Well I hate to go offtopic but any discussion on the TFG is better than none.
If you ever read Archaic's articles about the TFG in Australia when they were the test market the rarity was seriously messed up.
However they also messed up for the US release. Removing the rarity from figures wasn't so bad IMO, these are more expensive and there aren't as many figures as cards from the TCG. Getting duplicates is no fun thing. Though there are still some figures that are rarer than others, you can see this on ebay, even if its mostly because of supply/demand and not actual rarity. Removing the Pearl/Crystal figures was a bad move however, that would have allowed a kind of rarity that wouldn't hurt the game as much.
Another bad move was the way they were packaged. One visible figure/one none. One of the main selling points are the figures so showing one is not a bad idea, however not being able to buy just a random figure set really hurts the game since you'd be forced to buy many repeat visible figures to get a random one. Also making the visible figure also available in the random slot was horrible, this happened to me twice and made me raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaage.
It did get a lot of ads on TV when it first came out though hardly anyone knew they existed, they really needed to have some kind of Demo and use Pokemon Organized Play to their advantage to help promote the game with the TCG fanbase. Having a figure on the tins is a good idea. Hopefully they've taken all this time to get their stuff together a lot better. Also if they had made these available on toy shelves would have helped as well. I don't think placing them on the TCG sections as a bad move but I bet if more kids saw the figures and more kids would see them in a toy isle they'd sell more.
I think that they will be working there way up. I expect that we will see ALL of the gym leaders eventually if the game actually last that long and they start to release the game on a reasonable time schedule. I was turned off by the game when they took out rarity and the special non-painted figures.
Drew
Well of course we'll see all the gym leaders eventually if the game is not canceled :tongue:
What I mean is they aren't helping themselves by having the original gym leaders, if they had the D/P trainers/Gym leaders and Pokemon they'd be more recognizable. I mean what if instead of D/P themed expansions on the TCG we were getting original Gym leaders only trainer cards and R/S pokemon only.