Pokémon TCG Live: A Year-or-So in Review

grriffinn

It’s been a year (technically a year and 2-to-3 months, the TCG Live’s beta became global in November 2022) since Live dropped for a majority of the player base and I’ve formed some opinions one the changes encountered when moving between Online and Live.

The Good:

• The Credit system isn’t as bad as I thought it’d be, it’s actually very fair when you factor in the changes made to booster packs and card rarities made in SVI.
• The art and the orientation of the playing field isn’t as disorienting as I had feared, it takes some getting used to but then it becomes second nature.
• The game is a bit faster than Online was, dragging cards rather than tapping them takes some getting used to but it becomes second nature pretty quickly.
• Adding phones to the list of available devices has really helped boost the overall accessibility of the game.

The Mixed:

• Opening packs from any pre-SVI set that’s currently available in the in-game shop (Sun & Moon-through-Crown Zenith, I have some old pre-SUM era code cards but I’d rather not risk it) is iffy, the Credit system isn’t kind to these sets and you’re better off using said Credit system to get the BLW-CRZ cards you want
• The 3D models used for player avatars are a step-up from Online’s Flash-era 2D paper dress-up puppets but they’re still really awkward to look at
• There’s no way to report players in-game, this is something Online had and I’m kind of shocked that Live never bothered to import it
• Pairings need to be retooled, mirror matches are WAY too common
• Live’s Battle Pass is a nice upgrade to Online’s VS Rewards, I just wish there was a way to expand it beyond the 50 level max
• The Ranked ladder is nice but it becomes a slog once you get into Greninja Rank, I rarely go beyond Houndoom level and the highest I’ve ever gotten is Alakazam level.
• Quests are nice but having a max of two (with only one yielding Crystals) makes getting said in-game currency outside of the Battle Pass makes for an extreme grind.
• The Crystal currency is nice on paper but clunky in practice, it accrues at a rate of 60 Crystals per day (excluding any extras you get from tiering up the Battle Pass, doing well on the ladder, or leveling up) whilst digital versions of decent physical TCG products cost between 1,000-3,500 Crystals. And despite what the developers have said in the past, I don’t buy the whole “this game will never be monetized” bit and the way the Crystal currency is currently structured is a pretty big giveaway.
• No events or in-game tournaments, I understand that Live is still a work-in-progress but the loss of this feature makes the game feel lifeless.

The Bad:

• No landscape mode for tablets, the fact that we STILL don’t have one a year later (despite the desktop app’s layout being good for tablets as well as computers) is depressing.
• The end match animation doesn’t an on/off option. This has been brought up MULTIPLE times during the last year and the only way I feel TPCi would do anything about it is, if the rumors about loss of Online’s in-match chat function are true, something tragic happens to a player that doesn’t take it well.
• There’s no in-game option to enable/block emotes, enabling some players to emote spam when the match doesn’t go their way. This feature is something Online had and it helped cut down on that behavior pretty quickly.
• Match pairings feel worse than Online’s ever did, I get that part of it is due to Live pretty much giving you everything you need to make a tournament-viable deck on a silver platter but it at least should discourage mirror matches.
• There’s no post-game match log. Online had this feature and you could even copy it to your device’s clipboard so that you could use it for reporting bugs.
• Letters to the Community have all but been retired, the last one we had was back in August when Worlds was just a few days away
• The only mod responses anyone on the forums gets are canned responses. I understand why it’s done but it should be at a minimum, using for a large amount of replies makes the mod team look more like a team of bots rather than actual people. And to tempt fate, I predict this thread will get a canned response from the mod team too.

So yeah, even though Live has made some strides to be a decent replacement for Online it’s still hobbling along. I’d say this could be a shift in the right direction but recent shifts in the Pokémon IP have stymied my optimism from being as high as it used to be.