Review Special Rates

at the time im typing this im at a chain of 639 eggs and i havent had a single albino i have every single boost available to someone except zcrystal i feel like i need to spend ~1 million credits on a boost that will only get me like 1-5 albinos and wont pay for itself at the end i cannot afford to buy zcrystals i hate that the uber charm only affects melan chances now because we no longer have anything for albinos except for something thats really rare and really expensive to get. and the type HAS TO match the eggs youre hatching. hatching normal eggs? but your normal type race team isnt until 5 months from now? well i hope you have millions of credits to spend just to hatch a couple pidgeys no ones gna buy <3 i understand the need for the nerfs, ive hatched a handful of super early melans personally. but i feel like it got nerfed *too hard* it feels impossible to actually get anything now, which is really frustrating to someone whos been a long time player and ive been on site for over 6 years now. my dream of having a s/a livingdex feels nearly impossible at this current rate of specials. if i have to hatch a thousand eggs just to get one albino then whats even the point? im probably gna get a melan before i ever even get an albino at this point. might as well ONLY melan hunt now. /end rant

It's been a while but bump? If anyone has anything new to say or anyone else would love to comment I'd appreciate the feed back!

I am having trouble reconciling two complaints that I'm getting: - Specials are too hard to get - Specials are worthless because the market is flooded with them So I have to ask... Which is it? Are they too hard to get, or is supply so high that prices are rock-bottom?

I personally think that Specials are too hard to get now. I keep track of all of my hunts in my journal and with 1000 eggs hatched, I only got 5 shinies within that block while I got 9 albinos. I think albinos are okay personally, but it's shinies. I thought shinies are supposed to be more common than albinos? If it helps, I also hunt with all possible boosts (shiny charm, z-crystal, uber). It's a hit or miss really, sometimes you get pretty decent odds or you go 600+ eggs without anything. It's just not worth hunting at this point and it's no longer fun, it's frustrating. And with the second question there, personally I think people just don't see S/A being worth it like before unless if they're dirt cheap. I don't see the supply being high with them, especially since most users now will just delta them and sell the delta vouchers instead of the S/A itself. Hopefully this all made sense, I just woke up not too long ago.

As Ludmilla said, I wouldn't exactly call the market flooded with specials. More like there's no interest in those vs the Delta Point Vouchers (DPV) or the delta'ed specials themselves such as a shiny rock delta magikarp or something else. I will also agree that it's super hit or miss and I understand that's the entire point of RNG is to not have everything always go the same exact way but I've went for hundreds of eggs before with 0 specials, but the hunt I'm currently doing is ridiculus with specials in comparison? I'm not complaining it's just very night and day with hunts and I agree, sometimes shiny pokemon are harder to get, sometimes it's the albinos that are harder to get. Overall I think just a .25% or something small like that to bump rates overall might raise the overall morale of users on site? I'm not asking for that exact amount of a bump and I can't promise it will make all or even most users happy but the fact that you have said you would re-evaluate it and you are taking the time to look and try to get our opinions means a lot more to the users than you could imagine. So thank you again Niet for answering quickly and trying to ask us for our middle ground opinions.

Coming in as a non-hypermode user, I believe that albino rates are fine (like others have said) but, especially as a non-hypermode user, I believe that non-hypermode user odds for shinies should be buffed slightly to around 1/350. I understand that the game needs to make money, but for £6 a month/ £50 a year hypermode is hard to get. I mean I could literally buy a Netflix plan for that price and watch thousands of TV shows. (Rather than get addicted to this game lol) Anyway, what I'm saying is that better shiny rates should be more accesible. (Now I understand the shiny charm exists, but you have to pay to recharge it) To sum up my point, shinies need to be looked at. Edit now that I'm a Hypermode user (free): The shiny boost from HM feels so much more than a double. But now, albinos feel so much harder, especially compared to shinies.

Personally with the selling/flooding of market part of the discussion Niet mentions since that stood out to me, I feel like there's eventually a point where people just already have the specials for given 'mon. And people generally not as interested in buying since they're hunting things themselves. When new 'mon come out, generally you're going to see a lot of active users already hunting the 'mon and obtain what they need within the first week, so why buy from another sort of thing after that point unless you didn't keep up with that first week? If that makes sense? Because I feel like I notice that a lot more. Personally I don't buy specials from many people because of the price increase that happened when DP value changed (so things weren't 5k egg = 40GP for shiny anymore), I don't want to double the pay of something I used to be able to buy half/a third of the price but not have another source of spare GP to be using for that adjustment in price in the specials market (since I want to use that currency elsewhere), so then I go to hunt it myself. (Doesn't help that I only buy Lonely natures) But it can be a tough thing since I proceed to not get a shiny until later in the chain, usually past 200, to the point it just feels like "might as well go for the melan now", and then the melan proceeds to not pop for a while unless I just happen to be a lucky duck. Maybe that old DP price isn't something everyone considers, especially newer players that didn't know about that general price norm, but is this decreased in market price really that low, or is it just returning to how it was before the DP change? I never really did adjust the price to the new market norm, so personally I've never felt that issue with not being able to sell since I sell a lot of my specials pretty well (unless I have a loooot of one kind of species/albinos). Sorry for wall of text, just wanted to give my take as someone's who played for more than a year actively after returning from a hiatus and how I view the specials in the market point. I hope it makes some sense? :o

Specials are rare- yes. The reason they're "oversaturated" is because they have poor DP value. People buy DP at somewhere between 1 to 2 ZC per DP point. I personally sell mine at 1. People are more inclined to buy DP vouchers as they are more convenient than buying fields of specials ( dozens of trades or more ), where a voucher is a simple 1 trade thing. As Ludmila stated their luck with specials have been abysmal. We understand that a 1/40 chance does not guarantee a shiny every 40 eggs. Personally my Fidough hunt has average 1 shiny every 66 eggs, Sei being helpful of course. I also average 1 albino every 130 eggs. So my luck generally is okay during this hunt. But I've had very poor Hunts where I didn't get a shiny for 250ish eggs. My H. Sneasel hunt, if I remember correctly. I think I post it here prior. I'll look for the link in just a moment. Edit: found it ouo/ Does this mean to remove the vouchers? Absolutely not. They're a loved and very positive item that helped us out with getting DP, and I assume many of us are incredibly thankful for it. I remember many rejoicing when they were made available. It's just many overlook specials due to their poor value and wanna just a few steps to said vouchers.

Honestly I want specials to be rare, but not as rare as they are. Melan rates and albino rates are much better than the shiny rates. I don't need sparkles every party, but like... when you can go hundreds without anything it feels... bad. It makes you ask 'Why am I bothering?'. I'm not one who can truthfully complain. I get extremely lucky in comparison to most... but the sparkles keep me continuing my hunts. To know others are struggling to even get sparkles makes me, a user who can spend my money freely on site, feel bad for those who cannot. Maybe change base rate for non hypermode users? I was actually thinking that the chain of 40 should be applied to all users, and hypermode maybe gets a boost of 41? Mostly bc the base chain rate of 40 is universal for the radar in the actual games... That's just my thoughts though!!

So I read this and went to double-check something, and can confirm two things: - A chain of 41 would result in a divide-by-zero that would result in a probability of 1/∞ of getting shinies. Which is to say, zero shinies would result! - Perhaps more importantly, the Radar is using the formula that was on Bulbapedia in 2014. Apparently, that formula was just... wrong. It was a bit weird with factors like 2621400 and 14747 seemingly out of nowhere, and it never really made sense that a chain length of zero yielded better shiny chances than the base. The current information is that the odds should simply be a linear improvement, 1/(200 x (41-N)), where N is the chain length (up to 40). Note that again allowing a chain length of 41 would result in a divide-by-zero ;) So anyway, I'll be looking to update the shiny chance formula to the new, simpler one at some point. Practically speaking this will make the odds a little bit worse at shorter chains, but just about unchanged when it gets to 30+ chains. But that'll be part of whatever update results after this discussion.