As beloved New York City mayoral candidate Jimmy McMillan once said, the price of trading in Pokemon TCG Pocket is too damn high! At least, I think that’s what he said. I’m not really politically engaged – I’m too busy grinding packs and burning my Immersive Rares so I can trade for the ex cards I need to actually enjoy playing Pocket.
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Before trading came to Pokemon TCG Pocket, I knew it was going to be terrible. I wrote that it was going to be disastrous for the game, and yet it turned out to be even worse than we expected. If you were hoping it would work like the good ol’ days on the playground, when you gave them a bent Blastoise and they gave you a First Edition Charizard in return (after they convinced you it wasn’t really that good) then you’re going to be desperately, painfully disappointed by what Pokemon TCG Pocket has to offer.
The High Price Of Trading
It’s not enough that you have to trade rarity-for-rarity, or that you’re beholden to Pocket’s nasty little Hourglass time gate. Those limits were expected, and probably would have been acceptable if they were the only ones. On top of that, though, you also have to spend some amount of Trade Tokens on every exchange, earned by selling cards from your collection. The amount of Trade Tokens required scales with the rarity of the cards you want to trade at an exchange rate of roughly four to one. So if you and your friend want to swap ex cards, you better both have four more ex cards you’re willing to set on fire as a sacrifice to the Poke gods.
It’s a pretty outrageous price that makes trading cost-prohibitive to all but the fattest of Wailords, but to the developer’s credit, the game’s official Twitter account shared a statement acknowledging the complaints that the cost of trading is too high, and saying it is “actively investigating ways to improve the feature to address these concerns.”
The statement also explains that the way trading was initially implemented was an attempt to prevent abuse from bots and people using multiple accounts to build their collections faster. “Our goal was to balance the game while maintaining a fair environment for all players and preserving the fun of collecting cards that is core to the Pokemon TCG Pocket experience.” It’s an explanation that kind of makes sense. They don’t want people to use trading as a loophole to get all the cards without opening packs, and they don’t want to encourage people to pay bot services to farm cards from them either. The price is meant to be a barrier against low effort trading, but it just wasn’t well balanced as it should have been.
Maybe I would believe that if I hadn’t seen this exact same scenario play out in games over and over for the last decade, if not longer. It’s the same thing every time. New monetization gets introduced, the community freaks out, then the company walks it back. It’s limit testing, pure and simple, and it’s always a win for the publisher. If they set the price too high and people pay it, great, but if they have to reign it in to appease the complainers, hey, at least they get to show how good they are at listening to their players.
We Only Have Ourselves To Blame
It’s hard to blame these companies for doing it at this point when the players are just as complicit in the charade. The internet mob is always going to freak out about monetization no matter how reasonable or outrageous it ends up being, so of course they start high so they have enough wiggle room when their players start to complain. It’s all theatrics and both sides are playing their parts.
If Pocket’s intention was to prevent abuse from bots and multi-boxers, there are many other ways it could have done that besides making people burn all their cards. There could have been a minimum-level restriction to trading, or friendship level requirement, similar to Pokemon Go. Heck, a simple Captcha has been able to defeat bots for decades, why not try that first? Now that I think of it, doesn’t the Hourglass time gate already prevent this by forcing you to pay real money to perform multiple trades a day? Pocket is double dipping on the ‘anti-bot’ sentiment here, and I’m just not buying it.
No matter how much it changes, it’s never going to feel good to throw away cards in order to trade. If preserving the fun of collecting is the one and only goal here, then maybe there’s just no place for trading in this trading card game. It was controversial when Pokemon TCG Live cut the trading feature from the previous iteration, Pokemon TCG Online, but I’d rather have no trading in Pocket than overpriced, predatory trading anyway.
- Released
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October 30, 2024
- Publisher(s)
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The Pokemon Company