"Thoughts and Solutions to the current state of PoGO"

#PokemonGO: Hey fellow travelers, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the current state of the game, the meta, and some other various topics that I wanted to discuss and see if the community is on the same page. I'm going to point out things that I think are great, and things that I think are sub-par and I want your input as well! If you think I'm wrong, tell me why, if you think I'm right, let's discuss possible solutions.That being said, something I don't want, is for this thread to be turned into a circlejerk of hate and frustration toward Niantic. They have done an amazing job with their game so far and it only looks to be getting better. If you have complaints or negative comments that don't contribute to the discussion, I'd ask you to post elsewhere, however constructive criticism is welcome and encouraged! We want our ideas heard by Niantic, and nobody has ever got what they wanted by complaining. So without further ado, I want to move on to the first order of business. The Grind:Whether you’re level 10 or level 30, the game is a grind, and that’s not a bad thing. This grind is what separates the casual players from the hardcore players, but not necessarily in a way that has positive effects on the long term sustainability of the game. As you level more and more the game gets harder to progress (as any game should,) but unlike in other games, the rewards seem to be abysmal the further you go. Each level up gets progressively harder, and 10,000 experience that it used to take is now 300,000, until suddenly the only thing you want to do is run around evolving Pidgey. This leads to one of two things, “The Grind”, OR, players quitting out of boredom. What casual player wants to catch and evolve 3,000 Pidgey just to be able to compete in gyms? Now, this leads to a stale playstyle, in which, we go around catching Pidgey and ignoring Clefairy because they’re harder to catch and have the same reward, if not less (more candy to evolve=less xp.) If we want to see a steady amount of players through the lifetime of the game (and I know I do. I love sharing my childhood nostalgia with strangers in a park,) then something needs to be done about “The Grind.” The potential solutions are endless, but I have a solution that I believe would make things a lot more diverse; Start scaling XP FOR EVOLVES. No longer would you need to catch the aforementioned 3,000 Pidgey to progress to higher levels, but instead you could prioritize what you want. Instead of making the XP reward for an evolve a static 500xp, it would scale with the amount of candies required for an evolve. Now those Clefairy are worth catching, just as much as the Pidgey. Of course, you could still amass ridiculous amounts of Pidgey and evolve them for XP, and that’s good. Some people like that. We don’t want to eliminate that option. But the reward for evolving your buckets full of Pidgey is now equivalent to the reward of catching and evolving a bundle of bellsprouts. Some may argue, “Pidgey is still a more common mon, leading to more people evolving more Pidgey,” but that’s fine. We don’t want completely remove that aspect from the game, like I said earlier, the grind is not bad. But now, instead of ignoring that zubat, you can catch him, and evolve him, and he’s not a waste of balls like he was before. But why stop there? SCALE EVERYTHING! That’s right, I said it, scale everything! Scale the amount of candy you get from catching a second evolution, scale the rewards you get upon level up, scale the amount of stardust you get from a catch in accordance to its ring color (so that harder to catch mons reward more dust.) Now those super annoying, super hard to catch Raticate are worth something! Every other game has scaling rewards for difficulty. Why shouldn’t PoGO? The Meta:So now you’ve caught those 3,000 Pidgey, you fell prey to “The Grind,” and now, you’re level 22 with an impressive inventory of your personal favorite mon; Gengar, Persian, and Jolteon fully maxed out and ready to rumble. You grab your battery pack that you bought just for PoGO and you walk/drive to the nearest gym, ready to pit your team up against another trainer! You go to tap on the gym, the anticipation is there, you’re ready, you’ve finally caught up with the other trainers and you’re ready to show off your team. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. 3,000 Pidgey got ground into candy for this moment. You click GO and start your battle, and your fully maxed Jolteon gets shredded by a defending Vaporeon. A frown begins to form, you have a few good mon left, and as you continue to battle, each of your favorite mon gets obliterated by a defending Vaporeon, Dragonite, or Lapras. You walk away defeated with a frown on your face. “That was what I spent all that time catching Pidgey for,” you think to yourself. Now, this scene is obviously overly dramatic, but the premise is there. You just spent weeks to try and build up your favorite team, and you go to battle and suddenly your team is in the trash, along with your dreams. You receive no reward for sentimental value and casual players everywhere are mad that their favorite mon can’t even pick a fight with a Vaporeon. That poses the question, what are we even grinding for? A chance to get squashed by the same five mon, over and over unless we conform and max out that Snorlax we don’t like?To everyone that will argue that every mon has their utility and some the effectiveness of those mon in combat depends solely on the trainer battling with them, you’re somewhat right. You can learn to dodge, and have the best possible moveset, and try super hard for perfect IVs, and at the end of the day, your perfect Persian still has less of a chance against a Snorlax than a 0/0/0 Vaporeon with the worst possible moveset. Now, there’s obviously a metagame in every single game that offers PvP, and we can’t always satisfy everyone, but in the current state of the game, we’ve got a stale metagame. The formula for CP doesn’t take into account nearly enough of a mons stats (speed specifcally), the complexity behind natures and building the right moveset is gone. So now we’re left with a meta where massive attack, slow mon, are dominant. But what about the Jolteons of the game? What about all those quick hitters that still boasted moderate attack stats? And to make matters worse, a Snorlax with hyper beam, takes the same amount of time to get it off, as a Raticate with hyper beam, despite the fact that Raticate has a speed stat more than 3x that of Snorlax. That doesn’t seem fair, does it? This leads me to back to SCALING! Yeah, I know you’ve probably heard enough of it, but the solution to a lot of problems in PoGO is to either introduce or balance scaling. Factor in the speed stat more heavily into the CP formula, scale move animation duration based on speed stat, scale dodging based on speed stat. Every mon has a speed stat. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be utilized. Give every move a base duration, and modify it ever so slightly based on speed. That way, although Jolteon has a lower attack stat, he fires off his Thunderbolts in quicker succession than a Flareon fires off his flamethrowers. This is only fair. The speed stat was used originally to determine which attacker went first, but that was back when the game was turn based. Now it’s live action and attacking in turns is a thing of the past, leaving the speed stat in the past as well, and that shouldn’t be the case. The Moves:Another large problem that ties into both, “The Grind” and “The Meta” is moves. Now you’ve gathered 400 Magikarp candy and you’re ready to evolve. You click the button and get hyped about your new Gyarados, only to find out he has twister. A charge move that deals less damage than his fast move. Are you seriously expected to grind another 400 candy in hope that the same fate doesn’t befall your next Gyarados?The solution: Make powerups function like levels in the original series. At level 20, Gyarados can learn bite, if the trainer so chooses to bequeath his Gyarados with the ability to bite his opponents. When your Gyarados hits level 20 while powering him up, he can replace his fast move with bite, if that’s what you choose. This also leads to a more rewarding system of powering up at higher levels. Right now, you get a few CP per power up when your mon is already up there. Now, you keep powering up your mon even though the % difference in CP is abysmal for the amount of dust you have to spend, because when you hit level 41, your Gyarados can learn the coveted hydro pump. This leads to another amazing thing. Say you catch an Ivysaur, it’s already level 23 when you catch it, and you evolve it. Your new Venusaur was rolled with Razor leaf, and you really wanted vine whip. You can’t learn vine whip now, because he’s already above level 9 (the level at which Venusaur learns vine whip.) This makes it much more rewarding, if, for example, the trainer were to level up his starter all the way, over a starter he catches. That way, even though you spend more candy and stardust making him the beast you want him to be, you get to pick his moveset. This is a reward and a deterrent all at the same time. Don’t want to put in the effort acquiring stardust and candy to level your Charmander to get the moves you want? Well then settle with the moves you have. Now you’re forming a sentimental bond with your mon and turning them into ultimate gym demolisher. This is fun for casual and hardcore players alike, because now, we don’t just pick the highest CP and slam our fingers on the evolve button. We strategize about what we want our mon to be. Do we want a defender Blastoise, or an attacker? Do we want a mix of both? Now the customization of your mon is in your hands. Now he’s YOURS and not just another Charizard. He has the moves that you carefully crafted for him, and even though he may not be the best theoretical attacker, you value those quick animation moves so you can dodge more attacks. Now we’ve given players a choice of playstyle. No more stale tapping and holding. We can craft our mon to cater to our playstyle. Well, travelers, that’s all I have for you. These are some of my thoughts and solutions to the current state of the game, and I’d love to hear your input and hear your solutions! I won’t be providing a TL;DR because even though it’s a brick of text, summarizing it won’t do it justice.EDIT: A lot of players are commenting about the idea of XP scaling, saying that we shouldn't scale XP. In no way did I imply that it should get easier to level. I think that aspect should remain the same. I simply suggested diversity in the methodology of leveling up by making the XP from evolves scale with candy requirements. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2c4KONd