After massive fan backlash, Pokémon TCG Pocket is changing how trading works - Related to how, ‘anti-bot’, computing, works, aren’t

After massive fan backlash, Pokémon TCG Pocket is changing how trading works

Pokémon TCG Pocket finally added the trading feature after several months, but it was not well received by fans for its restrictive policies and new types of currency. Since adding the feature in a few days ago, TCG Pocket developer Creatures, Inc has changed its approach and noted updates and improvements are on the way, although there is not a specific release window for when the game will implement those changes.

“Since releasing the first iteration of the trading feature a few days ago, we have received a large number of comments. Thank you all for sharing your feedback. The item requirements and restrictions implemented for the trading feature were designed to prevent abuse from bots and other prohibited actions using multiple accounts. Our goal was to balance the game while preserving the fun of collecting cards that are core to the Pokemon TCG pocket experience,” the corporation expressed in a press release.

“However, thanks to your feedback, we understand some of the restrictions put in place are preventing players from being able to casually enjoy the feature as intended. We are actively investigating ways to improve the feature to address these concerns. Going forward, we also plan to offer multiple ways to obtain trade tokens including through event distributions.”.

The current system limits trades to the same level of rarity, and only cards with a rarity falling between 1 and 4 diamonds, or 1 star, can be traded. Players will also need to have the right type of currency to initiate the trade with trade tokens and trade hourglasses. Creatures, Inc says players who log in now will receive enough trade tokens for a free trade. It’s not clear how the trading mechanic will improve in future updates; it clearly won’t come with no restrictions, as it would be far too easy to complete card collections through trading alone.

Please enable Javascript to view this content.

With any luck, an revision will arrive within a couple of months.

Just about a week ago, a rather cool project that started with Indiegogo fundraising embarked on the shipping journey. While that is an achievement in......

An AI startup founded by two Polish entrepreneurs has seen its valuation triple to $[website], after confirming it had raised $180m. ElevenLabs leverages ......

Five months ago, the Draghi analysis on the EU’s innovation gap with the [website] was published. This sprawling 400-page document has become fodder for endl......

These fake RTX 5090 listings aren’t ‘anti-bot’ — they’re scams

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs are here, and with them come some absolutely insane price tags. Fancy a top-of-the-range RTX 5090? That’ll be $2,000, please. And we’re not even talking about third-party takes on these cards, some of which have prices rising above $3,000.

And just like clockwork, the scalpers have stepped in to snap up every last card and resell them on eBay for even more outrageous prices, because what’s a GPU launch without a healthy dose of pain and scarcity? Yet this time, the scammers have a new trick up their sleeves, and you need to make sure you don’t fall for it.

During the Covid pandemic, GPUs were hard to find as the global supply chain shut down. Scalpers and scammers openly and proudly listed their ill-gotten goods for sky-high prices without even bothering to excuse their behavior. As you’d expect, people weren’t happy.

This time, the scalpers have a new tactic, and it seems designed to generate understanding among casual observers, perhaps even sympathy. Indeed, browse eBay today and you’ll likely find a plethora of listings with some variation on the following title: “Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 32GB (read the description).”.

And why must you read the description? Because there, the seller helpfully explains that they’re not actually selling a graphics card. No, they’re selling a photo of the card. Why, you ask? Well, it’s an anti-bot measure, of course! How very thoughtful.

In cases like this, the seller is trying to frame their obvious scamming as actually being pro-consumer activism. They’re selling a photo with a misleading listing title, they explain, to trick scalping bots into wasting their money on a non-existent product. “Don’t shut us down, eBay,” they say. “We’re the good guys!”.

Except, obviously, they’re not. This is not consumer activism, it’s simple scamming. The hope is that buyers desperate for a sold-out card will just read the “RTX 5090” part, see that the seller has positive feedback, and hit the Buy button. Easy cash for the scammer and a world of pain for the buyer.

And it works. At the time of writing, I found two sold listings over the past day for an RTX 5090 photo, and that’s just among the listings that are still active. If you scroll the sold items on eBay, you’ll find dozens of sold listings for photos of an RTX 5090, all hovering around the list price of $2,000. eBay might get the buyers their money back, and the sellers may be punished, but does that change the reality that this is a scam? I reckon not.

The first and most obvious warning sign of these listings is right there in the title. If any listing headline contains the words “read the description,” it points to that something is not quite as it should be, and that you can’t take the product description at its word. Use that as your first clue.

The second is that these listings and their titles often contain unusual or non-standard fonts. This seems to be an attempt to evade eBay’s automated scam filters and detection systems, and it’s something you’ll regularly find among the garbage in your email spam folder. If a seller has taken the time to add strange and unusual fonts, something shady could well be going on.

As well as that, each of these fake graphics card sellers has spent time carefully building their reputation on eBay to reassure bidders that they’re legit. The lazy ones will just buy a few cheap items and hope no one notices they have zero feedback as a seller. The more sophisticated GPU scammers will take more time, such as the one that sold trading cards so their feedback was full of buyers commending them on their “great cards.”.

A few years ago, I fell victim to a GPU scam on eBay. I wanted to buy an Nvidia GTX 980 Ti (I’m showing my age here) and found one listed close to MSRP. The seller had 100% positive feedback, (admittedly from a relatively low number of reviews — another red flag), so I felt comfortable dealing with them. In the end, I paid for a GPU that never arrived, and it took me months of wrangling with eBay to finally get my money back. It was so difficult that I almost gave up.

You see all of these hallmarks in today’s fake “anti-bot” listings. If you come across any of these warning signs, be extremely cautious. When this much money is on the line, it’s safer to study the scam listing and move on.

And if nothing else, the emergence of these scams demonstrates how much more work companies like Nvidia and eBay have to do to prevent innocent people from getting scammed. If regular buyers are unable to purchase a product before it sells out to scalpers, and if it’s child’s play to get scam listings hosted on eBay, something has gone very wrong.

Alexandra Ebert has possibly the coolest job title ever: Chief AI and Data Democratization Officer at MOSTLY AI.

Today fintech Yooro launched which aims to transform private markets, specifically in complex unlisted investments, by eliminating barriers and stream...

The [website] Summit London 2025 is just around the corner! Set to take place on March 25-26 at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Centre, this two-day ...

Google says quantum computing applications are five years away

A few weeks ago at CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posited that practical uses of quantum computing were about 20 years away. Today, Google’s head of quantum Hartmut Neven told Reuters that we could see real-world applications of quantum computing within five years. So, who is right?

, current quantum systems don’t have enough “qubits.” In fact, they’re short by around five or six orders of magnitude. But why do we need so many? Well, current research indicates that more qubits result in fewer errors, creating more accurate quantum computers. Let’s talk about why that is.

A qubit is just what it sounds like — a quantum bit. It differs from a binary bit in a normal computer because it can encode more data at once. The problem with qubits is that they’re quantum particles — and quantum particles don’t always do what we want. When we run computations on a quantum computer, every one in a thousand qubits “fails” ([website] stops doing what we want it to do) and throws off the results.

Back in the day, we had a similar problem with traditional computers. The ENIAC computer, for example, used over 17,000 vacuum tubes to represent bits and every couple of days tubes would fail and produce errors. But the solution here was straightforward — we just needed to drop the vacuum tubes and find something that didn’t fail so often. Jump forward a few decades, and we’ve got tiny silicon transistors with a failure rate of one in 1 billion.

For quantum computing, that solution won’t work. Qubits are quantum particles, and quantum particles are what they are. We can’t build them out of something else and we can’t force them to stay in the state we want — we can only find ways to use them as they are.

This is where the “not enough qubits” part becomes relevant. Just last year, Google used its Willow quantum chip to discover that more qubits equals fewer errors. Essentially, Google built mega qubits out of multiple physical qubits, all of which share the same data. This basically creates a system of failsafes — every time one physical qubit fails, there’s another one to keep things on track. The more physical qubits you have, the more failures you can withstand, leaving you with a enhanced chance of getting an accurate result.

However, since qubits fail a lot and we need to achieve a fairly high accuracy rate to start using quantum computers for real-world problems, we’re going to need a whole lot of qubits to get the job done. Huang thinks it will take as many as 20 years to get the numbers we need, while Neven is hinting that he can get there in five.

Does Google know something that Nvidia doesn’t? Is it just fanning the flames of some friendly competition? Right now, we don’t know the answer. Perhaps Neven just wanted to boost quantum computing stocks after Huang’s comments caused a loss of around $8 billion last month.

Whenever the breakthrough does happen, Google thinks it can use quantum computing to build improved batteries for electric cars, develop new drugs, and maybe even create new energy alternatives. To claim that such projects could become possible in as few as five years is pretty out there — but I suppose we won’t have to wait too long to find out how right or how wrong Neven is.

Shopping for new smartphones can be a real chore, and Android devotees have it harder than those of ...

Table of Contents Table of Contents Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus vs. Galaxy Z Flip 6: specs Samsung Galax...

Table of Contents Table of Contents Sound production differences Calibration and connections But how...