The deal with grinding in a hack.

So what's your opinion on level curves and grinding?

While I realize higher levels do not always equal difficulty (that would be Trainers' AI, Pokemon, and movesets), an RPG in general without a decent but not overdone grind is like toast without the butter for me. If you're not going to train in an RPG (where even Pokemon has it's payoffs for grinding in the form of new evolutions and moves), especially one like Pokemon where story and cutscenes hasn't always been exactly a strong suit most of the time and is sometimes discouraged (Black/White), what are you there for?

Level curves are useful tools to be used by the creator, but it's not always used well. You must have a certain Pokemon at a certain level to gain the move useful against the Gym Leader, for instance. Thing is though, I see too many people use it as poor man's difficulty gauge. Such as using out of nowhere a way-over-your-expected-level Mewtwo when you haven't even gotten the third badge yet.

I agree that level curves are often difficult for people to get right without putting a significant amount of effort playtesting and adjusting the difficulty curve extensively. Let's face it, it's nearly impossible to get right on the first try or as you're going along.

With that said, I myself am not a fan of having to grind, and would rather use an underleveled team strategically to win. I think the wonderful thing about Pokemon (at least up until Gen 6 and it's Exp. Share mechanics) is that the player has a way to adjust the difficulty on their own with their party choice. More specifically, they can choose to actually raise less than 6 Pokemon, in an effort to keep up with a standard curve with minimal grinding at the expense of possibly lacking extensive type coverage. This is a significant boon to the player, as they can decide early on if they want to grind and field a full team. I feel that this is part of the reason Game Freak has necessitated an HM slave or two as well. It's easier to push the young or inexperienced player into a less grindy curve by forcing them to keep HM slaves.

Basically, if a hacker is going for the standard Game Freak difficulty, there are a couple of things they have to keep in mind. First, they have to make sure that the Pokemon distribution for the player AND for NPCs isn't lopsided in one side's favor or otherwise ridiculous for the point in the game that the player is in. That means no Thick Club Cubone on the first route, or anything with similarly high/abusable BSTs early on. Second, if the player is playing with a full team of six, they should find themselves several levels behind the "bosses" by the midgame if they battle all of the Trainers and don't grind on wilds. If they're fielding a team of four, they should be right around the same level. (This is how I've found it generally playing the vanilla games. Your mileage may vary). Third, outside of bosses, each area's level curve should remain relatively flat. A route should not have a random level spike. Generally, the hacker should have a level in mind for the route, and not deviate more than a level up from that. Difficulty should be determined by how many Pokemon the Trainers have, not by giving one Trainer a level 30 Pokemon in an otherwise level 22 area. As a general rule, the more Pokemon a single Trainer has, the lower their levels should be. Obviously, BSTs will factor into this as well. If a Pokemon Breeder has 5 Sunkern and a Sunflora, I would argue you're okay keeping them at the maximum level for that route. Conversely, if one of your Ace Trainers is packing a Garchomp and 3 other Pokemon in Victory Road, you may want to lower the levels a bit or make sure you're not giving him or her other high BSTs. Even if you NEED the Ace Trainer to have pseudo-legendaries for some reason, consider giving him lower stages of them. A Garchomp and a Dragonair are much more manageable than a Garchomp and a Dragonite. Fourth, you should strive to keep the wild Pokemon relevant to the player. This basically means that you shouldn't severely underlevel the wilds or bottleneck their variety once you've passed the opening segment of the game. Make sure the player has plenty of chances to catch what they may need to get through a difficult encounter without forcing them into cheesing every fight with the perfect counter with a satanic level curve. You should also strive for variety. If the player is possibly going to need a team member to counter a Fighting-type Gym in the midgame, throw them a few different Psychic and Flying-type Pokemon their way. Or even mess with learnsets so that something they're bound to have will learn a move with appropriate coverage by then.

Basically, hackers need to open up and stretch out their difficulty curve instead of throwing spike after spike. If your hack is of standard length (to the Elite Four and that's it) and your players are up in the high 80s by the end, you've probably done something wrong if you went for a Game Freak-esque curve.

Despite everything I just said, I personally will do anything not to grind, and am known for beating RPGs with severely underleveled teams. If I remember correctly, I beat Final Fantasy 9 as a kid for the first time with a team of level 39s. That sort of strategic challenge makes memorable gameplay for me. Nowadays, I'll simply cheese games or encounters that I feel are unfair before I'll repeatedly bash my face against them. That is not how you want your players to react to your difficulty curve.

I'm not a fan of grinding myself either, especially if I can't speed up the emulation enough to do it really fast. But even so, grinding a lot shouldn't be essential.

Anyway... the main reason I even wanted to write here was not just to say that because it's so obvious that many players don't like to spend time playing hacks just to grind most of the time. But if you want to force some sort of difficulty by having it being fair to everyone, no matter how much they grind, or how they train their team (equally or not), it might be a good idea to hack the exp gain system.

What could for example be done to maintain the difficulty, no matter whether you grind or not, could be done so that trainer pokemon would give 5 times the amount of exp that wild pokemon do. That way you would have to grind a lot to make "any use of it" in terms of leveling up. And if the system was changed even more, the exp gain rates could for example be modified so that pokemon would require exponentially more exp to level up when they reach another "tens" (from level 30+ to 40+ for instance), and for making this work, opponents would also have to give you exponentially more exp when they are in those levels as well of course.

Hacking the game like this would require lots of testing and could easily break the game by making it unbalanced (or almost unbeatable if played "in a wrong way") unless it was implemented properly. Not sure if players would like a changed system in general either. But just posting an idea here, nothing more :)

This issue is the reason why my hack game will have a version balanced for emulators with speed where overleveling is extremely easy, and a version for a device without speed, with a gentler level curve so less grinding is necessary.

I want my game to require dedication, but not tiresome amounts of grinding.

I'm against forced grinding, I hate it. I want to have close, strategic (as strategic as in-game gets) battles with everyone. I don't find easy matches fun, but being forced to grind so that I have a chance is even less fun. It's downright boring. The player character isn't on the adventure, I am. I want to move and explore too, not keep battling lower leveled Pokemon in the same spot or re-battling the same Trainers (who eventually stop getting stronger) because the hacker decided to fire up A-Map and A-Trainer and raise everything's level by 10 once I reach a certain point. IMO there's two things you should never have to do in a hack - Be forced to grind, and walk through grass to get back to the starting town (the latter being a whole different post :P). If you're trying to have an open region like Kanto or Johto, bad level scaling and grinding is unavoidable. When that's the case I can forgive it, and I know that even in general unless you put an immense amount of time in and have multiple people play testing, it's just hard to have good scaling, but I still hate it. Grinding should be something the player wants to do.

Ah.
I don't mind grinding when I know the game(hack or official or a different rpg) is going to have higher levels. But if it has more storyline, I prefer to follow that rather than grind. Using strategy to beat higher levels is fine by me, unless they're 10+ levels, meaning I have a 5% chance of quitting this game for a couple months.
I thought of this in fact for something I was making. I had an idea for two games that were estiitially the same, but one focuses more on the Red/Blue look of minimal story, optional legends, higher levels, while the other was focused on a BW sort of appearance with minimal grinding, more storyline than BW, and you could beat the game with 30s or 40s rather than higher levels. What do you guys think?
Of course, I don't mind the EXP Share at all in this gen. I understand some people are upset because they only want one pokemon to get the boost at a time but it's still nice to use. Hey, free Exp.

I hate it. Oh, how I hate it. I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Nintendo developed Pokemon games have too much grinding.

There are plenty of things that are better to do in an RPG than grind. Pokemon tries it's hardest to implement tactical battles and challenges, making a great engine in the process. For instance, the Battle CDs in Colosseum are the Gen 3 engine showing just how fun it can be when done right. But these are specific situations you would never experience in standard play. Normally, you only have a couple practical options in a battle. These are usually easy to spot, such as switching in a Pokemon that has a type advantage. Tactics takes a back seat to preperation; the battle is usually won or lost before you even bring out your first Pokemon. And this is when you're advancing through the storyline and not trying to catch the Pokemon who appears one out of a hundred wild encounters.

Thankfully, there's hope in hacks. Compared to more recent releases, moves do less damage in general in the GBA era. Many of the moves added in Gen 3 are tactical and situational in addition to being properly described. Double battles drastically increase the amount of options you have in a turn. Abilities offer a chance to alter the battle in unique ways, ensuring each is not like the last. Weather and environmental effects can impact the battle. A hacker has plenty of tools available to reduce the repetition.

Unfortunately, hacks are pretty sloppy in general when it comes to difficulty curves. Not only are there extreme ebbs and flows, but it's rare to see engaging side activities that let you level up or battles that rely on using special moves. Difficulty curves are just the tip of the iceberg too. Considering the amount of details people put into maps, filler runs rampant at an mind-boggling rate. Never mind the quick, glass-cannon style battles: the map doesn't have trees in straight lines! Yay!

And so i conclude, grinding in hacks is far, FAR too rampant. I play hacks because I want to reduce the amount of grinding, not increase it. I need variety to keep me engaged, to feel like progressing through the game is actually progressing the game, to make beating an opponent a show of skill and not how much time you have to waste. There isn't any accomplishment for beating a game that you need to grind to beat; anybody can do that. To see difficulty hacks that just increase the level to make it more difficult is certainly making it harder to beat. These hacks don't require any more skill.

I don't think any of the official Pokémon games require much grinding, I can only recall having trouble with the Elite Four in Ruby on my first playthrough, but that's only because I'd only been using my starter Pokémon the whole time. I never finished any Gen 5 games, though. But things are definitely much easier now with the new Exp. Share in Gen 6, X/Y was very easy to beat and so is OR/AS.

I really dislike unbalanced level curves, or just ones that require a lot of grinding in hacks though. I'd much rather hacks release a different version for people who like a challenge, or have some kind of post-game challenges with overpowered trainers that require either grinding or a better strategy to defeat.

I have been playing DarkRising alot recently and had noticed the way the creator had tried to keep the game "hard". I am tired of doing endless hours of grinding just to beat a single gym. I am at the third gym and my pokemon are in their mid lv 40s and in pokemon R/S/E you are around lv 40 when you get to the 8TH GYM. I think the creators could have chosen a BETTER way of keeping it hard by actually thinking of BATTLE STRATEGYS to use against the player. Grinding makes a game 50% less funner and makes you get frustrated. As for the level curves, I think it should stay the way it was.

Most of the official pokemon games are quite simple and easy to beat. They require none to little amounts of grinding and have basic story lines, but they are getting more and more easier and with Game Freak trying to attract more and more younger players into buying the games. I have nothing against that, but I think that is what leads to rom hackers trying to make games more HARDER. I just wish that they'd use stratgeys and tactics instead of endless hours of grinding.

Edited:

After playing some more DR I noticed that they do use strategic methods with the gym leaders, but it seemed to be more based on evs and level advantages.

miksy91 said:

Anyway... the main reason I even wanted to write here was not just to say that because it's so obvious that many players don't like to spend time playing hacks just to grind most of the time. But if you want to force some sort of difficulty by having it being fair to everyone, no matter how much they grind, or how they train their team (equally or not), it might be a good idea to hack the exp gain system.

Click to expand...

My thought on this is that wild Pokemon should give at least 1.4 or 1.5 bonus like trained Pokemon do. Downgrading Trained Pokemon exp. bonus to 1.1 or 1 will work the same. It would just eliminate the grinding hassle and maintain the difficulty stable as well (i.e wild Pokemon at reasonable levels, ...)

The mistake I made on my previous Gold Rom Hack was to implement Wild Pokemon at same level than the previous Gym Leader in each area. It lead to a frustrating situation : not that much Exp. gained, and moreover you get OHKO'd to 3HKO'd by wild Pokemon before you kill them.

while making my hack i try to keep the pokemon within the same level as the original game, i sometimes lower or bump the difficulty up if it feels necessary.