- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
There's this saying that players will optimize the fun out of a game if given the opportunity. Pokemon was not designed to be a competitive game.When I say this is a kids game and it should have stayed a kids game, I meant it. Pokemon is at it's root not meant to be competitive and the staff at Game Freak are so inept that any attempts they make at balancing it around competitive play will only serve to further fuck over the base gameplay of Hero's Journey Simulator: Pet Monster Edition.
IVs are the best example, they were meant to make every Pokemon unique, so that even two mons of the same species wouldn't be identical. This Garchomp can hit a little harder while this one is faster, like genetic variations among real animals. Which is why for the longest time it was a hidden value.
But in the realm of competitive, you try to get every advantage you can. So competitive players started bitching that a hidden mechanic which wasn't meant to be exploited was hard to exploit (not helped by the fact that Nintendo's yearly tournaments have a cash prize for the winner, so there's a financial incentive to this), and Game Freak accomodated them by gradually making the mechanic more visible and easier to exploit (power items, destiny knot, the stat judge option in gen 7, bottle caps, etc.).
It's gotten to the point where it would be better to just remove IVs, they're clearly no longer the fun secret mechanic that makes every Pokemon unique. Casuals don't care, while competitive players only care about having all IVs maxed out and will always bitch and moan that you can't do that as easily as on Showdown, so you might as well just get rid of them.
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