Forum Thread

there's a lot of feeds going around about how the magearna lottery/raffle isn't great, and i've decided to compile a list of reasons from various feeds/comments in a big thread.

- the bias towards users with more game chips, money, and time (aka too much stuff needed)

this isn't too much of a problem with this as this is unavoidable, but just take one look at the number of tickets and convert them all to the number of game chips needed, the monetary amount is almost at a billion, and the amount of grinding... this number will drop, but it won't drop much, and i go into my next point.

- the number of magearna given out isn't nearly enough.

there were more shaymins than this, are more lugias than this, i'm willing to bet there could be more victinis than this. it's a normal magearna, no need to be this rare. plus, since there are so little ticket numbers won't go down much either, unless everyone really splurged on the first day.

- it's unoriginal, and we were expecting better.

rng legends aren't rare, but that's the problem. it could've been like a raylong quest, something do to with hangman, etc but we got a lottery, which is something we literally already have, and it's done better than this.

- people need to finish our alola dexes

"(Online within last 24 hours: 1,770 members)"
365 magearna per year. do you see the problem with that? it'll take a few years for everyone to get one, and we can't forget about duplicates. we need to finish these dexes, and there are literally people who are borrowing pokemon for the dex right now so they don't need magearna. we're literally trying to AVOID having to get magearna, which to me should mean something.

- they're going to be worth more than shiny legends

dittos are 9 times more common. yeah. for a regular magearna??

at this rate i'm going to repeat points, so please consider reworking the lottery? other points added on or arguing against these ones are also appreciated.

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yeah...and for the chance of winning, you will need at least more than 10 tickets to make the chance of winning into 0.01%

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so it's practically impossible to win

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I'd like to counter a few points here and gonna make a suggestion for it soon.

1st. Every event is biased towards someone like SCS is biased towards people playing in specific slot of time and Victini's case was similar when it was first released and very few people had it and it was as rare as ditto but it isn't rare now due to SCS update.

2nd. It shouldn't be like raylong quest since that quest

3rd (This should go into suggestion) Since magearna has 5 forms I'll suggest that instead of 1 magearna every day it should be 5 per day which would be fair 5*365=1825 which would be enough for most of the people to complete their dex and get all forms.

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Thank you for your feedback! We always try to take in every opinion when making decisions in order to create the best game experience for our community. Before I answer your individual points, I want to point out that (despite all criticism being voiced at the moment) I firmly believe that Magearna's Raffle is a great addition to the game center and that it will be a fun challenge in the long run. But let me explain in detail why:

Quote from My_IRENE

[the numbers of tickets] will drop, but it won't drop much, and i go into my next point.

I will start with this argument first because I've seen it mentioned a few times - and I feel like most criticism is strongly based on this assumption. And I want to point out that this argument will most likely not hold true - and just in a few days (maybe one or two weeks) you will clearly notice it.
Today is Day one - the day of its release. Everyone is crazy about this new feature. Everyone is participating - and most people are throwing their entire reserves of game chips on it (probably didn't listen to the wise pro tip given by Mewton M. Meowth in the news post). Yes, today, the raffle is basically 100% based on luck and it's pretty much pointless to spend a single game chip today.
Right now (10 hours after its release), people already spent almost 100 Million Game Chips on it. But you have to keep in mind that those are game chips which have been accumulated for years!

To give you an important statistic here: Our "Game Chip Common Wealth" (for the lack of a better word) is currently around 1 Billion Game Chips among all active users. And this amount has - like I said - partly been collected over many many years. Users have been sitting on them forever.
And today they've used up 100 Million - meaning 10% of it! Just like this, the common wealth decreased by 10%. So if people continue this behaviour, their entire reserves would be used up in basically 4 days (100 hours). You can see why it is very unlikely that we'll see 1 Million tickets being bought every day, can you?

So in the long run, in order to keep up the current behaviour of buying 1 Million tickets per day, our community would also have to earn 100 Million GC per day (otherwise they wouldn't be able to spend this amount on a daily basis). And that is something completely unrealistic and almost impossible.
Maybe that's hard to imagine at the moment, but I promise you that you will very very soon see that the total amount of raffle tickets bought per day will be far less than 100 Thousand. Perhaps even less than 10 Thousand in a few months. And then it will actually be rather easy to buy enough tickets yourself for a "guaranteed chance".

Yes, right now it's gambling - but eventually you will be able to earn it through "hard work" instead of pure luck.

Quote from My_IRENE

- the bias towards users with more game chips, money, and time (aka too much stuff needed)

To be honest, I don't have much to say to that. All I can say is that I personally believe that it's a good thing that a feature requires you to spend time on this game - or the game center in particular. Collecting game chips was quite pointless in the past for most users who already bought all the available prizes. Thanks to this update, you finally have an incentive to play Coinflip, Hangman, etc. - the games which don't give you any prizes besides Game Chips.

Quote from My_IRENE

- the number of magearna given out isn't nearly enough.

and similarly:

Quote from My_IRENE

- they're going to be worth more than shiny legends

This is something that we could discuss in the future. I would prefer waiting a little before jumping to conclusions, though.
Yes, maybe it will be a little too rare (when compared to the amount of active users we have) - but it's always a little hard to judge how market prices will evolve in the long run. I'd prefer making it too rare first and then maybe make it more accessible in the future (making something too common right away can have fatal consequences - because "suddenly setting something to be rarer" is an unpopular thing to make. And sometimes even impossible.)
But as you've maybe seen in the most recent past, we constantly analyze our already existing features and try to implement Quality-of-Life updates whenever necessary. For example, most recently we've implemented a gem discount - making gem hunts a little easier - and we've added gems to the Dream World Shop. We've also added the "Every 50th is a shiny" to many Pokémon which would normally be incredibly tedious to hunt. So what I'm saying is: Rest assured that we will monitor the situation closely and see if a chance would be beneficial :)

Quote from My_IRENE

- it's unoriginal, and we were expecting better. [...] it could've been [...] something do to with hangman, etc

It does have something to do with the hangman, though? You use the hangman to get chips which you then spend on the raffle.
I think it's actually much better than just adding it to the hangman - because the way it's implemented now, you can decide how you want to gather the Game Chips; whether you prefer playing the Hangman, the Coinflip, the Treasure Chests etc. ... I'm pretty sure every user has their personal favorite and we're including everyone.

Also regarding the "unoriginality": I'm afraid that not every Pokémon on PokeHeroes can have its own super-duper-great-three-dimensional-interactive-roleplay-quest-minigame-feature. We already have so many features - and I think it's good to sometimes give incentive to spend more time on features that already exist (i.e. the game center games)

Quote from My_IRENE

- people need to finish our alola dexes

It's a tradeable Pokémon, so I don't see the problem.
And if you are a completionist, then I guess you'll have to take the challenge. But that's what completionism is about - isn't it? Trying to achieve the impossible.
I'm pretty sure that for all of our completionists on PH, there are many much harder challenges at the moment. I doubt anyone who's serious about completing their dex will fail at getting a Magearna in one way or another. People have achieved much harder here.

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I hope my point of view described in this post gives you a better insight into the decisions made by me during the development of this new feature. I understand your concerns perfectly well and I do see how it can be frustrating not to have a good chance of getting Magearna in the near future. That's unfortunately "how it is" with this kind of feature. It takes time to balance itself. And my main point is that we all need to wait a little and see how this feature evolves. And then we're always open for improvements when necessary :)

Kudos to Riako! 🍷

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Hm... I really like this new update, although, yes it is a little too rare, but don’t we all agree that poke hero’s is getting a little too easy these days? I missed the challenge I got when I first came here and this just made up for it

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