[Archive] Pokémon Unite -- Welcome Back, Revolving Door

You say, "Yes", I say, "No"... I say, "Yes", but I may mean, "No":
twitch.tv/yuugijoou
yuugijoou
discord.gg/bKT9pRW
You say, "Why?" and I say, "I don't know"
...oh no.
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It's been long enough to have been forgotten (and at least some of it absorbed into the ever-inflating ignominious abyss of "uploaded, but never properly published and/or archived" content of mine), but I actually DID play this game... when it was new.
It's fine. There's actually a lot to enjoy about it, when you get down to the details.
BUT... and this might sound... ... ... petty? ...but literally every aspect of it OUTSIDE the actual gameplay is utterly tedious and makes me not want to interact with it.
Which you MUST. If you want to get to the gameplay part of it.
Which. I mean, truth be told... I guess I dislike the one more than I appreciate the other.
Like, I don't know how they accomplished such an engineering feat, but if the menus were written in basic HTML as discrete web page payloads with whatever multimedia they concocted to only LOOK like game-quality interactivity... ... ... everything would actually load more smoothly and the user experience would be vastly improved.
It's that bad. Somehow. STILL. I can't believe it either.
Of course, the gameplay takes place in an actual game engine and whatnot, so it doesn't have to deal with literally ANY of that.
But if you want to be rewarded for following any kind of game plan or guidelines or carrot-and-stick incentivization... well, y'know... you'll have to dig through pages upon pages with tabs upon tabs of information and loading and just... lurching... from one element to another... with actual measurable SECONDS between pressing a humble directional-pad button and your command being interpreted and acted out upon the horrific vision before you. Well, that just means you have chosen to suffer.
And absolutely no interface element will be consistent with another. Pages full of itemized events and their rewards and descriptions, so unwieldy that there's going to be some shortcut keys smattered across them... but very little common thread in their design. They're just slapped together, knowing that they will become irrelevant and cycled out within, at most, days anyway.
Don't forget your daily "free" energy cylinder draw! Your daily events calendar of the same handful of objectives! Do some daily battle pass tasks! Even just the free ones?! N-No?! Why not?! A-At least claim your pittance of Fair Play coins?! C-C'mon!
Nevermind the inane tedium if you're bothered by little red notification dots all over begging for you to investigate the nothing you already knew and thus craved them being cleared away, digging through the menus for that as well. The system works!
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To speak nothing of the questionable macroeconomy of the non-game framework itself, as with many others like, before, and certainly after it... which I just abjectly refuse to interact with.
For a point of comparison, I couldn't be bothered with a free pass on Fortnite, which actually DOES pay for its successive passes, which for my time investment alone, I consider effectively mandatory... so a game that doesn't even want to give out anything like THAT, even as a pittance, well... ... ... I could certainly pick up a minimum wage part-time side gig in place of "playing" a game that constantly plays with me. (I'd be more fiscally solvent... and my soul would be just as corroded by late-stage capitalism!)
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So what I've fallen into the habit of doing is... waiting about a month for the welcome back campaign features to kick in, claim some rather sizable rewards across a two week period, and then stop playing again for the same length of time to get some more lump sum return on investments.
I don't generally stick to a regular calendar of it, so I'll leave some time on the table where I could be more EFFICIENTLY (un?)grinding this particular workflow. I'll try to line it up with an in-game event I might be interested in or find similarly rewarding, but they don't always sync up meaningfully with their disparate demands.
Sometimes I can't even manage to do THAT much, and much like this one almost did, the welcome back period lapses before I reach the free license threshold. The disincentives are very strong with this one.
At the very least, I'm told by very convincing mathologicians who tell me the raw coin payout of NOT playing on a regular basis is roughly the same as the daily limits imposed upon those who grind consistently against the rocky shores.
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I'm going to TRY to be more consistent going forward with a) stream archives (which I have over a hundred of, easily), but also b) actual uniquely not-streamed content (which laughs heartily at how "little" the stream archive backlog has to its name)
...but... um... we'll see? (I sure hope we will, anyway... this habit of generally NOT-seeing has had me massively bummed out for longer than RUclips can actually remember.)

[@strategist9]

My condolences that this game still has some grip on you. But hey, at least it isn't League I guess!