The builders of Pokémon TCG Pocket have lastly provided particular particulars on main enhancements coming to the game's much-loathed trading operate, which has been an absolute mess since launch. And the enhancements sound genuinely great, however it's going to take eternally for them to be carried out.
In a post to the Pokémon community forums, the builders defined the upcoming modifications. We're itemizing them right here as written:
The largest change right here is that TCG Pocket will take away the currency that's at the moment getting used for trading: Trade Tokens. Trade Tokens had been added to the game particularly to be used with trading, and albeit, they suck. They're completely vital so as to commerce in any respect, however the one approach to get them is by successfully vaporizing playing cards you already own.
We explained it in more detail here, however the tl;dr is that as issues at the moment stand, if you’d like to commerce one ex Pokémon for a pal's ex Pokémon, you need to throw 5 different ex playing cards within the bin first to get enough commerce tokens to commerce the one you need. And your pal has to do the identical. While there have been a few different methods to get bonus commerce tokens since then, the system total has remained extraordinarily discouraging for anybody who truly desires to use it.
The new system, on paper, is a lot better. Shinedust is a currency that already exists in game and is at the moment used to buy "flairs" for playing cards — little animations to make them sparkle in particular methods whenever you use them in matches. You gather shinedust robotically everytime you get duplicates of playing cards you have already got, and more shinedust is offered from occasions and different strategies. Unless you're huge on flairs, you most likely have a lot of it simply sitting round already, and the TCG Pocket devs say they're trying into methods to offer you even more to guarantee trades can occur.
And for what it's price, it’s important for TCG Pocket to impose some value to trading. Otherwise gamers might game the system by making tons of new accounts, opening the quite a few packs handed out to gamers early within the game, and simply commerce all their new rares to their foremost accounts. Then rinse and repeat. Imposing a value ensures that people are trading thoughtfully — the commerce token system was simply approach, approach too costly in your average participant to ever hassle.
There's one more huge change listed right here that may make a huge distinction: the function that may enable gamers to share playing cards they're thinking about trading. As issues at the moment stand, you possibly can put a card up for commerce, however there's no approach to inform anybody what playing cards you may want for it except you call up your folks exterior of the game and inform them. Everyone else simply has to guess. As a end result, most gamers aren't even bothering to attempt to commerce with strangers. But if we will offer some clue as to what an acceptable commerce could be, gamers could make cheap affords and truly use the system.
All in all, the community seems pretty happy with these changes, and early responses are optimistic. There is one huge disadvantage, which is that gamers have already thrown away tons of uncommon playing cards simply to gather the present trading currency, and there's actually no approach to get that back. Even although current commerce tokens will likely be changing to shinedust, the playing cards are nonetheless gone.
And there's one different difficulty: we're going to have to wait months earlier than any of this takes impact. The weblog publish suggests these modifications gained't be carried out till fall of this 12 months. In the meantime, it's seemingly that trading will grind to a whole halt, because the present system is horrible and no one goes to need to nuke their uncommon playing cards to do it if a higher answer is on the best way. We're seemingly to undergo a number of more expansions earlier than the "trading" in "Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket" actually takes off.
Save that shinedust, I suppose!
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].