I've not a lot of thoughts on Temtem itself, the monster designs don't do anything for me and the MMO aspect is greatly offputting. That said there's still a fair few things to respond to in this thread.
Some games have reduced costs for preordering, in order to get profits earlier. I haven't heard of any queue bans, but I've seen unsourced reports of the moderators wanting to force a very specific type of community and are heavy-handed with bans.
I doubt Temtem will last any period of time. MMOs aren't exactly a popular genre anymore, and from what I've seen there's little there to keep players logging in and paying for the various costs. I wouldn't even call Sw/Sh decent on their own, but Pokémon has enough of a dedicated fanbase to keep it going, and there are various events going on often enough for people to reasonably keep invested.
Saying it's early access isn't really a defense, you're basically just gambling that maybe it'll get better and early-access has a lot of games that failed. Additionally, the developers felt that it was not only in a releasable state, but good enough to ask for money for. Defending any flaw with a "maybe" also isn't doing the devs any favors since it gives them an easy way to get out from any criticisms.
No RNG also makes everything extremely stale, if everything is a stable and constant theres fewer risks to calculate. No missing means there's never a risk to using a high-power but inaccurate move, and consistent damage means there's never a reason to use a less reliable move to guarantee a kill versus risking a low roll.
Even with a game as RNG-heavy as pokémon there is often discussion that competitive formats are extremely easy to flowchart.
Leveling and reliant on having high numbers than your enemies is something that comes with a lot of poorly designed RPGs unfortunately, you can use other strategies in a lot of them but even in good RPGs simply having higher numbers is enough to muscle through anything without ever needing to think or strategize. Having so many NPC trainers also speaks that the EXP curve is slow, so instead of tough fights meaning a lot you just have slow annoying fights where you backtrack every so often to heal after mindlessly spamming your good moves.
Overworld vs Random encounters is a manner of debate and personal preference, but sw/sh actually handed it well aside from the technical issues. A mix of both manages to solve the issues of needing to chase down enemies if you want/need to mindlessly grind for a bit, and also lets you know whats in an area without having to waste time to find out if theres any low rate encounters.
A holdover from wanting to be a Pokémon MMO, you take the on the gyms Dojos because that's what you do. The Pokémon games usually give a brief explanation of it being the Player's dream, but there's also some other things that come up and give the player investment outside of go to place, get badge, rinse & repeat until end.
Rivals motivate players, the Team X plots motivate players, etc. and what motivates players in Temtem?
Except that is an issue with Temtem, they elected to ignore one of the major demerits of the genre because everyone else did. To use a metaphor, If everyone decided to stab themselves in the leg because someone did before them, would it be okay for you to do so?
NPCs can have text that hints to the greater world's working, or advice, warnings of nearby mons, hints towards sidequsts or simply decent jokes. A game I played recently, that I cannot name due to this forum's ToS, had NPCs change dialogue depending on a few different factors notably the time of day/night, and what state the Player currently was in. You could get items, or minor quests depending on that.
I got away from the point a bit, but if a lot of NPCs have pointless filler text the solution is to simply have less NPCs.
Not really, lots of early RPGs were based off of tabletop games and how to simulate those with the game acting as an impartial, if limited, DM.
WRPGs tended to go for more player choices and options, predicting and simulating what a Player in a tabletop game might want to do. JRPGs took more direct inspiration from the genre's early instances - copying from Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy without really understanding why those games were made the way they were.
It's not, snazzy UI and OST are the most it has going for it. Atlus repeating a lot of the mistakes of P3/4 because those games made a lot of money for them.
I see a lot of mentions of "toxicity" in various communities, yet not once to this day has anyone elaborated on what "toxic" actually means. Could you please be the first?