Player Reviews

for what it's worth, i did enjoy a decent amount of time on this site. the playerbase was very friendly and welcoming towards me when i joined nearly three years ago. i've made some great friends on here. i've had some eventful hunts and type races in my time on pfq. ...all that being said, though, i wouldn't in good conscience recommend this site to people. beloved site owner niet, crown king of being as rude as he wants to his userbase. takes criticism about as well as one takes being stabbed. hell, even here in the review section, negative reviews are put under extreme scrutiny or straight up removal. you cannot say your review section is impartial and then go "oh but reviews that are >80% negative aren't shown here". pick one and stick with it. not to mention your hypocrisy, either! let's not forget the infamous news post where you laid your trauma for all to bear as Important Mandatory Reading, but in the same breath you slap anyone else on the wrist for doing the same because "kids are on here, they shouldn't be seeing stuff like that!" uh huh. the weekly tournaments are tedious, repetitive and frankly not worth the effort. they're unbelievably stale now, and to hit the top 100 for that egg reward, especially when new fakemons are dropped and everyone's scrambling to retain their arceus rank, you have to have literally all the time in the world to stay up there. i've seen people lose sleep over it. /i've/ lost sleep over it before, as much as it pains me to admit. it isn't sustainable, it isn't healthy and it certainly isn't fun. hunting is a whole other beast, but despite your fervent denial it is absolutely catered towards paying players. just look at all the whales on this site who dump so much money into zc, and look at all the melanistics they hatch. and then compare that to all those free to play guys out there who put in valiant effort but haven't gotten a single melan. it's still pay to win, no matter how you cut it. the longer i think about this site the more gripes i come to realise i have with it. i could go on all day about inconsequential minor things but i don't have the energy to think or care about pfq anymore. and by the looks of the slowly declining number of online users at peak times, so is everyone else <3

Really cool game, I remember reading something somewhere here, I think in one of Niet's journal things, about people reacting negatively towards possibly being able to respond to trades with just money/items and no Pokémon (along with other things I can't remember, as I have bad memory), and I have to say I think that's a good idea and don't understand why they reacted negatively, but I understand if that's not a possibility anymore. You guys are doing a good job! Nothing's perfect, but this game is pretty dang cool, and the people here are nice too!

The game is very creative! It may seem simple, but it gets complex real quick and it is easy to get the hang of. The community is very welcoming and helpful. Really addictive, I wake up and think of getting on the game. Great replacement for my nostalgia for Pokemon Crater. :)

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The contents of this review have been removed due to violations of our policies regarding illegal content. This action has not been taken lightly but it was required in this case. I apologise for the inconvenience this action has caused.

Very creative game to relax with, and intelligent techniques through the game, love it!

Been playing less than a year and not exactly sold on this being the "best" as a lot of reviewers claim. I've never tried sparring because I have no interest in it nor has anyone sent me one. The community here is a mixture of good and bad. Aside from a good few players, there seems to be a few bad apples here too. While it does have the free to play aspect, most of the other items you would have to pay to obtain or find other players willing to sell them - and sometimes at higher than okay for most prices. Forums are hit and miss and honestly, I rarely use them. I only use them for journal posts but nothing more. Staff I can't say are rude 100% but one MiT was just a bit rude over a journal post and when I told them that they should've given me an opportunity to correct it because I'm not familiar with UK laws and they never bothered to point that part out much to the dismay of those that say "read the rules" - and they responded like I'm not making sense and thus I didn't bother to try talking more sense into them. It just seems like most of the friendlier players are just the normal trainers themselves and not part of the staff.

Most of this game is Pay-To-Win, and when contacting staff they speak to you in a more personal and unprofessional way like using words such as, “I, me, I’m,” instead of words like, “we, our, we’re...” This creates a weird and awkward situation when contacting staff when asking questions and such and just feels tense as if you’re being talked to as if you are uneducated compared to the staff member helping you. All and all I’d say that the staff here are rude but helpful.

As we are currently training new Moderators, I figured it best to take this claim of unprofessionalism quite seriously, so I investigated. I found no contact between you and any moderators via PM or Forum, so I finally checked the Support Centre and found one ticket. A ticket in which you requested help in locating your account, but not before having created a second account in direct violation of our "one person = one account" rule. Consequently, you were given a bit of a talking-to about it, but the situation was resolved and here you are now with an unlocked account. Having reviewed the communication between you and our moderator-in-training, I can conclusively say that they handled it very professionally indeed. In fact I will be using that ticket as an example of how to deal with similar cases in future. The use of first-person singular pronouns is totally fine. Staff members are individual persons who work together but still independently. When one of them says "I will look into this for you," that's not unprofessional, that's personal dedication! I hope that this clears things up, both for you and for future readers of this review.

When will the staff admit this game is purely a pay-to-play disaster, luring us in with pretty colours

It's... not, though? You don't have to pay to play.

As a courtesy to the reader I wish to emphasise that Pokefarm is certainly a game I enjoy and consider to be a very loving timesink of mine; to the point where I have cashed in for Hypermode, I have considered this game valuable enough to my entertainment to have spent real money on it. I appreciate it for what it is—an indie petsite derivative of its source material in a very fun manner with its own unique mechanics and ideas. It is a game I would recommend to a friend who enjoys Pokemon and petsite formats, however I strongly believe that to ignore what negatively impacts the experience would be a great disservice to both the subject of my recommendation and the game itself. To play a petsite with extensive mechanics and features regarding the obtaining of the desired virtual animal is to take upon yourself a certain level of grinding, whether for currency or to reach the specified requirements needed to unlock a reward. Depending on what a player is looking for, coming into this game and seeing the Everest that is the PokeDex and Arceus rank will either make or break them. At its core this game does have an end goal, to reach the top rank by filling out their PokeDex which is constantly expanding due to frequent updates in adding new Pokemon or forms. Along the way, completing PokeDex entries will unlock other rewards such as gaining the ability to obtain Legendary Pokemon, which in of itself unlocks more PokeDex entries. You have to find out what part of this you enjoy, what your niche inevitably is. Some people will strive for rare variants of Pokemon to sell through this long process, it spurs a sense of satisfaction. There are periods of stagnation. This game is not an MMORPG experience, do not go in looking for that experience. As with all things, there are negatives. I do not need to be a particularly experienced programmer to understand that what I frequently come across on here are counterintuitive design implementations. There are numerous issues that range from "Inconvenient yet workable" to "This is not excusable for a game that has been up for this long". At the time of review this game is maybe 8 years old. There are issues with features on here that make me wonder just what exactly the code must look like. There are optimisation issues that need addressing whether or not you can have another coder on the staff team. I am willing to cash out on the opinion that there are likely people on here who would volunteer—not even ask for money—to help streamline what I'm beginning to visualise as spaghetti code. Please understand that if there is a plug-in by a random user that many people, myself included, consider essential for making this game playable, there is a problem. This site does not even consider blocking to be a core feature. Even with the argument that it impacts the inherent gameplay of clicking, I strongly disagree! People will skip over the blockable user and deprive them of their clicks regardless, this forbidden fruit of a generally essential and widely-used feature is happening whether or not it is officially coded. The site banner claims this game is still in Beta. For 8 years? This is... not a good thing. This is worrying, and evidence that something is not being done as it should be. I apologise if I sound overly pedantic, but this is a frustrating and poorly-addressed issue, it calls into question what the future of your games looks like. I have to emphasise that, as people are already optimising the website for free as plug-ins, there are definitely people who would happily look over the inner workings of this site as volunteers. I genuinely, genuinely believe in the possibility that this site can be optimised, and I am not someone to lightly take on the agony of having expectations. Overall, it is a game that is fun. It is a Pokemon petsite and it works, I enjoy it. It has a dedicated community of regulars who have dug their heels in for the long haul and these are the people who want to help this site grow. This site is lovely and people are willing to help each other and I am happy to spend my time and money here, because ultimately, I get great satisfaction out of seeing the funny currency numbers go up and helping other people, especially the new players who would like to spend time on here. I hope this site is around for a long time. 4/5 stars.

Thank you for your insightful and eloquent review. I would just like to mention that yes, the code is indeed that bad. It is so bad that I would not be willing to subject others to it, especially not for free. This is one of the main motivations behind the "PFNew" project and that part is going well. The new codebase is in fact a pleasure to work with, not something I dread doing every time something breaks. On a personal level, I've been dealing with some serious motivational issues. I am very grateful to the community for their patience while I work through this. I understand how frustrating it can be when "the devs" (or in this case, the single dev) aren't living up to expectations, so I consider myself very fortunate to have such a generally understanding community backing me. With regard to the QoL plugin, its features are things that are useful, but not necessarily intended. For example, fields were "intended" to have Pokémon laid out so they're visible. In original concepts they even had collision boxes! But this was scrapped, and players discovered that the META was to stack and sort them, but not everyone does that, so QoL offers the option to do it - even though it wasn't, and still isn't, "intended". But that's okay, that's exactly what "plug-ins" *should* be able to do: provide an alternative, some would say "better" but that's subjective, way to play. I actually have plans for PFNew to have some kind of "plug-in workshop" where you can develop and share your own. Rather than having to copy snippets of Custom CSS into your skin, just toggle on a plug-in. Sounds nice, right? Anyway, thanks again. Your feedback is much appreciated <3

This game is so fun! It's awesome for anyone who likes pokemon.