Raichuforyou

I think I clearly understand why there's a tax. I just critiqued it and said it is inherently regressive in nature and puts deflationary burden on lower income accounts versus higher income accounts. Nothing you have really said counters that. Especially when people are managing higher tier trades via trade chat or discords and avoiding the tax entirely, we're seeing that the little guy who sells heart scales or berries has a higher tax burden than someone who is selling a Kyu hat or a shiny Alpha starter. This is not an untrue statement.

This is not a counterpoint at all to what I said and doesn't make what I said untrue.

The GTL tax is a regressive tax that punishes economic activity that players who don't want to participate on random discords just to make trades.

It's a legal issue. The game cannot distribute Gen 5 sprites to you because they never existed, and doing so would be PokeMMO distributing the Pokemon company's IP. The workaround is allowing mods to be added to the game. They have no responsibility if a 3rd party happens to mod in Gen 5 follower sprites, and nor does Bethesda if someone decides to mod Thomas the Train into Skyrim.

I definitely don't disagree with this nor did I ever consider this limitation. My fiance and myself both play PokeMMO on the same network. I just don't think there are *zero* technical solutions that could be applied. Make battle instances synchronized on all three of your characters- Make it so you can't just sit around on 3 characters fighting Cynthia. Have other berry plots be "taken up" if already planted on another character, have 1 Alpha only be catchable on one account; this is especially egregious when Ditto comes around. To pretend there is no solutions that could be applied is ignorant. This is a can of worms that the devs have opened up also that they probably should have never opened, but they've certainly made changes to make alt accounting easier; allowing you to sign up for multiple accounts on the same email encourages alt accounting more (keep in mind this behavior has been around forever), and being able to save multiple accounts on the login screen (this change happened within the last year or so) certainly doesn't discourage alt accounting either.

I'm sorry? Your comment was an statement that was generally complaining about the state of over inflated assets. My counterargument to your point is that you see a bunch of asset inflation due to the normalization of alt accounting. I guess if you agree with this point, good job? But it wasn't exactly what you were communicating before.

I'm not sure I agree with this logic from a supply/demand standpoint. Let’s say, hypothetically, the game only allowed one account per person. That would massively shift how different resources are valued. The supply of one-time encounters like Alphas, Jirachi, and Heatran would drop significantly, making them rarer and more valuable. On the flip side, if you focused on something like berry farming, your profits would actually go up because there’d be fewer people mass-producing berries across multiple accounts, reducing overall supply and increasing real market value. The problem right now is that alt accounts artificially inflate supply across multiple aspects of the economy. When someone is running six alts for gym reruns, berry farming, and event farming, they aren't just making money for themselves, they're also flooding the market with extra resources that wouldn't exist otherwise. This drives down profits for solo players and devalues certain grinds. A real-world example of this phenomenon is inflation caused by overproduction of goods. Look at agriculture subsidies in the U.S. When farmers are paid to overproduce crops, supply skyrockets, and prices for those crops plummet. While that might seem good for consumers, it can destroy smaller farms that can’t compete, just like how solo players in PokeMMO struggle against multi-account grinders flooding the market with cheap resources. That said, I’m not saying the economy is perfectly balanced without alts, and yeah, things like Heatran being 8 million is ridiculous. But that’s a separate issue. Alt abuse doesn’t fix the economy, it just shifts the problems elsewhere while making it harder for people who don’t (or can’t) multi-account to compete.

This is certainly a rocking the boat discussion, so bear with me. I'm pretty prepared if the conversation just ends to "this would be too significant of a change to suddenly make in the game". Alt accounting has been something that has been allowed since the very beginning of PokeMMO. If anyone remembers back in the early days prior to breeding, it was basically the only way to produce even more starter Pokemon as obtaining them through other means was impossible. PokeMMO has naturally progressed to where much more features have been added, and I can't help but feel alt accounts have inherently devalued some resources that players obtain. I believe devs have been quoted prior that they regret making the game where you can very liberally use alt accounts, but we now live in the world that we live in. To clarify, I have taken advantage of alt accounting before when it comes to berry farming, gym farming, Alpha hunting, and obtaining event rewards (having all of the Alpha Kanto starters is pretty sick not gonna lie). And even I think the benefits I've obtained from doing it seem cheap and devaluing to a person who simply focuses on their one character. I don't know what the solution is here, but I don't think it's to completely sunset the creation of alt accounts or delete them or anything drastic like that. I've always thought something like a "per account instance" might be something interesting to propose - If you've already caught Alpha Ditto on one character, it simply does not appear on another shared account. If you've fought Cynthia on one character, then other characters will have to abide by the same 16 hour cooldown. Berry plots will appear as "occupied" or something like that. I'm not sure what you guys would think on this. Crab react if I'm a big dumb idiot or do the more civilized thing and talk this out in the comments.

After 2,800+ hours of playing this game, I have finally caught a shiny. Shiny rate is fair.

There's so many ad hominem attacks in here that focuses on the supposed "noobiness" of players rather than actually focusing on legitimate criticisms back to some of the points I made. C'mon guys. You're better than this. I guess I'll add onto some of my original thoughts regardless: The dev changes to matchmaking were welcomed in terms of fixing some issues for matchmaking. A lot of my critique to where these bosses just serve to essentially be hyper specific DPS checks with not much room for creativity still stands. This is probably going to just be an unfortunate ongoing issue with raids, but there is absolutely zero motivation for me to participate in these series of raids knowing that I have Shaymin already. Which I suppose is a shame for the devs considering that the raids every event is basically like 1/3rd of the content. I'm not sure what could be done to entice repeat playthroughs of a series of raids where one has already obtained all of the pokemon, especially the final legendary.

I've literally made a suggestion like this that has unfortunately gotten ignored in the past that got a lot of people to agree to this. It was to change the Amulet coin to a per-battle basis instead of a strict 1 hour time limit. The post was here: Frankly, I think the one hour time is a bit ridiculous, as I am someone with ADHD as well. There's an argument for the effectiveness of the amulet coin going down as well for neurotypical people as well who simply want to change their Youtube video, quickly text a loved one, etc.

Counterpoint- The community is too immature to handle this. I see it just ending up with rampant bullying.

Raichuforyou Thank you!

Interaction in a discussion does not inherently equate to enthusiasm or interest. People might discuss something because: It’s confusing (e.g., players asking for help or clarification). It’s frustrating (e.g., complaints or grievances about the raid system). It’s mandatory (e.g., players needing to organize because it’s required for progress).

Wouldn't this be expected due to the nature of communication needed for raids to begin with? I am not denying that they are popular, but inherently a lot more communication (thus, messages) were needed to participate in the raids compared to previous content. I wouldn't equate messages = raw interest. For example, I sent all of 4-10 messages during the Halloween event to ask strategies and borrow someone's team. I'm sure individual raids alone I was sending 4-10 messages just to communicate and coordinate with my team.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on what the baseline for what should be expected out of a player who has prepared for this.

To literally quote one of the first paragraphs in my post: "The current random matchmaking system is a bit of a joke at the moment, and if anything seems like a small band-aid application to prevent criticism that the raids currently aren't 100% tailored to those that are in pre-existing groups" I think raids should be accessible from a random matchmaking standpoint. Otherwise, what is the point of it?

As a minor complaint to tack on top, AI teammates is something that solo players will inherently face a lot more than groups. I actually HAVE won some raids with some teammates quitting and the AI taking over for them, but this is a huge problem where AI teammates seem to have a preference to fight the minions. If they have AOE moves, they likewise also seem to prefer using single target moves for some reason (Flamethrower vs Heat Wave). The AI also doesn't seem to have the sense to not hit something when Ally Guard is up as well. This can be seen as a bit of an indirect nerf or challenge for solo players to overcome.

The problem is that not everyone plays the game the same way or has an active team like you do. Saying, “just join a team” kind of ignores how hard it can be to find one that’s active and willing to help out newer or solo players. A lot of smaller teams and people who prefer playing solo just get left behind, which is frustrating for anyone who still wants to participate in endgame content. And yeah, endgame content should be challenging. I’m not arguing that it needs to be dumbed down. But there’s a difference between a fight being difficult because it’s well-designed and it being difficult because it’s practically locked behind social requirements. If you’re in a team, that should feel like a bonus, like you’re being rewarded for coordinating with others. But it shouldn’t feel like a requirement to even have a shot at success, nor should this be the baseline for balancing. Right now, it feels like the raids are so skewed toward group play that it punishes anyone who doesn’t already have a solid team.

Isn't this heavily ironic that there are many boss battles and alpha battles that inherently use RNG to the boss' favor, yet once it is time for the player to use it, it is effectively banned? This definitely leans into the Computer is a cheating bastard trope. I played against the Salamance raid tonight for example. I managed to get a random group that actually had the capability to realize that the chat existed, and wanted to group up after our first failure to correct our mistake, which is admittedly a privilege I was being admitted over 95% of solo queue players. We did not have a magic bounce mon to resist the roar so we literally had to rely on resetting 5-10 times to make sure our desired order of Pokemon was being sent out. Something completely left up to RNG. We ended up freezing it and disabling it effectively for 2 rotations (8 turns). Should we disable raid Pokemon getting frozen now? There are other battles to where strategies literally say "Did the boss send out a 'wrong' minion? Restart the battle". Critical hits are also in contention. Especially if you're running a strategy that relies on screens, the consequence of getting critically hit is that your Pokemon can die and the battle may literally turn unwinnable. The consequence of you getting a critical hit is that you're more likely to hit the damage threshold and it's really less consequential. For your second point, I'd still like to see some loosen up on some mechanics as I feel the current state of things is way to overly restrictive. I don't find the current state of teambuilding for the raids particularly very impressive compared to Doubles teambuilding. And I get that it's a 4v3 with the boss being incrediby busted. You know what would've been cool and insanely creative for the Salamence fight that I just mentioned? If the first few turns, my team actually managed to skill swap a permanent Truant onto it. That would take a ridiculous amount of set up with most likely screens+Follow me support, while having to protect a Skill swap mon. Instead the current meta is literally just Tailwind and Ice Beam/Blizzard spam with a Murkow thrown in near the end that has a mental herb. That is arguably a lot less creative and a more pigeonholed strategy compared to anything that could be theorycrafted on.

And my argument is that no, a lot of these players in this very thread are NOT going to be motivated going into future events to do the raids right. A lot of you could make the "so be it, that's the consequence of players not bothering to involve themselves with 'end game content" argumen. My argument here is that if the end game content is so reliant on having initial friend groups and the content is so balanced around that factor, maybe that deserves a re-looking into, especially if so many people are having issues with the content. I'd argue the majority of this playerbase are single oriented players who rarely interact with the greater community unless they have to. And no, keeping the difficulty of the raids as-is does not encourage me to join a team or find some MMO. It just makes me annoyed and resentful of people who make arguments that the system should be this way. Many of us truly admired PokeMMO for not having some of the negatives that we see in other MMO's, with hyper specific and specialized teamwork needed to push through. Dependency on others is definitely a polarizing trait in literally every video game I have ever played, and the most fun ones I've certainly played don't have a huge emphasis on making very specific choreographed moves and plans prior to doing content. For example, my grind to Grandmaster in solo queue of Overwatch was much less stressful than whatever the hell is going on with solo queue for raids. I'm definitely getting into subjective arguments here based on emotions and preferences. I guess I'm just really asking you guys please consider our perspectives here.

But the thing is that there is no room for creativity other than just pure damaging mons, having some speed control in the form of trick room or tailwind, or throwing up some screens, and using heal block. The rest of the "creativity" is being present with a team that has the ability to talk in Discord and pre-plan out a plan of attack. There's a lot of potential strategies that are dead in the water in terms of the immunities that these raids have. Some are permanent weather setters with invulnerability to Cloud Nine. All are immune to flinches, and confusion. Maintaining stat boosts are impossible. Imposter Ditto does not copy the boss along with any of its stat boosts. Leech seed gets ignored within a turn. Taunt gets ignored. Status and stat drops eventually get shaken off. If you think the community is lazy, it's because there are so many restrictions as how to actually fight the bosses in interesting or clever ways, and that the strategies needed to beat the bosses are inherently lazy themselves. I can go on and on and on about what moves and abilities that the bosses and swarms are completely invulnerable to, but my point is that these restrictions don't create creativity. They hinder it entirely. I understand we can't be having stuff around like Endeavour, Perish Song, Sheer Cold, or Wonder Guard to completely cheese these bosses. However when you remove a lot of the normal effects of abilities, moves, items, etc as the players remember them and railroad players into this one-dimensional way of play, they're going to get a little annoyed.

Okay, so I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think these points are actually contradictory. On the first point about invalidating strategies: Yeah, countering common strategies can shake things up and encourage variety, but that’s not what’s happening here. Instead of rewarding players for experimenting or coming up with creative solutions, these raids feel like they’re just slamming the door on everything unless you’re running the one hyper-specific comp that works. That’s not variety—that’s just forcing everyone into the same narrow box. It kills the fun of figuring out a strategy that works for you and makes it feel like the devs want you to play their way or not at all. As for the hundreds-of-Pokémon point: I get it—there are always going to be “better” options in Pokémon. That’s just how the game works. But the way these raids are designed makes the problem worse. If we’re saying the goal is variety and creativity, then the system should actually encourage that. Instead, it feels like having a wide toolbox is just a way to brute-force whatever niche comp is needed for the current meta, not to explore different strategies. It’s less about creativity and more about how much time, money, or resources you can throw at building the “right” Pokémon. And honestly, I don’t think my points about accessibility and variety clash at all. You can have fights that allow for multiple viable strategies without requiring players to have a giant, perfect toolbox just to participate. Right now, the raids are too far on the “you must do X or fail” side, and that’s what’s frustrating. There’s a way to make things challenging and fun without railroading players into one specific setup.

I have to clarify that I wouldn't have much of a problem with this event if the main and final prize was something cosmetic in nature. An Alpha Jirachi, while there was another method for others to obtain Jirachi. I do think that for example, Pumpking difficulty has always been lame, but thankfully the rewards are inherently only cosmetic in nature. Jirachi is a mainstay in competitive Pokemon play. And yes, while it does have Legendary Pokemon status, it's like if shoulder armor was a high raid reward in any other MMO. Sure, you can live without shoulder armor, it just kind of sucks that important tools are getting locked behind unfun events.