I've been playing this game since the crater days and am super impressed with how far its come. That being here a few ideas that I have moving forward that I think would retain the player base, increase store purchases, and improve quality of life for players. Ideas are not listed in any particular order.
1) More frequent non-pokemon themed events that will keep player interests between main events. Not sure why these have not happened in awhile or how difficult they are to incorporate but here a few options many of which have been done.
2x EXP
2x pokedollar payouts
Increased legendary, Ultra Beast, Shiny spawn rates
Increased rare prize drop rates for sidequests
Swarm events where certain pokemon spawn
2) A "release tab" option after catching a pokemon. As long as seasonal scores still include unique catches it would be great to not have to go through hundreds of common pokemon and release them one by one each month. Another option would be "bulk releases" similar to how you can select multiple pokemon to be put up for trade at once. I know you can always have an alternative seasonal account but that prevents you from improving your main account and showing placement there each month. You could list the seasonal catches for trade but that dilutes the rare/valuable trades and becomes a pain to manage.
3) When Gigantamax pokemon become available there should be a mix of ways to evolve them. Some gigantamax forms should be item based. If the pokemon normally evolves with items (appleton, flapple, melmetal, and alcremie) the gigantamax form should require more of the same items. Like you must feed flapple 10x sour apples for it to evolve. I think Alcremie should require 1 of each sweet to reach gigantmax form. This would bring value back to items that have quickly fallen off in value. It would also likely cause a surge in mystery box purchases. Other gigantamax forms can be a combination of normal search events or high EXP thresholds (maybe 1 million exp?).
4) In addition to Halloween Events each year players should be able to resurrect Kabutops and Aerodactly (Fossil) from dome fossils and old ambers on Halloween Day each year. This one is just my personal desire to have these pokemon back in the game. I miss the neon green version of kabutops (fossil) from way back in the day.
5) Add daily, weekly, and monthly challenges for prizes. It is nice logging in and getting a daily reward but it would also be cool to have daily tasks that give prizes to players each month. There could be a tier list for daily tasks completed (10 days/month low tier, 20 mid, all days high) to determine prizes. Prizes could be stated or random each month. Having weekly and monthly goals could also result in top tier prizes or you could use some kind of challenge system to determine seasonal winners. I think that would be hard to incorporate for seasonals but if the goal is to get players to play consistently and often each month having hard to achieve goals that determine seasonal rank would certainly freshen up the current system. Here are some possible examples of challenges. Again there is a lot of flexibility here and I think making each month different would be a more fun and dynamic way to award points.
Daily: catch 20 shiny pokemon, battle Cynthia and win 15 times, catch 2 legendary pokemon, etc
Weekly: Complete 200 gym battles, catch a unique ultra beast, catch 10 unique starter pokemon, etc
Monthly: Complete the Galar sidequests 3 times, Catch a specific shiny legendary or UB, complete 1000 Season Battle Tower battles, etc
6) Add a sidequest completion counter to user profiles. Another way to flex and a cool stat to track.
7) Add companion pokemon behind character models when searching. It would be awesome to have the first pokemon in your team appear behind you while roaming the map. This might be hard to accomplish or costly but its just a cool future idea.
8 ) Add a "Watch" column as a main column when browsing PokeBay auctions. It is frustrating to search for auctions, click on one, watch it, and then not be able to go back to that search query. Adding a "Watch" column directly after the "Started By" column would just make the whole process smoother.
9) Add a sort by experience feature to PokeBay. Would be a good filter to help people sell high exp pokemon that might otherwise not be seen or clicked on if the exp is on common pokemon.
10) View top 100 or exp rank of particular pokemon. It would be cool to see where your specific pokemon ranks if it is not the top pokemon for its species. Could be a bot function on discord such as !rank ID#
Thank you to all devs, mods, and players that make this an awesome community. Congrats on Vortex's recent 8 year anniversary! Hoping for many more years of fun.
