0 0 2 0 6 6 0 2 2 1.00 36 [Cøld] FreezingColdRose 0 0 0 1 0 1 5 7 0 2 2 1.00 37 [SêVí] SEVIIChampions 0 0 0 1 0 2 7 8 0 2 3 0.67 38 [KZ] KingZone 0 0 0 1 0 2 6 6 0 2 3 0.67 39 [XĐ] XĐ 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 3 0 1 1 1.00 40 [RøNê] XxRøcknêrsxX 0 0 0 0 1 1 3 6 0 1 2 0.50 41 [sÇw] WïnGardiünLëvïø 0 0 0 0 1 1 5 4 0 1 2 0.50 42 [RûbY] RUBY 0 0 0 0 1 2 3 9 0 1 3 0.33 43 [Syns] Sayajins 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 1 0.00 44 [FARQ] TheFarquaads 0 0 0 0 0 1 11 7 0 0 1 0.00 45 [TWST] Stratégie 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 46 [VVVV] Veni Vidi Vici Vixi 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 47 [CÄØS] Reyes del Caos 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 5 0 0 2 0.00 48 [MGRB] MagmaReborn 0 0 0 0 0 3 2 4 0 0 3 0.00 49 [Pâst] ShadowOfThePast 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 50 [LËM] Simply Lëmonadë 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 5 0 0 2 0.00 51 [NøS] NotSurrender 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 52 [RISÉ] The Uprising 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 6 0 0 2 0.00 53 [ZØNE] KILLERSZØNE 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 4 0 0 2 0.00 54 [RTRB] Reino del trébol 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 5 0 0 2 0.00 57 [MR] HelloMister 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 0 1 0.00 58 [GNBK] BLOODNIGHT 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 59 [TFBO] TheFishingBoiiis 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 60 [Oa] Original 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 1 0.00 61 [PVPB] PVPTrainingBase 0 0 0 0 0 4 4 8 0 0 4 0.00 62 [LÔST] LôstGôds 0 0 0 1 0 0 4 2 0 0 1 0.00 63 [BanD] TheBand 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 0 0 1 0.00 64 [BDKS] BladeDarkness 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 1 0.00 65 [RHT] Rare Hunter Team E-Sports 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 1 0.00
 
 
What an ending!

Till the very end, [SLSY] Soul Society had chance to win a Team of Year 2022 title. Im very excited for 2023 edition and I wish luck to all teams.
Statistics into massive All-Time-Table soon as well as note about finalists.
 
 
A big thank you for all the teams- those who just start their journey in TT, as well as those old teams who are putting effort into this tournament since years. Thank you for being part of it.
 
 
 
I would want to say thank you to staff members, both those active and not who has helped me in 2022. 
@Cosmooth @Shadow @DeusBruno @Elizn @AustinMMO @KaynineXL @Revz @Edwardinho @Seth @Aidenjc @MPDH and @BaliAds
 
Thank you for being part of Team Tournament.
And see you all, players, in 2023!

Machamp is finding some difficulty navigating a tier with Spiritomb and Dusclops, as they are easy switches that result in both Flame Orb and hazard damage. Both also have very little pressure from the rest of the meta, since they're incredibly bulky and can maintain their longevity with Rest or Pain Split. 
 
I feel like Feraligatr is more concerning right now due to its versatility, as it can beat its own checks with a different set and scouting this can result in a loss due to momentum. 

PoryZ gone from UU 💪

I'm pretty excited about the changes. Probably inevitable with all of the HA action happening. Stay tuned. 

Not targetting anyone, just quoting the information.
 
Our usage system is just horrible. The UU metagame has developped for the past 2 months around the latest update features (Empoleon Roost, Espeon Magic Bounce, Machamp Drain/Bullet Punch, etc.). All the UU/NU movements are in direct response to that UU development that is now thrown out the window with the departure of Empoleon and Espeon. How can we possibly justify 7 usage movements based on data that is now obsolete. It doesn't make sense to have UU/NU movements happen at the same time as OU/UU movements. We always end up in these situations awful situations:
Heracross goes up to OU, next month Gligar falls to NU, next month Heracross returns to UU, next month Gligar returns to UU. Jellicent going up to OU at the same time as Azumarill goes down to NU. It's not a surprise that Azumarill returns to UU the following month after its biggest check leaves the tier. It's plain stupid to have all this yoyoing going on. Tiers are supposed to reflect what is currently going on in each metagame and that's not what is going on in PokeMMO. There are countless solutions to this issue that have been documented, analysed and discussed over the past years. Please just change this awful system already. Any system that will desynchronise 1) OU/UU usage movements & UU/NU usage movements and 2) move up & move down cutoff points will solve the problem. It's really simple and requires 0 work for staff. 

I wanted to add one thing to the issues this unstability cause, it is that we aren't playing a PvP simulator but a MMO with players having sometimes limited resources. It may not strike to the old players, but getting into PvP - or just wanting to try a new tier - will be more costly than ever, to keep up with whatever is available or not, what you need to answer a threat that will probably be gone after a month and come back because of wanky usage. It is already the case but it will become bigger issue with HAs ; there is a world where overpowered mons can stay two months in a tier because players don't have money for whatever HA patch at 2M to get its usage up. 
 
Tl;Dr vicious circle where fewer players actually play and what they play are limited to their resources and not always meta. 

I won't touch on the tiering system as everything said here represents my position on it.
I'd also like a reponse to that as the thread has been posted 20 hours ago and this - your game's balance - should be your top priority, not whatever reskin of whichever of your 2 events you choose to do for phase 3 of your reskin marathon.

The game won't find balance until legendaries are added. Pokemon was built by people likely more competent than you and me with them in mind.
Certain tiers will always disproportionately favor a certain archetype until we get the proper tools to balance them. 
I read a response from Kyu earlier that confirmed that we were never getting "the most powerful legendaries". What about the others? Why do you still have an Ubers tier? We have been strung along for the better part of a decade with the promise of balance.
Now is the time that you turn around and reveal that your priority has always been to string us along with the slowest ever drip-fed content the world of gaming has ever seen. 
I'm torn between a sarcastic "who would've guessed?" and "it's about time".
What, exactly, are your arguments against the perfectly balanced - non-"powerful" - legendaries, if any? Because I fail to see the issue with implementing the legendary dogs for example right this second, most of the lower-tier legendaries are in fact likely to drop to lower tiers and not even be OU.
You have supposedly been working on implementing legendaries since 2014. If they are not damaging to PvE and are a boon to PvP, what on earth is the hold-up? I have my theories, most of which involve most of the development time being sucked down the drain of server stability and the monitoring of RP-related economy in an effort to accomodate your casual chinese cash cow, but I won't go into another rant inside a rant, I'll respect your time, unlike you.

We've established that your goal is not balance, your goal is preserving the shitshow we have had to deal with for years because you believe it is the best way to keep people interested and to prevent a stale metagame. You are wrong.
What you are doing is shooting yourself in the foot. Because you don't offer the proper tools, instead of several viable archetypes, there is only 1 per tier. That is staleness. That is a game people want to move away from.
Staleness in a player-driven PvP environment isn't broken by drip-fed content, it is broken by player innovation. Why do you think older gens are still popular on showdown?
 
Your concern likely is that legendaries would "break" PvE. Let me be the bearer of good news: not a single person plays PvE pokemon expecting a challenge. You can tune that AI up to the moon and it won't make a difference. You will never offer a challenging PvE experience unless you remove a significantly larger amount of tools available to the player. If that is really something you want to do, take inspiration from rom hacks like Emerald Kaizo, create a nuzlocke mode... in short, do your job. Don't punish PvP players for your lack of imagination in problem-solving PvE problems. 
You tend to respond to players asking for perfectly reasonable things in a know-it-all, condescending way using hasty generalizations, false dilemmas, everything in the book to avoid revealing your roadmap, to the lucky 1% that get a response that is. These are the same players in a community that have been carrying the shit out of your game for a decade and have allowed you to milk an insane amount of money from an IP that isn't yours. Show them some respect. You have enough money to hire a PR rep, do it. I would ask that you also hire additional devs to not have to delay your projects 17 times over the course of 4 months, but you've made quite clear you're afraid the unqualified and uninitiated would immediately start unraveling your spaghetti code.

Rant over, have a good day.

The problem with the 3-months system is that it looks like an ultimate solution to creating all tiers, but it simply never worked for NU. The amount of chaos and unstability the system created for NU has always been overwhelming. That's the reason why TC always tries to artifically create "stability" there by quick banning everything that dares drop to that tier without any test whatsoever. Over the years, I have suggested so many ways to try to improve the tiering system, but all of my suggestions were either shut down or ignored. I came to realise that staff/devs like the 3 months system for two reasons:

1. 3 months = 1 season
Having the main usage movements right when a season ends looks like great game design since it means in theory that throughout a season, a tier shouldn't change. The problem is that tiers are very different and a single solution to everything is pure fantasy. UU is created based on more that 550k duels per months. NU is created based on 8k duels per months. It just doesn't make sense for NU to be created the same way UU is created when the data available for creating these tiers is so high for UU and so low for NU. Considering that Munya announces usage movements 1 week before the end of the third month, it also means that it's only the first 20 days of the third month that determines usage movements. We don't even get 8k UU duels that create NU, only 6k. This means we are seeing mons with 35% win rate rise up to a tier where clearly they are not even viable. Something with so low win rate should not be able to move up and yet that's the case. This is the equivalent of having Flygon (35% win rate) rise up to OU out of nowhere because the data available for creating tiers is so low. 
 
2. Chaos is good
I used to complain a lot about how bad the tiering system was for NU and how much chaos NU had to deal with every season. The answer to my complaints was always the same: "stability = staleness". Staff/Devs don't want lower tiers to stabilize, they embrace the chaos because they associate chaos with keeping the game "interesting". It doesn't surprise me that they intent to add Hidden Abilities progressively. It implies disrupting tiers with chaos and that to the them means keeping the game "interesting". I tried to argue mutliple times that providing stability to tiers means tiers can evolve naturally. That leads to having better tiers and having more informed tiering decisions. When a tier is stable and naturally evolving, it's easier to analyse to impact of adding or removing threats. 
 
We need usage movements to reflect what is happening in each tier and determining usage movements based on 20 days of usage (6k duels) is absolute non sense. That's not enough.
 
I believe the best way to handle usage movements would be with a 2 repetitive months cycle. For a pokemon to drop to a lower tier, that pokemon needs to be below 4% usage two months in a row. For a pokemon to rise to a higher tier, that pokemon needs to be over 5% usage two months in a row. No more first, second or third month. A pokemon that has proven to be worth something in a higher tier, can rise up to that tier every month. We wouldn't have to wait 3 months for every single time. This system also requires no extra work or effort from staff. The data is available in game and no calculations are required. I remember analyzing what the tiers would look like based on that system in 2020/2021; the usage movements would have made more sense and were more dynamic too.
 


Another issue I see coming is the addition of new Regenerator Pokemons. I implore devs to not let that happen. This will kill the competitive scene. I like stall and would love to have more regenerator mons, but in PokeMMO it would be complete madness if we have a 1 hour time limit rule + multiple regenerator mons. Games where players have to make plays to win will result instead in huge stall fest based on that 1 hour time limit rule win condition. I don't know if there are any plans to add more regenerator mons, but if that is the case please reconsider before it's too late. 
 
 
Also, TC needs to do something about UU. Since the addition of P-Z in UU, UU usage dropped from 40-50k duels per months to 8k duels per months. UU used to be played more than NU. Now, NU is played 3 times more than UU. I don't think any tiering decision in the history of the game has ever been this bad. Please just ban P-Z before UU matchmaking dies. The death of UU would also mean the death of NU. There is so much at stake here and TC needs to act. (Plz don't ban me again for disagreeing with TC)

While only a handful of Hidden Abilities and later gen abilities were released recently, it is already clear that the impact they caused to all of the tiers is significant and will be in the future. The lower tiers are currently in an absolute chaos and that is an understatement. The idea of entire tier reset has been throwing around here and there but that discussion can be stopped because today Kyu dropped an absolute bombshell of an update saying new Hidden Abilities will be gradually introduced to the game little by little. While we cannot know the exact frequency how often this will happen, I would still argue this changes everything. PokeMMO's tiering was designed around expecting stability and supporting stability. The usage movements done every 3 months were done so that Pokemon near the cut-off point wouldn't be constantly moved between two tiers every month while people in the lower tiers had to constantly redesign their teams unsure if a Pokemon is going up or down a tier each month. Only exceptions were done monthly if something had suddenly over 6,7% usage in a month to raise a tier or 1,7% usage in a month to lower a tier because this indicated a high likelyhood a Pokemon would be moved in the next 3-month-cycle. This system provided competitive play and tiering needed stability.
 
That stability is gone. Not only does it take months for people to discover the full potential of released Pokemon, every new addition shakes everything even more. Because stability no longer is a reasonable goal for lower tiers in this game, the only reasonable option is to abandon that 3-month system altogether. The tiering moves have to happen monthly for now. It makes no sense people have to play lower tiers knowing that the Pokemon they have to prepare in lower tiers is going to be staple in the higher tiers but due to the 3-month-rule it may take up to 3 months of suffering with a Pokemon that you know you only need to temporarily prepare against. Also it simply leads to very weird looking tiers. You may have some old outdated relics in higher tier while having Pokemon that gained incredible boost with updates in lower tiers and you would have to wait for months for things to stabilize because you cannot really make an argument for a ban with the current tiering policies (looking at you UU Alakazam and "NU" Espeon). These kinds of things take away the whole point of tiering and makes the tiering system look incredibly chaotic and pointless to any competitive player with reasonable experience and also takes away the whole purpose tiers were designed. While we're in this chaotic time (meaning new things coming in constantly), you have to update at least OU tierlist monthly. This would at least start to formulate some kind of a shape to UU tier, which then could potentially create a playable NU tier. Also the amount of data OU matchmaking gives every month is by numbers reasonable enough to make decisions based off on monthly usage.
 
Other issue that needs to be addressed are quickbans. While before in the stable era of tiering, quickbans should be used sparingly because you had to get that certain level of certainty and evaluation of whether a threat is broken not only on paper but also in practice but now we simply don't have that stability to make those assessments. Rather, there are so many potentially broken threats in the metagame that it is almost impossible to create and evaluate a potential suspect test when people are preparing for tons of potentially banworthy things at once. In other words, you cannot tell if a metagame went better during a suspect test if all that was done during that suspect test was focusing some other broken threat more. This kind of a suspect test could indicate a metagame went worse during a suspect test due to more centralized usage, while in reality people were just using more resources to focus on another broken threat, which by looking at the usage would indicate a worse metagame than before. What this all means is that suspect tests during a chaotic period of a metagame can be useless or even counter-productive to the true evaluation of whether a tier has improved due to a ban or not.
 
The solution to this is simply that Tier Council makes difficult decisions they think are right, even if they are made too quickly. If a Pokemon seems too strong for the community and for the Tier Council, it is better to let it go. This all can be revised when a certain level of stability has been reached. But currently we cannot get overly diplomatic about every single Pokemon - if it seems too strong it deserves to be gone. The point of Tier Council is to be competitive experts and to analyze if a Pokemon is too strong for the metagame and can it be reasonably handled, it is not to point out that every 3 months usage will do the work for us. Difficult decisions must be made but in the current state of the game it's better to make a couple of hasty decisions than doing nothing because otherwise the lower tiers will remain in a constant unplayable chaos state.
 

I think every Venu will be running giga drain + weather ball + growth so zong and bat arent safe
but yea if sludge bomb is replaced with earth power rotom heat can manage venu but still it will be tricky to scout all this out without potentially losing a mon

Serperior currently has June usage of 1,20% in OU.
 

 

 
Contrary takes 73,68% of Serp's usage so it's safe to say this usage is after the update and the Overgrow is before the update. By this, it is reasonable to assume post-update Serp's usage for whole June has been 1,2% * 0,7368 = 0,88%. Update was released 24th of June, which means Contrary Serp has been available for 6 days, which is 6/30 days of June so 1/5th of the available days in June. If it is assumed Contrary Serp was available for the whole month, Contrary Serp's usage would have been 4,4%. And this all is also despite the fact that during the event people play matchmaking far less so less usage accounts to the statistics after the event was released, as well as Serp's being less available for less wealthy players due to expenses.
 
TL;DR It is already evident that Serperior is going to OU. Just ban it from the UU in the meantime so people don't have to teambuild against a broken threat that will be guaranteed to leave the tier anyways in a month of two.

This is definitely true, however I somehow can't seem to understand why UU is getting dumpstered while we have to wait for things to go OU by usage. Can't we make Pokemon OU that are going to go OU by usage with almost full certainty? And if in some rare instance we are wrong, then I guess we can let those Pokemon to be tested if they fall below the OU usage. But it feels weird precedent what we're having that before things are going to OU (which depends on the time of release can take multiple months), they are slugged through UU testing while everyone who has played Pokemon for more than 12 ladder games realize there is no way in the universe these Pokemon aren't getting OU usage. Why is UU being treated this horribly?

I think Serp should be banned from UU immediately. Sure, it has some technical counters like Crobat and Mandibuzz but it would centralize an already messed up metagame to a ridiculous extent. Contrary Serp has been OU in Gen 6 and Gen 7, metas with incredibly high power level and it was always limited to its full potential by Chansey/Blissey, yet still was incredibly strong. I think Serp needs those special blob in the tiers to not run over things with minimal effort, or have people dedicate their full teams to make sure this thing just doesn't run them over. I'd argue it's easily Offensive Ubers in UU (sweeps a significant portion of the metagame with little to no effort) but even if that definition was stretched to the max, there is no way you could argue this thing wouldn't be at least unhealthy for teambuilding. 

cya next week

Unfortunately Tomorrow I am leaving the game, wanted to share some of my lately favorite builds before I leave!

I will provide difficulity level (in my opinion) next to every team. (Easy/Medium/Hard)
 
OU:
UU:
NU:
 
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS DONT ASK ME I WONT ANSWER BYE
 
 
 
 
 

Jesus Christ, you guys complain about everything

I thought it would helpful to have those damage (poison, burn, weather, rocks ) percentages show up in the battle chat. It could help in calculating damages.
 
It would make it easier to determine how many more re-entry to rocks you will live or determining how many more turns of poison you will survive.  

2x31, 3x25+  -  290k- natured 
 3x31, 2x25+  - 400k - natured 
 3x31, 3x25+  -  520k - natured 
 2x31, 3x30  -  540k - natured 
 4x31 - 450k - natured 
 
Genderless +100k
Happiness and/or baby pokemon breeds +50k
27+ IVs +20k
29+ IVs +60k
21k genders +40k
9k genders +20k
 

 3x31, 2x30    -  620k- natured 
 4x31, 1x30 - 715k- natured 
 5x31 (including 4x31, 1x0) - 950k- natured 
 
Genderless +200k
Happiness and/or baby pokemon breeds +100k
21k gender +80k
9k gender +40k
 

 0 IVs are counted as another 31 
 All egg moves are free 
 Incense pokemon and/or volt tackle Pikachu - +50% of total cost 
 I can breed an unnatured pokemon for half the price plus extras if needed (eg, gender or happiness/baby pokemon) 
 I'll be more than happy to send you the final 2 pokemon to breed so you can have your own OT. 
 I can breed HA's if you send a starter breeder 
 

Pokemon:
IVs:
Nature:
Gender:
Egg moves:
HA?:
Your OT?: 
 

 510 EVs- 25k 
 510 EVs and level 50- 45k 
 LC EVs- 30k 
50% off if bought with a breed!
 
Training link available.
 

Hope to see you soon!
 
A huge thank you to SupaFlyNinjaGuy who created all the artwork and banners!

This reminds me of 2 years ago when I bet 25m they wouldn't release the matchmaking update on a certain day, and then they did.
 
Maybe it's time for me to make another bet

There's no way you guys fall for the "two weeks" thing for the 3rd time 

Real talk I can feel some serious hype

When you have too many cooks in your kitchen and nothing tastes like you want it to - it is time to hire a chef ezzzz

This game is not structured in a way where we can divvy out work into hyperspecific chunks. All of the developers here wear all the hats they can, because that's what the project has needed up until this point. It allows us to run on a very lean team which is very good at producing results.
 
If we were looking to invest into more software developers for the game, I'd guess it'd take around a year to train someone to fully understand the project like I do. It's pretty big, at over a million lines of code and 40 subprojects atm. And we're kind of picky, in that if we're looking to hire someone to work on the actual product, we don't want a revolving door of useless year 1 CS students touching the codebase with their grubby messy hands.
 
If we did find someone who's both competent and underemployed, I'm pretty sure it'd cost at least $100 if we want them to show up every day. So yeah, it's pretty expensive.
 
I'm sure it does. It annoys me too, I'm tired of working on this patch. But throwing more people at the problem doesn't actually solve this particular situation.
 
When it comes to development, usually goals and their problems can be categorized in one of two ways:
A goal with an objectively correct solution. Like: "Make the skills work like they do in X game." "Make the game run on iOS." "Make an animation which does X" A goal which is open ended. A vague idea, like "Make an event which commemorates our 10th anniversary, somehow." For #1, you can absolutely throw more cooks into your kitchen to get the thing done. It's easy, there's a correct way for things to occur, and if you don't do it that way, you failed to do the thing. We do occasionally contract people for this type of work, especially if it falls out of our areas of expertise.
 
For #2 though, we have found that more cooks does not make the creative process better. They can do more things at once, provided that their problems can be categorized as #1, but that's not really the issue when it comes to events.
 
The bottleneck is designing and iterating on whatever mechanics we come up with, and that role is restricted to 1 or 2 (extremely experienced) people out of necessity. Otherwise you get the problem of too many cooks in a kitchen all trying to make the same pot of soup, and nobody is happy with how it tastes.
 
I've yet to find a way to improve that, so the real lesson is what we came up with 10 years ago, and what I should have done in the first place- "just don't give ETAs lol"

logged off

I have noticed that a LOT of messages on Reddit or FB about PokeMMO is people
asking :
"Can someone help me evolve my Kadabra?"
 
So I suggest a pretty simple solution :
Players can give their Pokemon to the daycare and take it back immediately for
1000 pokeyen and it triggers the evolution.
 
That would make less work for the support "someone stole my Haunter!" and Mods and CM wouldn't have to move all across the map to do it.