Poor game mechanics (shiny hunting)

Everyone else that is shiny hunting probably knows what I’m talking about. You spend months hunting shinies you want and eventually you might put a bounty on them. So I did. This bounty system is a real upgrade to the PMU economy, I felt (or giving them away for free of course).

But no, everything goes wrong in this game:

  • Your shiny despawns from relogging/you crashing (yep, even when you haven’t moved. don’t try me)

  • Short wind timers. Before another person gets there or you found someone to get them there, wind has likely come and your shiny will be blown away

  • Guild timer*. The most awful one of all. No one likes this. If wind doesn’t get you or the shiny, this will. Guild timer was a bandage solution to an old problem, that has never been properly solved. Can we please find ANY other solution that isn’t this? maybe make it specific to monster houses only?

  • Landing on the wrong floor. Ever been escorted in time, but you landed on the wrong floor and missed out on a shiny? It happens. (Though, I made a solution myself for this, this shouldn’t have to be a problem in the first place)

  • your shiny dies to magnitude, selfdestruct or something else obnoxious. Not as important to look into, but these are unnecessary punishments. (is this even calculated in the odds??)

I’m pretty sure you’re all aware of these issues yourself, but I think it’s time we discuss together how to find a solution. After my experience from the past week and missing out on 2 shiny pawniard (with evidence) that were bounty hunted for, I was fed up with it. We shouldn’t be wasting more time than we have to!

*guild timer means after a certain amount of time spent on a floor, your guildie can’t come to your floor anymore. The timer should be around 10 minutes in every dungeon.

I do think that these mechanics were fine before shiny-hunting, but shiny-hunting changes the whole game imo. Especially in regards to guild timers, with some recruits and therefore some shinies being so far within a dungeon, it’s almost impossible to get there before the wind timer or without potentially losing the shiny by having a guild mate log off to pause the timer.
I personally thing things like Magnitude are moreso a dungeon balance issue as opposed to directly related to shinies themselves, but they’re honestly very annoying. I’d rather have something like Earthquake hit harder as opposed to Magnitude killing both enemies that give exp as well as shinies which are generally quite rare.
I’m in agreeance that the at the very least guild timers and shiny despawns should be looked into especially, as these seem to cause the most issues for me personally when trying to a shiny a guildmate has found. It sucks since shinies already aren’t guaranteed recruits and stuff like the timer + despawn can result in even more ways to lose shinies.

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Regarding this: Why Shinies Disappear (Maybe) ( I showed him already but for other viewers ). Not just a shameless self plug, It really does feel like that could be the reason.

I don’t think wind would be a problem as long as the guild timer didn’t exist.

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I strongly agree that this is an issue that hinders the whole point of giving away opportunities to a person that has been looking for tha specific mon. I don’t think this is a brand new issue, it has always been here but it started affecting us the most (or it started to be more notorious) when shinies were released. You could lose any rare/uncommon pokemon you wanted to share and it would be a downturn, but when it’s about shinies I think it’s a whole story apart considering it could take months to find such shiny given its rarity.

I think that the guild timer setting should be either increased or simply be removed from the game. I feel in all honesty that it brings more issues than the one it’s supposed to fix. I would think it was a big problem to keep meeting with guildmates inside a dungeon and killing eachother, but now that there are plenty dungeons, chances of meeting in a dungeon aren’t that high anymore (unless HC/new dungeons in which case the hype doesn’t last long).

When it comes about the error pruducing the party to split and someone spawns in a different floor than they’re supposed to, it seems to me the biggest problem to be solved. Once this error has occurred it practically determines the outcome of the run, since the timer will not make possible to meet again. I think this issue could be solved by increasing the time you can be in the same floor once you have moved, even 5 minutes can make the difference.

About pokemon dying to other npcs or by self-inflicted injuries should be the lesser of the problems, switching the moveset of the npcs for a proper moveset would be enough to prevent it from happening (even if such moves are buffed to compensate the change).

I apologyze if what I said was not completely understood, I don’t know what I wrote either.

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I don’t have anything else to add here that hasnt been addressed, so im mainly just posting to say i agree and would like to see a change to make the game better in terms of shiny hunting. ive personally had to re–enter a dungeon at least 4 different times trying to escort someone to a shiny floor and it separating us. its very annoying and very much should be fixed :c

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At some point, this is pretty well explaination of this situation.

I brokedown that topic here: Guild Timer Increase
after making the suggestion and investigating, is something that programmers doesn’t have access to, so it makes me think it’s either talk with Fennes or Andy about it.

I would like to add this: It’s been know that each pokemon has certain chance to show up, and each pokemon depending it’s spawn behavior, but being honest, I don’t really see that! It’s quite frustrating see is more easy to get a common spawn shiny pokemon than rare spawn ones! I mean, Raise your hand if you have more luck shiny hunting where common recruitable pokemon shows up more easly rather than the rare one is (if you find it, of course)?

In my shiny hunting experience, I can see 4 huges problems:

  • It’s hard to share with others via guild system cuz time is on the play.
  • Rare/Extremely Rare/Unique Spawning pokemon needs an adjustment (Starters, Larvitar, Goomy, ID mons, etc).
  • The resources used to do the shiny hunting is a lot, even way more if the spawn is time limited and rare (basic items, the money wasted, honey, etc.).
  • Friendly fire is a huge risk.

And for last to say, when I shiny hunted, it took me almost 500 spawn for the first shiny hunt I did (Time based and quite uncommon) and it took me 2 months, almost 800 spawn for the second one (Rare and not time based) and it took me 2 and 1/2 months, and actually, I’m doing one which has more rarity and time based already and I’ve seen 1109 of them and still nothing (on month 3) and I also have the risk that pokemon with magnitude hurt the shiny and loss the chance.

The shiny mechanic is fine mostly, but still needs adjustments and other factors that need be considered to make it enjoyable and less painful to players.

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While I don’t think sharing shinies for things like bounties was something actually planned for when implementing them, clearly it has resulted in desirable emergent gameplay. On top of that, several of the suggestions listed are for problems that exist even outside of shiny hunting. Take my vote.

More details for nerds

Can confirm I’ve had this happen to me.

This is only a severe problem when combined with the above and can be worked around otherwise; the timer is paused while the floor is unloaded. That said, I’m not sure what problem wind actually exists to prevent. Even in PMD it seemed like a rather arbitrary mechanic; it’s generally faster to move to the next floor ASAP rather than wait around for respawns. The only abuse case I can think of is monster houses, and tbh I think that’s more a monster house problem as they’re a bit messy in general–but that’s a topic for another thread.

So I certainly wouldn’t be complaining if wind timers are generally extended.

I don’t actually know the specifics on the guild timer, as my own testing has yielded weird results that seem more like random failures to sync than they do time-based. Regadless, if it exists, I agree we should extend it to a couple hours and/or limit it to monster houses.

By wrong floor, do you mean an incorrect instance of the same floor your guildmate is on? Definitely have this happen to me fairly frequently when doing rescues as well, though it’s hard to know if it’s the guild timer or not.

Considering the state of the friendly fire poll, hopefully this will be a non-issue soon.

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Shiny hunting changes a whole lot when it comes to the game mechanics. Frustration levels rise a lot when it comes to a couple of these things, so let me give my opinion on them.

I have yet to have this happen to me somehow, but I do know of several players who have had this issue happen to them.

This one I have yet to really hear much about, but can definitely see where it comes from.

This one I have to HEAVILY HEAVILY agree with. The guild timer is the biggest issue I’ve seen with everyone sharing shinies or putting bounties on shinies with. Especially places like Sky Fortress. With several Unown chambers, and having to go through some extra maps like choosing between the Ice/Fire/Electric chambers, its not easy to say, share a Dragon Chamber/Dark chamber shiny without basically forcing a relog and potentially risk the shiny despawning as a result. Somewhere like Cryptic Chasm is another example. Especially with the ice breaker-esque puzzle after 40F, remembering the engraved tablet, grabbing the unown stones in the first 25 floors, and having to remember to have a key or bringing dig to get one. I think you get my point, some dungeons with a 10 minute guild timer would make them ridiculous with what you have to do to be able to share or potentially forcing a relog to not risk timers.

I believe this has happened to me trying to share a shiny, and being extremely rushed due to the guild timer.

I am actually shiny hunting in a dungeon right now that has Magnitude on either 3 or 4 Pokémon(2 of them thankfully are time exclusives) which extremely worries me that if I find the shiny I am looking for, its going to die to Magnitude.

Now with my responses, let me try to propose some ideas that could help come up with solutions to this. In terms of relogging or crashing, sadly I can’t really suggest anything for this as I don’t know what causes it, but it should be looked into because imagine you find your first shiny but crash, and lose it because of it. Short wind timers, in general it would be great to have all dungeons have a general wind timer increase, so people can stay on floors a bit longer for shinies to help give them to others. Guild timer… If it could be specific to monster houses, or not exist at all, it would be SO beneficial. I explained by responding to a point of Levy’s above how much of an issue guild timers would be in some specific dungeons, and I’ve seen SO many shinies failed to be shared because of this specific timer. Either increase the time of this timer, or get rid of it. Thankfully like Levy said, there is a nice solution to the landing on the wrong floor but it still bites if you don’t know it. As for the moves, like Pencil said that is more of a dungeon balance issue than anything, and I’d rather see like Earthquake over Magnitude. Hopefully we can all work on some solutions together and discuss them as a community.

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On top of this, there’s a really rare chance that you hear the shiny sound when you move to the next floor that turns out to be a monster house which, as a result, completely replaces the floor where the shiny spawned with a new monster house floor. It recently happened to me today with Zappeh as a witness so don’t give me that “it spawned right before you moved to the next floor” bs. If there’s anything that can be done to fix this it would be greatly appreciated.

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^
Also I think a MH can be rolled when someone enters a floor still too, but I can’t really confirm that. It happened again semi-recently though.

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The MH thing is 100% a possibility (we’ve seen clear examples of it happening in the past - including one Deleca posted involving a shiny Seviper in WF). A lot of these frustrations are understandable and many are unintended on our part (the Pokemon disappearing 100% is not intended obviously, and we have seen the thread Deleca posted!)

I mostly wanted to reply for now to say staff are definitely following this thread and are always discussing ways on how to make the shiny hunting process smoother and more fair for those who choose to partake in it. It does help to know the clear points of frustration though.

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I agree with a lot of what’s being said. I just want to point out that one problem with no guild timer is supplies aren’t regenerated when the guildie reaches already visited floors.

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I believe you are right. I’ve seen it mostly with parties and Secret Rooms, actually. Where the non-party leader members enter the next floor after the Secret Room, its not a MH, and when the party leader enters, the floor becomes a Monster House. It may not just be the party leader but anyone like you’ve said. However, I’ve definitely had this happen several times in dungeons while training with others.

Only the floor players are actively on are ever synchronized; if you go to floor 5 of pebble cave, the only floor your guildmates will see the same as yours is 5. Empty instances in dungeons become immediately inaccessible.

With regards to the Pokemon despawning while holding items, there are ways to de-equip items off Pokemon that might help in the interim? For one, TM Thief is available and functional - so if taught to a low level Pokemon it can take away the item and potentially stop a despawn.

From my own personal attempts this seems to work, but if anyone finds anything to the contrary, feel free to tell me I’m wrong :wigglypensive:

It´s a good choice, but the purpose of that is to fix that bug, it doesn’t happens with regular NPCS, as far as I know, only bosses and shinies are affected by that, and sadly, Thief is not always the anwser cuz not everyone will have access to it or restrictions from dungeons will not allow. Maybe a copy/paste of code structure of regular NPCs could fix that… maybe.

This bug does actually extend to all NPCs in the game in dungeons - I did testing with rocky ravine NPCs to verify. This suggestion is not to fix the bug, but to offer a workaround while we try to figure out what might be causing it.

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