Daely Snack: Have shinies lost their purpose?

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Shinies. The elusive differently coloured Pokémon that were so rare that most people thought they were hoaxes/glitches/hacks. Yet, with the internet becoming more and more widespread, soon everyone knew about them. With a 1 in 8000 chance of finding them, they were truly sought after by collectors who had to put considerable effort into getting them.

With people complaining they couldn’t get one, Gamefreak threw a bone and released several shiny Pokémon as events, in addition to making some slight tweaks to the chance of finding shinies. Sorry folks that had a shiny Raikou, your’s became so common that people didn’t care about your achievement anymore. Luckily there were only a few event Pokémon, leaving a majority still hard to catch (even when using the Pokéradar).

But XY changed even more than that. They made so many tweaks that, as evidenced by the comments here and on other sites, you could easily find three shinies a day. The Safari zone with hundreds of Pokémon available, a new egg breeding mechanic, horde battles, the Pokéradar is back and maybe even a tweak to the base chance itself! This brings my to my concern of today: is there still a point in shinies?

The major thing about shinies was not that they were differently coloured. In fact, you could say that over half of all Pokémon looks worse or almost not different at all in their shiny form. No, the thing that made them cool was the rarity of finding one, the thrill of encountering and successfully catching it. It shouldn’t be only about its looks, but also on the memory that is attached to it. But with XY the rarity is gone. People will stop caring about your feat. “Oh, you got 30 shinies? I got 60, hmpf.” The whole elusive aspect went away, and that makes shinies not that exciting for me anymore as they once were.

But that’s just me of course. What do you think? I’d love to hear your opinion in the comments, and when I got the time I will try to respond to them. Seeing as this is a discussion post, keep spam to a bare minimum. If you got something interesting to say, say it, but don’t start 200 comments threads about one battle you had, use the chat.

~Daedardus~

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3,018 thoughts on “Daely Snack: Have shinies lost their purpose?”

  2. This whole article right here is Dae’s way of messing with my mind. He doesn’t have any shinies himself, but he sees a select few of us with insane luck talking about our shinies and dramatically blows it up. There is nothing wrong with the system at all! EVERYTHING IS CLEAR NOW!

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  4. I have 5 pokemon from each region not Kalos lined up ready for trade through bank. I wanna check their summaries once they get to XY to see what they say. This can be used to determine if we are revisiting Hoenn or not.

    Cause I know in D/P/P, if you pal parked a Kanto/Hoenn Pokemon it would say they were from Kanto or Hoenn in the summary. But then a Johto Pokemon would say Faraway Place and we got HGSS

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  6. Want to hear something funny? I technically found shinies in every generation except for Hoenn. I plan on changing that with my Super Epic Sapphire Shiny Legendary Encounter Spree (SESSLES is pretty catchy).

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    • I’ve actually begun playing Pokemon Emerald over the past two weeks and was leveling up my treecko starter to lvl 10 before I started into next town and ran into shiny wingull – my first gen 3 shiny. Luckily I had 5 pokeballs from May. Its now on my team. I plan on bringing it all the way up to XY

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      • That was my situation with HeartGold. Restarted a file with event legendaries, got pissed off, 5 minutes into my new file I find a shiny Pidgey. Caught it with my last Pokeball. 😀

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  9. ahhh so its just that pokemon from 5th gen can’t be used in GENERAL for the 6th gen tournaments. HAH!!! take that pokegenners!!

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  14. I still can’t get a shiny, so I’d say no. Even to get a shiny in Gen 6, you’d have to have an awful lot of patience

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  16. “The rarity is gone?” Are you serious? I’ve played through X and Y THREE (3) times now, and have not encountered a single shiny. Take into account that I have not done any shiny hunting, the ‘usual’ rate of randomly encountering a Shiny without Hunting doesn’t seem all that more likely in my experience.

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  19. I believe shinies haven’t lost their purpose. They are still pretty rare and I still don’t have a single one. In the end of the day shinies are still what they are meant to be. Hard to find different colored Pokemon . As long as shinies differ from other Pokemon and as long as I don’t have one they are rare. As long as the color is visually different they are worth something. (Except for shiny Garchomp and Frosslass)

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  20. every website i go on i hear more about this new breeding method,but i havent actually read it thoroughly, or had anyone tell it to me well enough yet. Can someone please explain?

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  22. Even if the chances are lower and that’s slightly disappointing as far as the rarity factor is concerned, most are still by no means easy or fast to get. I’ve spent hours chain fishing and have fifteen boxes of failed MM chespins (well, half were wonder traded away). This doesn’t even count all of the running around in the friend safari that I’ve done! People still remember catching their shinies, and even if the overall time it takes to get one may be slightly less when averaged across everyone playing the game, shiny hunting still takes luck. Nobody’s guaranteed a shiny after 8,192 encounters or 1,200 eggs or whatever the encounter rate may be, so I say that it doesn’t really matter in the end. Getting one, ten, thirty, or sixty shinies still takes a lot of effort and luck! 🙂

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  23. I played over 250 hours, and I haven’t found a single one. I’ve hatched at least 120 ( ~4-5 boxes )eggs ! So I wouldn’t say its all that much more common!

    Honestly, shinies becoming a little more common was pretty predictable. The playerbase has drastically increased over the years and thus the number, and awareness of shinies has too.

    I always thought shinies were a sort of trophy to make you feel unique, and distinguish yourself from the rest. And basically make your play experience different. But making them randomly created by every individual games to simulate rarity is an odd way of doing it.

    I think they should rely on letting you slightly “customize” your Pokemon with little details instead. Like warpaint, cloaks, ribbons, scarves, a trim like furfrou, or other random items visible during combat. (Of course, maybe not to the extent of TF2 ..)

    I mean its clear that they’re attempting to have you like your pokemons for more than just combats, and want to give us the ability to raise them the “way we want”. (Though, some pokemons are inherently limited in the kind of strategy they have access to and end up being the same for a lot of people..)
    And even in the anime, they’ve given little unique differences to many pokemons, like that squirtle wearing sunglasses, the butterfree wearing a yellow scarf, or that pikachu with the different looking hair, and etc….

    Just by looking at how they made the IVs, EVs and base stats stack one over the other, and give us limited control on it, to make so much variables that two pokemons with exactly similar stats are hard to come by, or even hard to know what stats they even have.. I think its obvious they tried to find a way to have pokemons that would have different strengths and weaknesses, but it kinda failed once player vs player competition and fairness became an issue, and once they’ve made the process more accessible and less time consuming.

    So it would only make sense to make them stand out from the others as much as possible. And by giving a large selection of customizations, they eliminate the need of making one generic randomly determined difference only to give an impression of being different to each players. Or at least, it could seriously add to it, given I doubt they’d ever remove shinies.

    I’m not sure if it makes much sense the way I put it though.. Not sure why I even went on that tangent… :/

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  24. no they haven’t i’ve been trying to hatch a shiny phantump for literally three weeks now and i had no luck no far. i’m about to give up and train a regular phantump 🙁

    Reply

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