2024 plans, updates and discussion

the exp share and daycare limitations are needlessly punishing and will make the gameplay loop unbearable. there's no need to make the game harder and more unwelcoming to newer players, and more pesky for older ones. i am not a hardcore daycare breeder/field clicker, and i don't have the money to regularly pay for hypermode to increase my adoption limits and things along those lines. starting a new hunt be it for personal reasons or type race, is going to be much harder if refreshing/adopting actually *costs* something besides my time, especially before i reach the threshold in my hunt where the black flute rng bonus starts kicking in. referral points replacing guest interactions for DP is also pretty unreasonable. not everyone has people they talk to that would both: a) want to play a game based around just clicking things a lot and b) stick with the game long enough to even reach the referral reward. i tried getting 3 people to play pfq with me and none of them reached that point. clicker games aren't the most appealing thing to a lot of people, be it because it can be physically strenuous or they just don't have the time to dedicate.

in my experience, that only works, unreliably, a couple times a day. i've noticed that it does it sometimes and have refreshed to put an egg i was hunting onscreen in advance only to come back to a new page when my party is empty

Can I just suggest that maybe we half the actual turn in of Shedninja vs it being entirely 0? Like for example let's say shiny gives 10 points, albino gives 20 points, and melan 30 points. Of course these are hypothetical numbers for the sake of this argument, how come we can't have Shedninja shinies be worth 5, albino worth 10, and melan worth 15 instead of the regular rate? I understand it was previsouly used as "free" DP and it honestly feels like you're punishing the userbase for how the pokemon was set up by the pokemon company. Again just an idea and was thinking it might be worth consideration?

I actually really like pretty much all of this. I had been worried about what was going to change and the answer is... Nothing too stressful as far as I'm concerned. I love the arceus rank change - the stress of new tournament seasons coming out did make my one melan hunt a lot more stressful, so... I'm probably more likely to try melan hunting again when I don't need to panic/won't lose arceus rank every single time new eggs/pokemon are released :) The shelter change will be interesting but it makes a lot of sense and I'm happy to trust the staff to make sure it works out well for us. Thanks for clearly listening to feedback and taking so much into consideration. I look forward to seeing how all this plays out when incorporated into the game :)

The Shelter moves on as time moves on. Even if your last reload was a Black Flute load you might come back to some hatched Pokémon (hatched by the Shelter team), or outright missing because enough time has passed for them to be perma-released. If enough time passes for the entire page to be perma-released, it will load a new page when you come back. ***** Just wanted to answer that one real quick. Your questions are being collected and opinions heard. We have a big Google doc with them :D We'll get some answers to you as soon as we reasonably can!

Overall, even for some of the things I wouldn't be too happy about, most of this would benefit the site! I'll just share my opinion about some of the sections: Lab: Seems like a great boost! Though if you wanna encourage veteran users to use it more, I suggest maybe adding a small boost to find your chained egg in there. Something that maxes out at like 10% (or maybe even just 5% since you're adding more egg slots), just something to encourage hunters to visit it regularly. Shelter: I understand the reasoning behind the refresh cost and I’m not against it, but I don’t think it should cost more to use a flute. That seems to just hurt hunters, when it seems like you wanna discourage dex completion there. Also I didn’t see it mentioned in there so I’m not sure what the current situation is with the chain boost randomization, but if that still is going forward, I hope that you do add the default back to oldest eggs if first attempt fails, cause the refresh cost would just be a further punishment for not having a large amount of eggs in the shelter. Otherwise, I think a 50% chance to find an egg makes the refresh cost pretty insignificant. Daycare I love the plan to increase chance the egg output! And I am super for a buff for getting exclusives/variants. I’m sure there will be people that aren’t happy as it’ll likely reduce the value of them, but they've always been super inaccessible to most players due to the insane interaction requirements, and I am very much for increasing their accessibility, especially as they are a specific draw to this site over other pokemon sites. Deltas: Now here is the only thing that I think would hurt the game. I said it when it was first suggested and I'll say it again now, making specials you didn't hatch not able to be turned into DP is a horrible idea for the site in my opinion. From my understanding, the whole purpose of the introduction of deltas was that there was nothing to do with specials and there were a lot so they were becoming worthless. This does the same exact thing. It may not have much of an impact at the beginning but the longer it exists, it just is creating a larger and larger pool of mons that have no where to go and will decrease their value. There more reasons that I'm against it that I may go further into as discussions happen, but I also just say that it seems wholely unnecessary now. Ever since DP was able to be traded through vouchers, I hardly ever see people buying/selling specials for DP, so it's not even discouraging that as it doesn't really exist anymore, it's just removing future options for people that changed their opinion about a special later on.

I'm about halfway through reading the changes so far. I'm a fan of the lab & delta point reworks especially. I do think this is unnecessarily punitive: It's not great that eggs are already hard to find when you're hunting an obscure 'mon. People also refresh the shelter for breeding pairs, which doesn't seem like it breaks the actual core function of the shelter. I would hate to 'waste' an entire egg adoption's worth of budget on refreshes just because I am the only person hunting a pokemon. Since eggs showing up in any given refresh is RNG, this is unnecessarily frustrating and can't be controlled by player. My suggestion instead: Since the point of a budget is to prevent new users from using it exclusively to fill out dex, tie refresh budget to user rank. Arceus and Champion rank players should be able to refresh for 0 points since they likely will need legendaries/hard eggdexes that can't be found in shelter at that point. Newer users will need a higher budget to refresh. Let me know what you think.

to be completely honest i love pretty much all of the changes! a little nervous over how the new shelter pass concept will go (it seems like it additionally punishes players who don't have the resources/time to release a bunch of pokemon into the shelter, thus hunts for obscure pokemon becoming even harder) but i suppose it needs further testing on that front. a thing i don't completely like is how people were asked to vote whether they wanted the DP changes or not and yet the results were kinda ignored to push the changes anyway? why have a poll at all then? i really hope this won't become a habit in the future (even if i do understand why the changes have to be made and i don't oppose them), as it sort of diminishes the impact the community and user feedback has, but that could just be me.

i'd kinda wondered if that was how it worked, it just seemed like not enough time was passing for that to be it sometimes. thank you for the answer!

Love most of the changes. I would like to back up the previous comments that point out the flaws in needing to use shelter pass points just to refresh the shelter. In addition to the fact that whether or not an egg you're hunting shows up is something luck-based, and therefore should not be something players are penalized for, I've noticed that some tournaments (such as hatching the PotD) lead everyone to grab certain eggs at once, leaving me having to refresh the shelter dozens of times to get even one egg. If you do end up going through with that change, I would highly recommend you also go through with the earlier change proposed to the shelter, where the egg given by the shiny chain boost isn't always the same for everybody. That would lead to (hopefully) much fewer refreshes that are out of the control of the players just because we took a break, came back, and someone hunting the same chain nabbed the same egg. I would still vastly prefer that the no-cost refreshes stay in place, though.