yeah i know this is very niche and also childish and also by the time this posts i’ll be over it, but i don’t CARE, i’m PISSED at PokémonGo.
PoGo is not a well-balanced game. Has not, traditionally been. It started with 40 levels, went to 50 after 4 or 5 years, and the grind to get from 40 to 50 was incredibly difficult, way way way too hard. You needed 5 million XP to get to level 40.
You needed 176 million to get to level 50. Plus a series of different-per-level challenges to grind through for each level; it took me 18 months to do one, because I hated it so much. But I finished at about this time last year, which was a point of pride for me, because I’d leveled out when it was at 40 and that was the first time I’d ever maxxed out levels in a video game so I wanted to keep that record and ground my way up to level 50.
A couple months ago they announced they were adding 30 new levels and re-jiggering the progression because it was much too hard to get to level 50, WHICH IS TRUE. IT WAS. And I’ve had this completely arbitrary goal to hit 276m XP (100m more than necessary to reach level 50) before they raised the levels again, under the assumption that that would get me about maybe 3 new levels. So I got to about 268.5m by the deadline, which was yesterday, but…
It turns out I’d wildly overestimated the amount of XP we’d need to get up to the new level 80. It now takes 12.75m to get to 50th, which is like a 93% decrease, & 203.5m to get to 80th.
…
NGL, I’m salty about this. Uncharitably feeling a healthy dose of “WE did it and survived, YOU can do it” bc that difference is INSANE, even if I really truly agree that it was way too hard and in fact 13m is way more practical and far better scaled.
But what really pisses me off is that those of us who had maxxed out previously are now expected to re-do the level 40-50 challenges that have now been moved to levels 70-80.
There was never going to be a good choice here, from the information they released. High-end players were either going to sail straight through to the new level 80 (boring) or be expected to do the level challenges again (enraging, tedious, and incredibly stupid). They’ve gone with the second, now putting all of us who were at level 50 and had done the miserable fucking challenges at level 70 with the miserable fucking challenges ahead of us to do again.
That is not a reward for high-level players. It’s basically a punishment for getting through it all in the first place, and I’ve never been mad about a video game before, but I’m pretty goddamn upset/angry/frustrated/disgusted now.
They’ve done a ton of other incredibly stupid things, too. They gave us a couple hundred new item slots, and then dumped literally thousands of reward items for ‘leveling up’ – which they did automatically, you log in now and it tells you ‘congratulations, you’re now level (whatever) -into our item storage, leaving players with the choice to either buy MORE slots (LOL), delete what they just got, or not do the significant amount of gameplay that cannot be done if your item bag is full. It’s just incredibly poorly conceived.
At this point, I mostly just don’t want to play anymore, they’ve fucked it up that badly. But I’ve also been playing almost daily for over 9 years now, so the habit is difficult to break. And the major reason I’ve KEPT playing all this time is because it forces me to get out of the house to do one of the daily challenges (spinning a pokestop, the nearest of which is half a kilometer-ish from the house), and doing the little walk, even if it’s ALL I do, is good for me.