IntroductionI've been a fairly active participant on the GPX+ Discord (
invite link; please join it's fun there!!) since I came back to GPX+ on this new, blank-slate account, and the most thriving discussions on there tend to involve suggestions as to how GPX+ could improve. Because of the way Discord works, however, that discussion is quickly swept under the rug of time as the chat moves along to different topics. This means that I typically tend to repeat my own thoughts on suggestions periodically when they're on the mind, and more importantly, it prevents the points I and other people make from being consistently seen. So I've decided the best idea (and I really should have done this a long time ago) is to make a comprehensive forum thread about common topics on the matter of suggestions and site improvements, so that there's a permanent location for those ideas.
ForewordBefore getting into the actual suggestions, I'd like to discuss the state of GPX+ coming into its 11th year, and why the suggested improvements to the site that will be covered later in this post are important.
It's known to people who have been around long enough, and to those who are dedicated enough to pay attention, that GPX+ was mere moments from shutting down after Wymsy stepped down in 2015 before Zerxer (Nick) decided to allow the site to continue on, "frozen in time" for the remaining users to enjoy, without much being done in the way of serious change.
However, it's been almost 5 years, and I’d say we've seen a healthy amount of additions. The bimonthly Scavenger Hunts and Site-wide Shiny Hunts march on, holiday events are still a regular occurrence, and novelties are always being added to spice up the site’s unique flair. A Pokemon game released just last November has already seen a handful of its regional Pokemon added to GPX+, and a new contributor (LightKunai) has even been tasked to help the effort of spriting Galar’s Pokemon. None of these are truly the kind of fundamental, large changes you might have seen before the “freeze”, but nor will the suggestions in this thread suggest something so broad to begin with.
Unfortunately, despite this activity preventing the website from truly feeling “frozen”, the past 5 years (perhaps even more) have seen a slow, steady decline of active users. A once-popular website that set a record of 1,896 users online at once in January of 2011 now typically only sees a maximum of 250-300 users online at once, usually at absolute peak hours during an event or when a multiplier is active. On non-multiplier days, site activity can sometimes feel entirely pointless to people, mostly because GPX+ fundamentally runs on user interactivity; now that that activity has lessened, everything slows down.
However, to me, GPX+ never died, and was never “frozen”. It has merely become a more tight-knit, dedicated community committed to playing an overall well-oiled, timeless game, where there’s always something to focus on, whether it be interactions, explorations, shiny hunting, dex completion, trinkets, or any other such thing. The fact that many of the remaining core of active users have been here for over a decade speaks to how important GPX+ is, and how it could continue to persist into the future. I would hate to see the flaws that I intend to cover in this post persist, as I believe not accounting for them will create a situation where the site WILL eventually “bleed to death”, so to speak.
An important note to make is that the two remaining root admins (Big Bidoof/Jeff and Zerxer/Nick) are both quite busy with their lives, and have been for some time, so change to this degree hasn’t been in the cards for a while. However, what motivated much of the recent discussion in the Discord and eventually led me to create this thread are these hopeful words from Nick:
With that being said, here’s the meat of this post.
SuggestionsSpeaking the most broadly, I believe all of the main points I intend to cover come back to the idea of shifting the “perspective” of how GPX+ runs to account for a more tight-knit, dedicated community rather than a massive, ever-growing userbase, as it used to be years ago. It is, essentially, all about the idea of balancing a game that at its core runs on mutual user interaction.
There are three main, very broad areas of suggestion that I tend to see discussed:
1. Activity-based adjustments
2. Further encouragement and broadening of activity within a smaller userbase
3. Removal/adjustment of certain limits (ties into #1 somewhat)
These are ordered by what I believe can be most strongly argued in favor of.
Activity-Based Adjustments (click to showhide)
Activity-Based AdjustmentsThere are 3 further sub-categories in this area, also ordered by strength of argument:
1. Base Maturity Increase
2. Berry Tasks
3. Pass Orbs
Base Maturity IncreaseBefore getting into this, I should say that Nick himself has stated that he would consider this idea
(keep in mind though, this wasn’t a promise):
All games require at least occasional balancing to keep it fun for those who play it. What could be said to be the core fundamental of GPX+ is that it’s community-based - users must rely on others to get a majority of what they might want to do done. Because of the aforementioned slowly decreasing site activity in past years, GPX+ has therefore slowly seen a decrease in functionality as a game overall.
A good way to see how things have shifted over the years is to look at the bounty of statistics that are tracked on GPX+. I like to refer to this particular list the most:
See how almost none of these go beyond 2014? These numbers are almost impossible to achieve nowadays, and it’s because of decreased site activity. (PokeZone’s record was likely achieved on a high multiplier day with low maturity eggs, and by focusing on hatching throughout the entire day. It should also be noted that despite this record being impressive for how recent it is, it’s still half of the #1 spot.)
What I believe to be the most damaging part of this decrease is the discrepancy between non-multiplier and multiplier days in a typical user’s experience. Tyranisaur, a user in the Discord (and also quite active on the forums), explains what I mean well:
Therefore, increasing the base maturity so that non-multiplier days are less slow would create less of an attentive divide for a typical player on multiplier and non-multiplier days. Non-multiplier days would just feel “normal”, ideally, instead of painfully slow and pointless, and multiplier days would feel even more rewarding. The overall functionality of the game would smooth back out, the discrepancy would be less severe, and you would see less users groaning and deciding to do something else with their time when there isn’t a multiplier active. Multipliers should ideally act as a rewarding treat on top of a thriving game, not a defibrillator keeping a site that increasingly seems like it’d wither and die without its intervention.
The implementation of this base maturity increase is the tricky part. How much do you increase it without feeling like you’ve completely broken the game? Balance is important on the other end of the spectrum, too - things can’t be TOO easy, or TOO fast.
Here’s what Nick has said about it:
It’s been said by another user that the “maximum” multiplier that tends to be seen, x3.2, would become a x4.8 under this increase. That’s ludicrous, as x3.2 already feels quite nice even with the site’s activity problems. If base maturity was to be increased, then it would likely involve the multipliers themselves being nerfed, at least to the degree to where you don’t just once again create the problem a base maturity increase was trying to solve to begin with.
Moving on…
Berry TasksAnother area that is directly dependent on user activity are berry tasks in explorations. Most tasks, a user has direct control over what the task is asking them to do - there’s an ample backlog of users, online or not, to collect interactions from, the Safari Zone is always stocked with exploration-relevant Pokemon, all items can be readily purchased by at the very least using Purchase Power, and special exploration items are aided by Search Power (combined with a lot of refreshing).
Berry tasks are the sole type of task that is entirely out of a user’s control, and entirely dependent on mutual user interaction. Therefore, by the same justification used for increasing the base maturity, I think berry tasks in explorations need a comprehensive reduction.
This does not mean making them ridiculously easy. Advocating for a severe reduction would turn this argument away from reason and into petulant complaining, and I want to avoid that. Therefore, I think a more conservative approach needs to be used. Berry tasks aren’t truly bad - they highlight the core fundamental of community engagement, and prevent explorations from becoming something an individual can clear virtually entirely by themselves (which would detract from that fundamental).
I’ll use the exploration “Death of the World” as an example here. Similar to the base maturity increase section, statistics are helpful in highlighting issues:
As you can see, with the Exp. All allowing me to clear the “raise 5 Pokemon from eggs to level 100 in your party” task rather quickly, my fastest completion time is in 5 days. However, the all-time record is a bit under 2 days. Like the “eggs hatched in a day” records, that wouldn’t be possible today, and it’s all because of a single berry-feeding task, which requires you feed a Dedenne 400 berries.
Everything else in the task can be completed by me in a full day - it is this
single task that takes
4 entire days. From my point of view, and even taking into account my desire to keep berry task reductions within a conservative, reasonable range, 4 days is far too long.
Berry tasks should be a reasonable waiting game that incentivizes a user to click other users (and especially their exploration Pokemon) so that they’re completed quicker, but with the site activity being what it is now, you simply run out of active users who bother clicking exploration Pokemon on a particular day, and have to wait for that small chunk of users to come back for another 3 days (in the case of Dedenne) to get the task done. What was originally a good system has yielded yet another potential for a massive discrepancy in user experience (between other kinds of tasks and berry tasks), and a detractor for consistent activity.
Pass OrbsAdmittedly, this is something that I haven’t seen many others aside from myself talk about, which is why I put it at the bottom of the ranking of how strong the argument is. However, like base maturity and berry tasks, the same core argument about lowered site activity can be made for Pass Orbs, since they’re awarded through mutual interactions between users, and are another system that directly incentivizes that core fundamental.
I’ll bring up statistics once again:
Unlike “eggs hatched in a day”, these rankings don’t even have a surprising recent showing - none of them were achieved after 2015.
The solution to this would likely be to slightly reduce the requirements needed to obtain 1 pass orb (as of now, it’s 100 mutual interactions = 1 pass orb), similar to what might be done for berry tasks.
Encouragement and Broadening of Activity (click to showhide)
Encouragement and Broadening of ActivityThis topic is going to be less rudimentary and more philosophical/psychological, though there are a few specific suggestions I’ve thought of in the way of obvious additions that would help.
The issue of users not clicking back has always been a problem, but it seems especially perplexing on this version of the site, since I personally think the Berry Feeder couldn’t be more efficient in the way of interacting with other users. It’s a far cry from the old way of interacting, which involved opening a bunch of tabs and clicking with your mouse. Now, you can open a single tab dedicated to a packet of interactions, and can mash the 1-5 and spacebar keys to zoom through them.
Not clicking back is particularly a problem when there’s only a relatively small core of active users left, and encouraging this kind of activity more would aid in making the suggested changes feel like they’re making a difference.
More Obvious ObligationWhat I would first suggest is bringing back a similar feature on an earlier version of the site: information on what users have interacted with you that day on the main page of the site. Here’s a picture I took of it, on July 22, 2009:
An obvious, in your face list on the front page like this would make even the newest user aware of the idea that mutual interactions are important, especially with the direct encouragement to participate in the system (“be sure to repay the favor!”).
As of now, there’s nothing that obviously alerts you to users who have interacted with you on a particular day, so the obligation can be forgotten about (out of sight, out of mind). A user could easily go to the Users page and sort it by “users who have interacted with me today”, but something like the old system might encourage mutual interaction more.
What I might suggest though is that a list like this should be toggleable, so there isn’t a gigantic box on users’ main pages, but it should still be in a very obvious place, perhaps near or in the banner. An even simpler way, getting rid of the box with the list entirely, would be to put a button to open a list of users who have interacted with you today directly on the main page. This would make clickbacks a matter of a single action (clicking a button right in front of them), instead of going to the Users list and sorting by that metric (two actions, one involving clicking an out of the way link on the side of the screen).
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but I at least believe that the obligation of clickbacks needs to be far more obvious. On any given day I can even forget that there are people who have interacted with me on the sheer merit of me being online, and I can unintentionally put them out simply because I’ve too easily forgotten about that fact. In avoiding the potential of a gigantic glowing sign that yells at you to click other users back, I believe that these are some more reasonable ideas.
ListsTwo more lists should be created - one which lists “users that were online yesterday” and one which lists “users that have been online in the past week”. More popular is the “yesterday” suggestion, but the latter would broaden the scope of what lists like these might accomplish, so I’m including it as well.
The idea behind adding these lists is that it would reward activity on a broader scale, which I believe would help in balancing GPX+ to more strongly benefit the smaller core of active users. Including the users who occasionally poke their heads in within the group of those likely to be interacted with would keep them around more, and I believe a significant portion of active users are a part of this group to begin with.
Another change to lists that I propose is to do away with the “presently online” list entirely in favor of the “have been online today” list. The latter covers everything the former does and is a much broader category, so users being forced to use that instead would similarly broaden the rewards of activity. It would also greatly benefit the people who poke their heads in occasionally throughout the day but aren’t consistently active, similar to what I think would happen with the two additional lists.
Removal of Certain Limits (click to showhide)
Removal Of Certain Limits
This section involves removing limits such as “one shard a day”, increasing the amount of Pokemon/eggs you can open at once from 300 to a higher number (500 seems to be the consensus at the moment), and adjusting the limit on special items you can have before you’re barred from buying more/seeing them in the backroom.
It’s tentatively been suggested that the one-hour limit on moving eggs to the Mobile Walker be removed, as you wouldn’t be able to gain maturity with it for 2 hours even without the limit. However, a strong argument for keeping it in place is that the main point of the Mobile Walker limit is actually more about preventing people from immediately opening up space in their party, similar to the normal 1 hour egg hatching limit.
Miscellaneous/Extra (click to showhide)
DittoIn the exploration “Transforming The Heart” (the one you get Ditto from), the Wild Pokemon Ditto is added to your party after task 5 is completed, and the berry feeding task for the Ditto is on task 10. That means that there’s an entire 4 tasks to complete before the step where people actually can interact with the Ditto in a way that matters. These 4 tasks include: finding a special exploration item, getting 1200 interactions, having 2 repels in your inventory, and defeating a group of Unfezant in the Battle Tower. Even going as fast as possible, I’ve historically had around 10 to 12 wasted interactions on Ditto. This could easily be solved by just putting the Ditto in your party on the berry feeding task, or resetting the interactions for it when you get to task 10 (to maintain story immersion).
GPX+ Mobile Improvements
Unfortunately there’s not much hope in this area, but I’m putting a section here for it anyways, because I think the small improvements I’ve seen suggested on the Discord would help with overall activity, and this is already meant to be as comprehensive as possible.
The two major areas I see people talk about wanting improved are the addition of more lists...:
...and the expansion of how many interactions you’re able to load up at a time (as of now, it’s only 25, compared to desktop’s maximum of 300).
Pal Pad ExpansionYes, there’s an item for expanding the default maximum to begin with, but what’s the point of having a limit to begin with? It makes it further complicated when you need to make the decision to cull certain users from your friends list just to make room for new users you want to add.
The more conservative option I’ve seen is to at least 75, assumedly due to the achievement “Social Network” requiring that 75 people add you to your Pal Pad. If you’ve got 75 friends added, and they mutually add you back, it’ll cleanly get you that achievement without people having to decide to jettison users. More space would also create more opportunity for a particular user to be added to begin with.
That's all I've collected in a Google Doc so far from what I remember and what people have reminded me to add to this in the past day or so. If you'd like to read all of this as a Google Doc,
here's the link.As large as this post is already I'd appreciate feedback and further suggestions below.