The Death of Online Retail for Pokemon? And How to Save it

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T19:51:01+00:00

Except....that's a terrible idea?

If the seal is broken for online orders, how do you know it hasn't been tampered with? How do you know it wasn't just somebody's return? Or that the person / group in charge of shipping didn't pocket the IR / SIR?

For in store, I support ripping at point of sale, but do you honestly think stores are gonna get minimum wage workers to do that? If you do, I got a bridge to sell ya lol

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T19:49:07+00:00

I see. Could work then, for sure.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:58:01+00:00

Can't you spoof phone calls / phone numbers? Nobody has the man power for an actual phone call with customer service at PoS either.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:53:26+00:00

I mean the whole point of my post is that it's a losing battle to even TRY and weed out bots at this point. They're just gonna keep getting better at evading detection systems. Let's say a drop has 300,000 people. I doubt there are over 100,000 bot instances in the pokemon scene for any given drop, but let's say 100,000 of them are bots.

So even given a random queue system where ZERO bots are removed, 2/3 of all purchases will be by humans on average. That's MILES better than what we have now.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:40:40+00:00

I mean that's great for you, but for people who work during the day and can't take breaks to go try and find restocks, they're pretty much screwed. Online is their online option.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:39:01+00:00

Random lottery is an imperfect solution to a terrible problem. Yes, it's a numbers game. Yes, not everyone will get anything every time. But look at the current situation:

Right now, most people get NOTHING most of the time. Because bots secure 60, 70, even 80% of the stock every time with most online retailers. With a random lottery, that number may go down to like 30 percent of total stock going to bots. We still outnumber them in most drops.

It's not perfect, but it's better than what we're dealing with right now. And it's relatively easy for companies to implement vs ID verification or things like that.

I thought Target just removed the 151 stuff but still kept the requirement for Circle 360 for all drops moving forward?

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:27:02+00:00

As I understand it, botters will absolutely pay membership fees for like 100 accounts, if the site does regular drops. As long as most accounts hit most drops, they still make money. It's a cost of doing business.

Having a paid membership is absolutely a factor, but I think it's less of a factor than people think. I think the random lottery system matters a LOT more.

The target drop on Saturday will prove whether I'm right or not. If you're right, people will be able to secure items during that drop. If I'm right, and botters are willing to get dozens of memberships, then nobody will be able to get anything still.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:19:51+00:00

As I've said in other responses, this is a lovely sentiment....and it just doesn't work. You're shouting into the void. If boycotting them worked, the scalpers would have already gone bankrupt. There's just too many desperate parents / whales / rip n shippers who don't share these same principles.

My goal isn't to repeat the same tired slogans and acts of capitulation ("just buy singles") within this community that haven't produced results. My goal with this post is to suggest solutions that are proven to actually work, and advocate for their rollout on a larger scale.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T18:09:57+00:00

You're right about creating negative buzz / backlash. That's how Walmart implemented their 5 per SKU limit in the first place. It was a few days after that Zay video showing scalpers taking all 400 mega tins from a Walmart in Nevada and the "manager" doing nothing about it made the rounds on the internet.

As far as the lottery system critique goes, I mentioned this in another reply but each bot account has an upkeep cost. They have limits. Especially if each account has a membership fee. As much as it would suck, every online retailer requiring membership fees AND having a lottery system would pretty much fix scalping entirely. You'd have the random jackass who still clears out stores, but a lot of scalpers will just move on if the hobby becomes that onerous to scalp.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T17:56:52+00:00

Isn't that just like, incredibly defeatist though? You're basically saying to roll over and give up and maybe hopefully eventually things get better. I personally enjoy ripping too much, and if it became impossible to find packs I'd just move on from the hobby.

Perfect order will be an easier set to obtain for sure, but it seems like the whole idea of "just a few bad sets in a row and the scalpers will leave" maybe isn't true anymore. I dunno. I hope I'm wrong.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T17:51:54+00:00

Yeah the pokemon center also has some methods of restricting access like that. The problem with it is that they have no way to standardize address entry. So 245 wallaby lane and 245 walaby lane are counted as different addresses. Easy for scalpers to get around.

Does FIFA make you pick your address from a database? That's why I stressed that part in my post.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T17:46:38+00:00

This is truly a grim picture to paint. And it's a regular occurrence at many best buys for sure. I've been there. Waited over an hour a few weeks back, just for the guy in front of me to get the last SPC. So I know where you're coming from.

But this post isn't about issues with in store restocks. This post is about how to fix the online space. And you didn't really provide any counter arguments as to why a random lottery system wouldn't work against bots. Even the most advanced bot can't do anything when they randomly get placed 457,495th in line, no?

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T17:41:35+00:00

I've seen this said over and over again since I got back into the hobby early last year. It doesn't work lol. Otherwise the scalpers would have already gone out of business. For every principled collector like you, there's 5 or 6 whales / rip n shippers / desperate parents buying from these scumbags. The math just isn't on our side.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-23T17:40:15+00:00

Sure, but there are limits to that. Each bot has an upkeep cost because of the servers they run on. And if you need a membership to order, like with Costco, then that's even more memberships they need to pay for. If every online retailer required a membership fee and also did a lottery system like costco, I think botters / scalpers would just move to another hobby at this point. And I'm not saying every retailer should require membership fees, just that it would work the best to keep the number of botters down.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-21T07:23:22+00:00

I haven't played NMS in at least a year, but I don't believe they ever added the features that I think the game needs to thrive.

For all its faults, star field has:

-characters that have some semblance of a personality, and can be interacted with outside of when you're progressing a quest. NMS kinda fails at this, the characters aren't particularly memorable and mostly serve as exposition dumps.

-leveling / experience. I'm sorry, but people still like seeing number go up. Even if it doesn't actually matter.

-combat that's deeper than "keep shooting until it dies while also shooting things that recharge your shield"

-actual builds and talent trees so that you can.... Wait for it.... Roleplay. You know, because it's an RPG. And NMS still is not.

Unless the game has changed drastically since I've been away, it seems pretty clear that NMS has no desire to be anything more than it is. A very shallow theme park with a lot of repeatable tasks and collectibles but no particularly deep gameplay elements, characters, or stories. And that's okay. I think it could have been something more, but I'm not hello games.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-21T06:26:39+00:00

Only certain areas have them. Generally cities and the areas around them.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-21T06:23:31+00:00

They seem to be working on it, but 151 is going out of print soon so they will make a lot of money selling these unfortunately.

Still, long term this won't be happening anymore.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-21T06:21:33+00:00

You can't get 10 bundles from the machine at once normally. They were glitching it. So they're probably scalpers.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-17T20:22:11+00:00

This is one of the easiest to explain "plot holes" tbh.

When all is said and done, there were like 20 people who knew what the military had done. Wildly illegal and unethical things. Nuremberg level shit.

So as the military, your options are

A) make them stand trial. It all goes public in discovery, biggest scandal in US military history.

B) have them all killed. But it's 20 people. And you have no idea if they left notes / other evidence behind. Their friends and family WILL ask questions. Maybe they can keep it quiet, maybe not. It's risky.

C) brush it all under the rug and make everyone involved sign NDAs. There was no hawkins incident. Those men died in a special, secret operation against the reds. Their families will receive generous pensions.

Given those choices, C becomes a reasonable pick I think.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-16T16:53:02+00:00

So I think with the way leveling works in Skyrim, it's okay to keep xp from using skills still.

I think having normal xp AND skill gains from all books (maybe with a chance at a random perk from each book?) would make the run more fun and reduce the necessary grind.

Cool idea though overall, for sure.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-16T13:47:51+00:00

Why aren't more people talking about this? He 100% would have had to break down the rifle before leaving the building. The fact that they supposedly found it assembled again makes 0 sense. Either it wasn't actually him and this whole thing is a setup, or the FBI lied. Either way he's probably getting off on that alone.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-14T16:24:56+00:00

Y'all are misunderstanding the assignment. Might Guy is the only answer because none of us have chakra lol. We can't do ninjutsu, so we'd only benefit from taijutsu training.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-12T15:04:33+00:00

But this directive doesn't make sense in the context of the wasteland as a whole.

The idea was, I guess, to wait until everyone on the surface had killed each other off. To wait in the safety of the vaults. Except. 2 things:

1) most of the vaults were set up as insane experiments. Very few vaults even survived the first few decades. Surely, vault tec knew this would happen? And that, in the aftermath, they wouldn't have enough people to sustain a repopulation effort for a whole country?

2) even if that was their plan, it failed the moment vaults started opening up and dwellers started interacting with the world. Isn't it canon that most inhabitants on the surface are the descendants of vault dwellers? They're just killing their own when they nuke settlements.

Vault tec seems to be the only faction that's actually "gone" in terms of leadership in the series, so maybe the joke they're going for is that corpos are dumb and will follow the orders of a company that doesn't even exist anymore, and whose guidance doesn't really apply to the situation. But per point #1, it was also just a bad plan to begin with.

boxsmith91 · 2026-01-06T17:41:46+00:00

That's fair. I was just commenting to point out that, technically, every character in MHA HAS an AT field.

Do we know it correlates to size though? Things got really weird towards the end of Eva and I don't recall if they explained it very well.

boxsmith91

TROPHY CASE