Board 8 > I love the Pokemon series, but it requires too much fucking time

(+) Yeah! (+)

I know what they were thinking with EVs and IVs. I like the concept, I really do

but how the FUCK does anyone have time for any of that? People complain about gamesharked Pokemon but like... WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?

You gotta get a flamebody Pokemon to ride around on your bike hatching eggs that were bred from your perfect IV'd Ditto that had an everstone and

WHAT?

just... WHAT?

Why is it such a convoluted mess to create perfect Pokemon

and don't even get me started on shinies
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You could just like, not care about min maxing your Pokemon and play the game like a normal person

ExThaNemesis posted...

that were bred from your perfect IV'd Ditto

And many of those are hacked as well.

Shiny Pokemon are supposed to be hard to get so it's fine that they are rare.
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Nrrr posted...

You could just like, not care about min maxing your Pokemon and play the game like a normal person

right and I usually do but

I am an extremely competitive person and I do not want to lose to some scrub ass trainer because they outsped me by two
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Team Rocket Elite posted...

Shiny Pokemon are supposed to be hard to get so it's fine that they are rare.

I agree.

BUT LET'S TALK ABOUT NATURES SHALL WE

what. were. they. thinking.
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Back in the day Natures were a huge pain. However, these days they aren't too bad to deal with. They just need to make sure to bring back the Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee feature to force wild Pokemon to have a certain Nature.
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"Strong Pokemon. Weak Pokemon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites."
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"It's one thing to enjoy leisurely battles, but real battles can be a severe trial.
Truely strong Trainers sometimes must be prepared to choose Pokemon that can win rather than their favourite Pokemon."
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Yeah there's way too many hoops to jump through to even begin to get competitive. Doesn't help that until later on, Gamefreak didn't even want to acknowledge any of this bullshit. How long did it take for them to tell us in game what stat every nature increased/decreased?
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EVs aren't that bad with stuff like the power _____ held items and Pokerus.

IVs suck though, breeding/soft resetting is just tedious and annoying trying to get the right ones, on top of nature and ability RNG. But at least there's bottlecaps and super training now to max them out.
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Underleveled posted...

"Strong Pokemon. Weak Pokemon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites."

Team Rocket Elite posted...

"It's one thing to enjoy leisurely battles, but real battles can be a severe trial.
Truely strong Trainers sometimes must be prepared to choose Pokemon that can win rather than their favourite Pokemon."

this one of my favorite interactions on this or any other website
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Team Rocket Elite posted...

They just need to make sure to bring back the Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee feature to force wild Pokemon to have a certain Nature.

oh damn this is like four gens too late and I LOVE IT.

If you could force natures on Pokemon it would make catching the wild rare ones so fun. I live for remakes of every gen with this feature tbh
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I haven't been following along much with recent Pokemon happenings. Will Pokemon from let's go Pikachu/Eevee be tradable to main line games and/or Pokemon Bank?

Because it is relatively damn easy to get any shiny you want from the game and Max their IVs. There only thing doing me from completing a living shinydex in that game is the notion that it will only ever exist in a vacuum.
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Pokemon Home is sort of the replacement for Bank. Pikachu/Eevee Pokemon can be transferred to Home. Pokemon Sword/Shield only allows Pokemon that are in its Regional Dex so only some Let's Go Pokemon can be transferred in.
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But it being gen 1, you can almost guarantee that most will be in Sw/Sh.
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UltimaterializerX posted...

Post gen 1 problems.

If you don't cheat or use glitches, Gen 1 isn't really casual friendly for getting competitive Pokemon. At least not back in the day. In modern day, I imagine you can use RNG manipulation to get perfect DVs. Having to replay the game multiple times to farm for TMs is still a pain, though.
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I can only assume it's meant to nudge you towards trading

Trying to do everything yourself would be tedious for sure
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I swear people that complain about this must have stopped playing Pokemon after Gen 5
XY made it super easy to get a 5 IV Pokemon (and no you don't need 6, unless you are using a mixed attacker, and this is very rare)
Destiny Knot letting you transfer 5 IVs from the parents, so all you need is a 6 IV Ditto and you are set for life
Getting one via trading (a hacked one) isn't hard
And if you are against getting a hacked one, getting a 5 IV Ditto by yourself is also possible...and again, set you for life

EV training is even easier. Super easy in ORAS with Horde battles and somewhat easy in SM with SOS
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I actually hadn't done any competitive stuff that wasn't on Showdown since Gen 5 so that's kind of accurate.

I know the literal fucking hundreds of hours I put in on Gen 5 to get the teams I wanted set up tho
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perfectly EV training three different Garchomps smh I will never get that time back
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EV training in Gen 7 takes pretty much no effort with Pok Pelago. Just stick them in there and wait a day and you've maxed the stat. Festival Plaza helps too, but you need to get the right facility and a bunch of FP first.
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ExThaNemesis posted...

Underleveled posted...

"Strong Pokemon. Weak Pokemon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites."

Team Rocket Elite posted...

"It's one thing to enjoy leisurely battles, but real battles can be a severe trial.
Truely strong Trainers sometimes must be prepared to choose Pokemon that can win rather than their favourite Pokemon."

this one of my favorite interactions on this or any other website

I'm gonna take the line said by an Elite Four member over some joe schmo
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Man, I feel ya. Imagine my heartbreak when my HG Togepi egg hatched and it was...Adamant. TWICE.

Or trying to find a Run Away Aipom...what a nightmare. And then I finally found one and it was MODEST.

And I don't really bother with Natures and Abilities for just playing through the main game, but I do try to avoid the absolute worst possible ones, and...yeah. Just a mess.

Following on that, I do wonder how EVs and IVs and DVs were figured out. The games never really explain them. Surely someone must have hacked into the game's code to confirm it right?
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RyoCaliente posted...

Surely someone must have hacked into the game's code to confirm it right?

IIRC, yeah, that's exactly how it was done

And it wasn't especially difficult. Even without hacking, you'd notice the effects just by comparing two pokemon of equivalent level/vitamin use

ev training takes like ten minutes a pokemon
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a mother holding an everstone gives her kid a 50% chance of having the same nature and the same goes for a wild encounter when your first Pokmon has synchronize

these are gen 3 features. they've been in the game forever
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Right, but breeding was definitely cumbersome back then. I spent many an hour riding the trail from Mauville to Verdanturf on the mach bike just waiting on eggs to spawn and then hatching them, for one pokemon out of six. Even ev training back then, while not exactly difficult, was still time-consuming and monotonous.
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Also I would like to very much agree with the monotony involved here, and it's why I was never especially interested in competitive pokemon (and when I dabbled in it way back in the Gen 4 days, I used a simulator instead of my actual cart). I have absolutely no issue with people hacking in ideal pokemon as long as they're within legal bounds for the same reason.

EV training was super fun for me in the DPP days, I used that counting app on the bottom screen

it was a nightmare breeding though, and then having to Rare Candy your Pokemon to a level where you can determine their IVs

I ultimately used Action Replay to hack a bunch of teams but it was still very fulfilling to manually train them

I used the hacked teams for online play and used the legit ones to battle my friends IRL
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Came into this topic expecting it to be about the anime.

Leaving the topic disappointed. :(

Yeah it's garbage.

EVs at least are a good concept strategy wise but they are a pain to train.

IVs are just bad in every sense. They barely add depth to the game besides the occasional Trick Room minmax. They exist so Nintendo can make the pokemon feel more like living creatures to casuals.

Don't try to argue that in the pokemon boards, you'll run into a horde of teenagers who somehow think spending an hour biking for each pokemon is the expression of RL meritocracy.

Well, what I do is stick to Showdown for team testing and only breed it in cartridge when I intend to go to RL tournaments. Takes about a full day to breed a team, plus the time begging online for mons with hidden abilities. It's annoying, but manageable for tournaments.

But I really wish Nintendo added a simulator mode inside the cartridge so you could test teams.

Nanis23 posted...

I swear people that complain about this must have stopped playing Pokemon after Gen 5
XY made it super easy to get a 5 IV Pokemon (and no you don't need 6, unless you are using a mixed attacker, and this is very rare)
Destiny Knot letting you transfer 5 IVs from the parents, so all you need is a 6 IV Ditto and you are set for life
Getting one via trading (a hacked one) isn't hard
And if you are against getting a hacked one, getting a 5 IV Ditto by yourself is also possible...and again, set you for life

EV training is even easier. Super easy in ORAS with Horde battles and somewhat easy in SM with SOS

So basically "it used to take 24 hours of grinding to make a team, now it takes 8 hours so stop complaining".

Which fails to take into consideration that grinding itself is a concept that does not match well with competitive strategy games, and should be removed from competitive battling altogether.

Me last night: Fuck, I want to play a Pokemon game and build up a perfect team so bad

Me, today: That would literally take me 70 hours that I in no way have the time for
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ExThaNemesis posted...

Me last night: Fuck, I want to play a Pokemon game and build up a perfect team so bad

Me, today: That would literally take me 70 hours that I in no way have the time for

https://pokemonshowdown.com/

Go there and never touch a cartridge again.

yes I have put hundreds of hours into pokemon showdown

but it's not the same

they aren't mine!
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That said, most of my irrational attachment to certain Pokemon comes from the teams I've used on Showdown.

Like Celebi.

Gods bless that wonderous grass fairy.
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Honestly i think if they got rid of ivs it would be fine.

EVs are easy to train and provide strategic value.

That makes the only slightly annoying thing getting the right nature which isn't even that hard with new stuff.
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The problem with Natures is they can't be changed later on. IVs can only be changed to 31 but that's usually what you want them to be anyways. However, if you want to test out Modest, Timid and Naive, you need to train 3 different Salamence. The problem gets worse if the Pokemon is a legendary or knows an Event move.
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Team Rocket Elite posted...

you need to train 3 different Garchomp

ftfy -_-
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Or just play the story mode and be done with it.
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ExThaNemesis posted...

Team Rocket Elite posted...

you need to train 3 different Garchomp

ftfy -_-

Last time I played VGC megamence was amazing and chomp was just a poor man's Landorus.

Yeah, there's no reason why there isn't something like a Pokemon psychologist that can change natures in the games by now. They've added stuff like Hyper Training but it's implemented poorly. It's faster to breed a 5 IV Pokemon than to train one up to level 100, search for a super rare item and then give it to some guy so he'll max your IVs. Especially when there's no quick way to get to level 100. It's only really worth it for legendaries.
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Hyper Training first getting added in SM was a bit of bad luck. It was the game where they actually took a step back in regards to how fast it is to train to Lv100. Like it's really, really fast to get to Lv100 in ORAS.
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just hack your fucking pokemon like its always been done and look the other way.
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ExThaNemesis posted...

I actually hadn't done any competitive stuff that wasn't on Showdown since Gen 5 so that's kind of accurate.

I know the literal fucking hundreds of hours I put in on Gen 5 to get the teams I wanted set up tho

Well if we are talking about Gens 3 to 5, then I am totally with you on this one

This is a spreadsheet of Pokemon I trained in Gen 5 to be "Battle Ready"
Each one took hours. See how terrible their IV are? this is when I "gave up" for each of them, this is the best I wanted to settle on

Those are from newer games-

And I have more, I just didn't "Excel" them
Each one took a hour..at max

Again, Destiny Knot made it trival. Take a Pokemon with 0 IV and a 5 IV Ditto and breed 5 eggs
Hatch those 5 eggs, check which one has the most perfect IVs, and make it the parent together with the 5 IV Ditto
Now hatch 5 more eggs, someone should have 3 perfect IV. replace, someone should have 4 perfect IV in the first or second batch. repeat until you get a 5 IV parent

Now if you think a hour is too much time per Pokemon..I don't know what to say to you. How many Pokemon do you plan on raising? every single kind? then fine, complain away.

Also, there is something I can't defend -
If you need a hidden ability with specific gender like Combee, and good IV, this is going to get harder
People that aim for a specific Hidden Power is making thing even worse

But for general, 5 IV Pokemon? again, less than a hour
I used to breed dozens of 5 IV Protean Froakie and put them on the GTS asking for Legendaries. It didn't take a long time at all using my 6 IV Greninja. And I got a bunch of them 6 IVs in the process
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Keep in mind, if someone's planning on actually going to something like vgc, the one time I went they actually checked cartridges for hacked pokemon, even if the builds themselves were legit, so that isn't always an option for someone who's hardcore into it.
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A 5 or 6 IV Ditto is hard to get without hacking. Multiple 4 IV Dittos isn't too hard, it just adds time to your breeding.

To make it super easy I guess they could have some in-game task that rewards you with a 6 IV Ditto.
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red13n posted...

just hack your fucking pokemon like its always been done and look the other way.

There are hack checks in tournaments you know. Unless you are just playing casually, but then that's what I recommend Showdown for.

charmander6000 posted...

A 5 or 6 IV Ditto is hard to get without hacking. Multiple 4 IV Dittos isn't too hard, it just adds time to your breeding.

To make it super easy I guess they could have some in-game task that rewards you with a 6 IV Ditto.

Well having a 6 IV DItto actually helps and it's never being caught by the hack check because you aren't actually bringing the Ditto itself, you are bringing its descendants. I think everyone uses hacked Dittos even in VGC.

Still, it takes about 40-60 minutes to breed each pokemon, plus the EV training, level up time, and the hassle of trading to get the hidden abilities and version exclusives.

It's annoying and pointless at best. At worst, it makes team testing on cartridge unviable.

There is no reason a multiplayer strategy game needs to have that kind of grinding. You don't force a basketball player to work at an uniform factory during 6 hours a week before he can train basketball. You skip to the actual training part. That's real work. The rest are artificial barriers.