All right; so in gen 6, gamefreak made obscure competitive phenomena like EVs and egg moves more accessible to younger players with additions such as super training and the DexNav. Now what I want them to do is encourage their use by allowing NPCs the same benefits. Rarely in the pokemon games do you even see in-game trainers using ITEMS. That needs to change. I want to see Sun and Moon trainers with EV-trained, egg-moved, battle-equipped mons. That’ll better prepare kids for competitive, no?
Mmm… well, sort of? I mean, we already have that in, for example, the Battle Maison; facilities like that have used all of those things for ages. And to be honest I’m kind of happy with that, as a step up in difficulty from what we see during the story portion of the games. I don’t want to throw all of this $#!t at you from the start; that’s just bloody overwhelming. And I think the increase in transparency that comes from Super Training is much more important to introducing the EV system than having NPCs with EV-trained Pokémon would be; you can’t see EVs in battle, so ultimately that just winds up as being “everything is now harder for reasons you don’t fully understand; hahahahaha!” The other thing there is that EV spreads for competitive movesets are often based on calculations around which Pokémon you can take down in X number of hits and which Pokémon can take you down in X number of hits, all assuming equal level and heavily informed by the current metagame, and that’s just not something that’s ever going to have any place in single player.
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