Blarrg

There is no obedience in this game. The only time a pokemon will refuse your orders is when using Dig or Headbutt outside of battle (such as on trees or cave holes). Dig and Headbutt require the pokemon to have 150+ happiness to use outside of battle, to check your pokemons happiness you can type "/happy #" in chat, where # is a number between 1 and 6 that corresponds to your specified party slot.

Make sure you have HM05 Flash (its on the opposite side of Digglet Cave, need 10 caught Pokemon). Make your way back to cerulean and exit the city to the right and follow that route to Rock Tunnel, which will take you to Lavender.

You're missing the point. How do you know these aren't paying customers when you've already shoo'd them away from the game at the get-go? Of course they aren't going to come back after waiting in queue for 40 minutes on every login. You've basically made your chance of having a paying customer go from 10% to 0%. And as I said before, it doesn't matter if the information is available on the forums. Calling consumers lazy because they don't want to go on a hunt for information (that could easily be outdated because it is a forum after all) is extremely rude. When it comes to paying real money for a game that information needs to be accessible within the client itself, period. You shouldn't have to ask or reference other users to figure out what you're paying for. Imagine a grocery store that existed where none of the food had price tags or nutrition labels, that is essentially what you are excusing.

You don't need to have separate names for the accounts. Names are already registered through the forums and can be reused for all accounts attached to the character. If you wanted to have the option of naming your characters then yes you would have to implement a checking system. About the game data server, that doesn't necessarily have to happen (at least not right now). You can still designate character data within the individual servers as a database and minimize the accessing that it has to do (one call on login and one call on logout, one call every 5 minutes for disconnect fail/safe). In the long run you would obviously want a game data server, which would increase bandwidth usage between the servers but at the same time increase the capacity of all the other servers since the gameplay servers would no longer have to have a database on them.

Foreword Lately, you'll see several threads complaining (rightfully) about current queue times in both Red and Blue servers. Understandably, these threads are met with fast locks; however, I see many users (even mods) making excuses as to why its "okay" and we should just "wait for it to settle down." The arguments used in these posts are extremely naive and go against the very basics of business. Lets say you own a restaurant, and it for some reason becomes extremely popular and reservations start filling up every day and there forms a huge backlog keeping people from eating at your restaurant. The arguments of some posters here is the equivalent of "well we should just let the hype die down because they probably won't come a second time anyway." Sitting here and doing nothing about it only hurts the growth of the game and guarantees its eventual demise. All these new players will instantly be turned off from these queue times and you're losing tons of potential consumers. New players are what keeps a game alive, and if you continue ignoring and not taking advantage of these surges of new players (whether they be from streams, cultural fads, or season-based players) this game will continue to lose support and slowly die. However, this isn't a complaint thread, I have several suggestions that could help remedy this process. Save Data Cross Compatibility This is extremely important. Right now, your character is tied to the individual server you created it on. This is an inefficient bottleneck for the expansion of the game. Instead of the current setup, you should be able to choose your character, then choose the server you wish to play on. This way, when a new server is released, older players can switch without losing their progress. In the short term, this well effect market values significantly, but they would eventually become more homogeneous while improving the ease of expansion for the game in the long term. In-Game FAQ This needs to happen. Every day in help chat you see the same questions over and over and over from new players. Many of these questions don't get answered, and many of these players can get frustrated by this. Many of you will say "they can just search the forums," in which case, you are technically right. However, ease of accessibility is an important aspect in game design. Having the answer to these questions in game, or even having hyperlinks to the forum for various information inside the client itself can create a meaningful bridge from the client to the forums, increasing forum exposure and interaction while simultaneously reducing strain within the Help chat and relieving the early frustrations a new player can have. The FAQ can range from a variety of things, including links to helpful guides, explanation of game mechanics (such as EVs and IVs), even an in game typing chart showing offensive and defensive advantages/disadvantages of each type. More Purchase Incentive I'm sure plenty of players look into the shop and aren't very intrigued by what they see. What does medallion do? What does the axe do? So many players ask these questions. The problem is these questions shouldn't even have to be asked. Seriously guys, label the benefits of the items within the shop. Not only this, but give people more incentive to buy! There are so many things you can do to give incentive to buyers. Give players 10 free rare candies on their first purchase, make the first purchase of membership last twice as long! Not only do players look at the shop not knowing what anything does, they aren't even given a good reason to just try it out in the first place. These incentives can greatly increase sales allowing you to actually upgrade server capacity and keep up with the growing game. Conclusion Overall, I see a huge lack of vision from the developers on the business side of things. They want to expand the gameplay with new regions/pokemon/quests/bosses and that is great, but all the time spent on that will come at a huge cost. Two out of the three of these ideas are fairly easy to implement and can provide great benefits to the game in the long run. These ideas don't even scratch the surface of what you could be doing, and for the sake of the future of this game, I really hope you put some consideration into these or other ideas.