The divide of PRO community > PRO 2.0

[Zedsouth]

Hello everyone,

 

I was planning to post this as a comment to: https://pokemonrevolution.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=66563 but i decided that this should rather become a topic for more people to express their opinion based on what i am going to say.

 

As most of you probably already know the infamous PRO 2.0 (of course they will change the name) is the next plan, 3d, more (or maybe all?) implemented moves, abilities and fixed bugs. All these sound nice until you realise that all your game progress so far in PRO will NOT be transfered to the new game.

''it will be a completely different game''

 

I started playing this game on the first week it got released although i dont have many hours on this account (approx 350 ) because i shared my brothers (1300 h). Me and my friends were already playing another pokemon online game, much more limited and providing pokemon only from the 3 first generations. There was a huge debate few weeks before the release of PRO (August 2015) about transfering to the new game, a game with much better graphics, every map available and all generations. 3 out of 4 of us moved to the new game and believe me, we didnt regret it at all, even if we trying 30 minutes to login because the capacity back then was 200/200 24/7.

 

Recently i started playing again from this account and decided that i should complete dex and items, at least everything that was implemented so far.After 2 years all i can tell is PRO impoved a lot their servers quality and capacity (althought yellow server looks a bit unnecessary) but they didnt put much effort in serious map/bugs/moves updates, sterilizing the PVP battles and new places to explore. When i heard that PRO staff decided to make a new game these were my first thoughts:

2 years after and only kanto-johto-hoenn regions are implemented (yeah plus some islands), still missing abilites/pokemon/moves, the game is not even 50% done.

Why do you want to start again from scratch? Me and many others donated for this game, not only to get/sell a membership but also to support YOUR effort and progress this game.

Of course Shane explained the reasons why PRO updates were left behind for so long and they are pretty solid reasons, I personally wish you dont face this life pressure ever again. But in my opinion when you start something, even as a hobby, and you get such a feedback from fans/donations/dedicated players you should at least respect them and find somebody else responsible for the progress of PRO. Probably it must be very hard to code some moves/abilities and the glitches they can cause must be painful to sit and fix all day but what happened to the rest of the team? Is this game run only by 1 person?

 

Starting this new project will not only devide the community to half but also reduce it. Some players will quit and never come back at all, the new game will be played mostly by teens who are easily attracted to ''better graphics'' and the oldschool nostalgic players who grew up playing 1st 2nd etc generations will be stuck with the old. I am expecting to see some pseudo eyecandy minor updates to the ''old PRO'' (is it too soon to call it old?) or maybe a new map to stop people complaining for a while until they run out of donations and close the servers.

All i can think of is that the staff abandoned every good will to improve PRO and focuses on getting more money from the new players that will join after PRO 2.0 release. Correct me if i am wrong but how long do you think PRO will survive? 6 months? 1 year? im not deluted 2 years will be a miracle.

 

''make your own game'' > yeah im expecting this childish answer so don't bother answering that, i got used to this phrase since day 1 I started playing. You knew the difficulty of creating this wonderful game, you are hosting us and you should respect the people who are dedicated, love and give actual money for you to complete this.

 

I kindly request this topic to remain and not be deleted or get locked. Its a serious matter and people should express their ideas.

No hate :Heart:

[Prehax]

[mention]zedsouth[/mention], you are simply reading what you want to read.

 

It was stated more than enough that nobody is abandoning this game, not Shane nor any of the staffs. The new game is Shane's new project and has as also stated a few times NOTHING to do with PRO at all. The game itself will survive as long as PRO can pay the servers of the donations.

The yellow server was necessary duo to too many players back in Summer 2016.

 

The content for PRO doesn't stop, Sinnoh is being worked on and new stuff will come. Arnie just recently came back as a Staff and since then he brought us multiple new bosses (more to follow), the Johto Dogs, a new legendary, a ton of new TM moves and so forth. Shane had almost nothing to do with it.

 

The new game from Shane, is something else, something new and yes players will switch BUT this won't happen for another year.

[Furtifk]

The main reasoning for creating a PRO 2.0 stated by shane was that in PRO the source code is very old and cannot be improved much further without causing a lot of issues. So to further improve PRO would be very hard for the devs especially if there are only shane and thor coding stuff. I feel like what would be ideal is a data transfer to the new game without changing that much except for being 3d and different source code although that may be impossible. I agree with you this will be a shame to divide the already small community currently in PRO and will cause even less of a casual player base amount. All we can hope for I guess is for the staff to figure something out that would please everyone.

But I get where you're coming from :) and I agree with you.

And currently we don't have to worry since we are getting quite a lot of fresh content.

[Chameleon]

Your concerns are understandable, but it's for the better.

 

PRO is limited by its source code (or w/e it's called) and it's better to play something that at least has a chance of being complete. Unlike PRO which will never be complete. Moves/abilities etc. wise.

 

Also, PRO has a lot of artificial currency (ie bots), huge amounts of money/Pokemon that shouldn't even exist. It'd be a lot better in the new game I imagine.

 

There have been other Pokemon MMOs in the past. Good and bad. Shane, Thor and Red were a part of (at least) one of them. But they still decided to create PRO even if it meant dividing the community and see where it's at now. The older games probably don't even reach 900 monthly users whereas PRO goes past that amount daily on a single server.

 

Sometimes you just have to move on.

[Theprodigy]

Shane also stated that he needed to make the new game to keep PRO up.

[Guest CheckeredZebra]

Hey. I'm writing from my phone so please forgive any typos.

 

I told myself I would never post here out of anger or spite, and I'm not now. So please don't take it that way. For context, I'm staff at a different MMO but I'm not here to plug that. Just noting it for my later points.

 

I'm going to do a rundown since I find this kind of fascinating.

 

Reasons PRO 2 is advantageous:

1. 3D has to happen for content support. If the priority is more generations and more regions, try to imagine making the Alola region in 2D. Just saying.

 

2. Pro 2 is the best way to shoehorn in a wipe. Having new, important and fun features would minimize he sting. Im not actively part of this game really, so I don't know if PRO's economy is so bad that only a wipe could save it. On our side we managed to fix a ton of stuff with careful design decisions and have further plans to help the market out but they aren't comparable to an approach that would work with PRO. I can maybe see why it could get out of control here since rarity system/obtaining pokemon is different here.

 

3. Good chance to remove bad mistakes from past. Security, data management, making the entire experience smoother, better progress plan is needed. Frankly I feel like a lot of content in PRO was not made with enough foresight and that, in it's current state, the game is not sustainable in long run because of this. If it is, it will have a lot of dead/sloppy areas (for lack of better terms).

 

4. To link single DB to multiple servers. Right now PRO can't adjust to it's financial needs easily because each server = a new game. This means a less popular server is hard to pull the plug on because ethically speaking you're punishing ppl by removing all their progress over the random color server they happened to choose, and that is ew.

 

Reasons PRO 2 shouldn't happen, at least as a separate game:

 

1. PROs guts, like broken moves, CAN BE FIXED. From what I have read by staff here, PROs source is based on our old source. Well, it took a lot of frustration and work but now almost all moves and abilites are working. Not saying that to advertise, I just despise misinformation. We redid it, so can they. Now, is it worth it for PRO to try and save their battle system when they might as well redo everything else? Maybe not.

 

2. Why not just "freeze" PRO updates, remake everything and just republish the new game under PRO? You wouldn't have a split community that way and there would be no fears of abandonment. Just transfer basic account t data over (just the shells), give them a gift as a legacy (ex: surfing Pikachu) and call it a day. All upsides, low downsides. You could also keep banned data, so that your worst rukebreakers don't return.

 

 

Thanks for letting me chime in. Again, no malice. Just analysis.

 

Edit: bad typo

[Chameleon]

snip

 

Sounds like you're talking about PWO. Well let me tell you one thing about 2. You didn't fix shit. The economy you have is beyond fixing or even getting close to it.

_

Also, afaik your 2nd point on why it "shouldn't" happen is already planned. PRO players might be getting a few goodies from what I've heard.

[Guest CheckeredZebra]

snip

 

Sounds like you're talking about PWO. Well let me tell you one thing about 2. You didn't fix [Censored]. The economy you have is beyond fixing or even getting close to it.

_

Also, afaik your 2nd point on why it "shouldn't" happen is already planned. PRO players might be getting a few goodies from what I've heard.

 

TL;DR on the bottom.

 

Lot missing (Hoenn, Sevii, I think you guys have a PvP ranking system, etc), but we do have a lot of our moves working properly and had to deal with similar if not the same source code. We only have 13 broken moves and most of them pretty inconsequential, like Rage Powder. So if we can deal with the battle system, I imagine PRO staff can too. That's not meant to sound detrimental or as one-up-manship - it's encouragement. They can. It is possible. It can be done and I hope it happens sometime in the future. It would make this game pretty great.

 

We also curbed massive hyperinflation issues, which is something PRO is primarily struggling with from the info I've been able to scrap together. I can't comment on the rest. If you want to argue with me about that, I can get you a graph with the numbers but we'd start getting petty and I'd like to avoid that. This is about PRO, not my game. I only brought it up since it had similar foundations in technology. Furthermore, as I said above, some of our tactics for economy might not apply to PRO since they have different ratios for obtaining wealth/Pokemon. Though, for economy, give any game that has limited pools of resources (limited pokemon, limited nintendo items) 7-8 more years and see how the market is then. e-e;

 

Now, even if you rip the above points to shreds because I didn't have enough information about PRO (sorry if so), even if you hate where I'm from because of old bad blood or anything else...that doesn't make my 2nd point about splitting not being the better option for PRO any less legitimate.

 

2nd point might be barely happening (giving PRO players incentive/reward on PRO2), but I don't see why the games would have to be completely separated either way. You can argue whatever, but At my base I would disagree with making two Pokemon MMOs.</B><i></i> There's a lot more downside to not just relaunching it under the same banner. Why split up half of your staff and some of your playerbase when, instead, all of them would be useful when united? You have a big hiring/talent pool from your community, none of the staff you invested training into is going to be cut off from the revised edition of the game, and It's just more efficient & less divisive/confusing from a manpower/organization standpoint. This is especially true based off of recent readings that Shane/Thor are primarily the game's backbone when it comes to programming. (How many topics have said "Nothing has happened because Shane has had hard times, nothing has happened because [x] person was away," etc?) There's nothing inherently wrong with that as a development strategy (for security reasons). BUT, the output from Shane would have to be split across two games instead of one; something somewhere will get the shaft because of manpower getting divided in half unless they swap/modify how they are managing things or bring somebody else in to fill in for the other half of the work. That is much easier said than done.

 

I agree with revamping, updating, and redoing a lot of what PRO already has, and that it might as well start over due to everything that needs to happen for the long run. But I don't agree with keeping the current iteration of PRO up and releasing something separately, as that carries unnecessary downsides that are completely avoidable.

 

<B>TL;DR 1: You can disagree with economy. I can provide numbers but that's not as important as other points, and I don't want to stray the topic/hijack thread with that side discussion. However, our moves/abilities are working. PRO can do it too, and I wish them the best on that.

 

TL;DR 2: My point about splitting the games still stands, and just re-releasing PRO as a massively updated version of itself through a unified staff and unified community still seems like the better option.

[Akutowa]

I think that, PRO is incomplete in coding and mechanics. I think it would make more sense rather than creating a pro 2.0 with everything included which will take a while, why not just do it for PRO. 3d or 2d isn't that big of a deal in my opinion.

[Chameleon]

snip

 

This is my last post on the topic since, as you said, it's not right to hijack a thread.

 

Don't get me wrong, I believe you post everything with sincerity. But, we know the state of your game at the moment. Round of applause to you for getting most relevant stuff to work with the source code you have, but it doesn't mean anything when that doesn't translate into active players.

 

PRO's inflation is nowhere near the one you have. It's manageable, playable. Unlike the game you have, where newer/non rich players are the ones suffering for the money sinks. Those who have to pay 500k for a bike, 1m+ (last time I checked) for Volt Switch TM and so on. What good are fixed moves if you can't even grind your way up to be able to afford them? I'm sorry to say, but you have not curbed anything. If anything, the reason which may make you think that way is the amount of demand. 100 daily players on a good day and people like me no longer paying attention to the game means there's too little demand, mainly from the newer players themselves, which results in an okay market since you can't sell anything to non existent players. Prices have to drop. If your game had 300 players in a day and people like me playing, you'd see the real effects of hyperinflation.

 

The gap between the rich and the poor in your game is too huge to manage. I wasn't a poor player there, I was mid-tier and was able to get anything I wanted (worth noting I didn't want tier 5 old IV shinies etc. Any epic non-shiny stuff let's say). But face it, it's going nowhere. The foundation of that game is wrong in all areas and you can't get rid of it, it's beyond that.

 

I don't have any bad blood. I clocked 1k+ hours there even after I heard about PRO. I had hope that it would be fixed/managed. I even spent hours to consult with several staff over there about possible solutions, which were all rejected with a polite "we know better than you". If there was hate, I wouldn't have been stubborn to stay for 1k+ hours even after I was invited to PRO, trying to have an effort towards fixing the game.

 

PRO is still manageable imo. It could stay. But the pros of a new game outweigh the cons in my opinion by a mile. Pokemon MMO community is used to starting from nothing several times. I'm saying this as a person who played PRO for 5h+ per day on average for the past 8 months, knowing that a new game was in the works for at least 7 months of that playtime. Fixing something is a way to solve things. But, imo, using the experiences you have to build something better is a far better solution if done right.