[ti]closed[/ti][C/Alkaid][Spawn] A Foxy Trek

Shalin smiled, recognizing both the hairdo and the voice from the race in the Surge Steppes. "Oh, hi Alkaid ! Didn't expect to run into you out here!" she greeted, Nymris raising his wing to give his trainer a better view. "There's nothing torture about it! It's been really fun every time I've been up here so far!"

The Pheromosa shuffled his legs, lowering Shalin back to her normal height on the wing. "From what I've read, all the spawns have an equal chance of showing up," she answered. "So however many spawns there are in the area, that's the odds of a specific one showing up." For every time a player got what they were looking for within a spawn or two, someone else had to suffer through several dozen encounters before getting the Pokémon they wanted. "The levels aren't too bad out here, either. Might be a good place to get some grinding sone. I really want to go into an Instance, but my levels are too low right now."

The Invasive Species fluttered his wings in a BUG BUZZ to chase the Impidimp away, Shalin loosing a distorted, blissful sounding cry. At one point, Alkaid may have been able to get a clear view of what she looked like sitting on the wing, the vibrations in sync with the game's frame rate.

The girl frowned when he heard Alkaid had found every single spawn in the area except for the one he wanted. "How many different Pokémon have you run into out here, then? That would help us figure out about how long we'll be here. As long as it's within reason, I don't mind being out here a while." She already understood that to get up the level curve, she had to play. And why not knock out two tasks at once: level grind and search for a Pokémon at the same time?

"Well, you're in luck, as I'm also searching for a Vulpix," the greenette answered. "And I may want to look for two of them." Her eyes meandered away from an Impidimp that tussled with the redhead's Murkrow. "You and I are about the same level, right?"

Regardless of the answer she got, Shalin would pause upon hearing overseas players mentioned. "Oh, are you not from the States?" she asked.

Shalin wondered how rarity corresponded to Pokémon distribution. From her experiences in Ostellia, the Pokémon seemed to be for the most part evenly distributed. "Might need a larger sample size to confirm if mechanical rarity corresponds with probability of encounters, because all the evidence I've found points to rarity just being a combat buff," Shalin retorted as Alkaid's Murkrow chased this grass-type away, as well. She felt a little bad she was leeching experience, though the redhead didn't seem to mind for the time being.

"I am looking for two," she revealed. "After all, I have to catch a ride Pokémon of each type if I want a Silvally! That Pokémon ended up being a big carry for me in another game." She didn't recognize much of Alkaid 's words, but she did catch that the player was from Italy.

Working in the States was part of the reason many people immigrated. As hostile as some aspects of the country were, most companies took great care of their employees. "So this means you had to migrate servers? Sounds like a pain."

Shalin couldn't help but chuckle at Alkaid 's incredible misfortune. "As someone who follows a few RPG speedruns, I know how fickle of a mistress RNG can be," she tried to relate her experiences to his. "Seen the abrupt end to many a stream from seeing a runner lose a world record pace to run to awful encounter RNG."

The game didn't allow server migration? Most MMOs did. Why didn't this one? Were there concerns of item and Pokémon duplication glitches? Many of the mainline games had duplication glitches, though the ones since the X and Y, the start of the online era, had been patched. "That's miserable. How long were you playing on the other server?" she asked, swapping Pokémon to her Tropius, who was quick to chase the Sewaddle away with strong GUSTS from his leaf-wings.

Such was the nature of any chance-based system. Sometimes, the desired outcome would happen first try. Other times, it would take two or even three times the number of expected trials to get the desired result. "The game could use a pity system to try to normalize things," Shalin mused as the Sewaddle sprayed STRING SHOT toward Nymris, some of it getting on the wing that the eccentric rider wasn't seated on. The glitch hunter braced herself, expecting Nymris to vibrate... but he never did, instead bounding away from the fellow bug-type.

As Shalin listened to Alkaid 's story, even Nymris surprisingly attentive, she noted the use of a VPN to circumvent regional restrictions. She was more than familiar with their use for privacy -- and for piracy. "I... I'll just leave it at that." It was hard to imagine an event so catastrophic that it took an entire game server offline. Any company worth its salt would have many, many backups to reload from. What could have destroyed the server and all its backups simultaneously?

"Simple," the glitch hunter chirped. "Dynamically adjust the spawn chances of Pokémon that have not shown up beyond their stated odds. Many gacha games do this already." She was not one to play those kinds of games, but she knew those kinds of tactics designed to reduce frustration and keep players engaged.

The Murkrow seemed just as frustrated as the redhead was for a Vulpix not showing up. With the large number of spawns in the grove, the duo might be there a while... which wasn't a bad thing. It was better here than in the Surge Steppes, where the wild Pokémon were nastier and more aggressive. She at least felt comfortable fighting here until she could get more experience for her team.

"Once we're done here, might be a story to hear on the way back," Shalin offered to hear Alkaid out. She loved a good story, and hearing of the history of the game might help her, both in advancing her character and learning some potential strategies when UNOVR's main quest was ready to be routed. "Think you'd be willing to share once the stressful part of this hunt is over?"