Imagine, if you will, a laid-back evening playing Pokemon Legends: Z-A ranked. You dutifully assemble your team, putting in the effort of strategically maximizing your Effort Values and Individual Values and even doing a bit of shiny hunting to make sure your ace looks better than others of its species. You go into a match and claw your way through your opponents, securing defeat after defeat, finishing the match with a respectable 9 defeated Pokemon, over double what the second place finisher managed to pick up. You click through the post-battle screens, ignoring the raw points you accumulated since they do nothing in rank A (more on that later) to finally arrive at your hard earned reward:
A single Mega Shard. It’s almost insulting really; by the time you’ve reached rank A, with likely investment in Canari Plushies, you’re likely to get 10 Mega Shards from a single rock on the ground. And this is for a service you’re already paying money for, as a paid Nintendo Switch Online membership is required to play ranked battles in Pokemon Legends: Z-A. This situation showcases the problem here, which is that the rewards from battling ranked are too limited.
Right now, there are four broad categories of rewards you’re able to get from ranked matches. You can receive battle rewards given at the end of each ranked battle based on your performance in battle, promotion rewards from going up one or more ranks (e.g. from rank Z to rank Y), season rewards tied to your overall performance within a given season, and rewards that are a combination of the last two categories where achieving a specific rank in a specific season gives you special rewards like Mega Stones that are (currently) unobtainable any other way.
Of these categories, only the rewards distributed to players at the end of a season are even remotely commensurate to the amount of effort put in to reach certain ranks. With these rewards, rewards received scale with what rank you reach. For ranked battles Season 2, for example, which starts in roughly a day, those who reach Rank A will receive 3 coveted Dream Balls, a gold bottle cap, and 3 bottle caps. This structure of rewards makes sense. Once per season you’re able to obtain special items if you put enough time into ranked. But, the other categories of rewards fall far too short. Ranked should have some kind of incentive beyond love of the game once you reach rank A, and ranked battling should on some level able be able to sustain the kinds of activities necessary for ranked battling.
In order to field a strong, competitive team, you need to raise a Pokemon to level 50 at a bare minimum. At higher ranks, you’ll likely also want to select a competitive nature and maximize EVs and IVs in relevant stats. Doing this requires mints to update the effect of a Pokemon’s nature and bottle caps to upgrade one or more IVs to 31. Right now, while money for mints is obtainable in high quantities via things like the Infinite Z-A Royale, bottle caps are in extremely short supply. In prior games, like Scarlet and Violet, ranked battles rewarded LP which could be used to purchase bottle caps and other useful items. In other words, performing well in online battles produced rewards that enabled you to further play online battles with new and/or better Pokémon. This is how it should be.
In Pokemon Legends: Z-A, the battles from the Royale are necessary in order to farm the cash I need to correct for a harmful nature, and the Challengers Ticket matches reward the player with extremely rare items like bottle caps and apricot balls as well as helpful items for EV training like vitamins. Ranked battles, especially at higher tiers, should provide a similar set of rewards in order to incentivize playing online and prevent the monotony of one-shotting a static set of trainers with your level 100 party. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean that points earned in battle convert to a separate in-game currency like in Scarlet / Violet (though I do think that would be nice). But, it does mean that the rewards for hours of gameplay should be considerably more valuable than something I literally get 10 of off of the ground.
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