"Initial Thoughts: Mega Evolution is too Costly to be Balanced for Competitive Play"

#PokemonGO: TLDR: Mega Evolution costs make this game Pay 2 WinEdit: Read the post please. I'm aware megas are not currently allowed in GBL, but they very likely will be allowed in the future.Let's look at Mega Blastoise as an example.Mega Evolution costs 200 energy for the initial evolve and 50 for each subsequent evolution. A mega Blastoise raid will net between 30 - 50 energy.While the initial cost of 200 is high, the real issue lies with the 50 energy subsequent costs. If I wished to use mega Blastoise on my team in GBL every day, this would require me to raid at minimum 1.5 times per day as 1 raid alone will not be enough for a mega evolve. That's assuming I do all my GBL sets within the 4 hour window Blastoise is evolved and that I don't experiment with my team at all. Although I suppose it could be possible to really maximize the value of a mega evolve and always do two days worth of battles at a time, 10 pm - 12 am for day one, and 12 am - 2 am for day 2. Though being expected to do that every other day is most certainly unreasonable for most players.This means that not only will you need to spend your daily pass on Blastoise every single day, but you'll also need to spend on additional remote or premium passes just to keep up with the cost. If costs remain unchanged when megas become allowed for GBL, it's hard to not call this anything other than pay 2 win as it will actually be impossible for free 2 play players to keep up with the constant costs of GBL.Prior to this the game could still be considered as not pay 2 win because the costs to power up your Pokemon had an end (ignoring the outrageous price attached to an arguably necessary item in elite TMs). You could pay to do more raids or hatch more eggs, but ultimately it just meant that paying players got to the endgame faster than free 2 play players as there was no more costs after a Pokemon was built. Now however, costs no longer have that end. Hence, the game now forces constant payment from it's players to remain competitive. If Niantic wants megas to be viewed as anything but greedy, and for this game to be considered anything but pay 2 win, the costs need to be dropped by a significant margin such that you shouldn't fear missing 1 raid means not having enough candies to be able to use your Pokemon. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2YIhCFI