On top of the insane costs, trading limited to 1 request is INSANE
So we all are horrified with how trading “works” (arguable term). It is so immensely restrictive, requiring so much trashing of cards and resources, it’s like throwing your cards binder into a lake strapped with rocks, hoping that one of the scuffed commons flies out to the other side to your trade partner, who also just so happened to be throwing their binder into the same lake. Absolutely I N S A N E system.
BUT!
My post isn’t even directly about those cost restrictions. EVEN IF we had none of that, and it was a simple stamina + 1:1 rarity trades, no deleting cards, higher rarity = more stamina used… it being limited to 1 REQUEST AT A TIME is absolutely WILD.
There is one, hyper specific use-case for the current trading system that actually caters to anyone at all, and that is trading 1 and 2 diamond commons. This is fine for existing players to trade very basic cards to new players, as there are likely enough duplicates to be able to perform this.
However, even with bypassing the tokens system, 1 stamina per trade, with only 1 open trade activate at a time, it essentially requires two people to be in the same room or on a call to coordinate since.. wait for it.. there is ZERO way to actually REQUEST what YOU want! What is this absolute insanity. So at best, sat in a room with my trade partner, I can likely trade 5 common 1 diamond cards before we are waiting days for refresh. Utterly ridiculous.
Who is this for? And it’s not even a “throw your toys out of the pram” moment. Who is this actually for?
- New players are near fully locked out, struggling even to be allowed to trade the most common cards in the game (which they get most of all from packs anyway)
- Existing “regular” players are caught in the middle of having tons of cards but not enough intense number of duplicates to perform even 1 trade, since the other person, blindly, must offer any card they happen to also have tons of copies of, that I likely don’t need
- Whales or big frequent spenders have so many copies of so many cards, so trading is mostly viable, however all high rarity cards are hard locked out of trading, so it is entirely useless even for them because no whale is still missing EX or full art level cards
WHO IS THIS FOR?
I am beyond baffled at this catastrophic flop of a trading system. I always understood that it had to be limited, by design, to encourage people to continue buying packs. I knew time-gating was necessary as well. But here, even if our sole intent is to flesh out missing commons for new players, it’s STILL inadequate.
It’s safe to say that, as a community, we are likely going to ignore this feature entirely 99.99% of the time. I’m hoping the metrics prove this to be true, especially given how utterly convoluted it is even for the casual players who aren’t on Reddit. Hopefully they will revise the system in the future, but honestly, whatever disturbed mind conjured and greenlit this system in the first place does not give me confidence that the company actually wants people to enjoy the game.
Time to use pack points for that non-EX arcanine lol