Difficulty and HC

Game Discussion
1

Hi there!

Just going to keep this short - I think HCs are kind of trending toward being a bit too easy recently. Easter this year has a ton of rare Pokemon in the eggs that would take hours of normal gameplay. Honestly, I don’t mind this a ton - I think it’s a cool way of opening up options for hunting alternative Pokemon. That said, what I do dislike is how trivial the effort is to obtain these Pokemon. There’s in particular two big issues I wanted to talk about here.

  1. Currency shop.
    I simply think the shop’s prices are too cheap. Currency is plentiful this HC - you can probably get ~200 on a run without putting too much effort. With boxes it can get up to 300 on some runs! The top end item of this year’s shop was at 1250 currency which to my understanding is much much lower than other HCs. In particular, the fossils seem ridiculously underpriced, being priced at about 2 runs of effort.

This is not to say that price should be raised now - that ship has sailed and it would be unfair to those who have yet to buy. However, I do feel that for future HCs the # of runs to buy the top end items should maybe be a bit higher.

  1. Overabundance of Revivers
    Just to preface - I love the rev change. I think it’s a solid way of adding more revs without overloading the PMU market with them. That said, I think this HC might have gone a bit too far on the amount of revivers we get. It’s not uncommon to see double digit rev items in a run. In previous easters it was worth the effort to stock up on poke and buy revs to keep your run going. That’s not really a factor this year because you’re never really at any threat of dying. While from a market perspective this change benefits rev prices (by not making them absolutely worthless), it does in turn reduce the worth of everything in the HC since it becomes that much more attainable and you can more greedily play speedrun strats without worrying too much about being challenged. In previous HC’s I would play Gorebyss as a high risk high reward option. Truthfully, in my runs as Gorebyss thus far this easter, it’s honestly lost the high risk tag because I can revive out of any sticky situation.

There are maybe a couple, more nitpicky points, that I could make but I don’t want this to get too negative. A lot of great effort was put into this HC and I think it’s overall a positive experience for all players of the game. And I think it’s great HCs are taking greater consideration on ways to become more fair. But I also think the scales have tipped a bit too much in a specific direction and just thought something had to be said on that.

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2

For sure. I’ve never received this much currency in my life. In a few previous HCs, I was lacking a lot of currency. But in this HC, we’re getting tons and the shop is really cheap. The fossils were reduced in price but I’m wondering for what reason? They were already insanely cheap to begin with. If you compare them to other fossils that sometimes go to millions of cash… and now you can get a fossil in probably 2 runs. If it was for access of the pokémon, we already got access through partner eggs as well?? I just think this is poor balancing…

I love the change of revivers into the new revival items, but oh boy it’s raining revivers. I end up doing runs with 20-30 revivers and then have to drop most of my revivers to carry eggs. The other day people were also crying about the movesets being too hard to deal with. One of the complaints brought up was Togekiss’ Sky Attack. But wait. Togekiss had Sky attack since the very first Easter HC in 2011. Are we actually aiming to change HCs so everyone can walk through it without the fear of every losing?

“But what about the new players!”
Honestly, do you want to give them this mindset of dungeoning? We complain until movesets are for baby pokémon, and then proceed to give them 30 revivers in this dungeon to make sure they don’t die? Also if this dungeon was for new players, then why does the shop have that many mid/late game items.

I think we need to work harder on balancing stuff out and not please every complainer.

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3

I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. In my opinion, I’d much prefer Holiday Cave events to feel more like this one than the incredibly difficult ones of the past.

Holiday Cave has always been an incredibly grindy and frustrating experience, to the point that I often avoid the event dungeons as soon as I grab the items I want. It often feels more like an opportunity to grab limited-time items, rather than being an enjoyable event that I’d look forward to partaking in when I’ve got the free time.

Additionally, on the point that fossils and other items can be obtained in about two runs, well, yeah. That’s true. But how long does a single run take? Half an hour? An hour? 90 minutes? Either way, it’s a really long time, and not everyone wants to spend so much time performing a repetitive task. And with dungeons this long, in a game random enough that many deaths don’t feel like the player’s fault, I’d much rather have an abundance of revival items than having little to none.

20-30?
Alright, those numbers are absolutely inflated. I don’t think I’ve had a run where I’ve found more than about 10 of them. And usually I’m only finding about 6-8.

——

In short, this iteration of HC is much more friendly to those who aren’t willing to put dozens of hours into a repetitive, frustrating dungeon, and I believe that’s the way it really should be.

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4

I personally feel like this really only applies to this hc. Personally, I think this is fine as long as it’s only applies to easter hc. Easter hc is more about team runs, hence more revs distrubed for more members. This is very good for those beginners who want to go on team runs and also need the amount of revs.

I personally also feel this way. I still don’t understand why the price for the fossils and keys are dropped. I personally feel like 750 and 800 respectively is justified. As for the new cosmetics items, like necrozma crown. That and eternatus crown should definitely be higher than 1000 truffles. Especially with how many truffles we get from this time.

Honestly, I get the fact that this HC is definitely on the easier side. But with now removable revs, it opens the door to much more challenging HC, without the chance of it overfilling the economy with revs. Let’s just hope that summer HC (if that happens) can help overlap some of these concerns.

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5

To give a bit of context from what i gathered from staff,
The price in reduction of fossils and keys was based on gifts and the fact pokemon where parther egg able,
It didn’t seem correct to staff having gifts being lower priced than fossils and keys considering that’s what many people specifically run hc for, just spend all the currency on gifts.
and parther egg system gives on average that pokemon you wanted every other run,

Was the approach to just lower the price correct? Maybe not, maybe it was better to just raise gifts prices instead maybe also lowered how many truffles the player gets , but that would have just angered people.
Maybe it was better to just not fix the issue and leave It be.

To raise some defense on staff, let’s not forget that the hc was being delayed due to technical issues so they most likely where rushed and didn’t have the time to really balance everything out correctly, which may be the reason behind the shaky balance and second day adjustments

The stance i will take is this;

the dungeon shouldn’t be balanced around running it 8 times a day or something. the casual person dosent have that much time to spend on a game and this is a limited event that lasts 2weeks every year.
if somemeone wants to run it for 10 hours a day, i say let em get absurds amount of stuff!
getting every single shiny fossil in 60 hours? that sounds like a fair amount of time investment to me.
and i don’t say that as someone who likes easy wins; tanren chambers, central seafloor ruins, abbandoned arcade are some of my favorite dungeons, i loved running them and often sitting on a floor looking through my items thinking to myself, “how am i going to get out of this one?” was a absolute ton of fun.
but maybe such difficulty shouldn’t be on a temporary dungeon, it may be better suited on permanent content instead

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Believe it or not, I completely agree. I realized after posting this in the discord that I made this post misleading and created a distorted image of how I actually viewed this HC. During past HCs I actually made similar posts in the discord and here on the forums documenting what I felt were unfair challenges presented to the player - I had even said something about that this HC with line of sight moves. My broader point is not that HCs should not be easy because that’s not the case. Nor is it to hate on the new rev system either because it’s 100% an improvement.

What I fully intended to convey was that this HC made certain aspects a bit easy for the degree of prizes it gave, rather than disliking the idea of an easy HC overall. The Pokemon available in this HC encompass a huge pool of super desirable stuff in the game overall including quite a few HC exclusives. Adding in all the valuables in the dungeon items+shop prizes I simply felt that didn’t vibe completely with the idea of an easier HC. As someone whose exam period lines up with this HC’s release I will still be able to hatch hundreds of eggs and get pretty much every shop item including the high end ones. I personally think there’s an achievable middle ground beyond needing only a couple runs to get the highest shop items and the currency levels in Mt. Winter. For me that wouldn’t be anything drastic like increasing all the prices 100% or anything like that.

Also with regards to the revs I’ve not hit 20-30 but I have certainly hit 15 revs spawned on multiple runs. That said, I think that’s just a really unfortunate side effect of RNG’s natural variability. My personal proposal for that is to move the revs system away from an RNG spawn system. Instead you could have an NPC at the beginning of the dungeon giving you a specific amount of revs that you can choose along with a pass item. You can choose to get more revs but you’d get a lower grade pass. Higher grade passes would give you a greater amount of currency at the end of the dungeon. That way, players have more control over the difficulty they want from HC while also rewarding players who choose to play riskier.

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7

I actually really like this idea. The RNG of revival items has often felt a bit unfair to me, as in previous HCs, I’d often have runs where I’d go without a revival item for half the dungeon, only to be sniped by an unfortunate floor generation. If the amount of revival items received per run was fixed, this problem would be mitigated. Additionally, the high risk, high reward idea you proposed is really interesting. I’m not quite sure how that would be implemented from a technical standpoint, but if it could be added, it seems like it would serve as a great way to please all types of players.

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8

-shuffles in- I like this HC’s lack of difficulty because it doesn’t feel like i’m being punished for trying something outside the Pokemon that people say work. …mostly because I don’t have most of the meta picks or I just don’t like them.

Being forced to own a select few pokemon to have a chance at beating the dungeons and/or getting half decent amounts of currency isn’t fun to me. And isn’t the point of these event dungeons to have fun for two weeks? …Instead of hoping for just the right amount of RNG so you have a chance at getting to the end. But I’m probably just really biased against Resort because that wasn’t very fun to me.

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9

I mean, that you run sub-obtimally doesn’t neccessarily mean that you need like 20 revivers.
You really gotta play recklessly in order to faint so many times…

Which is kinda ironic, cause this comes from the one guy who constantly loses them to computer bsods.

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…I still wonder what I’m doing wrong to get around 5 revivers a run when everyone else seems to get 20.

11

I think it would have been interesting to have another currency for the event. Yes, the Truffles do their job but it feels constricted to HC.

For example, let’s imagine that we had something like: “Broken Egg Shells”, instead of the truffles. You could get these on the ground in HC but you would also get one from each egg that you hatch, regardless of where you obtained it. That way you are not forced to just do HC and if you are not aware that the even is going on and you hatch a random egg from another dungeon you would see the item in your inventory and wonder “where did this come from”.

I do agree with events being for fun, but they should be fun for all 3 stages of the game.
In the Early Game you get some really nice Pokemons that you could only get from very hard dungeons + some early game items to make your adventuring easier.
In Mid Game you might get some held items or consumables that you need for stronger dungeons + access to special Pokemon that you still would not have access to.
In Late Game you get everything plus cosmetics to show off. (because end-game is fashion-game)

What I would like is for effort to be rewarded equal to where you are in the game. Getting a fossil is completely useless if you don’t have access to Loch Lenile Cavern when you don’t even have Rock Smash to get to it. I do want the option to save up the currency to buy those for when you have access, but at the same time it should be harder than doing 2 runs of the event dungeon. Considering the amount of Pokes that people are willing to give for those fossils, you completely destroy your early-mid game economy and are able to buy pretty much anything (besides shinys).

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I do not follow you’r logic here im afraid,

But the event dungeons already do that. even if die on floor like 8 of the hc, the eggs there can containt some extraordinary recruits that can make early game a breeze,
i feel your doing the same mistake a lot of people where doing during summer hc, they narrow thier vision to just the big fancy reward at the top ignoring trapinch,which elvolves into flygon (one of the best pokemons in the game) which commonly spawned on floor 3! how is that not rewarding for new players?

the price is people pay for fossil is competely dependent on how easy it is to get, people are currently paying HALF the price they normally would be because of how easy truffle is to get,
normally people pay 1k for each unit of event currency. if the price of fossils would be increased or truffles made harder to get you would end up in the same exact position. you could sell a fossil for like 1mil each, in the previos HCs people payed mils for the legendary disguises which litteraly don’t do anything 90% of the year, they would be willing to buy it in mass regardless of how high the price ended up being.

(either way the economy is a mess and any complains about it feels like being mad a plant in a garden died of dorwning instead of being dying of thirst and arguing the pipe directed to that location should be smaller to fix the issue, when the irrigation pump at the well is pumping in 3 times the water you need for your whole garden in the first place)(people starting out are already given ,miracle chests golden masks, 20 reviver seeds and any tms and evo items they may need. who cares if they can actually make money or not? everything is free in this game if ask kindly enough.)

i don’t like this idea and also kinda counter points your whole argument you had about the items in hc selling for very high prices, first you say you want the hc shop to be easier to buy stuff from and then argue it should be harder cause you make too much money?

This whole post is just all over the place, it’s full of contraditions, unexplained reasoning, and false faults / badly worded praises? it’s very confusing i don’t understand if you are happy with the hc and your praising it or disliking it trying to criticizing or both.
it’s extremely confusing :eeveesad:

1 Like
13

Ok, I think I could have explained myself better in my post, so let me try to make my thoughts clearer.

I do actually like the HC but I agree with OP about it feeling too easy. What I was trying to explain is that there might be different ways to change the event works besides giving less event currency and/or making everything in the shop more expensive.

This is the issue that I was trying to drag attention to at the end of my post. If we consider that you leave before the first Kecleon floor (25F) you can still leave with ~20 truffles. By your logic that is 20k that you just made if you were able to sell it. In the early game you would need to repeat the same dungeon around 10-20 times to get a fraction of that money. I think that it should take some extra effort for you to obtain something as valuable as that instead of getting it in ~2 hours.

I am aware that this is an issue with how much money players agree that the event currency should cost and not the event itself, but there are ways to fix that. For example, make it so that only consumables (rev seeds, keys, evo items) are tradable and everything else isn’t.

This is a multiplayer game at the end of the day so if you want to get the “best prize” you should put some effort with other people to get it more efficiently, not to just buy it from them. Seeing someone with a legendary disguise should make you amazed and wonder how much work that they put behind getting it and not just wonder how much Poke they might have given for it (or that you could get if you sold it).

I actually agreed with what you are saying here, but I wasn’t referring to the dungeon by itself but the dungeon + the event shop. I mentioned that thanks to the event, if you are in early and mid-game you are getting access to Pokemon that would be inaccessible at those stages of the game and that in late game you gain access to cosmetics. I didn’t say that it was a bad thing, I was just stating that’s the way I saw events being run in other multiplayer games.

What I was having a hard time conveying was that the prices in the shop should be rearranged for the usability in that particular stage of the game or they should be locked under a rank of Adventurer (unless we go with them not being tradable). I think that the foundation of the event is flawed because it doesn’t matter whether or not you started playing the day before or you have been playing for 5+years since you become lvl1 when entering, it basically voids any progress that you have made outside of the event itself (besides having a larger inventory).

I don’t know about past events since this is the first one that I have participated in. So I just wanted to drop my 2 cents as to what I felt as a new-ish player.

I didn’t say that everything should be easier and then harder. I gave an alternative option to get the event currency so if you are tired of running Holiday Cave or you wanted to do other dungeons you could still get some of the currency and not feel like you should be “only” doing HC.

TLDR: HC is fun to do but the rewards are too strong, too easy to obtain to new players and progression outside of it is pointless since you are reset to lvl 1 and can’t enter with any items or have access to your items while inside of it.

14

This is something I absolutely would NOT support. There’s nothing unhealthy about the concept of a player-based economy - some people are willing to grind for items, and others either don’t have the time or the energy to gather the items they really want. The issue with the economy in the current state isn’t that everything is tradable. The issue is that kecleon sellables are way too common and put too much poke into circulation.

Additionally, if these items were made player exclusive, that would cripple rare item collectors who were unfortunate enough to miss the event. It would simply cause more problems than it would fix.

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I am 100% with you on that, if everything in the game was untradeable then why have other players to begin with. I was giving an example of something that could be done so there wasn’t a reason to just ignore the event completely and go farm Poke and just buy all the event items after it is done.

While I agree that everyone has their own life and that they might not have enough time to play the game as much as they would like to, I don’t think that means that all the content should be made available without having to put some effort into it.

Since you can’t put real money in the game to buy items, you will have to gamble with the drop rates, slowly grind to get enough Poke to buy it from someone, or as Superscemo mentioned earlier: “ask kindly enough” and just be given the items for free.

I think that at the end of the day, there will always be a disparity between someone that has a lot of time to play vs someone who plays it casually (this exists in every multiplayer game) and this is fine and healthy for the game. This type of games should be enjoyable whether you have time for it or not.

What I don’t agree with, is giving free stuff to those who haven’t put the effort just to “close the gap”, because what’s the point to put in the extra hours/effort if you could get the same or better by doing a fraction of it.

I actually don’t agree with that. I believe that the whole deal with “events” is that you are getting exclusive items that can only be found in them. If I miss an event I get excited waiting for the next time it’ll show up again, because it means that I’ll be more prepared when it comes back and I’ll either get access to the items that I couldn’t get before or be rewarded with even better ones. If every item became available all the time or there was no effort in obtaining them, there wouldn’t be “rare items collectors” because there wouldn’t be rare items.

Since I started playing recently I missed all the previous events to this one. I am actually looking forward to when they come back, now I can plan ahead because I know what to prepare for when they do.

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i don’t like a lot of your line of thinking,

but i would like to ask you a question about your idea of making expensive items in hcs untradable,

why is it a bad thing?
why is bad that new players have a way to sell to older players something?

that’s a problem in the not just the economy in this game, but in real life as well, rich people don’t have a reason to buy something from the poor, i mean what are you supposed to sell to like me? we already own everything and we can just run any dungeon to get it ourselfs,
there’s overabbondance late game and scarsity early game.
these fossils and dusguises (and the gem, globes and crystals too i suppose) change that,
they allow money to flow not just from older player to olderplayer but to older player to new player!
it gives poke a porpuse, it allows it flow very cleanly,

A new player sells a fossil, gets the money to buy from a older player who can then re spend that poke on a fossil from another new player and repeat the circle!
thats perfect! thats what you want from a working healthy economy!

i think it’s extremely important for the game to have middle ground items that has the same scarsity both late and early game or that has scarsity only late game while new players have plenty of, a lot of mmos fix this middle ground with things like crafting pieces, something new players posses but don’t need (which is ironically something you where complaing about like it was a bad thing) but older players do and don’t have enough,

Now, we can discuss about the economy and how to fix it for years, because there’s plenty of ways to do that, but i do not belive just making poke pointless by forcefully preventing people from trading the only thing they care about a resonable solution when it’s arguably the only thing working in the economy currently
maybe it is too quick a way to make poke,maybe it should implement in a permanent content, but that should be a reason to fine tune that rather than… out right remove it?

anyways hope this wall of text gives a lot of people plenty of thought regardless of how much they agree with it

1 Like
17

What in the Distortion World are you talking about?

Newer players should not have anything in the early game that the veterans need or can’t get themselves. The example that you put about crafting is the only thing that I can think of and even then, veterans would have way more resources to do that crafting if they wanted to. Also in those scenarios you are trading low level materials for low-mid grade pay depending on rarity, you are not trading the final boss material needed for Best-In-Slot items that veterans use for raiding.

My point is that this event in particular is giving early game players something to trade with veterans for “veteran prices”. This puts the economy upside down since essentially you are giving late game resources to someone that just started the game. If that was a normal thing to do then what’s the point of progression in games if you can just get anything from the late game as soon as you start playing?

This does not work because older players can just get the fossil themselves to begin with, hence why I mentioned that it should be locked to adventurer rank. In my first response I said that there is no reason to give a new player a fossil that they can’t even bring back to life since you need to progress into the mid game to even gain access to the dungeon where it allows you to do that.

I can give you an in game example that happened to me. I just recently got to 90k Poke after saving up for literal days of playing (My best team is ~lvl40). I purchased an XP-All from a veteran that cost me ~80K, so I went back down to 10k. Do you think that I am going to go to a dungeon without having access to an escape rope and lose it? Of course not, I am either going to play it safe or get an item that you can only reliably buy in the 4th city that you gain access to (escape rope).

Now imagine that same example but I just sold a fossil that took me ~2-3 hours and I got 1mil for it. I can buy 125 XP-All with that much Poke. At that point I wouldn’t care about playing safe because it would become as disposable as an Apple. If a new player achieved that much in so little time while I only got a portion of the same when I had to spend 10+ hours, I would feel like there was no reason why I should even try to put effort into the game.

TLDR: Players should be able to trade items that are in their game range (early, mid, late) of progress with veterans, but players should not gain access to veteran level items in the early-mid game range.

18

uh… just because someone can get something themselves doesn’t mean that they always want to. old ambers are fossils that everyone can get easy but older players buy a lot of them. why? because they don’t want to do the work of hunting down dozens of fossils and it’s easier to throw money at people.

old ambers can only be gotten from skylift or tanren chambers. getting them from skylift is both faster and more consistent. however, late game players don’t run skylift very often. based on your logic, since newer players have access to old ambers, they should be taken out of skylift.

similar logic for the dome fossil and trap scarf as well. those are only in crystal ruins/castle or a harder/later location. since late game players use trap scarves a lot and also buy a lot of fossils, should they be removed from their earlier game locations?

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19

Player to player trading should be allowed in a multiplayer game, I never said otherwise. It seems that my point is being missed so I’ll reiterate so it is crystal clear. In my opinion veteran players should be able to trade with early game players if it’s selling late game items to the early game players. This means that new players have to save a lot of Poke that is not as easily accessible as in later dungeons. The problem comes when new players sell items to veteran players, not all items of course but mid to late game items for mid to late game Poke amounts that are insane in early game.

Actually, yes. I think that an item that you can’t do anything with should not be accessible to you because there is no point except for you to waste an inventory/storage slot. Do you know where you should find that fossil? Maybe in the dungeon that has the room to use them on, not a random dungeon that they forgot to close up a side route so you get access to it even before you get the Cut HM. Also depending on your team it is really hard to even get to the floor in Mt. Skylift where the fossil shows up, and you need to have Frisk to see it, so I don’t know about saying that it is “faster and consistent. If you have Surf/EQ? Sure, but you don’t have anywhere near access to those abilities until you pass Sauna, and that is also a difficult dungeon.

You need Rock Smash to get into Crystal Ruins, and Crystal Castle is for levels 40+. Both of those I would consider them to be near the mid game, when you should have a decent grasp of the game. Also, guess what you have access at the same time as CR and CC, Loch Lenile Cavern, where you can revive your fossil.

TLDR: Give players items when they can actually use them. Don’t give away items that new players can sell to veterans for absurd amounts of money.