Looking Ahead to Pokémon X & Y Part 2: Raising a Competitive Team
Welcome to part 2 of Nugget Bridge’s Pokémon X & Y changes review! Last time I wrote a bit about some of the gameplay mechanics changes and move updates in X & Y, and before moving on to the exciting new stuff in the last part of the review, I figured I should touch on a different type of gameplay mechanics change: the changes to breeding Pokémon in the sixth generation games. There were several changes made in X & Y to make breeding Pokémon significantly less time consuming than it has been in the past. The traditional breeding process ended up being basically completely replaced by RNG manipulation the past few years, with players able to acquire Pokémon in a few minutes instead of a few days. In X & Y, that same level of RNG manipulation is gone, but breeding to get five-31 IV Pokémon is fairly easy — though it still takes a significant amount of time relative to using the RNG, or more importantly, just playing on a simulator instead of on the game cards. On some level, I can’t complain too much: until X & Y, I literally hadn’t been the original trainer of a Pokémon I used in a battle against another player since Journey Across America in 2006. I now have a box and a half full of perfect Pokémon that are mostly my own, so obviously I’m using the changed system much more than I used the previous system. However, I’d still like to take a moment to look at the big picture of the breeding changes in Pokémon before I get on to the individual changes because I don’t think this was a perfect set of changes.
As you’d expect from an established franchise that has been as consistently successful as Pokémon has been, Game Freak tends to be slow to introduce major changes to the game. Incremental change works very well to slowly improve parts of the game that aren’t broken, such as the battle mechanics. While I think most people would agree that the mechanics changes I wrote about last week would look even better if they had included, say, a reduction of the flinch chance of Rock Slide, a reduction in confusion self-hit chance, and a reduction in the odds of losing a turn to paralysis, the reaction to the mechanics changes in Pokémon X & Y has been deservedly positive because the changes that were made were good. Slow, incremental change is effective for gameplay mechanics, especially because if you go too crazy, things can get a little broken. That’s when you end up with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. Or maybe Cataclysm.
However, slow change is much less effective in cases where the incumbent features are weakest. While Pokémon doesn’t seem to have too many areas where large change is needed, one place that really did need an overhaul was the time investment required to raise a competitively viable team. Like the battle mechanics, we saw a variety of changes that made raising Pokémon a little bit better this generation… but if Game Freak wanted to keep players playing on their 3DSes instead of online simulators, an improvement larger than a little bit was probably needed. Breeding is faster and easier than it’s ever been, but being faster than before doesn’t necessarily mean battling on the cartridges outside of official events — or on the cartridges at all for players who prefer rule sets other than Standard — is going to be seen as a viable alternative for players who have enjoyed the convenience of simulators or for new players who might see breeding a competitive team as too much effort to make battle spot worth trying out. I should probably get my stake on the table here: I started playing competitive Pokémon in 2002 and used simulators basically exclusively until 2011. Even when I started playing in the Video Game Championships, I very rarely played in-game because it was a pain to get Pokémon and in-game Wi-Fi was horrible. The latter issue is definitely fixed now, and I think it’d be best for the growth of the game if people were connecting with newer players through the games, which have millions of people playing them, instead of the simulators and their thousands, but I’ve been using the simulators for over a decade for a reason. They’re much more convenient than getting a team in-game to test out is, and it’s going to be really difficult for Game Freak to change the behavior of players to keep them on their 3DSes at this point, especially old dogs like me with habits that are hard to break.
Pokémon breeding mechanics are among the franchise’s touchiest issues because it is probably the single case where Pokémon appealing to many demographics pits design goals against each other the most. Game Freak, like many of the more casual players it has attracted, seems to value each Pokémon’s individuality and has maintained a high level of individual complexity for each Pokémon (six IVs that can be 32 values each, one of 25 natures, one of three abilities) that with one new exception, can’t be modified at all once a Pokémon is born. The time investment of acquiring a high quality version of an individual Pokémon is also probably intentionally reasonably high: while it certainly isn’t going to take anyone a week to breed a single Pokémon like it may have in generation five — not that I would know — even using a previously bred Pokémon in the same egg group as a father, collecting a mother of the appropriate species and passing IVs is going to take a few hours per Pokémon without incredible luck. This is in stark contrast to a simulator, where players can enter a whole team and be battling in about five minutes.
I think Game Freak is probably never going to be willing to just have an online simulator clone mode to really compete with simulators on convenience because it’s so far off of the image they seem to want, but unlike in Black 2 & White 2, I think the in-game battle experience is fairly indisputably better on the carts in XY. As such, I think it’s realistic for the games to be reasonably competitive if the extra time involved with making a team in-game isn’t too severe. Whether or not Game Freak accomplished this in X & Y will probably be seen over the next year or so, but I think there’s some evidence in both directions right now. There are many, many more players playing in-game and making legitimate competitive teams than probably at any other point in Pokémon’s history, including a lot of people I would never have expected to be playing on the carts at all, but there are still plenty of players — some who are extremely dedicated to VGC — who are just waiting for Poke Bank to transfer RNGed Pokémon over to play with because they don’t want to spend the time making a team. I’d really like to see more players playing in-game compared to generation five, both because it’s typically much easier to convince people playing in-game who aren’t already tournament-goers to try out the format and attend events and because I think the international element of playing on the carts is a little more interesting than the relatively static group of simulator players. However, as someone with a few hundred hours logged in X & Y already that was mostly spent breeding Pokémon instead of battling, I’m not sure we’re really at the point where that’s going to happen over the long term yet.
Changes to Breeding, Training, and Acquiring Pokémon in Pokémon X & Y
For a full guide to breeding Pokémon in Pokémon X&Y, check out Huy’s Guide.
- IVs and Natures: Still the same as before
The first change is actually a lack of change. There are still six IVs controlling the six stats that have a range of 32 potential values and 25 natures. There are still no ways to change any of these values after a Pokémon is born.
This is noteworthy because if there is any place that makes sense to attack the difficulty of achieving perfect Pokémon, this was the spot to do it, and it didn’t happen. This seems to be one of those places where Game Freak likes the individuality of their Pokémon and appears uninterested in changing things, and I think that it’s probably a mistake. I’d love to see them remove IVs completely, but since they don’t seem to want to do that, simply allowing there to be some way to do additional training at max level or through super training to increase IVs seems like it would have been a reasonable solution that I am unsure why we haven’t seen. Natures are much less obnoxious to deal with because of Synchronize and Everstone, but a way to change a Pokémon’s Nature on the fly would be pretty handy, too. I don’t feel like either of these concepts are too out there — I could change personalities in RPGs that had a similar function way back in the early 90s (one of the Dragon Quests, I think?) and several MMOs have an equivalent to boosting stats at max level that being able to increase IVs the same way would emulate — but Pokémon not having anything like them implemented means that the cost of individuality is that the vast majority of Pokémon are genetically inferior fodder. Which apparently is a better state of affairs.
- New Item: Ability Capsule — Changes a Pokémon’s Ability to its other non-Hidden Ability (one time use, 200 BP)
Ignoring that changing between non-Hidden Abilities is almost never useful and 200 BP is a ridiculous price tag (especially now that battling online doesn’t give BP), this is a really fascinating change to me because of the previous bullet. Abilities, like IVs and Natures, had always been locked and now can be changed at a cost. Here’s hoping this is a step in that direction…
In the mean time, if you breed a flawless Pokémon with the wrong ability you can make it competitively useful for the low, low price of one easy payment of 200 BP!
- A parent holding Destiny Knot when breeding allows 5 IVs to pass down from the parents instead of 3 IVs.
Rather than improving the potential of existing Pokémon, the solution Game Freak chose was to allow Destiny Knot to vastly improve bred Pokémon. This wound up being a pretty good solution: with one parent holding Everstone and the other holding Destiny Knot, if both parents have 31 IVs in the 5 stats the bred Pokémon is going to use, you actually end up with a 19.3% chance (1/6 of not passing the right stat + a 1/32*5/6 chance of rolling a 31 when the wrong stat is passed) of breeding another perfect Pokémon to trade. Where this tends to be practically useful is earlier than that scenario in the breeding process, since if you have a male with the right five 31 IVs in the egg group you’re working with, as simply catching a female with the correct Nature and breeding it with the male using Everstone and Destiny Knot means you can almost always end up with a Female with the correct Nature and 3 31 IVs within an hour(probably 4 if the female is from Friend Safari), which is already starting to get you pretty close to having a realistic shot at rolling a perfect child.
Destiny Knot is fantastic. It makes X & Y breeding by far the fastest its ever been in the Pokémon franchise. I do want to go back to the points from the introduction here, though, because they’re most relevant to Destiny Knot. Destiny Knot was Game Freak’s only major overhaul toward breeding competitively viable Pokémon. Once you have a decent selection of Pokémon, it definitely becomes viable to get most breedable Pokémon with even or primarily female gender ratios within a few hours. The question to me here is still whether or not it was a big enough change. There’s a little inherent greed in basically writing that this was a great change but that I actually wanted more, but making a team on a simulator in five minutes is still going to appeal to a lot of people when you consider that even in a situation where I have males in the appropriate egg groups and get fairly lucky, it’s going to take me a minimum of about ten hours to breed a completely fresh team (which is probably a low estimate). That’s an awful lot of time to spend preparing to play a game.
I know there are a not insignificant number of players that see raising Pokémon as a major part of the game and as important to competition as battling, and while I’m glad some people value and enjoy the breeding aspects of the game, the competitive impact of breeding should be zero. No one comments on how really unlocking champions, leveling your account, and buying runes are as important a part of becoming a champion in a game like League of Legends as battling on the Fields of Justice, or how going through the storymode in a fighting game to unlock characters is as important as actually battling other players in those games because those claims are completely ridiculous and are just as ridiculous in Pokémon. At the end of the day, for Pokémon as a competitive game, acquiring a team to start battling is a barrier to entry, and while that barrier isn’t quite The Wall from A Song of Ice and Fire anymore, it’s still a fence I’m concerned many people are going to choose not to climb.
- Pokémon Bank Delayed Until Almost 2014
The lack of Pokémon Bank is perhaps the most irritating part of collecting Pokémon right now. On some level, this isn’t worth writing extensively about — it’ll come out when it’s ready and it’s better to have the game without Poke Bank than getting them both at the same time later — but the impact of not being able to transfer Pokémon is pretty large. Other than the release of generation three, where Pokémon weren’t allowed to be transferred at all with the changes to IVs and the addition of Natures, this is the first time Pokémon haven’t been transferable between generations at launch and it causes pretty large problems for the competitive game. Without Pokémon Bank, a variety of Pokémon and move combinations are missing. Some egg moves are now illegal, which vastly reduce the power of Pokémon. Chandelure, for instance, can’t learn Heat Wave without using a tutor or breeding with something that used the tutor in a past generation, so while even in 2011 before the BW2 tutor came out it was able to use Heat Wave by breeding with a Slugma from generation four, it is now relegated to the less useful Flamethrower and Fire Blast for a couple months without transfers. Several other Pokémon are missing important tutor moves that make them significantly weaker, such as Zapdos also missing Heat Wave, Scizor missing Bug Bite, and basically every Pokémon who would normally use it missing Icy Wind, which is greatly reducing the game’s speed control options. This is before you even look at Pokémon being completely unavailable because they aren’t available in XY. The net impact of this is that while we currently don’t have a ruleset anyway, we’re playing in a bizarre, fictional metagame that will be changed quickly when Pokémon Bank is released.
While starting fresh is probably appealing to some players, it also complicates breeding. It is much, much faster to get a perfect Pokémon using perfect parents, even if it is just a perfect male of another species. If Pokémon Bank were available, it would allow us to transfer over the flawless Pokémon we have in generation five and breed quicker in generation six. This is particularly irritating in cases like Scizor, where it is a good enough Pokémon now to breed one to use temporarily, but doing so is fundamentally a waste of time on multiple fronts, since we can neither transfer perfect Scizors to breed faster and will probably want to replace it completely when Bank comes out to get Bug Bite. Pokémon Bank is leading to a lot of wasted time, which is pretty frustrating for such an important feature and again adds to the barriers to entry complaint… we’re spending more time to spend more time on this one.
- There is currently no way to RNG or hack and only limited cloning
So here’s something else that’s a little controversial. I imagine most players who aren’t playing in VGC events would read that bullet and view it as a positive. I don’t, and I want to take a moment to explain why.
It is a pretty obvious theme at this point that I think anything that forces players to take a substantial amount of time to get started battling is a bad feature. RNG and cloning were things I liked a lot in generation five because it let people get around the tediousness of acquiring a team and get to battling, which for many competitive players is the only part of the game that is appealing. I interact with a lot of different players with a lot of different views on this stuff, and I can read some of the holier-than-thou responses about breeding Pokémon with trust and love and being a *** REAL POKEMON TRAINER *** already, but the bottom line is there’s a very understandable reason why so many players at tournament play and the time spent breeding Pokémon just to compete (even though that wasn’t actually true last generation). Most players don’t want to go through significant effort just to be able to play a game, especially if they aren’t already invested in it… it’s very different for me to spend a couple days making a team compared to someone who’s never played the metagame before and isn’t sure if they’ll even like it.
Fundamentally, what we do here on Nugget Bridge is try to make VGC more accessible to people and help grow and teach the game. Anything that makes the game harder to play works against those goals, and I’d say RNG and cloning not being available is a big mark against that. The lack of cloning is leading to people actually trading Pokémon, which is definitely cool and community building, but it isn’t even close to allowing for the same type of availability in Pokémon we had before and that is definitively bad.
I’m all for hacking being gone for now, though, if only because of how poorly people tend do it… but given a certain Magmar I’m getting mixed signals on how we’re handling hacking at this point, anyway.
- EV Training with Hordes / Super Training
One of the more promoted new features other than the obvious ones like Mega Evolutions and the glorious return of the Red & Blue starter Pokémon was Super Training, a way to EV train Pokémon without engaging in battles. While not nearly as time consuming as actually breeding Pokémon in the past, EV training has traditionally been a long and extremely tedious process, so I think we were all eager for a faster way to train Pokémon. Instead, we got Super Training!
Sort-of-jokes aside, Super Training was disappointing. The one really positive thing I can say about Super Training is that since it does give you that little graph of your EVs training even when acquired through normal battles, it should be reasonably discernible for new players that there’s a way to train their Pokémon other than experience that is probably important, which at least people can figure out exists without the help of an internet resource revealing the mechanic to them now. That’s not to say it’s necessarily reasonable for a player to figure out how to optimize EVs training without outside help, especially since the whole points-only-count-in-multiples-of-four thing is pretty unintuitive (more so when you remember it’s usually multiples of 8 but sometimes 4 at level 50 instead), but at least it’s there and people can probably get 252/252 spreads down without any outside influence. I am all for new features that help break down barriers to being competitive, and at least this indirectly teaches players something.
Super Training itself is hilariously inefficient as a feature, unfortunately. I used it to train my first few Pokémon because I think the minigame is kind of fun, but once the novelty wears off EV training through hordes is much, much faster… which is a little worrying considering that the whole point of Super Training was presumably to actually be an efficient way to train, and that the minigame probably took a decent amount of effort to develop. Super Training, inexplicably, is not even useful enough to be the best way to do anything but acquire some items. Hopefully, Game Freak increases the EVs training received from each training activity by at least about double next time they release a game, because it just isn’t very effective right now.
Perhaps the worst part of Super Training is that even though it doesn’t shy away from assigning numerical values because it comes out and tells you that you’re going to get +4/8/12 EVs training for each drill, it doesn’t actually list the values of your total EVs anywhere, instead giving me you graph you can’t actually use to figure out if you’re off by anything smaller than accidentally putting 252 EVs in Attack instead of Defense. All-in-all, Super Training feels a generation or two away from where it needs to be to be useful, but at least Game Freak isn’t essentially denying the existence of EVs anymore… even if the translators did decide to keep using a name for them (base stats) that competitive players usually use to refer to something else.
- Females can pass Egg Moves when bred
- Males pass Hidden Abilities when bred with Ditto
- Egg Moves can be relearned at the Move Reminder
While these changes are not very exciting to look at — they’re kind of the @Leftovers of the list — they’re really important because they allow for several combinations of moves and abilities to be legal that previously were not. Male Pokémon being able to pass their Hidden Abilities allows several Pokémon that previously were only released in male-only promotions to use their Hidden Abilities and Egg Moves at the same time, though many of those Pokémon, such as Charizard and Venusaur, are now in the Friend Safari anyway. Females being able to pass Egg Moves similarly increases the pool of allowed combinations, as you can now continually breed Egg Moves onto females and then introduce more with new males and get any combination of four egg moves you want on any Pokémon that can breed. The practical applications of this are pretty limited, but it’s kind of neat in the sense that combined with the Reminder change you can breed any egg move you’d ever want on a Pokémon and then relearn them as you need them and be able to change movesets with Heart Scales instead of needing to breed a new Pokémon. Cool changes.
- Friend Safari Pokémon are guaranteed to have at least two 31 IVs
- Friend Safari Pokémon can have Hidden Abilities if you’ve been online at the same time as the owner
- Legendary and other Pokémon that are unable to breed are guaranteed to have at least three 31 IVs
There’s isn’t a lot of exposition I can add for these changes, but other than Destiny Knot these are the best improvements for raising a competitive team in XY. While there aren’t really any legendaries worth catching at this point — Zapdos isn’t really Zapdos without Heat Wave and potentially Tailwind, and Articuno and Moltres are horrible — locking 3 31s makes it realistic to chain reset for a near-perfect legendary now without spending ridiculous amounts of time. I’m actually a little surprised by how many players have even managed to take this a step further and get Hidden Power Ice Zapdos already on Battle Spot, so even without RNG people are getting really solid legendaries.
While catching anything competitively useful out of the Friend Safari is pretty unlikely, between being able to get any of the Pokémon’s available abilities and at least 2 31 IVs, the Friend Safari is an excellent place to get the first mother for starting a competitive Pokémon’s lineage and cuts a bunch of time off of the process most of the time. Subtle change here, but it makes a mountain of difference.
Conclusion
Overall, the changes to building a team in this generation were positive, decreasing the time it takes to breed competitively useful Pokémon and adding some new ability/move combinations to bred Pokémon. Will it be enough to get people practicing on the actual game instead of the simulators this season? Only time will tell…
About the Author
Scott started playing VGC in 2011. He finished 17th at US Nationals, then lost in the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ. He finished 10th in the 2012 World Championships and qualified for Worlds again in 2013 after going into US Nationals second in CP. Instead of playing, he commentated at US Nationals and the World Championships in 2013 and 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NBNostrom!
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20 Responses to Looking Ahead to Pokémon X & Y Part 2: Raising a Competitive Team
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This would have been done like a week sooner but instead I spent 9 million hours breeding teams
Good article. There’s a minor math error, though. The chance of breeding a new 5IV Pokemon in the stats you want with both parents already having 5IVs in the relevant stats is:
Chance of passing down the 5 stats + chance of rolling a 31 in the cases where you don’t pass down the correct 5 stats
(1/6)+(5/6)(1/32) = 19.27%
You’re currently double counting the (1/6)(1/32) chance of getting a 6IV Pokemon.
I know I am the minority here but since I don’t have a PC but have an ipad instead, simulators are horrendous to attemp to use and often it’ll take about an hour of frustrating mis clicks and the screen constantly moving up and down along with bad input time for moves and such and these new features are absolutely amazing to me and since I was already a fan of breeding it’s just that much more satisfying.
I had never actually competed before due to bad accessibility and had to just plan strategies but not actually be able to use them so for the 4 other people like me these changes have made it so I can -and will- compete in tournaments, yes they aren’t perfect, but they are a huge step up in my opinion.
I used to breed and be happy with one perfect IV and thrilled at 2 due to not wanting or understanding how to RNG, and even then the wifi battles were rubbish and I didn’t even have much of a chance for fair fights online in-game.
I can’t say enough how thrilled I am with the new mechanics.
This quote and some comments I’ve seen lately makes me want to clear up something: RNGing is NOWHERE near as fast as people seem to think it is once you factor in the time it takes to learn how to do it. Maybe I’m just stupid, but it took me months of trying to wrap my head around it, giving up and then trying again before I was able to start RNGing Pokemon in 4th and 5th gen. And that was me trying to learn how to do it after OmegaDonut and friends already did the painstaking research to show people how to do it (which I worship them for).
I get why people seem to think that RNGing is supposedly fast, but that is only once you get the hang of it. When you factor in just how hard it is to learn how to do it, RNGing counts as a “bad” feature–which is ironic because I highly doubt GameFreak ever intended RNGing to be a feature. While I like that the Destiny Knot’s made breeding more efficient, it still takes a horribly long time compared to what I’m used to. That, real life and the fact that Pokebank doesn’t come out til the end of December is why I haven’t bred for competitive Pokemon at all in XY. While XY is finally making strides in breeding, it’s disappointingly not enough to keep me away from RNGing in previous generations. Talk about disappointing.
I strongly agree with the part about being able to change a Pokemon’s nature, IVs and abilities quickly without having to obtain another Pokemon. Like the article said, I don’t understand why GameFreak doesn’t just make it so that we can breed or capture a Pokemon just once and then manually change the stats whatever way we want. I’m also not sure what kind of message GameFreak’s trying to send where abandoning hundreds of infant Pokemon into the wild–many of whom are products of incest–is good for the sake of “competition”. Wouldn’t it be better if every Pokemon had an equal opportunity in competitive play? I know these are just graphical creatures we’re talking about but come on.
/end rant
#whiteguydoingmath
fixed it, thanks
After that fun intro to Gale of Darkness, I’m still surprised we haven’t been given some kind of (at least) in game simulator. The GoD simulator had us achieve specific goals with pre-determined pokemon, but how difficult would it be to program a simulator like PO (or whatever you younguns are using these days). It even has in-game precedent with the simulators and rentals of previous games. That way we could try it before we spend the time investing in it. Maybe in the future.
I’m quite sure this depends heavily on the individual. As many people as there are who have trouble learning to RNG like you, there are many people who breeze through it without much of a problem. I personally got the hang of 4th gen after one or two days of experimenting and 5th gen was even more straightforward than that. And the best thing was that, for the significant amount of people that ended up mastering it, RNG made producing flawless Pokemon so quick that many generous individuals (eg. Biosci) were able to step forward and provide them to others, so the crowd who couldn’t get RNGing to work out for them didn’t even lose out that much.
I agree with you that RNG being necessary was a bad thing, but that is only because of RNG being the only legitimate way to not handicap yourself without investing the time to manually breed, and not because there was something inherently bad about RNG. The ideal scenario IMO would be one where RNG exists to reward those who can master it, yet at the same time ingame breeding/SRing is made convenient enough (XY changes were good, but more convenient is always welcome) so that people who can’t RNG do not lose out in any meaningful way.
On to the main article, I pretty much agree with all its contents, because IMO whatever Scott wrote is probably the only logical point of view if you want to evaluate Pokemon as a competitive game objectively. On some level I’m satisfied that the removal of hacking and cloning has brought everyone down to the same level. I kept myself completely legit all through gen 5, not even duplicating my items, and would often feel bitter when other players participated with legal-but-not-legit Pokemon. The rules, which say go completely legit, are what every player agrees to abide by virtue of their participation, and paying lip service to them always felt like a betrayal of trust to me. But even so I know that for Pokemon to be a truly good competitive game, it would have to not subject players to the whole rigmarole which players hack/clone to avoid anyway, so I pretty much have to swallow my bitterness and agree with Scott that the absence of what hacking and cloning used to provide rather detracts from Pokemon as a competitive game.
For the other improvements, they’re definitely a huge step up from previous generations, but I am going to risk sounding ungrateful and ask for a few more improvements. It would be great, for instance, if the IV Judge, Hidden Power checker NPC etc could check any Pokemon in the PC instead of being restricted to only the party Pokemon. There should be some way, perhaps an ingame event, that would allow everyone to get their hands on hexflawless Dittos. And it would really be great if they allowed the second Pokemon in the party to exert its ability outside of battle as well, allowing us to wield the dual benefits of, say, Synchronise and Cute Charm simultaneously while catching wild Pokemon. None of these would particularly affect the non-competitive experience much and should be easy to implement. Lastly, as an aside,
It’s actually a direct translation from the Japanese games (基礎ポイント). And no, that doesn’t match with the terminology Japanese players use either.
Huh, didn’t know that egg moves can be relearned at the move relearner. Definitely alleviates some anxiety when it comes to teaching it new moves over its old egg moves.
This may be a bit unrelated, but is the consensus on PokeSav mons still negative? All mine in Gen V were done correctly down to each minute detail and were able to be used online, and in local tournaments as well. Although I’ve yet to attend VGC, I’ve read that using a hacking device (AR in this instance) leaves a trace on your game card and would show up in a legality checker. This leads to me asking: if I were to send these mons to Pokebank and then to my Y, would they still fail a check? Or could I not even send them to Pokebank in the first place?
Just a note: both links in the article are not working.
Like most I have been playing since the start and I have always hated the amount of time it takes to breed a team of Pokemon, I still think it takes too long. From a game design point of view I feel it’s a bad mechanic, maybe I am a little to critical but I feel the process should be very quick allowing players to abuse the best mechanic that they’ve created, that being of course: battling. As others have suggested an in-game simulator would be awesome and very welcomed but to me it’s all about the tedious, boring process of riding up and down on my bike that needs changing. It is not fun, the only reason I (and I assume we) breed is because we know how much fun we’ll have battling in-game.
I liked this article a lot, and although I am very happy they’ve made some changes, it’s still slower progress than it sounded, based on everyone’s initial reactions, and I’ve got a feeling we’re going to get caught out by it.
Everyone was saying on IRC how easy it was to get new things “Oh yeah, just throw a destiny knot on” “Just catch a parent in friend safari” and “Oh, Shinies are everywhere now” and such, so I was pretty pumped when i joined the party late. Watching streams from other event was what got me desperate to play again, and honestly, there’s still a huge barrier of time investment required to have just 6 quality pokemon, let alone 12 or so, to chop and change. With no rules yet, no real place to practice, and no idea if you’ll have to breed things again to get moves after bank, it seems like we could be wasting some time.
Also, I hope if (and I highly doubt it) we ever get to play with ubers again we have some kind of RNG/Cloning system available. I am not patient enough to soft reset for the legendary you have to catch to proceed.
Honestly, one of my biggest issues is that, without the Oval Charm, breeding two different species under the same OT results in a very slow stream of eggs. So, you waste a lot of time just riding back and forth without a full party of eggs. That’s been happening a lot less since I got the Oval Charm, but a lot of people haven’t bothered getting it. And, I’ll still be using my second cart for breeding once I finish that playthrough and get the oval charm on there, since all you need this gen male-wise is one with the right IVs since females can pass down egg moves and even if they forget the move while in the day care they’ll keep them until you take them out.
As far as RNGing goes… Learning how to RNG in Gen V and then getting a 31/31/31/X/31/31 Cobalion took me like one or two hours, and I had never RNGed in Gen IV. That’s significantly less time than it took to get my first quint in XY.
Ok, I don’t know if it was said but if you put a pokemon with the egg moves in the day care center to breed them down, they are passed down, even if the pokemon forgets it in the day care centre. Simplified: the egg moves are based on the move sets of the pokemon as it is put in. Take it out, then put back in when it forgets the move, not passed down.
I have to agree with tanyzing. Although I probably fall into the “holier-than-thou” category, it does irk me that people use legal hacks and face no consequences from it. When people clone things, it feels like they’re hacking to me – because you’re not putting in the work to acquire the Pokemon that the original RNGer had to put in. However, that’s not the argument – the argument is that people have had a difficult time getting Pokemon that would be at least on par with the competition. Which I agree is true, because I have RNGed several Pokemon, even entire teams, for lots of different people. And I also agree with the statement that breeding is tedious and takes a long time to complete.
What I don’t agree with is that an option to change your IV’s, Nature, etc. should be implemented. In my opinion, a large part of the Pokemon games is that each Pokemon is unique and that even two Pokemon at the same level can have different stats. I personally like that within the Pokemon games, and while I understand you’re going to want the characteristics of your Pokemon to be exactly what you want, we also must remember that not everyone wants to play Pokemon on the competitive level. Of course though, we DO play Pokemon on the competitive level, so that argument is also irrelevant. Maybe I’m too naive or sentimental, but I enjoy Pokemon for what it is.
Personally I’d just argue for IVs to be done away with, EVs theoretically still provide for diverse enough Pokemon to probably still create that illusion of difference for younger players (whereas anyone older than a certain age really doesn’t give a ratatta’s butt and just wants competitive Pokemon to use). I won’t go into the whole rng/hacking/cloning thing, but I’ll just say I used to wish one of the prior rules was that every Pokemon had to have your OT ID and not allow for traded Pokemon to be used in live competition; nowdays I guess I don’t care as much anymore as long as everything has legal stats.
Super Training I would argue does have its niche during the “story mode” timeframe and is more efficient than randomly killing things for 1-3 EVs during that timeframe. It only becomes obsolete post-game when you have the power items available to purchase (along with a Sweet Scent user or lots of Honey to speed things up). It also lets you “polish” maxing out at stat at 252 EVs easily since Super Training will never allow you to go beyond 252, so after killing 5-10 hordes (depending on Pokerus), then you won’t have to search out an individual Pokemon to finish and can just complete the Stage 1 training (unless I’m mistaken and the whole “can’t go beyond 252 EVs applies to everything in general, but even then OHKOing a Lv1 balloon is probably just as fast as re-scenting for another horde to kill) It would definitely be nicer if the graph was more interactive though and showed specific values.
So as someone whos too lazy to use pokecheck and figure out how to clone, and make other people do it for me, what category do I go under? Also while it is nice to think that each pokemon is an individual, the reality is that some are born inferior, which isnt the best lesson to be teaching kids anyways.
And even if someone doesnt play on the competitive level, Im pretty sure most people would be pod to find out that their team was genetically inferior.
Imo the best thing to do would be nixing ivs entirely and changing evs to an rpg level up system, where each level you get more points to invest in stats.
Lol, idk what that would make you. But you do state an excellent point with saying that while all Pokemon would be unique, that also makes some better than others. I’m not Game Freak, so I don’t know which one would be a better marketing strategy, but in any case, an opinion is an opinion. It’s not really right or wrong, just an opinion. Really though, it will come down to battling skill in tournaments regardless of how you acquired your Pokemon. How you obtain those Pokemon comes down to a question of morality, and what each person believes is right. If you don’t want to take the effort to get your own Pokemon Gavin, who am I to stop you?
You sir, are a parasite, a leech on society depending on the free kindness of others. Unless you have them doing it for you out of coercion, in which case that makes you more like some kind of criminal mastermind
Should work now. Not really sure why it didn’t work to begin with, but thanks for pointing that out.
I’d love to see them revisit this for a variety of reasons. Even if it wasn’t an in-game simulator in the sense of Pokemon Showdown! or whatever I could think of a lot of other applications of the in-game simulator for teaching players competitive mechanics and tactics without breaking the immersion of the usual adventure… there’s a lot of potential to introduce things without leaving the established rules of the game world there.
I feel like manipulating the different competitive aspects of Pokemon can be still sustain the unique, sentimental side of Pokemon. How sad must it be for a little kid to realize that their in-game Pokemon, their companions and friends throughout that generation’s region, are probably useless in competitive battles. Make it easy to change nature and IVs, not only can a kid use his in-game team seriously, but he can also minimize breeding to just one egg, so you can get this kinda weird but equally sentimental “family tree” aspect of Pokemon instead of “generations and generations of in-breeding”.
Another old feature that, with updates, could greatly benefit new players would be something like the Pokemon Academy from Pokemon Stadium II. I absolutely loved that feature, from the music and Earl’s sound effects to the insane amount of information to be gleaned. Updating it and including explicit explanation of IVs, EVs, natures, and different battle strategies could not only introduce little kids to these mechanics but also get them more competitive early on! You could even make it like a “Pokemon College”, a much more advanced version of the Pokemon School that players encounter in the end game area when players start focusing on competitive team building anyways.