Anonymous asks:

Do you think evasiveness and accuracy should be actual stats rather than just background stats that are the same for every pokemon unless altered in-battle by some sort of move.

I’m going to go with “no.”

Partly this is because I think the game is just better with ‘safe’ attack options, stuff you can always rely on to hit, which wouldn’t be possible with accuracy and evasion as base stats.  Mostly, though, it’s because this would make risk/reward calculations impossible and utterly invalidate a lot of the strategic thinking involved in the game.  Think about it.  If accuracy and evasion are base stats, then both will have EVs and IVs associated with them, and there’s no way you can know how much effort an opponent’s Pokémon has invested in accuracy or evasion.  With most of the other stats you can often make a rough estimate after seeing an attack or two, because if you know approximately how much damage your Pokémon tend to deal or take from different opponents (which you can get a feel for by spending time in the Battle Subway or whatever), you can say things like “well, that’s a lot more than I’d expect; he must have trained very heavily in special attack.”  For accuracy and evasion, though, a single hit or miss tells you nothing; you’d probably need to observe one Pokémon over several battles.  This being the case, not only can you no longer be sure an attack will hit, you can’t even know how likely an attack is to hit!  There is no longer any such thing as a calculated risk under those circumstances, and I just don’t think that’s an improvement.

EDIT: I suppose it might be nice to add a level factor to the equation that determines whether attacks hit or miss, so that Pokémon of high levels are more likely to dodge attacks from Pokémon of low levels, and so forth, but I’m not totally sure about the actual value of doing that – and it would make AI opponents who rely on their inflated levels to compensate for their lack of effort training, like the Elite Four, incredibly frustrating.