Money is cancelled. (Patreon)

ok so y'all know that the flow of cashmoney in E16 is busted-af right? like. the economy is in shambles. as the player you just get sooooo much more money than you should or will ever need and not only does it make it totally meaningless, but think of the street rats dude........

all right so let's talk about why this happened. marcello was doing something or other during E16's development and noticed there was an issue with the money loss formula. the formula is basically [player's highest-level of pokemon] x [a preset multiplier that scales up based on how many badges they have]. the problem marcello discovered was that this formula was not meant to go passed 8 badges. the preset multipliers only went up to 8 meaning the scaling past reborn's 9th badge was way too low. we fixed it by filling in the rest of the multipliers up to 18 badges properly using the same pattern.

so that was great. then we get to beta or-- whatever it was. people were like "wow this feels really unfair we lose so much more money than we gain" and so marcello and i pow-wowed and we were like yeah okay that's probably fair because we made the badge-scaling on the money loss formula really punishing late-game by finishing it out but the money gain formula hasn't changed at all

so the money gain formula is a lil' different. originally it was just [trainer's highest' level pokemon] x [a multiplier set per trainer type]. the trainer type multipliers basically range from 0-100 and many of them were arbitrarily set before for the purposes of designating AI. cuz ya see, current-day essentials has a value for each trainer type that's how strong the AI for that type is, out of 100. however, that wasn't always the case. the older versions of essentials didnt have that value, they just used the money value instead. soooo we had jacked up the money value on every one in an attempt to make trainers function properly, a plan that was fundamentally flawed by the fact that AI was never fully or correctly written in the first place so that sucks.

so, we're sitting there in the beta, or community release, looking at money and the first thing to do is to fix this money-AI value problem so I went and reset it on a proper less-arbitrary metric for every trainertype in the game (more or less based on how much relative income they might have). then, we decided that since the money loss scales up with badges, it was probably only fair that money gained did too. therefore to compensate for the increase in money loss, the lowering of the trainer multipliers, and the difference in formulas, we added the number of badges the player has as an additional multiplier for money gained.

this was a mistake.

if we had done the math properly we probably could have realized it was a mistake but that didn't happen and the public release came afterwards so it was hardly worth making a new version just to nerf money. so we just let it be. however that kind of thing is exactly why we're having more testing waves this time. so money in E16 sucks cuz there's way too much of it.

E17--

the problem needs to be fixed after all. the amount of money we're getting is too high, but I do think that it should still scale with badges so that the stakes are always raising through each segment of the game. Sooo rather than dropping the badge scaling altogether, I'm just breaking it into pieces. by dividing the badge scaling by three, the money only increases every three badges. Aside from working out with the numbers (and my tweaking the trainer multipliers again) I think this approach is appropriately thematic anyway. It creates six distinct blocks of leaders-- just like in the old online league. our leaders were broken up into groups of 3. so it's full circle! ...not that it's really apparent from the player's end... but i'll know.
and you'll know.
and that's what matters. 

kind of.