Single post in I over-buffed Melanistic Pokémon...

Niet, let me be frank, I really, sincerely, think we need a formal poll of the userbase along the lines of the TR rules update poll or the A/M rename thread. I'd like to propose the following questions: 1. Do you prefer to hunt your own specials or buy them from others, and why? 2. Do you use DP on a regular basis? Why or why not? 3. If the answer to 2 was yes, do you prefer to hunt your own DP or buy it from others, and why? We need a more concrete understanding of what motivates players than can be gathered from one messy announcement thread, and use that to figure out how to design the specials economy moving forward, on top of the daily stats etc.

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You've hit on something here: I think there's two fundamentally different ways to approach how you want to design S/A into the economy. Option 1: S/A are a rarity Shiny and albino chances are low enough that you might get one special sparkle a day even with full boosts. S/A prices are consistently high because each one has to pay for roughly one day of charms and HM (more if buyers are hard to find). Bartering becomes more common as it's less feasible for people to hunt things for themselves. Hardly anyone DPs anything because it's simply not financially worth it, and deltas are correspondingly more expensive. Option 2: S/A are a commodity Full boosts net you around 3-4 specials per day. S/A are dirt cheap and easy to sell in bulk to high buyers, who generously feed them all to Sally for DP. The reward gained from DP is proportional to the investment, so there's good incentive to use it, both for newer players and veterans with large hoards, so those large hoards get liquidated. S/A becomes a stepping stone and DP (be it deltas, or whatever other system supplements it) becomes the new endgame. (disclaimer: these are only speculations, of course, but roughly based on other MMO loot systems) I'm not going to say that one is better than the other, because they attract different kinds of players. What I am going to say is that right now we are caught in an awkward spot where neither is true and that is why the specials economy is weird. It's simply not possible to have both be true at the same time, and as the game designer you have the control so you have to choose a direction you'd like the game to move towards.

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Finally, my entirely personally self-motivated request: please bring albino rates back up a bit, for the love of Arceus, my TR chain is at ~570 and I've gotten two albinos in four days