Some thoughts about SV & Z-A presence:
- While I do think SV will just loop the starters forever there is one thing I can see them do: announce a rerun of the Mewtwo raid. Fits with the 30th celebration, gives another chance for people to get the mighty mark on their Mews. Just put the starter loop on pause for its duration, then start it back up again.
- Pertaining to that I can see them put the kanto starter trio out as mass outbreaks.
- Also I suspect we'll see them rerun the Walking Wake & Iron Leaves 5* raids again. Would be kinda nice if they ran them shiny, but I doubt that happens.
- Z-A still has one thing left to send out, judging by the text strings it'll activate as a Mystery Gift. Makes the most sense to reveal and give it out here.
- I am a little curious what the plan for the battle seasons in Z-A is. My assumption is it'll just keep the current ruleset and they just run it for every season until the servers are turned off but hey maybe they decide to tweak the rulesets for flavor for a while before Gen 10 hits?
And some stuff I'm curious about with Champions that I'll be interested to see if it gets detailed:
So like the thing about the general reaction to this game can be summarized as "Finally, they're making it way easier to do competitive than ever before" which reading between the lines mostly means
1. "we don't have to play the game in order to do competitive battles". Won't have to play raids for resources and tera shards, won't have to scour the world for a million berries, won't have to sell resources & grind battles for money. Finally, we can just select our Pokemon and make the changes and go battle. Freedom!
Except
everything costs the new game-specific currency. We currently just know you can get it from the battles & the presumed single player but I would like to see how much you get. And how much of that do you get in single vs PVP? Is it one time or infinite sources? What extent do you need to realistically play that stuff to get enough currency to actually do things such that it's faster and more efficient to do it here than to edit them as needed in their respective game? Related, but how much are items to buy; items are the one aspect we didn't get a look at other than knowing they're there.
Likewise, are any purchases one-time (such as moves) or do you have to pay
every time you change ANYTHING?
Remember even the website says to keep battling to earn points to keep powering up your squad so ngl folks, I don't think this is necessarily the magic bullet unless you get a boatload of VP per battle.
2. "We won't have to go to several different games to get the Pokemon we need". Makes sense, right? SV dumped the origin requirements and thus didn't bother including all of them to capture in the game so if you wanted Wolves, Calyrex, Enamorus (ok well no one needed Enamorus) or whatever you had to have SWSH, the DLC, L:A and beat the game/dlc to get there. This is one I see lifted up by a lot of people who aren't even competitive players (who, tbh, are the ones most likely to have all the games anyway) and
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm WELL! I have! Some doubts!
This is the one look at the "recruitment" screen we have and this isn't exactly optimistic is it? It's a seemingly random set of Pokemon, you can only "rent" for a week, and you can only pick a Pokemon to rent for free once a day. & permanent recruits cost at least 1k
So a bunch of questions that need clarity here are:
-The "r" stick icon seems like it could indicate a reroll the screen. So having confirmation on that would be nice. Is there a limit on rerolls?
-So ignoring rerolls for a moment, how often does this screen refresh? Once a day? Every battle? I doubt it's every time you enter the screen. When you buy a Pokemon, does it automatically fill back in?
-Actually, can you buy multiple copies? PVP always uses species clause so I can't see many people wanting do that but I guess having multiple builds available for different formats instead of editing the same Pokemon over and over could have merit.
-How deep is the recruitment pool? Aside from knowing that not literally every Pokemon will be available (presumably at launch it'll be all fully evolved SV + Z-A Pokemon + a few notable NFEs like Pikachu (Clefairy for example)) I mean... A lot of people have just immediately assumed oh well obviously everyone will be available through this screen but
I have some doubts that Legends and especially Mythics will just be randomly available through the recruitment gacha. Like the Legends are really strong Pokemon that you either have to do a bunch of nonsense to get to (Kubfu is probably the fastest you can get a legend and you still have to go through a couple hours of game time and story events to actually get a thing you presumably have to evolve to even use in Champions proper) and the Mythics are (depending on the era) best known for being event-only &/Or also having to do a bunch of nonsense to get to. I can EASILY envision a situation where you have to do things to get them, or that they might only be available to purchase during specific event periods. Live Service Games that are also still wanting you to participate in the regular games, baby!!!
-Also let's think about costs. iirc we only see Gardevoir and that cost 1000 VP. But is that the same for every Pokemon? Is something NFE like Pikachu worth less, are Legends worth more, does it all base on BST for example, etc ,etc.
I don't expect most of these to be fully answered, but I can see clarity being shown passively once we have more footage and scope of the game. It's good stuff to know, I think.
And related to that all that, would be nice to know exactly how Home & Champions interact. Although they use the term of bringing Home Pokemon "into" Champions, the infographic just sort of had them connected without arrows & we know you can't bring Pokemon out of Champions back into Home. My assumption based on that is it might instead use a PBR style "copy" feature, where you select what Pokemon/boxes you want and then it'll make a separate copy that you can edit or later down the line make an updated copy. Or maybe it functions like the Battle Box, where they have to be in Home all the time in order to show up in Champions? I do think they'll go into more details of how this works here.
