Of course, this is a change I’ve been thinking about for a while too so having a thread about it is encouraging to say the least. I was considering posting my own, and then you did, which is great!
I think conversations about how it’s implemented are important as just saying “Yeah chaining a shiny should be a thing” is kind of mostly agreeable for a lot of the community, but the how is what people will likely argue over the most.
I don’t doubt they could fill a novel, but I do think its important for people- especially developers who may come here if this suggestion is something that people want- to have this conversation because if it’s already talked out, that makes implementation as easy as it can be without someone doing the coding for them. “The community wants something like this, these are the complications, this is what’s possible with the code.”
I agree with this 200%. PMU does a poor job of balancing dungeon running alone with dungeon running with friends, especially with wallrunning. Even if all of your friends can also wallrun, it will always be more efficient to just go it alone because you don’t have to wait for anyone and you don’t have to communicate. Those things make dungeon runs slower, and if we can have anything to make dungeons more rewarding for running with multiple people, I think it should be implemented.
For me, this first glance definitely seems like a middle-of-the-road option, but I worry about how much it actually would encourage dungeon running together since, effectively, the reward is for one person (the party leader).
Let’s add a 4th person to this dungeon run, as well. They are also hunting Swablu, like P1. Does their count go up when killing Swablu in this party? If not, then it isn’t efficient for them to be running with this group at all. But if it does, that encourages people to match chains so they all get points towards a specific shiny.
Which leads to another question-
If I’m hunting Swablu and I have a good chain going, and I switch my chain, does that break my chain or do my points freeze and continue to accumulate when I switch back?
The main reason this becomes a problem if chains get ‘broken’ is that many Pokemon only appear during one or two times of day assuming its ONLY recruitable Pokemon. (For example: Treecko again) If it’s not Dusk/Night, I can’t increase my Treecko chain, meaning I probably want to hunt something else, but if I switch my chain and it breaks, then I’m essentially disincentivized from playing PMU during Dawn/Day hours since I can’t do my hunt- or any other hunts because if I switch my chain breaks.
Chains also stop being quite as problematic if its not “Get X points and guarantee a shiny” and instead “Get X Points and your shiny rate gets to like 1/100 until you encounter a shiny”. Or something of the like. It would even stop something like, say, Eevee, having a small chain being a problem. Because even if you encounter 30 Eevee in a run with honey, its not like you’ve guaranteed your Eevee, just made it massively more likely to encounter a shiny. I would also assume there is something in place (outside of wind) to prevent dungeon runs from being super long and grindy.
I.E. You can’t sit there, kill Eevee over and over again, get lucky with a shiny, and immediately jump back into a new Eevee chain. You have to go re-visit the chain NPC to start up your chain again.
True, I was thinking that as well. I’d also rather have lower chain rates for rarer Pokemon than higher rates with evolution lines counting. It kind of muddies the rarity if their evo lines count as well.
Honestly, I hate speedrunning dungeons with wallrunners. So I’m not the best advocate for speedrunning like that. Personally, I think speedrunning for rare Pokemon is the worst possible feeling ever, because the dopamine hit of a shiny sparkle takes much longer than it is worth. I think the time investment for hunting one pokemon should yeild the same results for hunting other Pokemon.
For example, if the average player can kill 5 Treecko in an hour, and 100 Spearow in an hour (Without using wallrunning, honey, or 4x speed as a baseline. I am talking about your average player, potentially with 2x Speed MAX) then the %age chance of getting a shiny should increase the exact same after killing 5 Treecko as it does for 100 Spearow. The rarity of Treecko vs Spearow is still the same, but the chain fluctuates to give you the same amount of boost for the same amount of time investment, on average.
Obviously this kind of data is not just… widely available. It would probably need to be guesstimated or tested and tweaked over time as its implemented.
Alternatively, you could use spawn rates of the Pokemon within the calculation, and make the calculation do something that makes Pokemon that have lower spawn rates have lower chains. I don’t have access to spawn rates, so I was using recruitment rate in my calculation.
Very transparently, I DO want to destroy wall-walking methods, but not speedrunning as a whole. I think wallrunning is broken and that the ability to wallrun at 4x speed is insane- so much so that one of the fixes I’d been thinking of in my head was that instead of making 0 hunger destroy your ability to sprint, you just go back to 1x speed once you’re in a wall, period. Doesn’t stop you from sprinting if you have the means to, but it does stop you from being 4x in the wall, at all.
As long as wall-running methods exist, late game runs are a high barrier for entry where you have to spend weeks grinding events to get crystals, recruit the “right” Pokemon, and spend a long time doing Tanren Mines before you can move on to doing Mt.Moon for grinding, and I think those grinds in and of themselves are problematic in the sense that speedrunning Mt.Moon (and other high poke yield dungeons) has utterly destroyed the economy and newbies are just being handed everything because there is little value to Poke and specific items anymore.
I miss when player-run shops had more than rev seeds and honeys, and were more prominent. I miss when Family Items were worth something. As kind and amazing as the community is to be gifting everything, I just want stuff to have value again. I want to see TMs, Dusts, and a wide variety of items in shops again, instead of them all just being given out for free because people can’t be bothered with the varying amounts of Poke they’re worth.
The loop is sad and depressing and as a guild founder I see it happen over and over again:
New person joins, gets given everything they need to get established, gets run through cut, gets picked up by a guild who helps them through the entire game (usually the ones who help them at the beginning recruit them, funny how that happens- I’m guilty of this too), grinds for a bit, gets burnt out and leaves. Some stay in order to help new newbies after grinding a bit, or stay for the community the guild has.
Sorry to say but the gameplay loop of PMU isn’t actually collectathon, it’s mega boosting all of the new players, making friends with them, and feeling almost parent-like pride as you watch them grow up, and then feeling sad when they leave because you just subjected them to the same exact gameplay and burnout loop that you’re experiencing, except without the means to help others like you’re able to.
One day, all of us will leave at our own pace, and we will be replaced by people who will also grind newbies to end game, who will eventually also leave. And that is why PMU gets like 30-40 people at once, on max. The cycle repeats. Until the gameplay loops in end game get fixed to prevent how massive of a problem burnout has become in our community or until everyone gets burnt out and loses hope all at once and newbies arrive to a ghost town.
I’m active here on the forums and in my own guild discord, but on PMU itself? I did one run earlier today in TC and I couldn’t do anything more than that. I’m here on the forums because I’m looking for change that I fear falls repeatedly on deaf ears, or only upon the ears of people who can do nothing about it.
1: I think not interacting with the game, if still viable at all, should require massive tradeoffs. I heard someone suggest a time system for increasing rewards based on time spent in the dungeon, but that encourages people to max out the time they spend in the dungeon, or to speedrun and wait on the final floor, or rewards people for being “bad” at the dungeon vs being “good” at the dungeon and a whole host of other issues.
Another thing we could try is scaling reward chances based on the amount of enemies killed in the dungeon. Wallrunners tend to avoid enemies rather than killing them, so if dungeon rewards happened to scale based on percentage of enemies spawned vs killed that might be a good idea. But it would require a revamp of how the end box system works which is another thing entirely. It’s complicated and I do not know how I’d fix the issue.
2: Yes! I’ve been saying this for a while but I think all mons should be viable, even if not equally balanced. Obviously some Pokemon will be better than others, but I use Gardevoir as my main, and it doesn’t get 4x Speed.
Honestly, I do not find much appealing in weather as a whole. Fog and Cloudy were never meant to be ‘good’ weather types as made evident by the fact they have nothing that sets them outside of orbs. Buffing certain weathers also does nothing for mons that are suffering because they are single type or a dual type with crystals in different weathers. I should not have to choose between running Heat Rock or Sparkle Rock with my Sylveon because its family item and crystals/gems/globes work under sun but sparkle rock gives 2x speed and an accuracy boost (if im right about sparkle rock giving the acc boost from sparkle weather). I should be able to run both.
Right now a lot of fairies are split down the middle wanting to run Sparkle Rock vs Heat Rock and I just don’t think it should be a problem. We should all just be able to run C9 or Clear Rock and be done with it. Rocks that induce the effects of hail and sandstorm damage non ice or non steel/ground/rock types respectively, which ruins their synergy with Pokemon outside of those types. Not to mention icy rock doesn’t boost accuracy of blizzard like hail does, while giving its negative effect of damaging non-ice-types in your party which is ridiculous. If you’re going to damage my non-ice-types, I should get the blizzard accuracy!
If you want to buff weather and make the weather rocks a good and interesting mechanic, buff them outside of having to rely on the crystals and such for people wanting to use them. I genuinely think buffing weather and adding unique concepts to it is a good idea, but they should not be mandatory to build your ‘meta’ Pokemon.
The biggest problem with adding fam items to mons that need the boost, is that then we ALSO need to add fam items to mons that HAVE the boost and would be shorted. Which means that a ton of Pokemon get new family items and a ton of mons get nothing, we’d probably end up having to commit to giving EVERY Pokemon Line another family item, and then it would still be unfair because then we still run into stuff like “None of the Eeveelutions get a type absorption fam item, they need one”, and do we give both Gallade AND Gardevoir both another family item? Wouldn’t really be right to give one and not the other. If Garde got an item that matched its Fairy OR Psychic Crystal (Sun or Fog- and probably Psychic bc it shares a type with Gallade) I still would be running Sparkle Rock, so that would be worthless to me. Fairy type users get shafted because their weather (Sparkle) already gives them 2x Speed and is not represented in their Crystal/Gem/Globe (Which are Sun). Meaning I can’t run Gem, Globe or Crystal AND Sparkle Rock, ever.
Also, Gallade and Garde’s family items apply to each other, so who are we giving the speed boost? If neither, and we made Gallade absorb bug and Gardevoir absorb steel with their new fam items, suddenly Gallade and Gardevoir both absorb Ghost, Bug, Steel, AND Poison with all of their fam items.
If both, and Garde gets one for fairy and Gallade gets one for fighting, then since they work with each other, suddenly both of them get 2x speed in clear and sunny weather.
If one of them, who do we give it to, and what type should it work under? If Gallade gets it for clear weather, then what does Garde get?
I really think that giving certain Pokemon lines who’s dual typings either dont match the Crystals, or is single-type, access to more family items just to boost them isn’t a great solution and kind of begins to clog the inventory even more. If both Gallade and Garde got another fam item, that’s 2 more slots I need for fam items and I already have 5 for the whole line. I think it’d be better to just make having multiple copies of a crystal be able to work twice for single-types, and removing the weather restriction on them so that dual types can use both crystals of their type.
Removing these restrictions is a lot less time consuming in the coding aspect, and in the research aspect, even if all of the things that are given are copy/paste abilities.
I think if we do a family item addition or buff for Pokemon, it should not be based on their ability to have speed in dungeons. It should be based on, outside of 4x speed, what kind of thing they would benefit from the most, and be given to Pokemon who NEED the boost instead of just being given to all Pokemon.
For example, Whimsicott gets a family item that makes it heal from poison type moves. Makes sense, especially with that 4x weakness, except the fairy-type globe makes it immune to poison moves, making the globe a waste of money, and making other fairy types that get immunity to steel in their family items inherently ‘better’ because then the globe works for them as well and they’re getting 2 immunities. (Except it doesn’t because fairy types don’t get to run sparkle rock which should be optimal for them, which loops back to removing the restrictions on gems/crystals/globes being a good idea.)
Funny you mention a Mission Rework, since I made a thread for it not too long ago which got a bit of traction. Would love to continue on that discussion as well tbh.
Honestly, each problem PMU has links into all of its other problems, and the code is such a mess that it causes problems because fixing one thing could very well break other things.