Abysmal trading implementation is indicative of much bigger problems
I have enjoyed collecting physical Pokemon cards for many years but, for a variety of reasons, this has become more difficult recently.
Pocket seemed like it would be a nice alternative. There was a big emphasis placed on collecting in marketing, which has always been my favorite aspect of the PTCG. In theory I could enjoy one of my favorite hobbies without having to worry about it taking up as much time, space, or money.
Oh, how wrong I was…
It didn't take long to discover that collecting all the cards was going to take a significantly larger time and/or money investment than the physical TCG would.
Pull rates for this game are atrocious, which honestly does make some sense. They want to keep players coming back to earn those rarer cards and even encourage a little spending, which is acceptable. I came into this expecting to spend some.
But how do we obtain those rare (2star+) cards? You keep shelling out money until you are lucky enough to pull what you need naturally or until you have enough pack points to get it outright. That's it. And pack points are accrued at such an insulting rate you will have to spend $200-500 to get the only cards you are likely going to be needing.
"Trading is coming" we kept telling ourselves. "That should help us complete our collections, right?"
WRONG!
Trading, as it turns out, is completely useless. All the cards people actually want and need? Nope, can't trade those. Guess you are going to have to keep throwing hundreds of dollars at this game.
What is even the point anymore? With every new update the app just gets worse and we see that they are more interested in squeezing those whales than implementing features that would benefit the entire player base and increase enjoyability.
"Gacha" game or not, I don't feel like being able to collect all the cards in a damn collectible card game is too much to ask, but apparently that's a rich man's game…
I doubt anyone even made it this far, but if you did then thank you for reading my novel. I just wanted to call out DeNA for absolutely botching what could have been a great experience.