Your thoughts on EVs/IVs/Breeding

[rhycochet]

the casual players tend to be little kids, though. not saying that adults don't play pokemon as well...but i find it pretty cool that pokemon can be accessible by both casual and competitive players...young and old.

it has enough color and flare for younger audiences to be captured, and gameplay to satisfy those who seek something more, deeper, more methodical.

 

[Ho-Oh]

I don't breed or EV train really or anything in-game. I haven't restarted a new game yet, but I'm sure I'd try to play by what's appropriate competitively. I breed for natures but yet I know I won't be using the Pokemon so I dunno why I bother when PO exists. It's kinda a waste of time with online competitive... unless you actually intend to play real life tournaments and stuff it's pointless lol. As for RNGing I also find that a waste of time, although I haven't tried it idk why people enjoy it so much.

I think that they should abolish the concept of different types of EVs. Instead of speed EVs, attack EVs, etc. let's have one universal type of EV that the player can allocate on the summary screen. All EV caps would remain intact. If you don't even want to deal with that you could have the option to auto-assign them.

lol well that's what PO does, so if we can do that in-game that'd be awesome, buuut what Pokemon would give those "special" EVs? Actually no I think that might over complicate everything as it is. ;x

 

[Kirbychu]

lol well that's what PO does, so if we can do that in-game that'd be awesome, buuut what Pokemon would give those "special" EVs? Actually no I think that might over complicate everything as it is. ;x

They wouldn't be "special", they'd just replace the existing EVs. I think it's a lot less complicated than the current system with multiple types of invisible EVs. To make matters worse, they're given out by different Pokemon in different amounts.

 

[Treecko]

[SIZE="a"]I never fully understood EV/IVs. I just only recently learned about them. If they got rid of them there wouldn't be much that affect stat increases. Nature does affect how much stats a Pokemon gets but EVs and IVs affect stats a lot more. I'm not really big on EV training cause I don't understand the system enough to train effectively. I think though that the system they have could be a bit easier.

I don't think they should get rid of breeding. During the days of Gold and Silver I only would breed to get the baby Pokemon like Pichu or Magby. Now I use breeding all the time to get Pokemon with certain nature or when looking for a shiny. It doesn't necessarily take away the hunting factor of Pokemon. I still don't use breeding to get Pokemon but actually spend time looking for certain ones in the wild. Still not every Pokemon is available in the wild so sometimes breeding is needed. For example in order to get the Eeveelutions you get to somehow get an Eevee (usually from in game events) and breed with a Ditto. Breeding is a very needed feature.[/SIZE]

 

[Xander Olivieri]

Gamefreak supports metagaming so they wouldn't get rid of Effort Values when they put them in there to create competitiveness. Remove EVs and everyone would only choose Psuedo Legendary Pokemon or those maybe a point or two away from them because there would be no way to train a Pokemon to defeat them.

As for breeding, you can only get a certain number of pokemon through breeding, so unless you expect gamefreak to completely rewrite everything we know about Baby Pokemon as well as rescript evolution methods for a pretty decent amount of Pokemon, there is little chance that they'd do it. And by little I mean we are pretty much in the negative integers and falling.

 

[Oryx]

I honestly don't think EVs/IVs were ever meant to be known and now that they are everything is messed up irrevocably. I mean, I doubt they intended for someone to fight the same Pokemon 200 times to get the right amount of EVs in the right stat, but I think it was just there to make the game slightly more realistic and once people figured out how it worked they took advantage of it and things got sucky because now to be competitive at all you have to think of that, and either RNG or spend forever breeding/training to make things work right. I wish they could rework it so people wouldn't know how to take advantage of it but it's pretty inevitable that they'll figure it out eventually.

 

[Clark]

Even without the EV/IV system competitive battling would exist, and people would still go to whatever mindless lengths necessary to assemble the best team possible. Pokemon would still be organized into tiers based on stats and movesets, and many competitive players would still pick exclusively from the OU tier. Really it'd... be the same basic situation. Assuming stats were completely randomized instead of relying on EVs and IVs, I'd imagine competitive players would go to even more tedious measures to obtain the best Pokemon, training several of the same species to preposterously high levels and picking the best stats from the bunch.

Yeah, EVs and IVs can be a tedious pain, but that's the way the game works. If you want to compete with the best players out there, you've got to work for it. I find that admirable in a way. (But to be perfectly honest EV training really isn't as bad as it seems, especially when things like Pokerus and the Macho Brace exist.) I think it's a neat and effective system in that it's nice for casual players as well as competitive players. Want to play casually? Great! EVs and IVs are practically irrelevant in casual play! You can ignore them entirely and still enjoy the game as you always have. Want to battle competitively? Awesome! You can use EVs to streamline and customize your Pokemon's stats, and breed for the best IVs. Want to battle people without putting in all the boring work? Find casual players to battle with; there's clearly plenty of them (I'm one of them myself). It's also worth mentioning that simulators like Pokemon Online are out there, if you're interested in competitive battles but don't want to bother with manually EV training or IV breeding.

Honestly I just don't see why this is still a topic of debate. Sure, it can be obnoxious if you're on random wifi and everyone you run into sweeps you with a competitive team, but it's really not that big a deal. You don't have to EV train or IV breed if you don't want to. There are lots of ways to enjoy playing Pokemon; that's why so many people love the series.

 

[Count]

To me, it kind of ruins the fun. I've been doing this IV/EV thing for a while but now I've just decided not to go on with it. Breeding/training my pokemon this way takes away the 'bond' I have with them as well and, call it what you want, but to me, that's an important component of the games.

 

[SuperGamecube64]

I don't like EV training and such for a very simple reason. I'm not trying to offend anyone, but to be quite frank it's stupid. Back in the 90's, when I first started playing you had to win your battles by planning out your movesets and strategies. More recently, no matter how good your strategy is, you hop online and find some guy that apparently is not in school, elected not to go to college or get a job and appears to be trying their best at being a real life Pokemon master. They take out everything you have in 1 to 2 turns a piece because they have EV/IV trained their team to ridiculous stat bonuses that make it impossible for a more casual player to even put up a decent fight. To put it simply, I have a job, I have friends, and I am a college student. I also play many games other than Pokemon. I don't have the time to invest in making a super unbeatable team, and I no longer bother playing competitively except among friends because of EV/IV trainers.

 

[Legobricks]

Statistics are exploited in any metagame. The only general thing that bothers me is how actual competitive play is the normal multiplayer of Pokemon now, while a 'friendly' match with relatively untrained monsters is uncommon. I'm far from a competitive person so while I can't hold anything against the statistic calculation of the games, their end result is a little distressing.

 

[Keyaki]

Statistics are exploited in any metagame. The only general thing that bothers me is how actual competitive play is the normal multiplayer of Pokemon now, while a 'friendly' match with relatively untrained monsters is uncommon. I'm far from a competitive person so while I can't hold anything against the statistic calculation of the games, their end result is a little distressing.

I think another reason for that are the over-rated pokemon

*cough Garchomp *cough*

 

[Oryx]

I don't like EV training and such for a very simple reason. I'm not trying to offend anyone, but to be quite frank it's stupid. Back in the 90's, when I first started playing you had to win your battles by planning out your movesets and strategies. More recently, no matter how good your strategy is, you hop online and find some guy that apparently is not in school, elected not to go to college or get a job and appears to be trying their best at being a real life Pokemon master. They take out everything you have in 1 to 2 turns a piece because they have EV/IV trained their team to ridiculous stat bonuses that make it impossible for a more casual player to even put up a decent fight. To put it simply, I have a job, I have friends, and I am a college student. I also play many games other than Pokemon. I don't have the time to invest in making a super unbeatable team, and I no longer bother playing competitively except among friends because of EV/IV trainers.

In a game with both maxed out Pokemon, you have to do a ridiculous amount of planning. Try going onto Pokemon Online one day. You can just pick what you want your Pokemon to be without going through the effort of training them, so you can max them however you'd like. Then go with your perfectly trained Pokemon to your exact specifications and play against another person. Chances are unless you put a ton of thought into your movesets, strategies, and roster as well as predicted switches and guessed at what they might use against you, you will be crushed.

In casual v. competitive, yes competitive wins. But in competitive v. competitive, you need more knowledge about movesets than most casual players do tbh.

In addition, it's not difficult to get the Pokemon you want perfected. No need to insult the people that do play competitively by accusing them of doing nothing with their life because they beat you in a Pokemon match. You can easily RNG good Pokemon into your game, or hack ones that are still legitimate Pokemon, just gotten faster. It doesn't take more than a few hours to EV train one Pokemon. It's really not that huge a timesink and tbh you probably care more about it than they do since you're getting so defensive that you feel the need to insult them. :P