Some of my personal interpretations about the implied Champions mechanics so far are pretty different. They may not be particularly based on anything more substantial but I may as well throw them out there for predictions' sake.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.
I'm tempted to say this is just 'you can rotate the model with the right stick' because that's usually a staple feature, and if it had a more useful function it would be mentioned on the bottom of the screen with text like the other buttons. Honestly the menu does seem pretty barebones though, and of all things it shows that each mon is in a regular Poke Ball which isn't the most relevant of info (aside from telling if someone is potentially stuck with a rental set) so maybe it could be that.
On the recruitment pool, I was actually assuming that it would cycle weekly but the limited 10-mon selection would be the same for every player for that week. This is more just from my experience with free character rotations in F2P games and I don't think it's actually implied by official material either way, but the way I see it since you can't train/edit the rental mons I wasn't expecting it to be completely random, for example since Season 1 is focused on allowing mega evolutions then I would expect that pool to be promoting some of the usable megas at a time, and then if they have a Z-move season then you would see more preset rentals holding Z-Crystals and so on. Though this may not make as much sense if you can just rent out most of the mons in a week but it promotes logging in every day I guess.
Something else about this interface is that it seems like the game starts out with a single box/30 mon limit but I assume that has to be expandable in some way if the box itself has search filters, so I would expect needing to save some VP for extra box storage much like GO.
I've just been assuming it's a direct transfer since Champions has its own box.
From the eShop, the specific limitation they mention is that Champions-origin mons can't be taken out and into HOME, implying that you could otherwise transfer mons back out from Champions to HOME going from HOME -> Champions -> HOME, but it is kind of cryptic still.
