I’m going to first preface this post by saying that I and a lot of other players really have a tough time thinking this thread doesn’t at least partially exist due to self-serving reasons Leo, especially after the snipe for a sparkle token at a recent auction. I don’t want to say it’s 100% true that those motives drove this thread, but I do want to comment on it being there because I think a lot of the conversation in this thread is really driven around this perception, whether it’s fair or not.
Now onto the sparkle token. I have read through this thread and I was previously debating this on discord a couple days. To make it known here: my position is that the sparkle token should not be discontinued. For now I just want to tackle a point or two that I disagree with before putting my own thoughts forward.
First off I’d like to address this point:
“To be shiny right here and now.*
Unless we’re assuming egg shinies will never be released…in which case that is the problem to address. There’s no need for a band-aid, we know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, and I’m sure if it’s made clear the community wants egg shinies that can be prioritized. After all, that is what the voting system on these forums is for, is it not? To cleanly show the staff team what the playerbase considers a priority.
And this is all assuming it’s not already in the works as we speak, which would not surprise me.”
At the risk of sounding rude, for me this is the point that really makes me personally doubt your argument is being made in good faith. For me it just wholly misses the mark. Given how often this term has been used in discussing game changes, I feel as if the term “bandaid solution” should be fairly understood. You wouldn’t use a bandaid for a broken leg because it’s incredibly serious and needs to be dealt with using more serious measures. However, if I scraped my knee – it is a problem, and a band-aid is a great idea to risk that problem growing. The issue of egg hatched Pokemon not being shiny isn’t a minor issue, of course, but also not a major one. In other words, you don’t need to solve it outright, but you better have some way of dealing with it in the meantime. This is where the idea of a bandaid solution is incredibly helpful.
Truthfully, if we only ever worked on the problems in this game by priority list and only attacked them with the “perfect” solution, I feel as if the state of things would be dang near unplayable.
Onto Syni’s point right here:
“I heavily dislike the Sparkle Token’s way of bringing every shiny back to a baseline value. If you own a sparkle token, you basically ‘‘possibly’’ own every shiny available in the game. So, with a sparkle token in the game, a shiny Pidgey/Poochyena has the same worth as a shiny Spiritomb/Dratini. To me, making this item regularly available has th effect that it devalues the regular way of hunting shinies because of the amount of time you can avoid by just buying a token instead.”
I think this point is actually a bit valid. Not all Pokemon are created equally in terms of rarity in the game and so giving a sparkle token would seem to defy the differences in rarity. This rarity manifests itself in many different ways - spawn rate, floors appeared, even recruit rate. However, I actually am not quite sure Leo agrees with this point based on the concepts underlined in this threadI think a lot of players did give a solid response that the grind for a sparkle token is either gated to a specific time period where you have to put a monumental effort to grind it out, or to an auction where you have to spend upwards of 6 million poke (which is an insane effort to grind, especially after the nerfs to a lot of money earning methods…). In other words, they don’t devalue the grind because the sparkle token itself is a grind equivalent to basically any naturally obtainable shiny in the game.
My personal response, however, is different. Rather, I am going to say (and this is going to be a terrible soundbite lol) that the idea of fairness isn’t always the most important consideration in deciding what to and not to include in the game. A very similar comparison is to Holiday Cave itself as a concept. Easter HC in particular makes Pokemon such as Beldum and Larvitar – two rare and hard to get pokemon otherwise – a lot easier to get. In the eyes of Easter HC, for the most part it doesn’t matter if you’re using that Bagon or a Rattata – the eggs will still spawn.
This is terrible balance-wise, but when Easter HC is canceled, the community gets furious. Because as a concept, the idea is just so fun that many players play the game just for it. I think sparkle tokens are the same way. They may or may not throw off this balance of shinies, but they encourage a drive to participate in the game that I truthfully haven’t seen in years. It was big enough to actually make me come back to the game after telling myself I wouldn’t. Perhaps there’s an emotional concept to this, but this is a game. I think the emotions are impossible to separate from the gameplay because fun is the whole point. I really think if the sparkle token is discontinued, this aspect is going to be lost, and maybe things will be fairer. But I think they’d also be a whole lot less enjoyable.
I think Reggie says it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MlNWYyVdh0
I’ll probably be back to this thread later but I’m really tired right now lol.