Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

Our local corvids have declared a truce with our local woodland mammals, and they have found acceptable terms over how to split the birdseed.

Also, the game's dragons and beasties are adorable, and I want to hug most of them.

The biggest one is the game will happily play itself, looping the same quest as many times as I'd like. And since quests and daily rewards give vastly too much free currency, and the payouts for the Monster Hunter event are enormous, it's infinite for as long as I'm willing to leave my phone on its charger.

Which is... not what I expected, really!

Some friends convinced me to pick this up because dragons and because Monster Hunter event, and I am... confused by its business model.

Typically, gacha games are either pay-to-win or have a window where they give you lots of free currency, then slowly shut off the spigot to convert to real money. This one seems to have severe balance issues in favor of the player, especially during events -- meaning I'm now deep in the endgame in a week without paying any real money.

Huh, I did not know "WickedlyFastWiFi" is San Jose's public SSID, and that they deployed it as a municipal service. That's neat.

Apparently, using instant coffee and a fillable tea bag works in those hotel single cup coffee makers. I shall now ponder what to do with this forbidden knowledge of the ancients while sipping coffee.

Also, hello FC2020, I am in you.

Oh wow, the Westin is a major step up from the amenities I was in for work this week. Hello, clean water, fridge, and coffee maker, I missed you.

Still on my bullshit:

(I work remotely, so thankfully I only need to be presentable in person every four months or so, when work requests my visit.)

In-person week again for work. Time to put on the itchy human suit so I can fit inside the office building.

Put together another rental team, this time composed entirely of shinies (all but one from raids). As before, this can be grabbed from VS > Battle Stadium > Rental Teams.

Including G-max Charizard, Salazzle, and Goodra, because... of course it does (and they're apparently all different typing).

And now more than half of 5* raids are for shiny Pokemon. Because this is extremely curious, I did a little digging to find out why.

tl;dr: folks widened the previous RNG flaw into a tool that discovers a hidden number exclusive to their games, then tells them where to set their system date forward in time to find their desired shiny Pokemon. So you just run the tool to crunch some numbers, update the system date, and et voila, desired shiny Pokemon that you can share with the world as many times as you like.

How this works:

1. Each copy of Sword and Shield generates a single secret number that it uses to randomize every Pokemon raid den in the game. This number is used along with the system date to determine the Pokemon for that den for that day.

2. About a month ago, Redditors discovered that this logic was flawed. You could lock in the stats and shiny status of any raid den, independent of the Pokemon in it, by updating the system date and experimenting. Then you could roll a separate predetermined list of Pokemon forward to get the 'mon you wanted. (This happens because only some of these properties are preseeded using the hidden number from 1.)

3. A Japanese player of the game realized that you could also crack the hidden number using enough sampling, since the algorithm the game uses is known and isn't especially secure. So they wrote a tool where you catch a few Pokemon within different windows of time, plug in all of their stats to figure out their numbers, then work backwards to the number the game uses for this generation. This works because enough of the variables about raid dens are fixed.

4. Since the game does not save after a raid den is completed, the game can be reset and repeated infinitely, hosting for other players to join in on.

Result: lots of people using the tool instead of spending multiple real-world days grinding for their desired shinies. And unlike save hacking, these are all generated by the game legitimately using its own mechanics against itself.

Worse: while you can ban the _host_ of these raids, any shinies generated on client machines will be difficult to track down since their properties will all be legitimate and their system dates correct. So this is pretty difficult to defend against.

So I think this means that, for the foreseeable future, shiny Pokemon will be common in the current generation of games and its raids, unless GameFreak takes clever action and/or removes shinies from the raid hosting pool entirely. Until then, it's probably worth stocking up.

--
Sourcing:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/Shinyraids/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikF56AHceJ4
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atpa8DMbAfM

Apparently this is still ongoing. I've since seen folks hosting shiny Copperajah, Duraludon, and Grimmsnarl.

So whatever they're using (probably bouncing the random number bug off of the shiny magikarp event?), folks are certainly getting their time's worth.