SwSh Pokemon Home

[BlueWaves]

Why is trading and Mystery Gift exclusive to the phone version? Is trading not a thing on the Switch version for GF’s eyes?

 

[Silktree]

There's also the fact you don't have to pay the full annual fee to transfer. About 3 bucks for a transfer, which is even cheaper than what you'd normally pay for with bank.

Except even by the end of the year, 200-290 Pokemon will be missing. Unless you're going to wait another year (at least) for the full batch before you spend anything on Home, you're going to pay at least $6 in total (and many will be tempted to use Home in June when the first DLC is released, so that would mean $9 in total at best). And let's not forget that Bank had a free trial at launch.

Anyway, both Bank and Home are primarily about storage - for an extensive period. There's a big difference between $5 and $16 a year.

 

[Dieter]

Why is trading and Mystery Gift exclusive to the phone version? Is trading not a thing on the Switch version for GF’s eyes?

Probably cause you got either functionality in the games. Which you need NSO for. So they probably also want to bypass free trading on Switch

 

[Matthew Clerkin]

There's also the fact you don't have to pay the full annual fee to transfer. About 3 bucks for a transfer, which is even cheaper than what you'd normally pay for with bank. While I see your point about paying more to do what you used to, you still don't have to pay the full fee to get what you want done. This is why I brought up the living dexers having the hardest time, cause it's hard to imagine people having over 200+ mons to take with them unless they were just that.

While I am sure the 6,000 spaces would be useful to Living Dex people, they would be victim to one of Home's bigger problems:

The possibility of trapping your Pokemon in the service for an extended period of time.

With Dexit being a thing, it is likely that some people will accidentally put Pokemon into Home that aren't in any of the games said user owns (or at all). In the best case this will take away from the total with the free service and in worst case this could force the user to continue paying for the service until they buy a game where those Pokemon can be deposited (I'll call this an exit option from now on).

With Living dex users, there would be a greater imperative to buy at least one game from a set in order ensure there is an exit option for their entire collection.

My recommendation to everyone using Home for the purpose of importing is to make sure your Pokemon has an exit option before putting it into Home or else your monthly subscription could end up progressing into an annual one.

 

[Phosphene]

Pleasantly surprised that there's a free version. I honestly thought that HOME was going to be one subscription only. It seems like this is GameFreak's way of allowing people to trade without having to pruchase NSO, which means that I won't have to hack my Switch or risk coronavirus human interaction to complete the Pokedex. It also means that I'll be able to trade between all the Pokemon games that I own without having to buy another console.

Premium seems a little pricey though.

 

[KrisiChiki]

They should have made different premium tiers so people could pay for whichever "feature pack" they desire. I personally have zero interest in any of the extra features in Home. I only care about storage and transfers and I imagine there are other people like me.

If I have to, I'll give up on my Living Dex. I lost interest in it after the SWSH shenanigans anyway, but I still have plenty of Pokemon I want to bring over to newer games for various reasons. Right now it's unclear if and/or when we'll have another game that contains all Pokemon so I'd still be stuck with having to pay for Home... which might become a reality if 3DS and Bank support stops. I'm not happy with the prospect of my Pokemon being stuck in UltraMoon forever.

I'm aware I won't be able to transfer my teams from future replays one day. I don't know how I'll feel about that when the day comes, but until then I want to save whoever can be transferred before Bank is discontinued. I still have my team members from my very first Sapphire playthrough.

 

[Peppermint Phoenix]

Home could have and should have been included in NSO

This a single series that requires multiple subscription services to access everything.

 

[Bittersweet]

Home could have and should have been included in NSO

This a single series that requires multiple subscription services to access everything.

This is exactly my concern, too. It's not that the price point is so steep that it makes Pokemon a rich-man's game, it's still affordable. But so many features that just came out-of-the-box since their introduction are now moving behind paywalls.

Online battling: Free since Gen IV, now paywalled behind NSO.

Online trading: Free since Gen IV, but now you need to pay for NSO or Home.

GTS: Free before, now you have to pay for Home.

Battle Frontier challenge: Free before, now it's in a mobile app (with in-app purchases!)

Transferring from an older game: You had to pay for Bank, which was fair enough because at least Bank was a new service in that it allows for mass-transfer. But now to move to a new Gen, you need to pay for Bank and Home.

Expanded storage: $7.50 a year... Now $25 a year!

On top of that, the games themselves are now $20 more expensive than they were before, and you also should probably consider paying for an Expansion Pass if you want the full experience (which costs about half of what the base game itself cost).

I wouldn't be shocked if next Generation, breeding was removed from the mainline games and they launched a new app called Pokemon Breeder which connected to Home and allows you to breed Pokemon, hatch Eggs, and buy faster incubators (for $1.49 a piece!)

 

[Phosphene]

Online trading: Free since Gen IV, but now you need to pay for NSO or Home.

GTS: Free before, now you have to pay for Home.

Trading and the GTS are still free, though you get some extra perks with the premium version.

 

[Bittersweet]

Trading and the GTS are still free, though you get some extra perks with the premium version.

The free version of Home only allows you to store 30 Pokemon...

... A ludicrously low number if you plan to use Home as a trading hub, let's be honest. It might not actually cost money to unlock trading, but it may as well.

 

[Phosphene]

The free version of Home only allows you to store 30 Pokemon...

... A ludicrously low number if you plan to use Home as a trading hub, let's be honest. It might not actually cost money to unlock trading, but it may as well.

While I feel that HOME is too pricey, I wouldn't say that having the storage limit being 30, as low as that is, isn't large enough for a trading hub. It definitely does not invalidate free trading.

Edit: If you were to get one Pokemon from each version exclusive family from your specific game, 16 Pokemon by my counts, and put them into HOME for trading, that leaves you with 14 spaces, which I'd say is enough. And you can always rotate out Pokemon too, which, while inconvenient, is free.

 

[TechSkylander1518]

Ha, I feel like I'm the only person excited for those little details added. The room trades and Wonder Box seem like fun additions to make trading more interesting than just "hey let's do this procedure we always have to do to complete the dex", and I always love decorating little things, so that room sounds nice. And official displaying of a Pokemon's learnset is very good! It also looks like (judging by that screencap on the site) you can now sort your boxes, with the example being by dex number.

That's all that appeals to me about the announcement, though. The rest of this is mostly just very clunky designing. It seems that everything you'd want to do involves at least two new roadblocks that it didn't before.

Transferring Pokemon has never really been easy, exactly, since even Gen 4 required you to go out and find your Pokemon in Pal Park, six at a time. But at least things were getting sort of streamlined with transfers to Gens 6 and 7- even though you had to use two apps to make it work, instead of just putting the Poke Transfer as part of the bank app, and you had to go back into your game and set up your transfer again if you were transferring more than thirty, because they wouldn't let you pick any box other than 1.

To go from X to Sun:
Start up Pokemon X. Put the thirty Pokemon you'd like to transfer into Box 1. Save your game and exit, and start up the Poke Transporter app. Confirm the transfer. Take out X, put in Sun. Access Bank. Put the Pokemon in Sun. Start up Sun.

Now? Here's what you would have to do to transfer Pokemon from Sun to Sword.
Start up Pokemon Sun. Put the thirty Pokemon you'd like to transfer into Box 1. Save your game and exit, and start up the Poke Transporter app. Confirm the transfer. Access the Home app through your mobile phone, and transfer the Pokemon from Bank to Home. Access the Home app on your Switch, and transfer the Pokemon over to Sword. Start up Sword.

Oh, sorry, did you want to send more than 30 Pokemon through? Do it again.

Hey, how about we just focus on the current games. How easy is it to complete your Dex now with the help of the GTS?

Well, first you have to start up Sword and look through your PokeDex to see what you need. Now access the Home app on the Switch and move whatever Pokemon you would offer for it. Now go to your mobile device and do a trade. Now access Home again to move the Pokemon back to Sword. Now you can start up Sword and have the Pokemon.

Hey, at least if you're premium, you can do this three times at once.

Seriously, are you kidding me? The company with two of the top ten Switch games in sales can't manage to figure out a way to transfer data without opening a new app three times? And requiring players find the space for another app on their Switch and mobile devices for what's been a standard features of the games? That's seriously bad planning.

 

[Bittersweet]

While I feel that HOME is too pricey, I wouldn't say that having the storage limit being 30, as low as that is, isn't large enough for a trading hub. It definitely does not invalidate free trading.

Edit: If you were to get one Pokemon from each version exclusive family from your specific game, 16 Pokemon by my counts, and put them into HOME for trading, that leaves you with 14 spaces, which I'd say is enough. And you can always rotate out Pokemon too, which, while inconvenient, is free.

Are you sure?

What do you do if you use the Wonder Box and end up receiving a bunch of otherwise valuable Pokemon that are not compatible with SwSh? They're stuck, using up what precious little storage space you have. You run the risk of painting yourself into a corner if you wanna use any of the trading "features".

Using the free-tier HOME service as a trading hub is also going to prove quite the clunky and irritating using experience because, unlike with Bank, you can't just keep all your collection in the one place. Even checking a Pokemon's IVs (i.e. value to a trade partner) is locked behind the premium paywall. You'll need to keep shifting Pokemon in and out of HOME as needed, and that unfriendly user experience is clearly the point, as obviously Nintendo/GameFreak are banking on people just getting irritated with that, caving and just paying for the premium tier.

 

[prog rocker]

Using the free-tier HOME service as a trading hub is also going to prove quite the clunky and irritating using experience because, unlike with Bank, you can't just keep all your collection in the one place. Even checking a Pokemon's IVs (i.e. value to a trade partner) is locked behind the premium paywall. You'll need to keep shifting Pokemon in and out of HOME as needed, and that unfriendly user experience is clearly the point, as obviously Nintendo/GameFreak are banking on people just getting irritated with that, caving and just paying for the premium tier.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there an IV checker in SwSh?

EDIT: My bad, I was wrong.

 

[Shib]

Overall I'm happy with the details we have now. Yes I was hoping the subscription cost would be closer to Bank, but honestly £15 a year for the additional convenience I don't mind - it has pushed it up enough that I'm not going to bother renewing my Bank sub when it's up in a couple of months though. Had Home been £5 cheaper I'd have kept the Bank sub for the convenience too, but as is between now and my sub ending I'm just going to build a living dex into one of my alola games for future shiny hunting possibilities then transfer everything over.

I get how people often feel like stuff like this "should be free because there was a free equivalent before" but I think on a deeper level it's often not 100% correct - often in the past trading between gens was a ballache, having recently replayed Gen 4 and wanting to transfer up the legendaries and a couple of shinies I did find myself getting a bit irritated at the amount of time it was taking to transfer up to the point that I could easily use Bank - I didn't have a Gen 5 file saved at a point I could use the transfer lab so had to play through the latter half of an old file on Black too!

There are a few things that I think are a bit off with HOME though, primarily the features that are on mobile but not on the Switch version. I hate having unnecessary apps on my phone and always assume that more and more companies are constantly pushing people to using mobile apps to try to access more data on them. So mystery gifts (when there are likely to be gifts exclusive to HOME users) being restricted to mobile means I'll end up having to get the mobile app when I have no real other need for it.

I don't mind the GTS being on Home instead of in game - I get that it feels a bit less user friendly, but I think it could have a pro in reducing the amount of people putting up level 4 Rookidee asking for level 100 Arceus etc. It's still available on the free version and frankly that's more than I expected to see, I didn't think there would be a free version at all.

 

[Johnny Boy]

Glad we have more information on home. Only question now is whether the partner Pokémon from LGPE will be able to be transferred.

 

[Dieter]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there an IV checker in SwSh?

EDIT: My bad, I was wrong.

No you're right, but like previus generations it's locked in the post-game. You have to reach rank 4 in the Battle Tower to get access to it, but after that you can check any Pokemon's IV's from the Box by pressing +

 

[Shib]

Glad we have more information on home. Only question now is whether the partner Pokémon from LGPE will be able to be transferred.

I didn't think of this in regards to HOME - my guess is probably not. To my mind the gift Eevee and Pikachu are there to make up for it, but I could be wrong.

 

[swiftgallade46]

I may be crazy but I feel like my favorite kind of Subscription based softwares are the kinds where the only differences between paying and free versions are QOL changes. Sure you can complain about how clunky and lame the free version is but that’s...the point.

With that said, it seems like there are still a lot of QOL issues with even the paid version so I do hope they improve those as time goes on. Not to make excuses for them, but the logistics of connecting Mobile, Switch, and 3DS games probably comes with a lot of unavoidable inefficiencies.

 

[Grass Type Gardenia]

New info has come out for Pokemon Home

Pokémon HOME

With Pokémon HOME, you can move Pokémon between compatible games, trade Pokémon on the go, and more!

home.pokemon.com