4th Gen Please Help

[nerdyboy321123]

I know this looks intimidating, length wise, but please... help. The story itself is pretty insane, and it leads to me doing something that has a 3 in a million chance of happening. I'm borderline insane right now because I honestly have no clue what's happening, so please... read and help.

So I've been playing pokemon for a long time, and playing with EV's for maybe a year. However, I just started getting into natures, and just made my first "perfect" pokemon (Modest Alakazam with 31 speed and sp. attack IV's) And decided I wanted to do another, so I decided to try and make an adamant tyrranitar. I bred dragon dance down to it from dratini->lapras->larvitar, and that went fine. Then I started breeding my male dd larvitar with a female one I have to try and get an adamant nature because I knew it had to happen sooner or later. Or so I thought. I bred 59 larvitars without a single adamant nature in the bunch. To try and speed up this process I went to the ruins of alph to the patch of grass with natu's. I caught 39 natu's (If I caught an adamant one I could use it to catch an adamant ditto using synchronize that I could use to breed an adamant larvitar). But when I went back to the pokecenter to check their natures, not a single one was adamant. So I went looking for alternatives, and found an adamant abra in my PC. However, it has inner focus, so I gave it an everstone and started breeding it with my ditto to try for an adamant, synchronize abra to use the aforementioned ditto trick. So far I've hatched 5, and not a single one has been adamant.

So, sorry for the lengthy post. But is there any explanation for this? Looking back on it, of my natus:
brave, gentle, careful, bold, bashful, docile, impish, lax, and serious natures have 3 natu's each
quiet + lonely have 2 natus each
and there is 1 natu of sassy, calm, naive, hasty, relaxed, mild, modest, and hardy

Counting up all of those, only 19 natures are represented, meaning 6 are left out. Doing the math, there is a .002% chance of this happening (19/25^39) so you can make sure I didn't do the math wrong. And that's just on the natu's

I found all the natures of my larvitars, and they were: Quiet, Bashful, Naive, Naughty, Gentle, Impish, Bold, Brave, Lax, Modest, Hardy, Rash, Sassy, Timid, Careful, Hasty, Serious, Mild, Docile (I was too lazy to count how many there were of each)

I cross-referenced the two sets (bred larvitars and caught natus) and discovered that there was a ton of overlap in natures present.
The natures only present in the natus were:
quiet, calm, and relaxed

The one's only present in the larvitars were:
naughty, rash, and timid

Looking at the lists, there were 3 natures excluded: quirky, jolly, and adamant

I did the math again, and the odds of getting 98 pokemon with only 22 of the 25 natures ((22/25)^98) is a .0003% chance, or a 3 in a million chance.

At this point, I don't know if I'm going insane, if my game is broken, if there's some game mechanic I don't know about, or if I'm just REALLY unlucky.

Any tips/suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bobandbill]

if I'm just REALLY unlucky.

This is the answer. There is no hidden game mechanic that will completely exclude some natures in your game - you can get all of them but it's a matter of luck.

As for the maths... it's actually not quite right so I'll proceed to go a bit math-sy here. Warning: it may get a bit tl;dr, but you asked, so... =p.

Firstly, a smaller problem. If you have a die and want to roll a 6, say, then the chance you would think is 1/6 - and it is. With two throws to get two sixes is (1/6)^2 = 1/36. Same to get say a 5 on the first roll and 4 on the second - again, 1/6 * 1/6 = 1/36.

But if you just want a 5 and a 4 and don't care about the order in which that happens, then it's actually greater than 1/36 - you can get a 5 and a 4 in that order, or a 4 and then a 5. Probability can be misleading like that.

Basically it is similar here - although the chance for having that specific combination (quirky, jolly, and adamant) is (22/25)^98 ~ 3 in a million, (more like 3.5 in a million), there's also the chance that that is the case for say the quirky/jolly/modest natures not coming up every 98 Pokemon encounted. And so forth. This comes to 2,300 ways (from 25!/(3!*(25-3)! = 25*24*23/6) thanks to the good old binomial theorem (google it) to arrange the natures in such a way that 3 natures are excluded and 22 are not. Although it's possibly also incorrect to say this (too tired to check/hate stats anyways) if you mutliple the combinations with that probability you get [2300*~3 in a million] ~ 0.007, or 0.7%. Not that unlikely, or leastways not 3-in-a-million chance.

Arguably if you care about calculating the chance of not finding a Pokemon with the Adamant nature in particular just from that computation, it would be (24/25)^98 = 0.0183 = 1.83%, or nearly a 1/50 chance. 17 Pokemon encounters gets you to the 50% chance of finding it or not, and 25 encounters means you have roughly 36% chance of not finding an Adamant Pokemon. 50 encounters - 13% of not finding a particular combo.

It's not large but significant, certainly. Basically you can put it down to the fact that if you encounter 25 Pokemon that doesn't mean that you should have encountered 1 of each nature - you could in theory never encounter a Pokemon of a certain nature. Or simplier yet, flipping a coin 10 times won't always give you the outcome that you get 5 heads and 5 tails. Sooner or later you may even get 10 heads or 10 tails in a row. [And if you didn't care what nature you didn't get but just that you didn't get one nature from 98 encounters, it's 25 natures (ways) *0.0183 = ~ 45.7% of missing out on one nature!]

That and given how many people have played or play Pokemon (a game that gets millions of sales per gen), someone's going to encounter a 3/million chance event sometime. =p

And one last thing:

However, it has inner focus, so I gave it an everstone and started breeding it with my ditto to try for an adamant, synchronize abra to use the aforementioned ditto trick. So far I've hatched 5, and not a single one has been adamant.

I don't know if it matters for HGSS if you are using those games, but the everstone thing in some games only works if the Pokemon holding it is female (or the ditto), iirc. And even then it's only a 50% chance that the nature of the female/ditto parent will pass down.

If you have any other questions please ask them in the Help thread sticky at the top of the section. Closed.