General Feedback thread

Just popped by to give my feedback: I love the font used for the site. A lot of sites try to use hard to read fonts with bright colors and it strains my already terrible eyes. Thank you for the simple font, it's quite pleasing.

I want to say that with some of the new events and updates, you guys have brought me back to being at least somewhat active. Real life is still a pain on letting me have some free time, but I'm able to enjoy this site more now. The HW event, type race changeup (tbh I like the type race either way but since this time my type matched with my hunt I want to hunt more plus I feel like I'm doing more even though I'm just hatching 5k eggs), the glorious egg timer. Especially the egg timer. Love that egg timer. Literally, like EXP in return for not much clicking? Yes please.

So I've got some criticism, and I've got some corrections to make involving the legal disclaimer in the full details page of Pokefarm. I'll separate both points with a line of hyphens. Let me know if the legality point should go elsewhere. I'm gonna be honest when I say that this website's overall design is...rather poor. I've only been around for a few days but I just cannot get into this. There's tons of buttons creating useless clutter, and the button layout in general is confusing and unwelcoming. For example: why is there a rules button and a wiki button on the top and bottom of every page? Why can't there be a singular page for events and news? Why are some useful links in "More..." and "Other Links", such as the one for summoning items (which is never seen in any other page), placed alongside links like the one for the albino radar, which already has a button on literally every single page in the top menu bar? Why are genuinely notable areas, such as the Fishing Hut and Trade Centre that I only found just now, hidden under "More..." and "Nearby Places"? The way that these are placed creates a problem similar to the "Games & More" button on the main menu of Smash Wii U/3DS; it isn't immediately obvious as to how significant the button is, and, in fact, it's made out to look completely the opposite. The menu that pops up when you click the hamburger button under a Pokemon could be a lot better, too. And speaking of that hamburger button, I couldn't even find out where to edit my trainer avatar for a while because it's also kind of hidden; and when I did, I was met with a very barebones avatar editor (which, while offtopic, was disappointing). In general, a lot of these pages could be condensed, removed, or laid out better, because it feels like I'm browsing a website from the 1990s that's trying to look like a website from the 2010s. Not only that, but attempting to play Pokefarm without spending a cent is made difficult by the fact that every account upgrade is insanely expensive if you're trying to purchase them using credits. And that in of itself is made problematic by the slow, awful grinding process of getting interactions. There is no real quick and tolerable way to do it, and the maximum rate at which you can get interactions using the best and quickest possible method is pitiful, at least for what some of these upgrades cost (+/- 40 every 7 seconds in absolute best conditions). Please rework this into something more efficient, easier to find, and less time-intensive if possible. Pokefarm's active userbase will grow if it provides a system that's friendly to new players, efficient for those who want to invest a little bit more time (allowing new players to become returning players), and doesn't require so much attention. Pokefarm's tutorial can take days if new players can't immediately find and get accustomed to sorted/stacked fields, and that very nearly turned me off right after I started. And I'm still turned off due to how unintuitive and sluggish it is anyway. ---------- By the way, I want to take a moment to point out all of the faults in an excerpt taken from the "Full Details" page. This misses a very important detail stated in Iwata's answer that says that they cannot allow works that are threatening their intellectual property. They won't criminalize people who do something out of affection, but they will rightfully criminalize people who are using their IP illegally, as any company looking to protect their IP should. Pokefarm isn't "legal" because you "show love" for Pokemon, it's "legal" because Pokefarm is inferior to the official games and doesn't get nearly as much attention. It is not seen and targeted as competition, because it is, quite frankly and objectively, not as good as what's made officially. On the other hand, lots of fangames were taken down because they were really popular, and they had so much effort put into them that it made them feel like real Pokemon games; all-new stories, new regions, sometimes even new Pokemon, new mechanics, and the prominent in-depth battling system that isn't sorely dumbed down to the point of being braindead easy (i haven't seen pokefarm's yet, so i cannot speak for it). If a new fan was shown one of those Pokemon fangames, it'd almost be indistinguishable from official games. They would see that as competition, not an online egg hatching simulator. That's the only reason why Pokefarm is, quote-unquote, "legal." In the end, making money off of others' IPs is and always will be illegal in most scenarios unless you're dealing with an indie developer who's feeling nice. And the sad reality is that if you make a really good fangame for free instead, with all of those intricate details like in-depth battling, a good story, et cetera, it'll get shut down too because of the simple logic threatening the protection of the Pokemon IP that is "why purchase a pokemon game for $40, when I can download this awesome fangame for free?" Regardless of whether or not you think this ideology actually helps with the sales of the Pokemon games, TPCI (not Nintendo; see below paragraph) finds it harmful and dangerous to the protection of their IP. It's difficult to come to a balance, and regardless of whether your fangame or website is totally free or paid-for, the best solution is always to just put your talents into an original IP. But I digress. As a sidenote to distinguish which companies own what; Nintendo does not own or control the Pokemon IP fully, as they own a third of the IP, and all they do is simply handle publishing and some licensing. Creatures Inc owns another third (they handle the TCG and have made a few spinoff games), and Gamefreak owns the last third (they create the main-series games we all know and love). The three of them are affiliates of The Pokemon Company International, which you could guess is the company that actually owns Pokemon. So...no, Pokemon is not Nintendo's Intellectual Property, although they do own a portion of the IP. The fact that this isn't common knowledge in a day and age where the internet lies in the palm of your hands is astonishing.

I'm not gonna comment on the above, but I will say this: This site is very autism friednly, it fosters a very friendly community, they do actually do things if a user reports someone for bullying, and its a well made and well laid out site. Sure things can seem hidden at first, but if you poke around the site you can find things (my friend found all of the various features in about a week from when I showed him the site to when I saw him the next week.)

Well now, let's have a look... - A rules button and a Wiki button at the top and bottom of every page. And yet many people still "didn't see them". Or "couldn't find them". Mind you, we've had people claim they "didn't see" the big bold rule on the sign-up screen that said only one account was allowed, so that's not exactly a high bar. Also the Rules link at the top is customisable (that bar of smaller buttons is, on the Farm page) so the one at the bottom is the only permanent one there. - Summon Items vs. Albino Radar I feel this is an unfair comparison from the get-go, because Summon Items are only used occasionally while the Albino Radar - if used to full potential - is used every day. It makes sense, therefore, that its status is shown more prominently. I would also note that the link to the Summon Items page is included in the item description panel for those same items, giving you direct access when you need it. - Fishing Hut, Trade Centre... This one's a valid concern, and one I hope to improve on as I redesign the Farm page. For instance the first panel of that page is practically obsolete at this point, and could certainly be replaced in importance by the Nearby Places, making the Farm kind of a hub for where you want to go next. - Pokémon menu Define "better" please ;) I'm absolutely not saying it's perfect, far from it, but without any indication of what can be improved, there's little I can do. - Trainer editing We are painfully aware of the limitations of our system. All we have is a pre-rendered set of generic outfits. This is a vast improvement over "generic White brown-haired male", "generic White brown-haired female" and "generic White brown-haired androgynous" - people have other skin colours than White and other hair colours than Brown! So that's what we prioritised to get at least basic customisation out there. A larger scale system is in the works but there are many other things to catch up on too. - Pages condensed, removed, laid out better Again, examples would help here. As the one who designed it, I am biased towards how things are now as being "fine". Vague statements aren't really helpful to try and fix things. - Expensive account upgrades Yup. That's progression systems in a nutshell. A large number of upgrades are single-time purchases, so they are objectives to work towards. Especially the Poké Radar, which I can only guess is what you were referring to in particular. It's an "endgame" item. That being said, interactions aren't the only way to gain currency. You can use Scour Missions to get currency, or items that you can sell on the Market for currency. Boxes can contain GP, and GP is given out regularly during Fabulous Friday and as a simple login bonus. The restriction on Credits being generated by interactions is an intentional measure to prevent hyper-inflation. Essentially, we can't afford to have people literally printing money ;) It's a problem that all MMOs face, and I believe we've handled it reasonably well. - Tutorial length We did just implement the "Egg Timer" feature, which gradually increases EXP over time with a reward for making interactions in the form of speeding it up further. It shouldn't take too long to complete, now that there's a baseline that's not zero. - Legal stuff You're right in places, and wrong in places. The key thing that keeps us open while other fan-games are closed is because of the uniqueness we have compared to existing official games. Even terrible-quality fangames that attempted to re-create the main-series games got shot down on GameJolt, for instance. It has nothing to do with "competition", and everything to do with originality. That's one reason why we deliberately avoid re-creating core features like the in-depth battle system (and even official side-games do this too - "battling" in Mystery Dungeon, Ranger, Tretta, Shuffle, Rumble World etc. all use varying elements that make them distinctly "Pokémon", but are all utterly unique from the core series system) - any feature that we do re-create is reworked into something unique, such as how Fishing works here. This derivative nature is what keeps us going. Because you can't say that 100k+ users is "not popular". PFQ is its own game, and does not dilute the value of the Pokémon IP - in fact, I know that it actually increases its value because we've had people who used PFQ as their first point of entry going on to become avid Pokémon fans with all the official games, that they wouldn't have been interested in if not for us :) --- So anyway, thank you for your time, I hope this response addresses your concerns.

I understand this, though I see no obvious way to customize them, so this is still a potential problem. Nor do I see a way to customize my forum avatar and signature, and if these are stuffed in "More..." and "Settings" alongside all of the other buttons and menus varying from meaningless to moderately helpful, that's a problem too. You still don't need two links in different places going to the same page if one of them is significantly more prominent than the other; it's completely pointless! As for your next point, what if I don't have a summon item? How about an interactive world map? Easy, familiar, intuitive, and especially fitting alongside the general idea of the website. It would allow you to free up a lot of clutter at the very top for other things, too. I figured it'd be obvious, but since it isn't, let's look at this. Why are there two buttons placed to the right, and why does one of the options "seep" into the second line of options? And for some reason, "Dress up" and "Send in trade" are nonsensically sectioned off together despite holding no correspondence or relevance to eachother. Those are my main problems aside from very minor psychological button readjustments. I understand this too; consider creating clothing and the trainers' bodies seperately so you can mix and match clothing too, if you haven't already. I've given plenty already strewn about my post, but if you want me to summarize, I will. The entire top section of the site is cluttered with loooots of junk, to be honest. Wiki and Rules should be either put into one "Important Links" button, or in a page that new users are forced to read upon signing up. Pretty much every single button involving the word "OFF" could be removed and displayed in an inventory page for their respective items, which should also be placed up top, since I'd say an inventory is very significant. Make a shop where people can purchase account upgrades that shows how much they cost for each individual currency, greying out the ones that they cannot be purchased for. The point of this is to be streamlined and simplified, and while it's nothing new, if you're thinking about how it's not "unique," there's no need to be "unique" when it comes to designs like these; at least not when being "unique" requires you to be unintuitive in the process. In essence, don't fix a system that isn't broken. I disagree. You didn't seem to acknowledge my points about the entire sluggish and unfun process of making interactions, and I'd like to know why that is? Scour missions give a very slow rate of credits since the only method to get them from scouring is either obtaining sole credits (which you don't get many of) and selling items. It's faster to do interactions, and even then that's still unbelievably slow. Comparing this relatively small website to an actual, sizeable MMO is quite questionable. This is a simple egg-hatching simulator, which doesn't stack up at all against something as big as Runescape, or WoW, or...you get the idea. It should not be as big of a problem as it is in legitimate MMOs for how unpopular and relatively simple the website is in comparison. I did notice this and appreciate it, though you should still make the website more streamlined and friendly for new players in general. New players aren't going to know about sorted/stacked fields going in the first time, since it just isn't knowledge given to them directly through the website or tutorial. I already covered your "originality" point. By "inferior," I was talking about how it doesn't compare to the actual games in the slightest. And that's why other fangames that do are the ones that get taken down. It has absolutely everything to do with competition, because at a base level, protecting an IP involves proving that you are more capable of handling it than anyone else. An IP is in danger if it has to compete with itself, whether it be with a fangame, or even an officially licensed game. That's why we will never see another XD, another Colisseum, or another Stadium ever again once the main series of Pokemon moves to the Switch, because at that point a 3D console Pokemon game would become infinitely redundant, and turn into sales suicide. Companies want sales, their IPs give them sales, and if they see something that they believe endangers their sales or IP, whether or not you agree with them and their mindset, they will do something to ensure that it is taken down. I'm sorry if you can't accept this, but it is a pattern that I've seen time and time again, and it is in fact how it works every single time. How many of those 100k users are consistently active, though? There's a difference between a total number of users, and an active userbase, which I tried to make apparent in this line: Saying you have 100k users is like saying "i have 100k subscribers" on YouTube when you only average about 5k views per video. If the content you make can’t keep people interested or hooked, people aren't going to stay. There's likely a lot of stagnant profiles within that number, which begs the question as to how popular Pokefarm really is. And that's what I'm trying to get at, because I want to help this site become more successful and popular, since it's obvious you've put a lot of effort into it already. Thank you for your time as well; it's taken me about five hours to write all of these responses, and seeing as it's almost 7 am, I'll be heading off to sleep now.

I ain't Niet, but uh... Pokefarm is and always has been a clicking site. ~6 interactions/second (if I take your "40 interactions/7 seconds" number as accurate, which I am 'cos I don't feel like fact checking right now) is pretty dang good. I'm... honestly not sure how you could get more speed than that without using a clicking bot, which I'm p sure are against the rules anyway.

Dress up and Send in Trade actually DO have something to do with each other: THEY DON'T FIT WITH ANY OF THE OTHERS!!!! Dress up isn't unlocked until you unlock scouting because of the fashion case, which is nessecary for scouring. And sending a pokemon in a trade is actually a redirect to the trade center. Unlike the other options these REDIRECT to other parts of the site, instead of performing a specific action/opening a pop up.

Just to clarify, since (sorry selocon!) you do have a tendancy to post things as fact without actually knowing... But yes: they are separated from the other menu items because they take you to a separate page to perform their actions, rather than doing so directly. This provides for a more logical structure. Along the lines of "logical structure", Give and Take Item are on the same line since they're so closely related, and "Switch" and "Send to Field" are both movement actions and so are on the same line. This reduces the vertical space needed for the menu - always a good thing!

My only complaint with that menu is that 'send in trade' and 'release' are so close to each other. Wouldn't be a fun misclick, although I guess you have warning screens to keep that from happening.