[DISCUSSION] Why I DON'T Like the Ultra Wormhole Mechanic in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon!

[0kamii]

 

Hey, everybody! It's 0kamii, and welcome to my Friday post!

Last time I did a rant-esque post of sorts, it was unexpectedly popular. Currently my "Why I'm NOT Soft-resetting for a Shiny Starter in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon!" has almost 13,000 views! WAY more than I ever thought it would. That's even more than my original Emolga post at only 7,600ish views. Almost double. For some reason, y'all really seem to like hearing me rant, so I thought I'd try it again with something I've been meaning to get off my chest.

The Ultra Wormhole was a mechanic introduced in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon that enbales the player to catch various mons that they wouldn't ordinarily be able to catch. This includes mons not found in Alola (unavailable through Island Scan), and various legendaries from previous the generations. The premise sounds good on paper, but in execution it's not quite as stellar. I've found myself actively dreading using the Warp Ride feature, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Therefore, I'd like to spell out a few of the reason I don't like the wormhole mechanic. Hopefully you can all remain objective and hear me out. Though I'm sure the title alone has already made some people angry.

 

Why I DON'T Like the Ultra Wormhole Mechanic in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon!

 

I'll be the first to admit that for the most part, the Ultra Wormhole is a unique feature that adds substance to the postgame. However, there are three things about the wormhole that make me so frustrated, it's hard to anticipate using it.

1.) It's hard to control.

 

 

Do not tell me that you can switch the controls, I know that. If that made things better, this reason wouldn't be on this list. In my opinion, controlling the ride pokémon, be it Lunala or Solgaleo, isn't exactly a walk in the Pal Park. I would assume that most of us use the Warp Ride feature with the Circle Pad, but even that doesn't save this feature from being maddeningly hard to control. Now obviously, everyone is different, and you may have an easier time controlling Lunala/Solgaleo than I do. From my experience however, it's very easy to loose grip on the circle pad, and have your finger slide off. Not only that, but it doesn't always respond to your movements as well as it should. You try to duck, and it swings slower than you want, and you hit a blue orb instead of the boost you wanted. On top of that, there's also that persistent problem of you being a reasonable distance away from a wormhole, and the game forces you into it anyway. I'm not talking about the times you hit enough orbs and slow down, I mean the times you come out of a corner and glide away from the wormhole, only for the game to get confused and throw you into it anyway. Just me? Eh, the point is that my first issue with this feature is that the controls are nightmarish. And my griping doesn't end there.

2.) The RNG is infuriating!

 

 

If you're like me, and you've been trying to take advantage of the wormhole's ability to find various legendaries to Shiny hunt, then you've probably experienced the same aggravation I have trying to find legendaries. I understand why the system works the way it does, because you're going to far off worlds containing unknown pokémon. You're NOT supposed to know what you're going to find. Frankly, I don't care. This feature makes finding the mon you desire absolutely absurd. I've already had multiple Shiny hunts (Guzzlord, Rayquaza, and Kyogre), where just finding the right mon took me several hours because RNG was not on my side. In that three hours, I could've soft-reset over 300 times! I don't understand why they didn't just recycle the soaring in the sky system from ORAS with the wormhole skin. Make each wormhole unique to the legendary you want to find, that way you don't have to spend hours with RNG, bribing it to give you the legendary you want. At least with the soaring in the sky system, you knew exactly where to go, and what you needed to encounter the legendary you wanted and you could get to hunting it ASAP. Here, it's a constant battle with luck, and it's easily the most annoying thing about the wormhole mechanic. I get that Shiny hunting as a whole is reliant on luck, but simply finding the pokémon TO Shiny hunt shouldn't be.

3.) The non-legendary Shinies are too easy.

 

 

I'm going to say it right now, I'm not an elitist type Shiny hunter that believes in a challenge. Full 1/8,192 odds or nah, you're probably thinking. No, I don't feel that way. I myself am a method hunter, I use the Shiny charm, and S.O.S. battles, and Masuda Method, and so on. I support the practice of increasing the odds of finding a Shiny. Frankly, this reason is more of a nitpick if nothing else, but my last post like this had three reasons, so I'd like to stay consistent. That being said though, it DOES actually somewhat bother me how easy these Shinies are to obtain. There's very little work that goes into finding them, and I've even found a few completely by accident while looking for legendaries to Shiny hunt. I've found a Floatzel, a Lombre, a Quagsire, and a few others. I get that some people have nor the time or patience for traditional Shiny hunting, but something about how readily these mons are found kind of irks me. Again, this is just my opinion (as I suppose it's balanced by the small number of huntable Shinies), but there's something less satisfactory about having a Shiny so readily handed to you. Sure, maybe I'm not one to talk being a method hunter, but 1/512 odds guarantees nothing. I still have to hatch 500, 600, 1,000, in rare cases 2,000 eggs before I see my mon sparkle, and the feeling when it does is SO good. I earned those sparkles. Here, with odds as high as 36/100, they just feel like they lose their value. And as a Shiny hunter, that makes me sad.

Well, there you go. My second ranting on something within the Pokémon franchise that I don't actually like all that much. Be sure to let me know how YOU feel about the Ultra Wormhole mechanic in the thread below. Do you like it? Or do you agree with me and it's not really all that great? I look forward to the replies, and be on the lookout for my Monday post when I'll be bringing you "All Our Favorite Fairy Pokémon"! And that post is way overdue.

Thanks so much for reading, everyone! Battle onwards, friends!

- 0kamii

[Tenebris_Kane]

@0kamii 

As a whole, I like the concept of the Ultra Wormhole as it does allow you to get a lot of legendaries and with me owning both games I can get all of the legendaries and get them with the correct natures for current strategies without resetting and hunting through previous generation games plus without shiny lock it is great to be able to catch them in shiny form and it is a nice challenge.

I don't mind that it is hard to know what legendary I will get as it is fun to know that I could stumble onto any of the legendaries associated with the colour of the portal and if you pay attention to the level of each wormhole and the colour you can narrow down the potential Pokémon quite a lot. I don't mind finding the wrong legendary sine it's still a legendary (I guess I can be easily pleased  )

I do however have to agree with the shiny odds for normal Pokémon within the ultra wormholes 
Like you I enjoy finding shinies as they are rare, I don't often hunt for shinies but with the amount of breeding I do I come across quite a few now and then and the feeling is great   

However when using the Ultra wormholes the odds are just too high to get excited about, at first I thought it was great and I would love to get my hands on more shinies with better odds... but this is rediculous. If you check the GTS for any Pokémon you can get within Ultra wormholes people practically give away the shiny forms for anything they want, for example just look at magcargo.. Black Waterfall hosted a giveaway for the shiny magcargos a while back and I was talking with him on discord when he saw how many there were, he just kept trading his spare Pokémon and managed to build up a collection, even offering a large number of them to the community according to the last update to that thread he still had 12 left!!! It is not even a prized Pokémon at that point, it is just a bargaining tool for trades or another Pokémon to add to the collection and Pokédex.. 

Edit - Now I am reading that back I apologise for the rant. I kinda got set off when mentioning ultra wormhole shiny odds. I guess I have been waiting for a while too long to vent that 

[Dova]

@0kamii

Personally Ive had very few problems with the Ultra Warp Ride mechanic as far as the controls go that is. The motion controls truly are, to use your description, nightmarish, but with the circle pad I always find controlling my Lunala to be easy. To say that the glitch where you get pulled into a wormhole for no apparent reason has never happened would be a lie though. Maybe the game could've just thought that there was no way anyone could dodge it? I don't have any Idea. As for the Legendary mechanic I cant say Ive ever had a hard time locating one (though Guzzlord took 2 hrs) because  Ive not soft reset for any of them (I have however reset for UB's) and when I was trying to find shinies Id often find them so Ive never thought them to be a hard encounter. Now to the shiny odds. I've gotten out of shiny hunting since 6th Gen but I still love shinies. I am a part of a few small Pokemon groups and to say that my shiny trade buisness has been unaffected would be completely false. It has basically ripped value from those shinies because everyone has them! and the odds themselves! I love the thrill of shiny encounters but I canf step in the Wormhole without getting a million shinies! I think that the UW shiny hunting method was good, but the percents were way off. Could they have atleast added a few more mons? I don't know what would work. I can also see how new players no-longer think that shinies ars something that you have to work hard to get to because they have 20 of there own! I think thats it for now. . .

[Kris]

I've killed every UW Shiny I've found

[ScottyThunder]

@0kamii Oh boy, here we go...

I thought I was the only one that felt this way when it comes to Ultra Warp Ride. We literally agree on EVERY point you made in the post. Shiny hunting doesn't necessarily affect as much as of yet, but I totally get where you're coming from.

You would think that having the ability to catch every legendary in the franchise in one game would mean that it was implemented practically and logically, but in reality, the Ultra Wormhole is the most asinine legendary hunting method I have ever seen, and I HATED roaming legendaries in gen IV! Because of how insanely difficult it is control, it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to get far enough find the Wormholes with guaranteed legends, so instead you're stuck with jumping into whatever hole you see with the most rings and praying to RNGesus that you'll run into a legendary. That blows my mind.

Every other generation, you have been given a guaranteed way to run into the legendary you want. Static positions, the soaring mechanic from ORAS, whatever you enjoy, the similarity between them is that there is 0 RNG involved and if you know where and when to find them, you WILL find them. Instead of that, if the luck is as bad for me as it is for anyone else, it is legitimately possible to NEVER run into the legendary you are hunting, and that is incredibly aggrevating for me. I spent four hours looking for Mewtwo. FOUR. HOURS. Guess how many legends I ran into in the time frame. 

None. Not a single one in four hours. And don't tell me its because I'm doing it wrong and not going far enough to find rare Wormholes, because I always go at least 4-5000 lightyears before I jump into one. I personally just feel like it was a cheap way to pad out play time, and they could have EASILY put at least a couple legends out in the world somewhere where you are guaranteed to encounter them. Nothing in a Pokemon game has ever upset me as much as this does.

Then again, perhaps I am just overreacting. Rant over lol

[Black Waterfall]

(Apr 7, 2018, 04:28 AM)Tenebris_Kane Wrote: However when using the Ultra wormholes the odds are just too high to get excited about, at first I thought it was great and I would love to get my hands on more shinies with better odds... but this is rediculous. If you check the GTS for any Pokémon you can get within Ultra wormholes people practically give away the shiny forms for anything they want, for example just look at magcargo.. Black Waterfall hosted a giveaway for the shiny magcargos a while back and I was talking with him on discord when he saw how many there were, he just kept trading his spare Pokémon and managed to build up a collection, even offering a large number of them to the community according to the last update to that thread he still had 12 left!!! It is not even a prized Pokémon at that point, it is just a bargaining tool for trades or another Pokémon to add to the collection and Pokédex.. 

@Tenebris_Kane Yeah, this is really sad. 

Let's say that I caught or hatched a Shiny Slugma in the earlier generations and then I decided to transfer it to USUM and evolve it into Shiny Magcargo. There is no doubt that it is a (so to speak) 'legit' shiny with ordinary shiny odds but, at the end of the day, my shiny ends up being almost worthless because it has a ultra wormhole counterpart...