A Visceral Look at PTCGLs Economy: Why it Doesn't Work

Today (01/23/2023) we'll be diving into the economy of Pokémon TCG LIVE. Opening it up for discussion for improvements that can be made to make the experience much more streamlined and in some cases we will discuss where things just don't make sense at all. It's my hope that by exposing the economy with raw values, we get a look at how best to improve it to allow people to play more fluidly with card sets instead of each set release feeling more like forced external expenses to see any sort of progress in game!

Here's the thing we need to address first: there are three different types of resources for no good reason. There's no point in making any more than even 2 types of resources ever. Any number beyond 2 is resource obfuscation, intent to confuse the user as what their resources are going to and why. Crystals, as an example, can be used to buy packs and battle passes. They would be considered the "premium" resources between Crystals, Credits and Coins. The interesting thing to note here being that there is no actual economy surrounding these things because there's no way to make purchase of any of the in game currency. This means that you must either spend your money on a peripheral site buying codes to redeem in order to fill your collection or that you simply only get access to what Crystals you can grind. As someone who made it to level 40 on the last battle pass (and spent the Crystals for the premium) I can only say I'm disappointed. There's no realistic way to grind Crystals unless you intend to play Pokémon TCG professionally and literally grind all day. The only real Crystals rewarded are locked behind the premium battle pass to begin with. So as someone who only grinds dailys because that's all the resources the game really cares to spit out, but also sees not enough returns on even the regular battle pass, what is my incentive to spend my Crystals on the premium pass? Just to have Crystals enough to buy the premium pass next season? So if I don't buy the premium pass, I basically don't have access to more than 60 Crystals a day unless I'm (attempting) grinding wins on a broken MMR. And the premium pass costs 30x that. So a month's worth of grinding dailys and not spending on anything else just to afford to buy your premium battle pass so we can afford to buy it again next season means what...?

I'm not exactly sure what the endgame goal is with Crystals. Because again, you can't purchase them directly. But their use is so fundamental to the structure of the economy. Unfortunately, if you want the premium battle pass, you have to forego buying in game packs at all with any Crystals you might earn along the way. Your choice is: build your collectio(buying packs of Celebrations to turn into credits, what a joke.) or be able to afford to buy the battle pass. But not both. Not without excessive grinding that not even professional players realistically have time for. The rewards structure is self cannibalistic with no means to support itself and no method to infuse your account safely as all costs to do so are external.

Which leads us to the conclusion that the economy is unsustainable entirely without the above suggested means to purchase Crystals. It's like The Pokémon Company designed a gacha and forgot that the game was intended to be free to play. The idea being "wait and see" in hopes that we demand to have access to full on gacha via in game shop purchases. They developed several nonsensical resources for seemingly no reason other than to confuse people as to which resources are important and what they're for, while also giving less than piecemeal rewards for casual daily grinders to even sustain a fun environment. The resource system points in every way to the intent to monetize in-game. And if there's no intent to, why bother to obfuscate so heavily? Why do I have more coins than I care for and no Crystals to buy a battle pass where all the Crystals seem to be locked behind? Why? Credits are made from Crystals too. But you don't want to give us any Crystals. 60 a day. Maybe 200 at most if you grind 8 hours of the day and get your licks in. I'm not about it. This economy is trash tier, friends. I'm not about to sit here and beg for Crystals when the game devs could just simply allow us to dust any card in our collection rather than force you to have a full set of things before dusting. That's forcing purchases upon the players because the game doesn't actually reward the important things in enough quantity to actually matter. Even after giving away Lugia VStar as a whole deck, there's still not enough Silver Tempest rewarded to complete the set. And those rewards get further diluted by _insert random avatar item here_.

You can't buy Crystals but Crystals buy packs and the battle pass. You can buy Coins with Crystals or turn Crystals into Credits, at about the rate of 200 Crystals for average 300 credits a pack, and that's being generous, as you should only be buying Celebrations for credits. Admittedly that can go a little higher but you never score enough credits from a pack to fully pay for a Gold card and it's very rare that you get enough from a pack to afford a full art or secret rare card. In most cases, you're getting credits enough from a pack to afford crafting a regular rare. But there's no dusting system. I can't get rid of those tacky rainbow rares, now. And I'm stuck grinding them so that I can get credits from a given set to get the cards I actually want. This is not a healthy structure, friends.

So you've got this constant grind of an economy that doesn't even sate itself on a casual daily basis and you expect to not only retain PTCGO players but have them feel fairly compensated?? No. Absolutely not. At this point the only compensation I'd be happy with is a port of my collection back to PTCGO. This economy is so trash that it's impossible for even partially serious players to get excited about it. And it's very likely that Pokémon Company's solution will be "you can buy Crystals, now." Which entirely defeats the purpose of being a free to play game. It was never intended to be free to play. The development of the economy shows us that it's intended to go down the microtransaction path as a matter of "when" and not "if." It's the only way these kinds of economies lacking dusting systems survive.

Dusting needs to be evaluated more heavily as an option and it needs to feel rewarding. Like, turning two rainbows into a full art or two full arts into a gold rewarding. Not 5 for 1 or more. House doesn't need to be greedy! These resources are infinite and there should be plenty enough for everyone to go around! Right now the resources feel like they're being hoarded and there's no reason for it. It's like TPC is waiting for us to beg them to turn on the in-game gacha.

And I'm just not about it.