Becoming Popular (The Avenue Every Player Should Know)

The structure is magnificent, a miracle of modern architecture. As you enter its highly polished interior, you wonder how any one person could have enough money to build such an opulent corridor. Looking around at the lavish furnishings, you notice three people dressed in office clothes having a tense discussion. Suddenly, despite your silent entry, one of them looks up in your direction. A broad smile spreads across his face as he notes your Badge Case, displayed somewhat immodestly atop your backpack.

"Perfect! I think we have our solution standing here before us! Young man, I entrust Join Avenue into your hands!"

And so, in a brief moment of illogicality, a man spends millions of Poké Dollars to build a giant commercial hotspot without even considering whether he has the time to maintain it. Shortly after the completion of this million-Poké Dollar structure capable of raking in billions, its owner spots a 12-year-old with no entrepreneurial experience at all and bequeaths it to him, simply because the child has a custom sprite. Wonderful.

Welcome to Join Avenue, probably the most beneficial introduction of BW2! Besides providing satisfaction as your avenue grows, Join Avenue is also a veritable source of profit, requiring virtually zero input while producing stunning results.

Populating Your Avenue

Anyhow, with your new-found status as owner of Join Avenue, you'll naturally be wanting to develop it—especially considering it looks a bit bare right now, with all eight shop spaces empty. Fortunately for you, a boy in a baseball cap has decided that he wants to be Unova's next big entrepreneur; your first visitor has arrived! If you allow him to, he'll gladly set up a shop and start a Raffle Shop, a Beauty Salon, a Dojo, a Café, a Flower Shop, a Market, or an Antique Shop.

Every day, various NPCs will wander into Join Avenue. As the handler of the avenue, your job is to talk to them and allow them to set up businesses within the premises. Depending on which NPC arrives, they will request to set up a different shop within your avenue, until all eight shop spaces are filled up. Following this, you must replace an existing shop in order to allow a new NPC to set up shop.

Even better, every regular player you interact with over the C-Gear, Random Matchup, GTS, or Union Room will arrive at your avenue, all ready to set up shop. Naturally, this has led to exploitation of this system, in the form of what has been dubbed the Magna Coil. Because a visitor appears at your avenue each time you make a GTS trade, there are tons of players on the GTS offering Magnemite in exchange for other Magnemite, allowing players to quickly amass high numbers of trades with little effort. Although some people label this as "cheating," it is not technically illegal and can be extremely helpful for acquiring the shops one desires in their avenue. If you choose to do this, though, be sure to be quick—Magnemite are being traded at such high speeds that it is often difficult to find one to trade for!

Ranking Up

Besides the "Invite" option on visitors who enter your avenue, you can also choose to "Recommend" to them certain shops. If you do so, the visitor will describe the kind of shop to which they would like to go. Sending them to a shop which matches their wish will earn points for both the shop and your avenue in general. After a number of customers come and go, you'll find that your avenue will hit Rank 2! At this point, all of the shops within your avenue will cut their prices by 1%, up to a maximum discount of 40%. How stunningly generous of them. Furthermore, the higher the avenue's rank goes, the more NPCs you'll find entering your avenue each day; in addition, some services become available when you reach certain ranks. The most important of all of these, though, is the addition of a new shop type: once you reach Rank 15, NPCs and Trainers entering your avenue may sometimes ask to start a Nursery, an extremely useful aid for hatching Eggs efficiently.

After a few more patrons visit your shops, one of your shops will rank up as well! After each rank up, shops will provide a wider range of goods or services until Rank 10, which is the maximum rank a shop can reach. If you manage to promote all eight shops in your avenue to Rank 10, all the shops will cut their current prices by 50%, and the Raffle Shop will offer two prizes a day! Keep in mind, though, that replacing a shop will revert it to Rank 1, so be careful what you replace.

Once again, the Magna Coil comes in extremely handy, quickly bringing hordes of patrons thronging to your shops. Coincidentally, regular players give 133% as many rank points as NPCs do, further enhancing the value of interaction with other players. As such, this is an extremely common way of quickly earning high ranks in one's avenue. In fact, if you buy from a shop, and then cause it to rank up, you can buy from it again. This is another feature commonly exploited by the Magna Coil, also allowing for a sizable profit each day.

Choosing Your Shops

Now that you're familiar with the basics of Join Avenue, you may be wondering—is it possible to create a "perfect" Join Avenue? Of course it is! Depending on your needs, you'll want to have a different selection of shops, which can be roughly divided into "commercial" and "competitive." As their names suggest, "commercial" shops are built with the primary aim of earning as much of a profit as you can each day, while "competitive" shops are there to help with training Pokémon. Keep in mind, though, that characters originating from games of different versions may sometimes offer different services, so this has to be taken into account when selecting shops for your Join Avenue.

The Commercial Shops

Raffle Shop

The Raffle Shop is probably the simplest shop of all. Though its only service is a single raffle each day, it is completely free! Playing the raffle allows you to get one of ten different prizes, ranging from the lowly Berry Juice to the supremely rare Master Ball; the higher the rank of the shop, the higher your odds of getting a better prize. Naturally, the Raffle Shop is almost completely commercial, apart from the odd PP Ups, PP Maxes, and Rare Candies you can obtain from the raffle. Even though the profit is guaranteed, however, the amount of money you tend to make each day is relatively small as compared to the Antique Shop or the Market.

Market

The Market is an excellent source of not only profit, but an extremely reliable one as well. From the very start, you can buy MooMoo Milk, Fresh Water, and later Honey, in high quantities. In the higher ranks, the Market begins to sell "souvenir packs" consisting of Lava Cookies, RageCandyBars, or Old Gauteaux, depending on which version the shop owner originated from. Even better, the Market has some very rare items for sale that cannot be found anywhere else, namely the Ether, PP Up, and Max Revive. This means that you can turn a huge profit each day, so long as you have sufficient patience to sell the items to the item maniac on Route 5.

Antique Shop

If you have a singular aim for your avenue to make tons of money, you can't get much better than the Antique Shop, with various items concealing random items which can be sold for excellent profits. Each day, the items you get are predetermined, allowing you to check all the items, soft reset, and buy only the ones that give you a profit. In fact, even if you get Hard Stones (the most common find) from each purchase, these can actually be sold to the item maniac in Iccirus City for 500 Pokés each. With the most expensive item costing only 2000 Poké Dollars (before discount), and the chance of getting items like Big Nuggets and Big Pearls, the Antique Shop will make you a guaranteed profit each day, and not a small one.

The Competitive Shops

Flower Shop

Probably the only florists ever to exist without actually selling flowers, the Flower Shops in Join Avenue instead stock nothing but Berries and Mulch. Although this may not seem very useful, the Flower Shop actually has its own niche in Join Avenue—it happens to be the only place in the whole of Unova where you can buy pinch Berries and type-resist Berries! As an added bonus, the Florist sells some uncommon Berries and Mulch, both of which can be sold to item maniacs for a profit.

Beauty Salon

The Beauty Salon is possibly the best and quickest way to erase EVs on a Pokémon. It offers numerous services, all of which make your Pokémon more friendly. However, its main selling point are the various "Makeup" services you can buy, which erase either 50, 100, or 255 EVs (depending on the rank of makeup you choose) from one of your Pokémon's stats. What's even better is that the rates are relatively cheap—completely erasing the EVs in one stat costs only 20,000 Poké Dollars, as opposed to the traditional method of 26 EV-erasing Berries! With this in mind, I think it's safe to say that it's a good idea to make the Beauty Salon a central part of your Join Avenues!

Dojo

In contrast with the Beauty Salon, the Dojo is the epitome of quick-and-easy EV training. For a fee, you can instantly add a number of EVs, as high as 64, to one of the stats of one of your Pokémon, or even gain an instant boost of up to 4 levels! If you're one of those incredibly lazy people who doesn't want to EV-train or power-level Pokémon, the Dojo is probably the best addition to your avenue. Take heed, however, that Pokémon do not evolve immediately after being trained in the Dojo, even if they should hit the level at which they normally evolve.

Café

The Café is an incredible shop. Although it doesn't offer as incredible EV-training opportunities as the Dojo does, it still provides a hefty 48 EV service, as well as some useful happiness increases. What makes the Café stand out, though, is the plethora of level-boosting offers it has. No matter which version the shopkeeper originates from, you can get a total of 13 levels a day at Rank 10! If you're too lazy to evolve Pokémon to complete your Pokédex, you may want to consider this shop. Be warned, though—like the Dojo, Pokémon cannot evolve after a meal at the Café, even if they reach the correct level.

Nursery

At first glance, the Nursery may appear to be an incredibly useful service, drastically cutting the amount of time hapless trainers must spend cycling up and down Skyarrow Bridge. However, due to the changes in the Random Number Generator system in BW2, it is virtually impossible to abuse for perfect Eggs in BW2. Essentially, if you're not really into RNG abuse, the Nursery is quite a cool addition to your avenue so that you can ramp up your 'Eggs hatched' count dramatically for a medal; if you're more of the competitive type, don't bother with it unless you plan to Spin Trade all of your Eggs over from BW to BW2.

Other Features

Within your Join Avenue you will find your personal office. This office is a place where you can relax, enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor, and be pestered by endless waves of NPCs asking for your opinion on some incredibly probing surveys. However, more important are your four slav- uhh, I mean, assistants. Many useful options can be accessed by talking to them, from the cosmetic properties of your avenue to useful data about you and the human occupants of your avenue.

Assistants

One of two assistants present in your avenue by default, Jacci, who appears as a female Ace Trainer, allows you to change basic options such as your title within the avenue, the greetings used by NPC shopkeepers, and, once you reach Rank 10, even the name of your avenue! Your second assistant, the male Ace Trainer Future, may appear at first to be completely useless, simply saying what a great idea it would be to set up a shop. However, it is actually via this assistant that one can control what kind of shop they will open themselves upon entering other people's Join Avenues. If you have friends, this can be an incredible help as you can choose what shop to give them. Even better, if you choose one shop to set up, they hire you, and you then change your choice of shop, your friends can even swap between the two shops daily, giving them the equivalent of two shops in one space! Your third assistant, Gardner, arrives at Rank 2 and is arguably the most useful assistant. Not only can he act as a PC to move your Pokémon around their boxes, but he can also bring up data about all occupants in your avenue who are not NPCs. Ever wanted to find out how much money you've spent shopping? Or how many Link Battles that Japanese dude you fought on Random Matchup has had? Well, now you can! The addition of Elethia to your avenue at Rank 4 brings the simple addition of free healing for all the members of your Pokémon party. Admittedly, this isn't very useful given that you can use either Gardner or the convenient PC in the office to heal your Pokémon, but Game Freak decided Elethia would be a fun addition.

Medals

For all you achievement hunters out there, Game Freak has made sure to include a selection of Medals to force people to develop their Join Avenues. In fact, 12 medals can be received from Join Avenue, making it the second-most medal-heavy new feature, losing out only to Pokéstar Studios! While most of these medals are fairly easy, some of them take a LOT of time to get, making them generally more tedious than difficult to get.

Conclusion

Whether you're after a quick boost for your EV-training needs or a reliable source of income, Join Avenue is an excellent help to every player's mission (well, almost every player). With a simple system that can be farmed daily and unthinkable returns for the minimal time investment, it's a worthwhile addition to your daily to-do list!

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