Poll: After 24 Hours, How Are You Getting On With Pokémon HOME?

It’s better than Pokémon Bank, especially since I can manage it on my phone, but that price hurts. I love being able to manage the GTS even if I’m away from my Switch!

insert Jonah laugh gif here

The Squirtle I got on first load has 6 perfect IVs. Not meaning to brag - just checking if this is standard or if I got lucky?

It’s ok. I mainly use the free option to fill my national pokedex.

I would like a way to see which pokemon in your box isn’t in your pokedex yet. Now I’m going back and forth between my box in the game and the pokedex and that’s annoying. Or am I missing something?

Not really a fan of how the features are split between the two versions of the app. I also feel that (for whats on offer) $24.99 AU is pretty steep. Itd be nice if havimg a Nintendo Online subscription at least gave a discount or something.

Moving multiple boxes around and sorting out Pokemon that are brought up from Bank could have been better IMO. I think that PokeBanks subscription model was fine as it was price wise. While i kind of get that GTS etc now encompassed more and that Pokemon Home could be a central platform for all things pokemon , i still kind of preferred an in game GTS.

Kinda wish we at least had 3d pokemon dex entries rather than static images alsom for that price it might as well have bells and whistles on switch.

Do people actually pay for this ? Pokemon Sword was fine but lackluster, focus on making a better one next gen and drop this filler crap

These poll results destroy my faith in humanity. Do people have no sense of the value of a dollar? There’s literally not much more on offer here than what Bank gave us (and most of the “more” is just features that used to be free), and we’re paying 3 times as much for it, so regardless of opinion on the quality of the features, from a quantity standpoint Home is objectively a ripoff. How anyone could possibly be okay with buying the Premium plan is beyond me. Be smarter with your money people!

Pokémon don't evolve that should through trade via GTS which is a bit ridiculous

Almost deppressing to see how people are willing to pay for a feature that normally would have been free. No wonder companies are getting greedier with a market so foolish.

Currently it's half arsed because it doesn't work with Pokémon Go yet. When that happens it will be much better.

Kinda upset that transferring your Pokémon from Pokémon Bank to Home is locked behind a premium membership. It’s pretty overpriced, but so far Pokémon Home is not too bad... I guess.

@Spudtendo isn’t this app a medium to cash a bit more out of Sword and Shield? But I bet your one of the few who’s ok with it

@Hobbesyall

Pokémon Bank existed before Sw/Sh came out, this just improves on that concept. The price is a tad steep but how is having an app that allows you to transfer your Pokémon between games a bad thing?

I'm glad I don't need it. Wouldn't want my Pokes sitting in Pokemon Bank limbo while I wait for them to be added to SwSh

I refuse to pay for it on principle, considering they're holding basic trading features hostage that should have been in S&S.

While I was super hyped for the return of GTS, it’s not as great as I’d hoped.

I was hoping that there would be better search functions/filters but they’re largely the same as always (including being able to request mythicals when they can’t be traded).

As a free user it’s also very hard to use the GTS to fill the dex. For example, I was browsing yesterday and found a Type: Null up in exchange for Avalugg. So I had to close the app on my phone, grab my Switch, login to Pokémon Home, find the Avalugg in my box and move it, save and close, then reboot the app on my phone, go back to the GTS only to find that it had already been traded or removed.

I’m fine with the GTS being part of Home but it absolutely needs to be part of the Switch App. It would be even better if we could use the Switch App to trade away Pokémon in SwSh or LGPE boxes without moving them first.

Other complaints:

The Pokédex doesn’t save alternate forms as the display.

I wish the Pokédex gave evolution details (lvl, stone, method, etc.).

I wish the Pokédex gave details on which moves the Pokémon can learn.

Wonder box is garbage. It takes hours for the trade to go through.. at first thought it was a bug. But I noticed when I changed one of them out that the other two completed hours before the one I changed. So it seems intentionally based on number of hours deposited.

Notifications on the iOS app don’t work. Have to keep logging in to check if the trade went through.

I agree that based on what is on offer here that it should be cheaper. It's Bank's features (which was 5 USD/year) and trading features that have been free otherwise. "Challenges", a sticker binder, and research tasks are barely additional features.

That being said, I did pay for 3 months (using my Google Play points--free for me!) so I could transfer my Pokemon from Bank. Once my subscription expires, I don't mind them being locked away until I have a need to pay for a short-term subscription again.

Also, I did vote "It's working perfectly so far - great stuff!". Not because I actually think it's "great stuff", but that I interpreted the question to be if you've had any technical problems in which the answer is no. Everything has been working just fine. However, there are a lot of features lacking. I don't like functionality being split across devices, especially when it hinders my ability to do things I'd like to.

For instance, I was just trying to go through my Pokemon and find any duplicates I'd like to trade. Naturally, since I'm trading, I'd be scrolling through them on my phone. It seems I can't alter the markings on mobile (argh!), but no worries--I can just favorite them and filter those when I go to add something to the Wonder Box. But wait! When you go in there, it won't let you trade something that has been favorited! AND you can't just click on that Pokemon and unfavorite there and then like you can when trading in Pokemon Go. So this presents quite a conundrum, doesn't it?

I have used Pokemon Bank as my storage for my Living Dex for a few years now, so I have completely transferred over to Home. I like the new features, but at the end of the day its simply storage for my lifes work. haha

I am not bothered that I have to pay an extra 13 dollars Canadian a year to store my sweet babies. Future games which use Home will exponentially increase the value of the software.

@SpicyBurrito16 the big issue might just be the price for bank transfer and extra storage.

Bank transfer in itself is not bad because I assume there's server to server stuff to deal with, so in theory you could get just the one month to transfer anything that's compatible to SwSh but the issue is if you want to KEEP more than the one boxes of pokémons in Home itself where you'd need to continue paying for the extra storage.

For people who were always fine with their in-game storage though, Home's free Basic plan might have a ton of potential though because it still allow transfer from Let's Go and I assume perhaps Pokemon Go as well once integrated while still letting you use wonder box and the GTS got case-by-case transfers using that one free box as temporary "transit" storage before moving stuff to the game itself.

Transfered my living dex from sun/moon to home, yet the pokedex on the Phone only registers a few of them Which is a shame. They do show in the pokedex on the switch though. Alsof when browsing through the pokemon on my Phone I see both the new boxes I made in pokemon home as the old structure I had in pokemon bank. Its confusing.

Still despite the bugs i'm reasonably happy so far.

I really should be getting a discount for being a nintendo switch online member. Anyway, I'm not buying the premium until I can actually dump most of my pokemon in sword and shield instead of having to pay for them to be trapped in home.

It's okay. Not great, but not terrible. I like all of the extra data available, but it's not worth the extra cost (above that of Bank).

It would be nice if there were more of the Pokedex entries for each game in the series, but hey...can't ask for everything that Serebii and Bulbapedia provide for free, can you?

Got my pikachu having only downloaded the switch version. My phone is old, full and rubbish so won't get the app.
Never transferred pokes from any previous generations. Guess this will be no different.

Only thing's I don't like is the lack of inclusion of the trading features on the switch version, forcing you to have to use the android or iOS apps. Also the wonder box trading is so slow it seems almost pointless to use it. Also the GTS is already full of people requesting ridiculous things. A magikarp for a meltan for instance.

One thing I am not a fan of is in order to transfer older pokemon from Pokemon Bank you need the premium subscription not really great seeing as at some point you will need both a subscription to Bank and Home if you want to keep exporting pokemon. Also I still feel the GTS should have been a part of the main game and not some separate thing and even worse one that is a mobile phone exclusive feature.

@Spudtendo I've remained loyal to Nintendo/Gamefreak through all of this during the Sword/Shield dilemna, but this? This is simply unacceptable. This should have been provided with the game from the start, no doubt.

Dont be a part of the problem people

@Lemonyoshi

Then complain about Pokémon Bank, which came out well before Home did. Again, I have no problem with people complaining about the price, but complaining about the service itself when Bank did the same thing years ago is silly to me.

What I wish is that they’d replace Bank with Home and charge only a tad more, like $2-3 or something.

I feel it’s a bit much and if they lowered the price a bit they’d get more people on board. Now you have people like me who want to use it and are already using Bank but don’t want to pay that higher price. Oh what a pickle I’m in.

People do realize that they'll have to pay for their own collection of monsters forever now?

Unless another game comes along that lets you dump all of them in it, your precious Pokemon that used to be yours for free, will cost you 15.99 each and every year.

How many full games' price will you spend by then? Nobody knows...

It does what I needed it to do, perfectly happy. ^_^

I don't like how much is in only one version of Home, I would prefer if most functions where in both instead.
I am also really mad that they made Friend Trade local only. That means that I only can trade with one friend. I have friends in other contries and I would like to be able to trade with them properly. It also makes no sense that they made only Friend Trade local only, having the option of trading locally is good but there should also be a global friend trade option.
Also, they need to fix GTS. If you can't trade a certain pokemon it shouldn't let you ask for it.
As it is now, I don't think it's worth the price.
But I do believe that they will improve the app in the future, and I will use the premium month I paid for to move the pokemon I want from bank to home then I'll just use the basic plan until I feel that Home has improved enough to be worth it.

It works well enough for me. It's a certain step up from the very slow and tedius Pokemon Bank. But it could still use some more "quality of life" refinements. Such as better navigation of the boxes. And speaking of boxes, why are we still limited to boxes of 30 Pokemon? Bigger or smaller boxes would be nice.

An auto-sort function would be nice too. Even if only "sort by national dex number" or alphabet order. I know we can do that in the lists though, so there's that.

I really like the mass release ability - real nice to just dump boxes of breed-rejects after a shiny hunt. I want to to like the Wonder Box feature - but it seems to take hours before it does the trades.

The return of GTS is nice, but with the connection to bank I already had a nearly complete national dex. I am just missing Zeroora and a couple Ultra Beasts.

@Bolt_Strike Next gen will be straight microtransactions probably. Fan base doesn't care.

It's a pretty nice option to have. Only owning one Pokemon game, I don't have much use for it at the moment, but I could see myself subscribing for a month or two when I need to move Pokemon around.

I have imported a few Pokemon with safari balls, and while they display and breed as usual if you try to surprise trade with them it says 'there is a problem with your pokemon' and kicks you out the trade.

For those who aren't aware:

If you import Alolan or original forms of Pokemon that you can't otherwise catch in Sword/Shield, you can view them as alternate forms in your Pokédex by hitting left or right.

You can breed Alolan/Galarian/Original forms by giving the form you want to keep an everstone before breeding it.

I hope syncing with Galar Dex is somehow patched in a future update. Its weird that it can read the Bank National Dex info, but not Galar Pokedex info. I really don't want to have to go through the trouble of depositing every last SwSh Pokémon

Basic Bidoof, that had me laughing harder then it should have.

$16 is a bit much. The app seems a little limited at the moment and has some clunky UI navigation issues but since we know there will be more integration in the future with services such as Pokemon Go, I imagine (hope) things will improve with time.

Otherwise the app does everything I need it to for now and there's a lot of additional perks and pleasantries that I was not expecting. A huge improvement over Bank, now let's hope they keep improving on it!

So, first of all, something needs to be done about the GTS. I have three mews, two jirachis, two victinis, a celebi and an Arceus, none of which can be traded. I understand why, but NOBODY ELSE SEEMS TO. The mythical/legendary setting is full of Pokémon that, to my knowledge, cannot be traded legitimately on GTS. So, while I might be willing to give up a spare zygarde for zacian, or any number of other legendary Pokémon I've accrued since sapphire, I can't find anyone wanting anything more common than a new without ruling out legendary altogether, and when I do, surprisingly nobody is offering anything. This was a problem back even in gen 6, are there even ANY mythic Pokémon that CAN be put on GTS, apart from hacks? And if not, why are those species an option? I guess Mew from gen 3 maybe some shaymin and darkrai, but the later ones?

I'm just gutted that I have a Mew stuck in my Let's Go Pikachu team and I no longer own the game! How annoying!!

I'm liking it so far and happy with the app. I expect it to only get better (hopefully) from here on out. I have over 200 Pokemon in Home right now & it seems to be working well, so far.

@Spudtendo Transferring pokemon has been a series staple since the beginning. These features have been stripped out of the games and sold back to the player as subscription services. Gen 4's bank was just a fifteen dollar download on the wii that acted as storage. Gen 5 just gave the player a ton of boxes in-game so they wouldn't need any more.

@FTPinkRabbit

Again, absolutely no problem with people complaining about Game Freak charging for these services. My problem is with people pretending Sword and Shield are the first games where Game Freak chose to get greedy. Bank started the subscription-for-storage thing, and GF has been milking its fans since the beginning when they went with two versions of the same game. Instead of using this argument as a dig against Game Freak, they use it as a dig against Sw/Sh, nevermind the money hungry history of Pokémon. I love the franchise and happily allow myself to be milked, but I’m not going to deny that it has always been this way.

@Spudtendo Oh yeah, gen 6 was definitely the beginning. It was the first time a gen felt underwhelming, relied on the genwunner nostalgia and tried to swing a subscription service. That said, it was nowhere near this bad, and when ORAS came out and was pretty good I sort of forgot about X and Y.

@FTPinkRabbit

Pokémon Bank wasn't a bad idea, though. Having a cloud-based storage to easily transfer Pokémon between games is much better than what we were doing back in the day. Home should be cheaper, but I don't expect it to be free.

@Phostachio It wasn't a bad idea, but it absolutely was them locking players into a subscription model. Cloud storage is not expensive, and Pokemon do not take up much memory. 5 bucks a year to store a few mb of data at the most wasn't actually a steal. It was just cheap enough for people to shrug off. If I charge you three bucks for a breath mint you can justify it by saying it's not much money, but that doesn't mean I'm not getting way more out of the deal than I'm providing.