The Current Tournament Is P2W, Right?

I think there's a very interesting discussion to be had here regarding this tournament being P2W. I love discussions like this so im gonna toss my hat into the ring. As for Skiddo's post about how to compare there is actually a pretty good comparison from last season! first run of Embretta's egg from last season where 100th place earned 964 points. So first I have to address the elephant in the room. The first two tournaments in a season will always have more stiff competition for top 100. As per current site stats there are ~300 Arceus users onsite. (And dozens more who can obtain it easily with a few dexes) A majority of these users will be the ones trying to place top 100 because they have a very clear incentive to place. I'm going to say something controversial and I apologize if I upset anyone. This is just my opinion. If you do not have arceus, or are not extremely close to arceus, the amount of resources/time/energy you have to put into placing top 100 in //any// of the first two tournaments of a season is just not worth it. Whether its a POTD hactching tourney, scours, fishing, evolving pokemon. If you are not in endgame you will end up spending more resources to place than the value of the egg reward will actually bring. Hard goal however? That is EXTREMELY valuable. And as stated by others, very achievable with a bit of effort. If you are willing to part with your tokens and are online immediately after the tourney ends you could potentially see your tokens to the arceus players that didn't place for anywhere between 100zc-60zc depending on how much others are willing to spend. As for placing? There are a lot of ways to stockpile resources on pokefarm without spending any money. Such as boxboxs,zcrystals, credits, albino radars, fab friday, selling tokens, selling RTE etc. Most players in endgame have a flow of currency coming in that they can tap into for additional dcps. But even then the shelter can get you a large chunck of your points if you hunt an obscure Pokemon. (Having to change hunts for a tournament is not unheard of, such as potd tourneys, vwave tourneys even evolving tourneys can mean if you want to win you have to change hunts. That is not an isolated experience for this tournament.) Assuming no shazi days, a star pass can get you up to a max of 762 points. (Renting star passes is an option if you do not own one too) and the daycare can get 36 points non-hm/144 points with hm. Based off previous 100th place that leaves ~200 points left for non-hm to place which would unfortunately need to be done via DCPs. In the generous assumption you lose 60 points from the shelter giving you eggs that arent yours that is 5 60x dcps. So 300 points and 3000gp without HM discount on dcps. And although 3000gp seems like a lot, that is a very obtainable amount of gp for an endgame f2p player who has been optimizing their income for months. This is an approximately 600zc investment, which means if a user placed under these circumstances they are paying 85zc for the hypothetical 7 tokens that would have covered their egg. Which is around the value of tokens after a tourney like this anyways. Not including an eggpass if needed. We could also cut it down to a 500zc investment if a user had the HM discount for DCPs and also we did not account for shazi days which can net additional points. This is all just hypothetical numbers. The actual hard part is creating eggs/hatching eggs etc. What I'm trying to get at is although there is DEFINITELY currency investment to place. I do not think a user needs to spend actual money to place. But the decision on if it is actually worth your time to place/is beneficial to your gameplay needs to be made as well on an individual level ^-^ sometimes the fun is getting the hard goal and raking in that sweet sweet currency from the users who want to keep arceus so badly 🤣🤣 (like me haha)

Update: Checking the heritage of every Munna egg in the shelter is so boring I'm tempted to switch to DCPs. Pay to win, after all.

I've already accepted I'm only going to reach the hard, not only because trying to find my own eggs is annoying (I keep running into four other people hunting my mon, maybe I should just switch but I don't have the energy), but because the top 100 are already so much higher than me and the top two are already in the thousands somehow. It sucks, even the berry one, while way out of my league, at least felt like it'd be possible if I wasn't just level 2 at the time. This is just "here's a free egg chance to whoever has star passes".

There are several tourneys I think should absolutely be rerolled if they pop up at the start of the season, and that's this one, scours, and fishing. While getting Hard for the Daycare tourney isn't all that, well, hard, if you (generic you) want to win that egg, you can't settle for good enough. Which then calls for a little planning (getting currency to buy DCP if you don't already have it; picking a good mon to hatch if possible, preferably one no one else is hunting; and HM certainly helps too, having x4 as many Daycare freebies to use, not to mention getting x2 the GP from Fab Friday), and then hoping you have enough time on the day to even play. Arceus help you if it's a Shazi day. Me, personally, I picked Amaura because I'm not as active atm but I want the ice gems and figured the fossil bonus would help more, but even I still had ~40 shelter adopts (out of 304) I didn't get to use on the Shazi day we just had. If the tourney started at reset (like most all events do), I would've gotten it all for sure, and then some. And now with just the Noot day I have the opposite problem lol. For scours, it kind of encourages people to cut back on sleep in order to log in to get scours/switch out teams for the best chance at staying on the board because the more you find, the longer you stay in. And sometimes, even with literally doing all you can do, it's not enough because it entirely depends on RNG and luck. Sure, switching out teams that have green bars in the energy department helps, but it doesn't guarantee good grabs. Players are always encouraged to "take breaks for your health!" and "it's just a game, please don't forgo sleep for the sake of pixels!" but I wish it was a "practice what you preach" kind of scenario by rerolling when a scour tourney appears as one of the first two weeks of a new season so people have no option to get up every hour. As for fishing, this might be just me, but who honestly like this one? I know I don't. Like scours, it's a bunch of sitting around waiting for something to happen. Even the Pokémon can ragequit and that's just annoying lol.

I gave up on Tourneys cuz I refuse to lose sleep over those things. I dont even try for those things. Ill reach the 'hard' rank, get 5 tokens, and i dont look at them anymore like this one? ive never hunted the shelter for my own eggs and nv will

As the event nears the end, I'm even more certain in my initial thoughts. I've tried putting my eggs in the shelter and searching for them to hatch, but it's nearly impossible. I've never run into the eggs I've released even once. Just a really discouraging event that I've tried my best to at least get the hard goal. I get it's supposed to be hard, but if I were relying on the shelter, it would be nearly impossible.

Agree. I have been lucky to find a few, but I typically have to go between 10 and 30 resets to find an egg. Perhaps the idea was "oh, choose a mon that nobody else is currently hunting to use advantage of the Black Flute" but for people wanting to go on with their current hunt AND do the tourney, it is difficult to just, change. Plus it gets tiring to check each egg just to see if it's yours.

Yeah I've had very little luck finding my own eggs in the shelter as well

I've never spent real money on this site, and I won an egg in #337 when it was also a new egg and this tournament type. All tournaments are going to be competitive, and favor people who either have a ton of free time or the money to do things more easily. Even just hatching eggs in general has people who can click 50k+ interactions per day or people buying exp boosts getting the advantage. Scour finds and berry growing encourage people to wake up at unhealthy times, so I'd say anything that involves hatching eggs is better.

I would have to disagree. All tournaments are going to be competetive, but this one is the only one I can think of that actively encourages you to spend either gold or cannisters to get enough eggs to top in the 100 if that's what you're going for. I'd go as far as to say it's encouraged to do that to even manage to get into the medium / hard tier for the reward. Other tournaments don't seem to have the same restrictions like a limit of how many eggs you can adopt from the shelter or collect from the day care. They're fairly balanced site wide, but even if they weren't, you can still reasonably expect to get medium / hard rewards if you work for it. This one is almost an impossible level of "work for it". I managed to have a daycare pass I got at some point for 60 eggs and I'm still only barely on the edge of 90 eggs. Searching the shelter has been impossible to find anything I've put in there from my daycare. Maybe hatching eggs is healthier, but that's because you can count on your hard limit of 6 per day to stop you from doing anything too extreme. But also this thread wasn't made with the intent to discuss what is healthy or unhealthy in terms of tournaments, it's that this one seems to heavily place balance on someone spending premium currency just to get the medium / hard reward.