Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32442598-20170630211012

For the past few days I've been playing on Pokemon Planet. I am a former veteran on PokeMMO, one of your competitors. I decided to express some of my opinions and observations to hopefully improve Pokemon Planet in the future, or at least give some insight to the developers.

Browser powered

What sets Pokemon Planet apart for one; is that it is exclusively powered through the browser, and thereby also custom written and scripted. I like and dislike this.

Pro: Way more accessible to non-techy guys or people who want simplicity.

Con: Missing scripts and many buildings cannot be entered as they are deemed "irrelevant". Also a lot of events that aren't working such as the arrows in the secret rocket chambers.

Overall: I'm overall quite neutral, I think the execution is great considering everything had to be custom scripted.

Rarity / Difficulty 

This is something that is noticed almost immediately when coming from alternative Pokemon MMO's. Pokemon Planet's EXP rate and catch rate is hardcore, to catch something as simple as a pikachu will take you hours if not days, whereas on most other MMO's catching pokemons are pretty much the same as on the original game. The EXP rate is also super low. I'm guessing this is to encourage the donation system to double everyone experience.

Pro: Brings the community together to increase everyones exp, and I found myself excited in the few hours I had double exp.

Con: Destroys the leveling curve, as you will hit a massive bump early on, when you outlevel the world, making each level take hours.

Overall: I overall hardly dislike this overall. I understand that catching a Dratini or other rare pokemons will be much, much more satisfying given this difficulty, but from what I have heard from others, it is simply too hardcore. I think a middle-road would be nice, so perhaps you don't have to farm 10 hours for a Dratini, but rather a few hours.

I also reckon this is confusing, as the target group is seemingly casual people, as it is purely browser-based, but the difficulty and rarity will only cater to hardcore players, who are willing to sink tens if not hundreds of man-hours into the game.

Legendaries

This is the primary reason I was brought to Pokemon Planet, the dreams of catching a legendary pokemon encourages me. However as truly legendary it is to catch one (which should be maintained), I believe it is simply too difficult to catch one.

1. You would have to get a good few pokemons to around 85 to weaken it. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but this is something that I reckon would take weeks of farming for me to do, as I can't find wild pokemons over 30-35 (which is rediculous btw)

2. You would have to undergo the endless farming of the 1/200k odds of finding one. For fun, let's do the math here. Say you encounter a new pokemon every 15th second. That's 4 every minute. Take 200.000 / 4 = 50.000. That's 50.000 minutes it would take, mathematically, to encounter one. That's 833 hours. Now as much as I want a legendary pokemon, I don't know if I'm willing to dump 833 hours into a pokemon MMO. Keep in mind this is time spent actually farming, let's say I farm 4 hours a day, which seems like quite a lot. That means I would have to spend 208 Days ! 208 Days of actively playing, that is '''absurd. '''

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Pro: Gives people a goal, a hope at the end of the road. To finally be able to glow as the legendary trainer they are.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Con: Rarity of the pokemon is likely to disencourage continuation, rather than encourage it, after realizing the scale of the rarity set by the developers.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Overall: For me it's such a bummer that not every Pokemon MMO features legendaries, so I'm glad this one does. However the difficulty of catching one is overtuned in my opinion. I think it should rather be something in the range of 1/10k. That would correspond to around 40 hours of farming to meet a legendary, this is more realistic for the playerbase to overcome in my eyes.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">World Scaling

<p style="font-weight:normal;">This is a strange one. I cannot for the life of my figure out what the thoughts of the developer was when deciding that most of the world would scale so poorly with your power-level. I personally reached the Second and Third islands, and through-out my entire progress I only ever encountered wild pokemons ranging up to lv. 30, and hell, that was in the Safari. Outside the Safari I think my maximum was around 26-27. How on earth is this a good design choice. It felt disencouraging to continue as there was no progress. I was killing the same level of pokemons when my maximum was 30, as when my maximum was 50.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Pro: Increase in leveling difficulty

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Con: Disencouraging / lack of progression. Rediculous difficulty to catch and level new pokemons.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Overall: This is one of the primary reasons I doubt I will be able to play much longer on Pokemon Planet. It is a dissatisfying feature for me. To put it into perspective. Say I wanted to catch a Pikachu and level it to my top pokemons, let's say 60. To catch the Pikachu itself I would probably have to dump around 5-10 or so hours into the game. Then to level it to 60 from supposedly around 15 would probably take another 20-30 hours. Meaning I would have to spend potentially 40 hours, to catch a semi rare pokemon and level it almost only half-way to max level. This is rediculous to me.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">I really want to love this server, but I have a hard time encouraging myself to fight the overtuned grind. <ac_metadata title="Review / Feedback of the server"> </ac_metadata>