What will be the Restrictions on Trading?
Many card game digital clients and video games restrict or disallow trading entirely to encourage players to buy digital packs instead of acquiring the cards they need from friends. It seems the "trading" part of our trading card games is being diminished, and they are being rebranded as "collectable card games".
I was honestly surprised when I saw that Pocket intended to offer the feature in any form, and honestly I do not trust them to not eventually phase it out.
We already know that trading will not be completely unlimited, and will initially launch with extra restrictions before expanding the selection of cards that can be traded.
What do you think those restrictions will be?
Will it be a limit on the number of times you can trade per day? Will you have to own cards for a certain period of time before they can be traded? Will your account have to reach a certain level or age before you can trade? Will you be required to have made a purchase on your account, or subscribed to the Premium Pass, before trading is permitted? Will you only be able to trade cards purchased with certain currency?
And how many of these restrictions will apply to the final version of trading?
In addition to preventing users from collaborating or acquiring cards too easily, how will they prevent players using multiple accounts to acquire cards?
An unfortunate reality is that if something can be traded, it can be traded for real money (off-app if not permitted on-app). You can bet there will be people farming rare cards across multiple accounts.
And how will vulnerable users like children be protected from people scamming them? Will you only be allowed to make trades of equivalent rarity?
I have lots of questions that the forum announcement didn't answer.
Comments
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I expect there to be a cost to trading. Maybe some “trading tokens” you buy or occasionally earn.
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I thought there might be something similar. We have items to recharge booster pack timers and everything else. Endless timers, and purchasable consumables to accelerate them, are the modus operandi of mobile apps.
In this case I suspect they will be severely limited and not purchasable, because if they are going to get you to spend money, they would prefer you spend it on a random chance at cards you want rather than being able to buy specific cards, or the chance to acquire them.
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My expectation is that there will be:
- a new "trading ticket" required to trade
- only allow to trade same rarity cards
- amount of trades per day/player will have a limit
- they will monitor and ban multi-account players that try to exploit trade between their own accounts (this is the hard part)
From what I was able to understand they are really afraid that trade will mess up the game (and they should, is has the potential to create massive exploits and disencourage paying players of spending as much money in the game), most likely that’s why they are postponing it without any deadline.
I think there is a tiny chance that trade may never be a thing.
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Good for you. That has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
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They might just quietly drop the idea.
From a consumer standpoint, I hope they find a way to allow users to trade reasonably freely without it being used for massive exploits.
And honestly I'd rather trading exist and be exploited by a small minority than not exist at all.
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This question is really interesting and also important to answers or observe in the future, because "Trading" is in the name of Pokemon TCG Pocket. How will DeNA deal with it will show us a lot.
There is a slight difference between CCG (Collectible Card Game) and TCG (Trading Card Game) that in TCG you can trade. (This is why Magic: The Gathering Area brands itself as 'CCG' specifically). At the same time, trading has been what made Pokemon TCG famous and popular in the world.
I understand every game developer/publisher wants to encourage people to pay, while the trading feature is likely to reduce in-app purchases, especially in third-world countries. However, at the same time, it has other positive effects such as larger player base, community and better popularity, etc. I believe their marketing/market development team has already researched and discussed on this topic.
To be honest, for me, this is a matter of choice how Trading will be. Will it be very difficult to encourage purchases, or easier so many more players can enjoy the game (while affecting the average spending per player)? At the end of the day, I don't know which way will increase the total revenue better. There is too much ambiguity to calculate here.
Personally, I hope Trading will make the game more comfortable and enjoyable.
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As in you put up a card for trade with a request for what you want?
That sounds great! They definitely won't do that.
It would make it too easy to acquire specific cards if you can put up trading requests for the whole world.
We would also see a return of the GTS lopsided offers, with a bunch of kids putting up common Ratattas and requesting golden Mewtwos.
I am sure all those trades will go through.
I think direct trading with friends a limited number of times is the best we will get. Maybe the will let you list a trade offer on your profile page.
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Yes agree, I really would like to have trade in-game (if it's fair), but it's a hard question indeed, they want to keep making money and keep players around. If their trading system it's easy to exploit for sure many people will feel less encouraged to play and much less to put money on it.
What I know is that there is no perfect mechanism to trade between players without any exploits. The question is how significant will the exploits be (I know about several players with a lot of accounts).
In my opinion there will be a lot of people exploiting it, so they will be forced to start hunting down people to ban them maybe by IP or device, but there are still ways to go around that, eventually it will became a big mess and they will have to shut down the trading.
If I was in charge I would implement an AI trade, I mean the game would generate individual timed trading proposals to each player, then if the player had enough trading currency and the correct cards they could trade.
I'm very curious about how they will manage this.
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