How will the public release of the game affect its player base?

[Aloha]

I'm not asking for hard numbers or anything.. I know there's no way of knowing that for sure, but I was wondering; how many people normally download the episodes in their final versions VS comunitty releases?

 

Taking previous episodes as reference, could we expect the player base to double? triple?, I'm asking because I feel the online platform gets a little lonely (Most of the time I don't get random match-ups at all) and I was wondering if I could expect that to change when the public release comes.

 

Best Regards,

[MetrololAce]

I think a lot of people aren't aware there is online mode at all. 

I played through the game entirely from episode 1 to 16 and never saw it mentioned anywhere.

 

Could be useful to add some kind of notification for it. 

The people I have spoken to about it were all surprised to hear about it.

[Commander]

Let me put it this way: the online feature weren't intended to come out for Episode 16, but since Marcello worked like crazy getting it to work, it was released during the second half of the beta period as a surprise. I can't exactly say what went on in the background but yeah, this was kind of an unexpected thing to come out. Let's just be happy that this along with E16 is out after that long period of time without it.

 

As for the playerbase, the forums are basically the vocal members of the game (though there is a large number of lurkers) and is certainly not the majority of the playerbase. When the public release is released, Ame does write in the news what the episode contains (as well as in a text document in the file for field effects). I do understand the point of players being able to miss the online features if they never touch the pokegear (I still rarely do). Pokemon Reborn still has a bigger focus on the single player experience so missing out on the online stuff won't be too big of a deal. I'm sure the wonder trades will get a little more hectic during the first month of the public release before shimmering down to being a little bit more than they are now.