PAX East 2014 Theme Discussion

[Shrain]

[Jeffolas]

Regarding what Shrain said, I want to say I don't necessarily think that kind of an arrangement is a bad thing.

For the sake of playing devil's advocate I think this idea could still work out, because while I agree that making leaders watch the entire fight is a bit much, I also think that they don't necessarily have to watch the whole match. Leaders just need be aware that it started and of the final tally so they can both sanction and verify the fight. That way a GL can still maintain their battles and queue lines while tending to other trainers simultaneously, it's a win-win. I can see a couple of concerns with this arrangement (dishonesty for example) but by showing the results screen that safeguards against the problem more than just accepting word-of-mouth for the results.

[Asahshi]

We could even merely ask that both trainers "check-in" with a Gym Leader before and after the match. The systems rewards you for getting as far as you can so there's not much worry of attempts to split the prize, so to speak. A large enough group could conceivably try and all get one person to win on all three days so that one of them could get the prize (whatever we decide that to be), but that would require a lot to do. I mean in order to throw the prize they'd need someone to throw the game at each round. Which requires each of those people to have others to throw for them. So that'd be....6 people altogether? And then they'd still only have one prize to try and split between all of them. It seems like it would be rather inefficient. And if we suspect that its happening we could always just ask that they challenge someone of our choice instead. In the end, as long as both the winner and loser are there to confirm which is which, I don't think it would be that big of a concern.

[nyankokimi]

Going to still have to shoot this one down.

As a GL at *East*, you are going to have a ridiculous line of challengers at any given time.
Do you really want your line to also include people waiting to check in with you?
Also, how put=off do you think the other challengers would feel to see people interrupting battles with check-ins?'

Sorry, I just really gotta put my foot down about this one. :/

[Lyrai]

It was a thought, and I probably should have used a better word than "supervision" because I would never expect the leaders to sit and watch every move made. I just remember feeling like the East '12 leaders handled the Rival challenge pretty well, and I believe there was some desire to bring that system back (at least from a challenger's perspective). I also thought it would promote challenger interactions while they were waiting for a chance to battle a leader.

[size=50b3i]Although my queues never really got [ib3i]that[/ib3i] long when I was Yellow...[/sizeb3i]

[Kaladin]

What about the challengers getting points at the end of their gym battles based off of the number of evolutionary stages that challenger has in their party? The gym leader does a quick count, writes down the point value on their card, and initials it? You could come up with an easy chart, award more or less points for the number of high level evolutionary stages they have, however the people in charge want to rank that. Maybe bonus points for Mega-Evolving in battle?

[Propriety]

Kim, for now, let's not worry about the logistics. Let's just brainstorm ideas. I agree that East '12 showed that having Leaders supervise battles just added to their workload and made things tough (so few people participated in the Rival Challenge... I have so many leftover prize badges T_T), but for now, let's just brainstorm. We'll start ruling stuff out later.

I like all the Evolution ideas! It's clear Evolution is going to be a big theme in X & Y and it would be wise to capitalize on that.

The simple sort of free-form idea I thought of (which admittedly doesn't have much to do with evolution specifically, but...) goes like this: in a nod to Mega-Evolutions, we encourage challengers to have Mega-Battles. Each gym leader would have 10 or 20 raffle tickets to give out over the course of three days, and each leader can specify the "Mega-Battle" challenge that the challenger has to meet to earn a raffle ticket. This could be using fewer pokemon, using Pokemon of all one type, answering trivia questions during battle, whatever. It would be up to the gym leader. The only catch is that you can only earn a Mega ticket from a gym leader if that gym leader is on your trainer card (that is, they match your skill level; so that the Veteran trainers don't earn all the prize tickets from the Casual leaders).

The raffle tickets could be used at the Champion Showcase to enter for prizes.

This way everybody could pick the challenge they want to issue, we wouldn't have to spend money on separate prize pins, we could appeal to awesome companies like Fangamer or Sanshee for some nice prizes (maybe some pins and a t-shirt or two), and nobody has to supervise any extra activities.

The only problem with this is it doesn't really give challengers anything much to do while they're waiting to battle, which is one of the things the side activities are supposed to do, ideally.

[Propriety]

I definitely like the egg idea, though we'd have to figure out a way to get/distribute a bunch of eggs. Could be something for me to do, though.

I like giving points by counting evolutions in the party, though I think basically everyone commonly uses fully evolved pokemon in their party? So maybe we do the reverse, we give them points for all the 1st stage pokemon in their party? Like an anti-evolution thing?

I also like the idea of having the challengers "evolve" by completing some tasks, though we'd have to figure out what tasks to complete. Battling other challengers is great, but it has the supervision problem. There must be a clever way of having them do so... maybe encouraging them to trade pokemon with other people and showing a diverse set of ID numbers in their party? Hm....

[Tellis]

Personally I don't really see the whole "supervision" thing as a problem at all? If it's boiled down to the honor system of "hey leader, we battled, I lost, he won, please mark off thing accordingly", it's about as intrusive as a challenger asking if the leader has a queue. Acting as a leader and a champion at the two Primes where we've had side-activities based around challenger's battling each other, it never seemed like something that was annoying to champions. And while I realize it's a bit different at East, though they are aggressive, challengers are possibly even nicer and more understanding there than at Prime. If they don't have the patience to put up with a tiny interruption like that, then I don't know how they had the patience to sit through any leader's queue.

As far as themes go, yeah, Evolution seems like the easiest to build a side-activity (and overarching design) around. As for other things we know about X&Y so far... there's certainly a Western Europe Fantasy vibe going on? Not sure how it could be worked in but it's a thought. There's also Team Flare, though not a whole lot is known about them, and making them a major part of the theme would be kind of lame because it might spoil those who haven't played through the whole game yet (and it'll only have been out for a few months). Um... Kalos is based on France... umm... baguette... prizes?

... evolution's probably our best bet.

[nyankokimi]