Blog
Reading is Fun!
Once in a while, we get a customer that decides not to read any part of the website during their purchase. Just today, we had a customer that messaged us repeatedly (and rudely) after 5 hours of placing his order, despite the first line of the order confirmation page and the order receipt email, as well as the FAQ and Status pages, all indicating the estimate to be “within 24 hours”. In 3 years of Rawkhet, this is the first banned customer (albeit, we’re having quite a bad day to begin with).
The messaging across the website has had a lot of refinement and thought put into it. When customers ask questions that have already been answered, we try to link them to places they’ve missed (such as the FAQ or Trade Guide) – but questions on timing, particularly below 24 hours, are ignored.
Toxtricity-Gmax added to the Gigantamax Package
We’re happy to announce that Toxtricity-Gmax has been added to the Gigantamax Package!
Both forms have been added: Amped and Low Key. Price will remain the same, this is the way 🙂
Customers who have previously purchased the Gigantamax Package can purchase the new Pokemon via the Custom Pokemon listing. The two will be automatically added to any pending orders.
The Teambuilder has also been updated for Toxtricity-Gmax and Milcery-Gmax, with various other fixes.
January 2020 Update
January Statistics
| Month / Game | Gen 6 | Gen 7 | Gen 8 | Total |
| November-19 | 61 | 931 | 4374 | 5366 |
| December-19 | 60 | 157 | 10350 | 10606 |
| January-20 | 96 | 450 | 7410 | 7956 |
| Total | 10682 | 92302 | 22134 | 125118 |
Exciting Times ahead with Pokemon Home!
More announcements regarding Pokemon Home have sprung up! Looks like there’ll be some nifty trade features that we may be able to play around with. Rawkhet is definitely ready to tackle any challenges from Home, and the two expansions later this year.
There’s bound to be some interesting complications – will there finally be multi-trade? How easy will it be to move Pokemon around? Will this affect pricing? Such exciting times ahead, and thankfully at a time where orders have started to plateau out.
Timings & Clarity
Hi folks, we’ll be updating the estimated preparation time permanently from 12 hours to 24 hours.
Rawkhet Pokemon was founded in a time between jobs, and there was ample time to run 4 rounds of preparations a day. This was especially easy with the 3DS, not so much with the Switch. We’ve been juggling well with SWSH, although there have been many days where we had to go with 2-3 hours of sleep, juggling our full-time jobs.
December 2019 Update
December Statistics
| Month / Game | Gen 6 | Gen 7 | Gen 8 | Total |
| October-19 | 292 | 1170 | 0 | 1462 |
| November-19 | 61 | 931 | 4374 | 5366 |
| December-19 | 60 | 157 | 10350 | 10606 |
| Total | 10586 | 91852 | 14724 | 117162 |
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
From Team Rawkhet, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! This has truly been a wonderful December for us with the launch of Sword and Shield, and we hope everyone enjoys the rest of the holiday season as well.
Please note that we are on holiday until January 10. Normally, we would continue to trade even when we go abroad, but after the immense workload over the past 5 weeks (and the juggling we’ve had to do with our careers, myself as a Gym Leader), we have decided that Team Rawkhet truly deserves a break.
On the subject of Timing
One of the big issues of dealing with a high volume of customers is the inability to provide real time timing updates. Unfortunately, the amount of variance is too high to estimate how long it would take within the Trade Queue before reaching a specific order.
Each Pokemon takes approximately 40-60 seconds to trade. That’s about a 10-minute variance on a 30-Pokemon trade, with most orders being 30-60 Pokemon. There is additional time overhead to establish trades with customers, lasting anywhere from a minute to 10 minutes. Additionally, when a hard network error occurs, trades cannot be conducted for 30-60 minutes.
Major Service Impact: 2019-12-11
Services Impacted:
- Switch (All) Preparation Queue
- Switch (All) Trade Queue
- 3DS (All) Trade Queue
On December 11, the team discovered an issue causing abnormally high disconnect rates with our customers. There are two network infrastructures powering Rawkhet Pokemon – an isolated local WiFi network which is used in HQ and a Personal Area Network (aka mobile hotspot) used on-the-go.
Switch Updates and Custom Pokemon
Switch Updates
Earlier today, Nintendo released a firmware update on the Switch. This means we are unable to go online at the moment and trades are currently on hold (customers with pending orders would have received an email, and the Status page is updated to reflect this).
The good news is that this is a trivial update that can be easily solved, but Nintendo has released the patch at a bad time with Custom Firmware (CFW) currently undergoing a refactor (think restructuring) process that is expected to complete on or by Sunday.
We are well equipped to deal with this and will attempt to process orders ahead of time. As we have 2 Switch consoles, we’ll update one to Official Firmware (OFW) and process outstanding orders on Friday night and the other on Saturday night.
