Forum Thread

tl;dr because I know math can be confusing: the gem costs for the bird trio and Ditto are too expensive, it should be lowered to a more reasonable cost such as 300 gems per bird or Ditto, which would cost ~30 million PD to hunt them. Reasonable but not too expensive.

Hey! This suggestion has a similar motivation as this one here that I posted. Basically, hunting the bird trio and Ditto is absurdly and unreasonably expensive. The fact that they've been on site for 6 years, with many dedicated shiny hunters here, and still don't exist on-site as shinies shows that they're truly way too expensive.

Ditto Math

Assuming you pay 1,000 per gem, a Ditto hunt would cost 700 million PD if you only aim for 70 eggs. That's well over double the amount of the amount that the wealthiest person on site has! It's a number that would take years and years to actually achieve. Very unreasonable for a collect 'em all game. Even if you only payed 500 per gem, a low price for normal gems, it'd be the still-very-huge amount of 350 million PD. And all of that is if you're just going for 70 eggs, whereas most people tend to try for 100 eggs in these kinds of difficult hunts.

Birds Math

Of course, the birds are more bearable, but still would require years and years of gem collecting. Assuming again you pay 1,000 PD per gem, for 70 eggs, a hunt for one of the birds is 350 million PD. At 500 PD per gem, it's 175 million PD, of which only the wealthiest person on site hits. These are some intense PD amounts, again, unreasonable for a collect 'em all game. Again, this is only for 70 eggs, a low amount to aim for. For all three birds it's about 1 billion PD to hunt all 3 if it's 1,000 PD per gem, and about 500 million at 500 PD per gem. Wow. Yikes.

Combined Total

Now put it all together. Let's say you're a shiny hunter, you want to complete the shinydex. For just 4 shinies, the total cost of hunting the bird trio and Ditto, at 1,000 PD per gem, for 70 eggs each, comes out to be 1.75 * 10^9 PD. My calculator didn't even want to give me the decimal form it's such a large number. But here it is: 1,750,000,000, 1 billion, 750 million PD.

If you assume 500 PD per gem, it's 875 million PD. Better than over 1 billion, but not a likely price considering 500 PD for these gems is paying considerably low. Also uh, 875 million, still an absurd amount! I also want to emphasize this is still only for 4 shinies. Yikes. Alsooo only for 70 eggs each, a low amount to aim for for these hunts.

Ahhh! What should we do?
Cut down gem prices for these Pokemon. Like, cut them down a lot. Consider a hunt for an ultra beast, which is 30 million PD if you're paying 300k per saddle. That's already pretty tough for a user to accomplish. For Ditto to cost 30 million PD to hunt, it would be 300 gems per Ditto. It doesn't sound like a lot, but 100 Ditto eggs for 300 gems each is, in fact, 30 million PD. Still quite difficult for a user to accomplish.

For the birds, for each one to cost 300k, they need to cost 300 gems each, too - 150 flying and 150 fire/ice/electric. The same math applies to them as it did for Ditto.

It would cost 120 million PD to hunt all 4 of these shinies. Is that a reasonable number? It's certainly more reasonable than over 1 billion, or 875 million. Users are able to hunt UBs, not easily, but definitely seem to be able to, as there's a couple of each shiny of them. And UB hunts cost 30 million PD. So I'd say 300 gems per is a very reasonable number, yes.

Any thoughts on this are appreciated, but most especially on how many gems each of these 4 Pokemon should cost. Perhaps everyone else has a different idea on the cost? Also please, please, please don't come running in here shouting "but they're supposed to be rare!!!" I've outlined more than enough proof in this post that the current gem prices are too unreasonable, and a 30 million PD hunt, as I've mentioned before, is still difficult to accomplish, but not unreasonable. That's my response, pre-made, for those people who are going to be posting that. Because for some reason people think "easier" means "easy", and that's false.

Forgive me if I sound stupid right now, but aren't the prices of on-site items dependent on the user selling them? You are asking to change the general value of items because of how expensive it is to hunt birds. While I would support this, it's really not something that a bunch of votes is going to change. What you COULD ask for is an alternate method for hunting them? Just, changing the value of gems doesn't really seem doable

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@FurryStar - the suggestion isn't about changing the value of Gems, or saying people should pay more / less for them. What the suggestion is saying is that the price of a Legendary Bird / Ditto Egg, when traded for with the Gem Collector, should be drastically less than it currently is.

The price of Pokemon Eggs from the Gem Collector are a set number of Gems that changes depending on the rarity of the Pokemon you're asking for.
- A Ditto Egg costs 10k Normal Gems - by far the most expensive Egg on site at approx. 10mil PD value per Egg.
- A Legendary Bird Egg costs 2.5k Flying Gems + 2.5k Fire/Ice/Electric Gems (5k Gems total) - half the price but still significantly more expensive than any other Eggs in the game.

Other Legendary / Mythical Pokemon's summon items are usually much closer valued to 200-300k PD each maximum, despite being significantly easier to obtain than a whopping 10k Gems. Even Xerneas and Yveltal, which are ONLY available by Gem Collector, only take 300 Gems each (though 75 of those are Dragon Gems, which are drastically more valuable).

This isn't balanced or fair and, as Karp points out in his post, the math on how many Gems you would need to obtain for a full Shiny Hunt and how much that comparatively costs in PD is beyond ridiculous. Considering that the only other way to obtain Legendary Bird / Ditto Eggs is via the Lab, the only possible way to hunt these Pokemon is through trading with the Gem Collector, which is currently infeasible, and needs a massive change.

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The front post can get a bit confusing, it's a lot of numbers. I added a tl;dr at the beginning of the post, which hopefully helps create more of a transition into reading the bulk of the suggestion.

If someone is confused, please post! We'll try to word it in a different way to help with that. I don't want people voting no just because they don't understand it, I'd rather people vote no if they understand but don't agree with the idea. If that makes sense!

Oh, thanks for explaining. Well, in that case I'm neutral to the idea. I see no reason not to support it, as it would make hunting the birds and ditto way easier, as it is unreasonably hard, but as of right now it doesn't really affect me. My vote was that it doesn't affect me anyway/I wouldn't use it, so the vote stays.

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Since i am hoarding gems for a shiny ditto i support, but i still feel that 300 gems are to cheap.

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I feel like ALL prices (especially dragon types) should be lowered, not just ditto and birds. Also, you can sell the birds/dittos you get from hunting but not everyone has 4 mil they can give frequently, so even if you manage to sell ALL of them, it wouldn’t make up for it. Besides, there’s the economy we have to worry about. Too many of those blobs and birds running around could be catastrophic

Support, that second part was just something I wanted to add in case anyone said it XP

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I fully support the idea of a gem discount, but not as much as you said, they are legends and ditto after all. Besides such a discount would make them becoming worthless.
I really don't think that making things extremelly easy is the best solution as it makes people become lazy about things that should require some effort.

Not long ago I made a feed saying this same thing proposing this discounts, that, under my opinion, are more accurate:

Birds: 40-60% discount from 5000 gems per egg to 2000-3000 gems per egg.
Ditto: 50% discount from 10000 gems per egg to 5000 gems per egg

That amounts would make the hunts a lot easier without making the shinies becoming common.

I don't think 300 gems would make the shinies common, since that's a ~30 million PD hunt. UB hunts are 30 million, and there's very few shinies of them. So it's definitely not extremely easy, because that's a lot of PD - it actually makes them one of the more expensive hunts. That's assuming those gem prices wouldn't skyrocket if the prices are slashed down to 300, which also is entirely possible.

edit: For comparison, a Ditto hunt, where each Ditto is 5k gems and each gem is 1k PD, is a 350 million PD hunt for only 70 eggs, which I think is still way too absurd. In a collect 'em all game it should most definitely be cheaper than that, at least 300 million PD cheaper.


For birds, even at 2k gems each, 1k per gem, is a 140 million PD hunt at 70 eggs. Still absurdly expensive.

I know 300 gems seems like a small amount, but these hunts would be much more expensive than you'd think.

Edit again because I can't settle on a final post: There are ~22 shiny UBs, and Ultra Saddles have been out since... I can't find any post on when they came, though I'm sure it exists and I'm just blind oops. But I know they haven't been out for a short time. So within the amount of time UBs have been out, it'd be 22 shinies as a combined number across all three birds and Ditto, which is most definitely not super common.

These are all estimations, of course, but I'd say they're the most accurate estimations we can get with the data we have.

Gems are also more common to encounter normally, though golden slot, boxes, rumbling, royal tunnel, etc, while ultra saddles can only be obtained without trading is boxes.

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Even though they're encountered more often, I'd say they're also in more demand than summons, which evens out that playing field. Because people are only using summons for a specific legend. People are using gems for boiling, other hunts, Zygarde forms, etc - many more purposes. So I don't think much of a difference holds.

I like the idea. I really do. But it’s just so unrealistic and unfair to those who spent years getting ditto

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