Blog
Payment Verification at Checkout
Recently, we had a case where a kid used his father’s credit card to make a purchase resulting in a not so nice exchange with Bank of America. To prevent this from happening in the future, we are requiring that all purchases through Stripe¹ will now go through 3D Secure Verification. PayPal is unaffected and there are no changes there.
For most customers, this is business as usual and probably nothing you haven’t seen before. When performing a Checkout through Stripe in the future, you may be prompted for additional information from your bank through “Verified by VISA”, “MasterCard SecureCode”, or “AMEX SafeKey”. This is for your bank or card issuer to confirm you are the cardholder, providing for a 2-factor authentication on your transaction to prevent misuse.
Rawkhet 3.0
This has been a long time coming, having soft-launched in October 2019. If you haven’t been on the website since, you’ll find a refreshing new look and feel on both desktop and mobile helping you find what you need much faster, as well as an all new Teambuilder experience for Custom Pokemon. To all returning customers, thank you!
Rawkhet has gone from selling on random platforms to our very own website in December 2016 and finally a design overhaul in October 2019. We have new features such as the Teambuilder to help us facilitate Custom Pokemon in the masses, additional validation at Checkout to check for potential errors, and robust post-Checkout guidance. Messaging and communication has also received updates and is clearer than ever. Perks of having our own website and not some locked down ecosystem like Shopify.
Productive Day of Bug Squashing and Updates
Slightly technical piece.
One of those days. We noticed some emails failed to send this morning, which happens sometimes. Because the failure rate was high enough to notice this round, we decided to finally move off SMTP¹ to the much more reliable and powerful Microsoft Graph API² (since we use Office 365 Enterprise as an email back-end anyway). This should hopefully now guarantee a 100% delivery rate with much more robust logging and security.
But this random post isn’t about that. As always, we performed unit testing³ to make sure all site components are still functional after the update. Green across the board! However, we decided to do a full scale integration test⁴ this round and literally buy off our own website. Whoops! It turns out the checkout message hasn’t been showing since October, when the site was fully redesigned. Another function was overriding the output. This has been fixed and customers placing new orders should now have much clearer instructions.
No, We Can’t Trade To Home
We get quite a few people asking if we can send the Pokemon they’ve purchased via Home – and the answer is no (as stated in the Trade Guide). Here’s why.
Pokemon Home is a hot mess. It truly is! You can’t trade on the Switch so you’re left with the mobile application. The mobile application doesn’t have a box view, opting to display Pokemon in Pokemon Go style (ugh). This makes it truly impossible to keep track of what to trade.
Next, Friend Trade doesn’t work the way most people think it should. Users must be in proximity with each other to trade which at the very least requires GPS spoofing (what is this, Pokemon Go!?). To top it off, you can only do 10 Friend Trades a day!
Mewtwo Raid’s Tough!
Phew! Finally, some challenging content. The 5★ Mewtwo Raid’s pretty tough, and definitely requires quite a bit of coordination to beat.
Team Rawkhet decided to try it out, beating Mewtwo after 3 tries. Here’s the team we used:
February 2020 Update
February Statistics
| Month / Game | Gen 6 | Gen 7 | Gen 8 | Home |
| December-19 | 60 | 157 | 10350 | 0 |
| January-20 | 96 | 450 | 7410 | 0 |
| February-20 | 722 | 4219 | 8746 | 1874 |
| Total | 11404 | 96521 | 30880 | 1874 |
Month (+Home): 13687 (15561)
Total (+Home): 138805 (140679)
The Rawkhet Pokemon Living Dex Collection is now LIVE!
Just in time for March, Rawkhet Pokemon’s largest listing has just been released!
Every Pokemon from Generations 1 to 7 – from Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, and Alola – ready to join you and Pokemon Home and the future. One huge package of over 900 Pokemon representing the best of the past, transferred in minutes!
Rawkhet Algorithms: Trade Queue
Technical piece! Rawkhet Pokemon gets about 100 orders a day, and prepares Pokemon in batches. At the end of each preparation batch, about 50 emails get sent out for collection. This poses an interesting problem – how do we handle the trade queue in the most efficient manner? Is first-come-first-serve, or FIFO (first-in-first-out) the best solution?
We actually use a custom data structure called a Priority Queue. This gives each order a “weight” or priority which we base off how large the order is (in terms of number of Pokemon to trade). When customers respond to get added to the queue, something like this happens:
Return of the 3DS
With Pokemon Home’s release, looks like the 3DS consoles and LGPE are back in action. We’re back at Sword and Shield’s launch’s level of orders but we’re definitely more prepared this round!
Here’s how we’re handling more than 100 orders a day:
Pokemon Home is Released!
Wow! Lots earlier than expected. Pokemon Home is released and we’re working through the night to get everything ready. Here’s where we are right now (though we’ll probably fall asleep at some point and pick up in the morning).
To-do:
Procurement of templates and ready migrationWebsite StubsTeambuilder UpdatesYou can find the new Pokemon in Teambuilder and buy them through the Custom Pokemon listing!New SWSH ListingsUpdate Gen 6/7 listingsTrade Guide UpdatesHome Living Dex ListingNow live here!Finalize remaining listings and common messaging
[Edit: Everything from here is on hold because once again, GameFreak can’t do multiplayer right and Home is a hot mess. To keep things safe, we’ll pause here for now]
