Niantic should really let players choose what moves their Pokemons get through TMs. I recently got a Staraptor that I could use for a decent Fighting counter (I am lacking good Psychic types). It had Quick Attack and Close Combat, and so I changed QA to WA, and I got 3 CTMs, and the charge move changed to HW-CC-HW. Just like that, and 3 precious CTMs wasted. Very frustrated now. Niantic pls change.
I agree. I had been using 4 tms on an Empoleon to try to get Hydro Pump a few weeks ago. Blizzard > Flash Cannon > Blizzard > Flash Cannon > Hydro Pump. Of course i got a lot more bad cases around those.
Ironically after that Empoleon, i got Flamethrower at the first one i used on my Infernape and Shadow Ball on Drifblim, then the Luxray and Giratina came with the perfect charged moves.
Most Dragonite's I evolved early on before TM's were a thing had Steel Wing & Hyper Beam. I think with CTM's, if you don't get what you want first try, if you use a second you shouldn't be able to receive a move u've already had. Really annoying using that second CTM & ending back up with the move you started with minus 2 CTM's. For some trainers CTM's are not common & using up 2 of them needs to give the desired result. Yes, of course there are some with nothing better to do than raid Legendaries all day who will disagree but these same people are probably throwing CTM's away anyway. FTM's work great allowing you to switch between 2 moves as required but CTM's are pretty rare & super annoying & frustrating!
Even if Niantic don't want to outright allow you to choose, what I'd really like is a system where you can't go back to a move you previously TM-d away. Then, at least, you wouldn't potentially need a dozen TMs going back and forth, over and over, trying to get the one move you want. It sets a finite limit on how many TMs you would ever need for one creature.
You know what Niantic could do? Introduce a menu that pops up when you want to use a CTM for the 3 options so that you can choose what you want. They could make CTMs rarer to compensate, maybe, but that would still result in a lot less frustration.
Niantic's 'game design aesthetic' (I'm using that term generously) is to make everything as random as possible and to make players jump through scheduling hoops to participate in exclusive events.
I personally like the idea of pseudo-randomness for TMs and gave it some thought a few months ago. Pseudo-randomness would mean that the more times you hit a move, the less likely it becomes to get that move again. I think that would impact player experience very positively since most players don't have CTMs to spare and might get very salty about having to spend 7 to hit what they were wanting, out of three possible options. Experiences like that building up can create enough dislike that it starts to impact willingness to play and Niantic should thus want to avoid the worst-case scenarios here.
So, they could probably create a temporary record every time a CTM gets used (and the record doesn't exist yet) and use that to store information on what moves have been hit. There's minimal data, storage and processing power usage here as the record only needs to store a few small integers and can be deleted relatively soon, when all moves have been gotten once, or otherwise in 15 minutes or so, and exists entirely server-side. Then they can adjust the probabilities in the CTM function based on the data in the record and make it less likely to hit moves that have been already hit according to the record.
So I think pseudo-randomness would be a viable option that shouldn't be hard to code for any of their programmers and would greatly reduce the number of sob stories we hear about using 5+ CTMs in one go, which would be a big positive. Just my 2 cents I guess.
As for OPs Staraptor, if you can, get a 700cp+ Eevee and walk it to Espeon. It'll be a better Machamp counter than Staraptor without any CTM investment.
