This is a great and underrated comment. Customer support is virtually nonexistent for Live, and they are of zero help for any complaints or asks. Even Niantic shows them up
Pokemon TCG Live’s First Year of Stats Released, Less Than 3% Usage Compared to Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel
- Thread starter Water Pokémon Master
- Start date
I feel you don't understand. Pokemon tcg live is a bad game. It looks bad, it sounds bad and nothing happens. Master duel makes you feel powerful. You get board slap, which sends cards flying, the game looks good and sounds vicious. Imagine evolving into charizard ex, it's card image pops up animated on the screen with its name, type and hp appearing and it slams the board and shakes everything AND then the other cards shake.
Master duel f****** spoiled me and now I can't play tcg live. I want to but then I hear the game, see the cringe characters and their animations and it makes me hate it because the game could be better.
Here us a game I play so you can see what I mean if you've not played
Master duel f****** spoiled me and now I can't play tcg live. I want to but then I hear the game, see the cringe characters and their animations and it makes me hate it because the game could be better.
Here us a game I play so you can see what I mean if you've not played
Live was never meant to be an upgrade.
TPCi don't have access to the billions that TPC Japan has, TPCi needed to move away from Dire Wolf Digital as 3rd party dev for PTCGO as it was costing them too much.
Since the code Dire Wolf used for PTCGO is their own proprietary code mostly ripped from their own digital TCG (Eternal) TPCi couldn't use it, they legally couldn't keep PTCGO.
Instead they hired an in-house junior team fresh out of school working for peanuts who's never actually worked on a game for a company before it seem from the state of the client.
The problem is that PTCGO was made by another company who knows how to program and maintain an online service and Pokemon can't have that.
would you care to elaborate on why exactly you believe this is the case? what is the motivation, in your view, for tpci to want to have a substandard simulator on purpose? serious replies only.
Sure, fudge it. Because of capitalism. Because Pokemon Company doesn't want to spend the extra money that it costs to hire an outside firm to do a good job so they use their insiders to do a sub-par job because it's gonna save them a tiny bit of money that makes their shareholders happy. Feduciary responsibility, my dude, why do you think Warner Bros. is canning all its original shows? It isn't because they want to increase piracy.
"epic win everything i don't like is because of capitalism" aside, fiduciary responsibility is more complicated than you have been led to believe it is, on top of probably not having much of anything to do with this. more importantly, can you demonstrate that this is a relevant motivator without writing fanfiction about apparently nefarious people you don't know anything about?
Wow that's a lot of words I didn't read.
I still play Live most of the time (although I'd be lying if I said the current meta has been keeping me away from playing in general, too much Energy acceleration if you ask me) and it really is the epitome of wasted potential and really bad management that can largely be blamed on TPCi for being a bunch of cheapskates.
- The servers are basically held together with paperclips and low-quality bubblegum, it was fine at first but now the bubblegum's drying out and the paperclips are getting rusty. Actions often freeze for a bit (on some occasions it's permanent, often requiring a reset) while the action timer still runs in the background and can cause players to miss their turns completely.
- Set releases often come with bugs and glitches which aren't fixed until weeks later, just look at how it took for them to fix Palafin ex.
- Obtaining certain in-game currencies is a pain. Coins are the most abundant but are useless, Credits can easily be farmed but require you to have a decently-sized collection already, and there's no way to get Crystals outside of doing one daily quest per day (you could also get lucky via level-ups) and one-offs like the battle pass and the Ranked ladder.
- The in-game avatars are a mixed bag, they're a step up from the knock-off car insurance OCs we had in Online but we basically swapped them for Toy Story's Andy (from the first film) in an anime art-style. Opening match animation is okay but I'm shocked TPCi hasn't gotten any complaints for that dreadful Fortnite-inspired end match animation, the sheer passive-aggressiveness it gives off makes me hope that it hasn't had a negative impact on some kid's already-shaky mental health like Online's in-match chat did (if the rumors as what actually forced Dire Wolf Digital are true, of course).
- TPCi offers very little, if any, transparency on the development side of the app. People complained about this when the app first started beta testing and TPCi responded to this by promising that they'd fix this with quarterly developer letters on their site but the last one was released back in August 2023 when Obsidian Flames dropped. Nowadays if you have a complaint you can take it to their official forums where a mod will just give you a canned response telling you that they'll share it with the devs or to file a support ticket (something that, if you've done it before for other Pokémon-related things, is a dreadful experience). Compare that to Online's forums where you could actually get a response from a developer.
It's also worth noting that TPCi doesn't exactly operate in the best interest of players, I genuinely hope everyone here remembers Worlds 2013's Gino/Mees fiasco as testament to that fact.
- The servers are basically held together with paperclips and low-quality bubblegum, it was fine at first but now the bubblegum's drying out and the paperclips are getting rusty. Actions often freeze for a bit (on some occasions it's permanent, often requiring a reset) while the action timer still runs in the background and can cause players to miss their turns completely.
- Set releases often come with bugs and glitches which aren't fixed until weeks later, just look at how it took for them to fix Palafin ex.
- Obtaining certain in-game currencies is a pain. Coins are the most abundant but are useless, Credits can easily be farmed but require you to have a decently-sized collection already, and there's no way to get Crystals outside of doing one daily quest per day (you could also get lucky via level-ups) and one-offs like the battle pass and the Ranked ladder.
- The in-game avatars are a mixed bag, they're a step up from the knock-off car insurance OCs we had in Online but we basically swapped them for Toy Story's Andy (from the first film) in an anime art-style. Opening match animation is okay but I'm shocked TPCi hasn't gotten any complaints for that dreadful Fortnite-inspired end match animation, the sheer passive-aggressiveness it gives off makes me hope that it hasn't had a negative impact on some kid's already-shaky mental health like Online's in-match chat did (if the rumors as what actually forced Dire Wolf Digital are true, of course).
- TPCi offers very little, if any, transparency on the development side of the app. People complained about this when the app first started beta testing and TPCi responded to this by promising that they'd fix this with quarterly developer letters on their site but the last one was released back in August 2023 when Obsidian Flames dropped. Nowadays if you have a complaint you can take it to their official forums where a mod will just give you a canned response telling you that they'll share it with the devs or to file a support ticket (something that, if you've done it before for other Pokémon-related things, is a dreadful experience). Compare that to Online's forums where you could actually get a response from a developer.
If you've been a Pokémon TCG player (or VGC player, both are applicable here) for as long as I have you'll know that TPCi, like Nintendo of America, always does things on the cheap. The only time they do spend a good amount of moolah is if it's something that gives them good publicity (like the World Championships or their 20th/25th Anniversary celebrations, one has to wonder how much they spent on those) and how visible it is. I also wouldn't be surprised if the changes TPCi made to Championship Series' tournament structure back in 2017 was largely based on costs.
It's also worth noting that TPCi doesn't exactly operate in the best interest of players, I genuinely hope everyone here remembers Worlds 2013's Gino/Mees fiasco as testament to that fact.
oh, make no mistake. i know that there are answers and you have given perfectly reasonable thoughts on the matter. was just prodding a fellow who's all hot air to think through what they're so miffed about instead of engaging in exclusively conspiratorial thinking and ranting and raving everywhere they go.
for me a lot of this comes down to not knowing exactly who precisely to blame. ptcgl management and what can be done is no doubt complicated in large part by the fact that it has no profit or even revenue component, and is entirely supplementary to buying into the physical game. it seems like there's an obligation to keep something like this up and running, and it's impossible for it to not be running at a loss as a result, so some care is no doubt taken in how much of a money pit ptcgl is allowed to be. what i'm personally unsure about is if it would really be better to shift the kind of model the sim operates on to a more predatory one in order to justify the kind of budget allocations one would want them to get to really dramatically improve what's there. a problem, if you really must call it one, is that i think that the model for card acquisition in ptcgl is if anything too generous to convert into a money maker without creating even worse PR. the card crafting is just too strong, such that gems are more useful for getting credits for card crafting anything you could possibly want than for actually "buying" packs to open.
it's really one of those things where i'm not even sure if ptcgl would be in any seriously better shape if it were also operating on the japan side of things with the full resources available to them there, whether it's due to my lack of confidence in pokemon official secondary applications being all that polished in general or to fear that they'd operate a much stingier ship that renders the game even less welcoming to people who don't come in with a wallet more open than their mind. frankly, nothing about tcg pocket suggests to me that it'll be anything but dead on arrival for any purpose beyond being a pack opening dopamine button with no actual interesting game to be found. comparisons to yugioh duel links that i've seen made here a few times feel especially misplaced or maybe just misinformed, as duel links wasn't a dumbing down of that card game for mobile gamers but a refocusing around, at least for a time, actually battling monsters and using effects to manipulate the outcome of battle rather than a deluge of card removal or effect negation. if tcg pocket were analogous to duel links, it would be some kind of crazy cross-generational, cross-format all-stars game with curated card reintroductions over time instead of the pokemon tcg minus any interesting gameplay.
i do appreciate you not waxing nostalgic about the awful old avatars like they were actually any better than the weird nonsense we have now, though.
isn't it because TPC and TPCi are different entities?
True, I haven't played since they decreased the number of cards
ptcgsim stays winning
The thing is they dint want to pay direwolf anymore, so they decided to make thier own in house team, they are given a small budget by the parent company of tcpi, so thats how live was made. Direwolf owns the proprietary ptgco client. They decided to be cheap. originally i heard they wanted to focus on being a mobile game, but they gave it up a while ago.
The parent company of tcpi wants very little to do with live, if they could shut it down they would, right now it just a barebones testing ground for irl tournament decks. They had no interest in theme, legacy format, also expanded have been largely neglected.
Another issue you dint mention was; both live and ptgco does not generate revenue, since they dont put any ingame purchases, so no way of expanding the live client at all. They suddenly closed down ptgco, because they were getting worried people were jumping a sinking ship from live back to ptgco. Also it is extremely glitchy and buggy, it seems to be worst for mobile players. One of issue was great tusks milling effect caused a glitch, and it wasnt fixed till 5 months later
They gave up on being an app, after people were forced to migrate, turns out its harder to making it app friendly with such a small budget
Im pretty sure the lack of variety was the reason peope were complaining. The only reason they have a half finished expanded, is they dint want too many people to stop playing live, otherwise they never wouldve had it if people wernt complaining. Also because irl tourneys are mostly focused on standard, tcpi has no incentive on expanding the client.
You arnt missing much, and its very glitchy and playing on mobile seems very unstable. Additionally playing ranked is only if you want more in-game currency. I finished the ladder and theres nothing do for a long time. Live has very bad marketing, pokemon in general is not very good on the online market, they prefer physical merchadising advertising. Now that live gives away too many cards very easily theres no way ingame purchases would be feasible now