gotta say though that likes mean almost nothing to an objective discussion, this is a non argument and an appeal to popularity. just because something gets a lot of likes doesn’t mean its good or not good, just as something that doesn’t have likes doesn’t automatically mean it has no merit.
that’s not what i said. your posts may have merit but that doesn’t mean i agree with them. people tend to like the posts they agree with. that reflects a general opinion more.
which is a point i find most important when talking about an MMO’s (and especially PMU’s rocky bumps over the past… 6 years?) potential growth and care.
this spoiler is my personal opinion which consists of ramblings, which i do not find to be the major point of this post since i think the above is more important.
i don’t really care if sparkle tokens are uh, “broken.” that point doesn’t affect me. it’s a cosmetic change. you lose nothing stat-wise by having a non-shiny, as somebody with a shiny doesn’t gain anything.
if the complaint is there are too many shinies circulating the game, then we don’t really know if it’s valid or not. i don’t think that’s something we can really justify, since i don’t know what constitutes too much and i’m sure anybody else knows either either. the only data we know is andy stating there were 555 recruited shinies on December 18, 2019 of last year, is that a lot? how much of that is affected by sparkle tokens? and let’s be real, do most people really care if it is? i certainly don’t. if you put in the effort to invest and get a shiny of it, go you.
if you’re talking about shiny tokens and shinies in general being auctioned; in the past few months there was six plus the shiny ralts at the end. that’s 7, well, added to 555 plus a month’s worth of shinies since it’s been a month since andy’s last post. that’s not a large portion, is it?
i think i have to echo turtwig’s point of fun over uh, unilateral “balance”…? if you can even call it that? (since how do you balance shinies, lol) i think sparkle tokens in auctions are great. maybe people are fond of decreasing the number, but the entire reason i’m motivated to farm money is so i get to pool with my homies in #bregandaerthe and have one of them win the sparkle token. i figure a lot of people are also poorer after spending 6 million on a sparkle token, which also hits another point concerning resources (poke) not being used up once you hit endgame. most things you can net for under less than 200k barring globes and gems, and when people have millions they want to use, it’s barely a dent. having an over saturated endgame item is great, and is exactly the reason why auctions are so healthy for the game even if they’re a bit “lame”.
i have no idea on the rates of anniversary HC, since i was inactive during that time. so i do not wish to contribute my perspective there.
regardless, if you have an item or prospect that is incentivizing people to play the game beyond what it offers originally, then i figure that’s a good thing. if sparkle tokens never appeared in auctions again, i would probably stop farming money, for example, since i don’t really want anything else besides the way-cheaper mystery eggs. i would play much more on the weeks of HC than i would on the weeks without, as well. so unless we have evidence that sparkle tokens are arbitrarily too common, i don’t think it matters, and i think their entire existence is tantalizing to the mid-late game player. which mid-late game needs more of.
(onto the topic of things being too common, this is how much you care if you’re the “only” shiny or the “first” shiny of a certain pokemon. i do not place too much value in this, same with other meaningless bragging right concepts like “first 100 of this pokemon”. and if that matters to you, maybe that’s more important.)
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A general opinion by itself still doesn’t mean much though, is what i’m trying to say. I’m just not a fan of discussing using mob mentality/appeal to popularity, because it leads to an argument that you cannot reasonably reply to or check for validation. If 300 or 300000 people think the sun is green, it still remains a faulty statement. Besides that, there’s only a handful of players commenting in this thread, and we have no idea what the rest of the players think if you’d even have to use this as a measurement. I know for a fact that there are others who share my perspective on the matter as well.
i mean, you’re free to continue speaking, i’m not denying they’re there. but i don’t agree with them. given this original topic has one vote i am inclined to think that not many other people (relative to thread posting) do too.
this is tangential but i think a general opinion regarding cosmetic issues (or something we cannot exactly say we can balance) is more useful to this case than gameplay issues.
the sparkle token dilemma impacts two sets of people at this current point of time:
- the willingness of people to grind poke at an auction to hopefully buy one, for the range of 5.5(not guaranteed) to 8m(nobody is contesting this)
- the willingness of people to grind event currency for a sparkle token. i do not know the rate of this so i do not wish to comment on something i’m not a part of.
this really impacts committed players who ultimately wish to gain a token as-there-of. no, sparkle tokens shouldn’t be more liberal or anything, but i assume this current factor is fine-as-is especially considering the market value of the token(10m, nobody’s paying for that).
conversely, mob mentality is only a bigger factor when something is inherently incorrect. if most players agree that they like dungeons where enemies give 100,000 exp on kill, people can agree but we can say that the rate of obtaining 100s is too quick and is overall unhealthy for the grind of this game.
can sparkle tokens be unhealthy at this current rate? i don’t think anybody can tell us that. it doesn’t impact gameplay beyond flexing on other players in town or in dungeons. so that’s why general opinion is both telling and fine here.
i think you’re better off looking at my spoiler, since you’re not exactly telling me anything here more than you have.
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I did look at the spoiler, the reason I only responded to the top part is because anything else brings us back to the thing I posted earlier:
Nobody really knows what we are exactly discussing for or against in this thread, the quantity of the item and other variables. I, for example, haven’t ever mentioned I didn’t want any sparkle tokens reappearing in auctions. I just don’t think they should be a returning item in HC.
Everybody probably has a different take on this, but since we’ve never specified, we are discussing without really knowing each other’s opinions!
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leo’s original point seems to imply removing them from being obtainable at all generically, which is the point i went off of.
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I think they’re fine as is. Having them in auctions is a fantastic way to get money out of the game. It’s one thing a lot of people want and will be willing to spend a lot of money for.
Having multiple opportunities is fair to all players IMO. Not everyone can make every event (be it work, school, ect.) so they might miss out on an auction or possibly even being unable to partake in a Holiday Cave (if they return there potentially).
I think it’s a lot more fair to all players to have more opportunities to obtain them. I don’t think the “rarity” of them argument really matters. It’s purely an aesthetic change. Sparkle Tokens help out players who simply don’t have the time to farm or the Pokemon they want to make shiny is unobtainable by conventional means (i.e it’s something you can’t consistently recruit and it’s something like an eggmon.) It’s very well possible too that someone already had gotten their favorite Pokemon to level 100 and simply don’t want to get onet hat is shiny & retrain them.
IMO the Sparkle Tokens are fine as they are now. It’s a good money sink, is a way for players who don’t have a lot of time on their hands to get shinies, & it helps out players who simply can’t make it to every event.
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In all fairness you could treat “buying” a Pokemon something like hiring a mercenary. I’m not against the idea of buying Pokemon.
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Responses
I cannot speak for everyone else, but I do not consider this to be a “big game breaking issue.” However it does, in my opinion, risk undermine shiny hunting, a supplemental mechanic to the meat of the game.
Syni has already addressed the argument hinging on how many people have X opinion. The controversial nature of this subject is definitely something to be noted–we wouldn’t want to implement something that 90% of the playerbase hates.
But conversely, the popular belief is not automatically the correct one.
The mechanic of shiny hunting is something I see as potentially adding hundreds of hours of gameplay for specific players. Getting the shiny of your favorite pokemon is a new goal to be reached–a player with no further goals has no reason to do more than just sit in town all day, if they continue playing the game at all.
Tying a bypass to a yearly event undermines that. Why should I bother hunting for a shiny Rotom when I can just wait for anniversary HC and grind it out there while reaping all the rewards of HC, or worse yet, it gets handed out for far less effort than hunting a shiny normally?
If the sparkle token is too difficult to farm during an event, we also run into the problem we had last time of it locking out players who can’t dump full-time job hours into PMU for two weeks. So I would expect it’s going to be easier to farm next time around than a shiny would be, which while solving one problem opens up another that has already been discussed at length.
This is not an argument I (or Syni has made at any point, to my knowledge) have made; this narrative of my case against the sparkle token hinging on how many shinies it lets other people have in comparison to me is completely false. My own stash of sparkle tokens has led me to realize that I’ll simply never have to hunt the few shinies I actually want, I can just token them. So that’s potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay I’m bypassing.
Because the great equalizer of pokemon rarity, breeding, is not in PMU. No breedable pokemon is particularly rarer than another in the main games, but here a Beldum is absolutely more valuable than an Ekans, and consequently its shiny variant, though adjusted to not have ridiculously impossible odds, is going to be rarer as well.
This argument has some substance to it. We definitely do need more money sinks, but my concern is, as I have illustrated above, that the tokens being too readily available is a deterrent to shiny hunting and thus risks hurting player retention.
I am, however, more in favor of the occasional token being on auction than I am of a freebie or more easily farmable one being handed out every year, as has been implied as a possibility.
Pre-post edit: After reading Bless/Nuxl’s argument for token auctions I’ve softened my stance on them.
I think you are vastly underestimating how easy it is to amass poke passively by just playing the game in the endgame. Not to mention that if players with a ton of cash stored away can just buy their shinies, they have one less reason to actually come back and play the game.
Pre-post edit: So long as there aren’t oodles of tokens sold off at out every auction, I think the price should remain high enough to mitigate this issue.
If Andy wants this entire discussion to stop, I won’t agree with the ruling but I will comply with it nonetheless. However, I do not see his previous post as an attempt to shut down the conversation, but as a much-needed statement on staff’s current position on the matter. He’s free to correct me if I’m wrong, though.
Pre-post edit: Though I’m personally going to give it a rest after this post, for the sake of my own sanity.
As already mentioned, this is a complete non-argument and appeal to popularity.
Pre-post edit: I like several of your other points, though.
I’ve addressed this above, fairness between players is not a core part of my argument.
The quantity of shinies in the game is not my concern. As mentioned above, everyone has different shinies they’re willing to actively hunt for, and my problem with the token is that it is either able to just completely bypass that mechanic with a less amount of investment if it’s too easily available, or by instead cashing out prior investments into grinding money–which then leaves the rich, likely inactive player in question down one reason to return to the game. Both of these scenarios result in what would have been a new goal for the player to pursue being trivialized.
“Fun”, while subjective, is something I agree cannot be ignored. That said, good game balance is often key to something remaining fun in the long-term.
I think what it comes down to here for me, is that sparkle token auctions force what I find to be a catch-22 if they’re too common; they siphon money out of the economy, but at the cost of letting people just completely skip hunting their favorite shiny by forking over enough money.
That said, I will agree my initial stance of completely stopping Sparkle Token auctions was too extreme; with their quantity appropriately limited, they should be largely self-resolving in terms of making sure they’re harder to obtain that way than to obtain any one one shiny normally.
I’m still not a super huge fan of the Schrodinger’s Shiny aspect of it, but that cat is already out of the box and I suppose there’s no use crying over spilt milk.
I can agree the mid-late game needs more incentives, but regular old shiny hunting is one new such incentive that careless HC availability of sparkle tokens (or enough being in auctions that their availability spikes too high–though to my understanding this is already being addressed) risks overshadowing.
I apologize to everyone else who posted after this, but I am at the limits of my sanity.
In summary, I agree my initial stance that tokens should be completely discontinued was an overreaction. I do think the core design of the sparkle token has problems that become more and more egregious as further tokens enter the economy, but the auction does a good job of both keeping that number low, and the required player investment required to obtain one high, so that hunting a shiny the normal way will remain a viable option.
I created this thread out of a feeling of obligation, as I had said I would do so on discord when we were discussing it there. In my rush to get it out, I didn’t spend enough time formulating my own position, and this overly wide lens resulted in a chaotic mess of a discussion on a subject that was far more controversial than I had anticipated. Regardless, though it was a bit mentally draining to keep up with everything, I thank all of you for humoring me and joining in to debate this subject; I feel I’ve a better grasp of the situation than I did before going into it.
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Before bailing out for now though, I gotta say he’s got a point here. :P
No problem Leo, i’m happy to help.
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. . .
For how far I would love to answer EACH response and mayor base breakdown of this topic (Yes, I read everything), I’m going to keep it real, with facts.
Said that, I 1000% disagree with this. First shiny spawn reduction for RR, now THIS!? What is your problem Leo?! What is your problem veteran players?!
This are facts:
- I’ve used my only sparkle token (And hell to get at least one cuz I was at finals in U…) in a Pokemon I loved since ever! Yes it’s rare to get commonly and even more because shinies aren’t in eggs yet! Munchlax! Because I love bear pokemon! Everyone knows that! Next of that, I pretty don’t care if I get it or not. also that Pokemon Gift covers perfectly that.
- I’ve seen most of sparkle tokens used in the Pokemon most players loved, main, or even desire (and most of them, not that rare to get as regular ones).
- AGAIN! Don’t treat new stuff like if doesn’t mean ANYTHING to you. (that discourages and hurts people, even more for those who gave their best to make it real in the game.)
- Shiny pokemon are by far more rare to get than a non-shiny one on most high leveled or complex mechanic dungeons, is not like we are going to get like hundreds of tokens!
- At the start and before shiny update, you all been suggested to farm all you could from HC and most of the people didn’t listen.
- More reason to be selfish even more with this topic, most of the ones who selled Sparkle tokens did with extremely high price (the highest I’ve ever seen).
- Sparkle Token wasn’t even easy to get in HC (Even more if RL takes their time to farm), and also, In auctions, only certain people have the chance to pay for it, HAVE HEART FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T EVEN TRY! (Including newbies or even recently joined players)
- You all already pay for shiny pokemon bounty, that’s something of your own will (Desire).
- Quite complementing the difficulty of get Sparkle Token in HC, I bet they are going to increase EVEN MORE the required quantity of event money to get one (For not say, that’ll will wake up the real selfish part of all of you, and not help those who want to get something else from it, I’m waiting for it!).
- Most of you have experienced the hard work, investment and time to get a shiny you really really want because is special and means a lot to you. I’ve been there too!
- Sparkle token isn’t THAT accessible to be a threat or make all of this topic taken 100% seriously.
And I’m glad to see there isn’t a lot of vote here, that gives me hope, and I can freely say is because 1 or some of the facts that I explained already.
And if you ask, yes, I’m taking this personal, and I think all for those who did contribution to shiny will feel the same as I do. Staff team does his best even in the worst circumstances to make it work. And to kill all these arguments, most of this comments are from Veterans points of view (Leads to being selfish), it was minimum talked or considerent from the point of view from a player who aren’t in the same level as us (Veterans).
I like everything fair and square, I know there can be stuff than needs to be nerfed, but for now, THIS ISN’T ONE OF THEM! Shiny chance are still being tested and talked by staff team as most of players have seen. So please, before making this type of topics of big projects, don’t only breakdown your fears, COVER EVERYTHING FROM ALL SIDES!
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I didn’t even get one of those tokens and im saying it not to be selfish but if you spend 200+ hours on a shiny then someone uses an item they farmed up in a few days it makes you feel terrible
My main point of argument is that if the token HAS to come back make it like 100k event currency because otherwise your not giving it a real value 10k was a joke compared to the value of a rare shiny
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Can we not necropost this dumpster fire, please?
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