UPDATES THAT WOULD MAKE THE GAME BETTER!!!

Welp, time to break down another list…

• Trading

This isn’t going to happen, the main reason why TPCi dropped trading when developing Live was due to the rampant scamming that was present in Online. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t big fans of people developing their own marketplaces, some of which were big enough to actually dictate the ”price” of cards on Online’s trading feature, on Online either.

• New music

This is nice in theory but there’s a lot of issues with it, TPCi actually wanted to use any of the songs from the main line Pokémon games they’d have to get the license for it (and that costs money, something that Live doesn’t have a lot of).

And yes this is a thing, the Pokémon anime has a nasty tendency of having great music (with some takes on in-game music) when it’s aired in Japan but is completely stripped away when localized and dubbed by TPCi.

• Chat Box

Are… are you actually serious about wanting a chat box in matches? Online had this feature and it got so toxic that Online’s devs removed it and it never came back. Seriously, if you want to give TPCi a reason to shut down Live then giving the devs an idea like this is the way to do it.

And no, safeguards won’t help with this. To quote Online’s devs when they announced that they removed the chat feature: “The trolls won”.

• Custom play mats

This is nice in theory (adding play mats was something Online wanted to do but it never got off the ground, IIRC the only thing they did was add an option to change it but only the default mat was usable) but its another resource drain in practice. You can only alter the red and blue portions of the game field if you want play mats, the rest of it is animated (specifically when you and your opponent bring in Pokémon into the Active Spot) and making that unique to each play mat will take time and money to do so.

• 3D

Like custom play mats this is just another resource drain, it also makes it harder to run on certain mobile devices due to their lack of a good GPU.

• better effects

Yeah…. no. This is just another resource drain, even the main line Pokémon games have moved on from giving attacks (outside of special circumstances) unique animations.

• Custom victory screens

People are complaining (and rightfully so) about the lack of an opt-in/opt-out option for the victory screen and you want to make more obnoxious to people that don’t want to be subjected to it? This isn’t even going into the resource drain problem (seriously, Live has a shoestring budget on top of being developed in-house by TPCi) that I’ve brought up twice already.

Hold on, I noticed that the idea came to you from Rocket League, a game that’s somewhat similar to Fortnite (a game that people here often cite when they make suggestions for more customization and emotes) and is owned by the same company that owns Rocket League. Seriously, stop trying to make Live like these games.

To quote Pikmin 1's Captain Olimar when you fail to collect all of the necessary ship parts in 30 days: "I am so very tired"

• Make gold more useful

This is something that I agree to some extent with, but only in terms of card cosmetics and sensible avatar cosmetics. There are older ETB sleeves you can't get in Live (AFAIK the oldest you can get are the ones from SWSH's ETBs, anything older than that has to be gotten with a code card) and Online's avatar feature made me hate flashy avatars with a passion after being exposed to countless avatars clad in cheap gold-plated clothes from head to toe.

• More interactive objects on the field

On the one hand you at least had the scruples to admit this feature would be tacky but on the other you're saying other TCGs have 'em.

I'll just point out the obvious: these kinds of features, especially those that require active user input, are really distracting and shouldn't be in a TCG app with any sort of playability and where paying attention to what your opponent does during their turn could mean the difference between winning or losing. Yes, we now have a game log but we also have a time limit that makes digging through said game log a pain.

There's less of an issue if it's a passive thing but it'd could potentially fall into the same specs problem that your other graphics-related suggestions run into, too much of it will cause the app to be limited to a small set of very expensive mobile devices.

I like some of the ideas that @Blondish34 had, mainly the ones about new music and making gold more useful. I'm getting so sick of the music, to the point where I'm just playing the game on mute at this point. I hate how useless gold is, and as I have said before, avatars should just be completely removed from the game, as they are a distraction to what the TCG really is. I'd love to have a chat box, but it doesn't really seem like there would be an efficient way to keep out inappropriate comments. If the comment had to be checked, then it would probably take too long, and the comment would get sent through at a point where the point it had been trying to make didn't even make sense anymore.