My thoughts of new Excavation sites

[J123b]

First off, I'd like to share my total excavation points as a way to solidify the weight of my points I'm going to make.

I've been doing lots of excavations and I believe that I have an understanding of what makes excavation fun and exciting.

I know that there are obviously a handful of players that have done more excavations than me, but I'm very sure that there are very few with as many points as me or more.

 

 

To start off, when I saw the announcement about updated excavation sites, I really liked it. I've felt for a long time that excavation needs an update to appeal to the mass, and obviously any new content is going to make people try out the the excavation sites for a little while when the update is fresh. It might recruit a few more hardcore excavators, but in the long run, excavations is definitely going to be more of a boring grind than it already was.

 

The old problems with excavations that will still remain: (in my opinion)

 

1. Vendor trash (previously only rare bones) like pearls, small mushrooms, rare bones etc doesn't make sense to me. It kind of defeats the purpose paying to enter the excavation site.

 

Solution: It would simply be better to put this value into the quality of the pokemon that spawn in the site.

 

2. (Not sure if this is going to be true) The pokemon spawns are very stale. After months and months you're just going to encounter the same pokemon time after time, this is something that creates excavation burnout.

 

Solution: Have regular small updates with a frequency of about 1-3 months, with just a couple of changes in excavation spawns. Keep a pool of pokemon for each site, enough to rotate around. Keep the changes small and frequent. I'm thinking in the range of 1 pokemon change for another in the same rarity tier per site per small update. Have just a few site defining pokemon stay permanent.

 

3. Progress in excavation rank. Previously after you reached 6k you had everything unlocked and only needed to grind 2k more for the tomb raider rank (which in my opinion is worse than paleontologist, but that's another issue). Now that cap is increased to 10k with entry of dragonic site, but problem remains the same. After you reach 10k you basically unlocked everything and doing sites with 30k is the exact same thing as doing sites with 10k despite the 30k one thematically being a much more experienced excavator (btw if you didnt do lots of excavations, points gains are really slow after you reach the cap of content).

 

Solution: Add some kind of reward or incentive for excavating, either by points or by regularity. This is going to make people who already enjoy excavating a lot enjoy it more and might make people who previously didn't like excavating feel more satisfied with excavating.

 

4. The artifact point shop. There is simply one item that's the most cost efficient and I'm always going to spend all my artifact points on that one, the addition of new gems might contend the list, but ultimately it will probably just decrease value of gems and we then go back to purchasing the most cost efficient item again. The new pvp items and evo items are not even close in cost efficiency, and i play on gold. This problem is even worse in silver from what I've heard about prices.

 

Solution: Buff/nerf prices in the artifact shop. You kind of need someone experienced in trades on both silver and gold to make the balancing right. My opinion is that the prices should be balanced between an average of gold/silver balance so that even if a few items will be more worth than others in efficiency, the best items will not be several times more cost efficient than the worst items.

 

 

Now for the new problems i think came with the update and my opinion why it was an overall disappointment:

 

5. The balance between spawns. Previously we would be quite likely to get one of the rarest spawns per map excavated. The probabilities have been changed for the worse with the new patch. I can agree that old excavation was kind of overpowered, it yielded lost of money from encounters if you had 6k+ points, but even then not a lot of people were doing excavations. This is obviously something I might have been very unlucky with, sampling only from 2 days of excavation sites, but from what i can tell, there has been a huge nerf to rare encounters. This is going to make people burn out from excavations very fast.

 

I see this issue as an opportunity to mix with the solution for (1) and (4). Giving people with high amounts of excavation points an opportunity to pay more for entry that gives better chance for high tier spawns is not something I would be opposed to.

 

6. While Dragonic site is really nice designed, it is huge and lacks a clear path to walk it. I've been forced to enter in staffview 1. I understand that you want to make the map the most prestigious one, but I believe that removing the one way direction passages in the start and end would at least make this site a little bit nicer to walk through. Being forced to take one of the paths on the way in and the other one on the way out just feels bad.

 

7. Some of the pokemon are put into the wrong spawn tiers imo. With lots of people doing excavations, Heracross being the worst offender. A previously t8/9 pokemon spawns lots and lots in historical site, this is going to decrease value a lot of heracross. I salute all owners of epic heracross that's getting their value decreased in this very moment with an f

 

f

 

Also Mantyke is too common imo.

 

This concludes my current thoughts about the new state about excavation. I might have more points I'd like to add later but this is it for now.

 

If any staff member wants to contact me in private with intention to make improvements for excavation sites, you're very welcome to contact me either here on forum or on discord! I'd be very happy to help you.

[Iceflake]

As a Quote "NOOB" at Excavations only having around 1.7k of them i would like to put my two cents into this.

 

first thing first i would like to point out jb has over 20mil

 

With your first point on useless money items in favor of Better/Rare spawn rate chances i would like say people with anything under 2mil like these items. They bring a Risk Vs Reward aspect to the sites, you will usually make your money back if you hit up all of them and even more so it rewards those who take their time to do them. Thus rewarding those who aren't filthy rich

 

The second point highlighting the Staleness of the Pokemon, I cant say much. I haven't did that many Excavations to make it stale for me. But i would think with the most recent update to them with the extra rare spawns and some low tier spawns it would become more interesting. Not much to talk about with this cause it comes with experience.

 

The third point describes No real reward for achievers. This is a easy fix in being decreasing the amount of "NOTHING" spawns you get after a certain threshold. Maybe add a milestone points like at 5k excavations you see a little less. then 7.5k and so on. I don't really see a reason why this isn't already in the game since the nothing spawns usually only help the players who are just getting into Excavations by giving extra points. And with the rewards of being able to sync fossils without a limiter is kinda of the best reward for getting a lot of excavations.

 

The Fourth point i cant really comment on. Since I'm still so low on excavation points i don't really have enough to purchase anything useful.

 

With the Fifth point being the same as my fourth. Cant really comment. I don't have enough points to get those spawns. But if i had to guess it would be because of the new added spawns making the other spawns feel like their more rare. Since adding something to a spawn zone will decrease the Percentage of all the Spawns in that area. A "plausible" fix to this would be adding another site. Maybe a underwater site like a underwater sunken ship site. To add spawns to. The east side of Hoenn is barren of sites to my knowledge.

 

The six point I'm just going to skip for obvious reasons.

 

With the Seventh point contradicting the fifth i believe. Of Jb wanting higher tier Pokemon more frequently. If that is the case of Heracross being lowered on the spawn tier list i don't really see a downside. I'm pretty experienced in the game of PVP (not trying to say i know every single mon that plays) But i rarely see heracross in pvp making any big strides in viability besides very niche cases. So it being lower on the spawn rate list is only adapting to the Meta i believe. The prices might go down but thats just the way the market works.

 

I would like to clarify im not attacking JB's Fixes im just trying to look at it from another angle. Hes my guildy and fellow officer. Just saying his Richness might be clouding his judgement on some of these points.

[J123b]

Nice perspective from another viewpoint, just a side note on why 5 and 7 do not contradict each other entirely.

 

I think an image will describe it better, don't mind the balance between them as these bars do not represent statistics, but focus on the principle I'm trying to explain.

 

Lets imagine this is the current situation, with 5 distinct rarity tiers (which there is not, it's just to demonstrate the point)

[spoiler=Image 1]

 

 

what i would like to see is

[spoiler=Image 2]

 

 

where the red bars represent the loss of probability, green bars represent the gain in probability and the blue lines representing the new probabilities

 

In the case of heracross (and others) i believe they belong in another rarity tier than they're currently at and i would like to see something in the lines of this

[spoiler=Image 3]

 

 

I hope this explains the situation more clearly

[Iceflake]

What I'm seeing here is increasing the odds of rare spawns. while decreasing the common spawns. Without proof that they decreased the spawn rate of the rarer spawns we cant say for certain. A mod/spawn editor can confirm this if they like. Thank if you did.

 

what i see they did was they added spawns to a spawn pool that you were accustom to. That would be the reason why you seem like you see less rare spawns. Adding a new possibility to a already existing will do that to any equation. What they did to my knowledge was added many new spawns to each site. Again if a pawn editor proves me wrong i will humbly apologize. Your answer just make excavations easier therefore not very like the MMO of pro that we are used too.

 

I see only 2 ways of fixing this and still make the game feel that classy PRO MMO feel, if any other people would like to add to this they can. One would be removing the new spawns which i highly disagree with. More rare spawns chances every day the better. Second would be adding New sites to Hoenn. This in turn would fix the "spawn irregularities your having" and give new players the chance of getting more points/money every day. While also giving people new and experienced in excavations, options on what they want to try for.

 

If its only the spawns rates you have the most gripe with i suggest making a post in https://pokemonrevolution.net/forum/index.php?threads/pok%C3%A9mon-spawn-related-suggestions-feedback-requests.97809/page-46#post-723048

that should allow you to possible change Heracross back to being a Higher teir and the fixes of the rates in the excavations. By voicing your opinion. apologizes to Prehax if he isn't the one who edits these spawns in the excavations ahead of time.

 

Just going to leave this you getting a Mon too much and wanting it to be a high teir and also wanting higher tier to be easier to catch are kinda contradicting each other.

 

Thank you, this will be my last opinion on this. This is up to the people and mostly the staff. Just trying to get people to see my side of this coin we both are apart of.

[Iceflake]

I would like to see other peoples opinion on this as well

[Darksun20]

I have roughly 15k exca points, and since the update I don't have the same concerns as you do, in fact my only issue and has been for awhile is the Shiny Rocks. Personally I think those rocks should always give something good and never Artifiact points or nothing. Other than the HA Epic Cyndaquill I got recently and a rotom before the update I can't recall getting anything good from them in all my time playing this game, and that's sad...they just feel like any other regular rock. That should make exca a little more exciting.

[Gatso]

+1