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Old 04-29-2009, 10:39 AM   #1
Vran
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My proposal, The End of HM Whoring

I don't like only having four moves on my Pokémon at any given time. And I don't like having to choose between HM whoring and putting HMs on my good guys. This is why I've come up with this radically simple change to how the games work. They need to invent a Moves submenu. Here's the basic idea:

One, you can still only pick from one of four Battle Moves. Which moves are available to choose from depends on which ones are currently selected in your Pokémon's Moves submenu.

Two, only moves which a Pokémon has personally learned are in the Moves submenu. Not Move Tutor moves like Charizard's Air Slash and not compatible TMs like Roar -- not unless the Pokémon has learned those moves at some point in its life, that is!

Three, you can change which four moves are your Battle Moves only while you have access to the main menu and are outside of battle. You access it like this: (Main Menu) --> Pokémon --> (pick a Pokémon) --> "Moves", above "Item" but below "Summary".

Four, Pokémon never forget moves. Instead, they swap in or out the moves that are on their Battle Moves list. When a Pokémon levels up and wants to learn a new move, now instead of doing that it will automatically learn that move but ask you whether you want to place it on the Battle Moves list or not. You can always change your mind later if you want after a battle by going into the Moves submenu for that Pokémon.

Five, the Move Tutor's out of a job, but he never did his job properly in the first place. That's because he won't let a Level 50 Jolteon re-learn Baton Pass even though it really did know it as an Eevee. And that's because the Move Tutor's nothing more than a cheap bit of computer code that examines what stage of evolution your Pokémon's at and determines what moves that evolution stage in general, and not your specific Pokémon, is capable of learning.

If we do all this, then we don't have to have HM Whores anymore! You can teach your favorite six Pokémon all of the HMs and explore Sinnoh with them instead of with Pokémon you don't care for. In battle, they can have whichever four moves you picked out of the many moves listed on their Moves submenu, which can but doesn't have to include HM moves. And the icing on the cake is that it's not just HMs: you get to keep all of your moves you worked hard to learn! So if you work hard and raise an Eevee to Level 50-something before you evolve it, then you get to keep all of those Eevee-exclusive moves with you. You still can only pick your top four for battles, though! But that's good enough. The way it is now, if you change your mind about a moveset then you either have to start all over again with a brand-new Eevee or you have to resort to hacking the move back onto the Pokémon.

I hope somebody here knows somebody from Nintendo. I want to know why they think little kids can't handle a Moves submenu but can handle the rest of the stuff that's actually in the newest games.
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Old 04-29-2009, 02:24 PM   #2
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I always thought Nintendo/Game Freak should have implemented a feature similiar to this, but I never did really think of how they would pull it off. Really, I'm tired of getting a Bibarel and storing it in my PC as my HM tank. It's quite annoying. I'd like to be able to teach my main party HM's without being afraid of losing an old attack and not having to go to Move Tutor to remember it again.

And with your idea, Nintendo coukd easily get around any problems at tournaments by simply having players register what moves they will be using along with their Pokémon.

Simply put, your idea is nice, but unfortunately I'm pretty sure neither game freak or Nintendo will ever implement this.

I'm just waiting for my MMORPG PokéGame with every region + ability to join teams/police force xP
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Old 04-29-2009, 02:45 PM   #3
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Just like you can't change your hold item in the middle of a battle, you wouldn't be able to change moves either. The submenu wouldn't be there. It's only visible from the menu accessed outside of battles. I mean ... do kids have to tell the judges what items their Pokémon are holding before the battle starts? o_o If they do, wow! I didn't know that! But if they don't, then I think they wouldn't have to feel obligated to do it for moves either.
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Old 04-29-2009, 02:53 PM   #4
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In tourneys you have to say what items you're bringing, but can choose who gets what.
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Old 04-29-2009, 03:14 PM   #5
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I think that removes some elements of surprise. I think it would be better if Nintendo had two DSes on hand with homebrew software on them. The DSes are connected to a PC. Nothing special. On this PC is a file they made ahead of time that has every contestant's team on it. Each contestant has a random I.D. code. Before each battle, all Nintendo has do is type in each kid's I.D. code to each Nintendo DS and there you go -- the monsters they wanted have been input into the game for this battle. After the battle is over you erase that team and upload a new one. Rinse and repeat. Seems easy enough, and it lets people not have to reveal who or what they're using.

Also, if Nintendo supplies the hardware and the software both, then they can be 99.9% confident that nobody is going to be using hacks during the fight.
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Old 04-29-2009, 03:36 PM   #6
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I've seen this idea presented elsewhere and saw a very good argument for the contrary: space.

In all honesty, it'd be a bitch to store all the data of what Pokemon knows what for every Pokemon at any given time, especially when you can have an upwards of 400 individual Pokemon on one cart at any given time.

While I'd love to see this, it's just not practical. I hate having to waste moveslots/'mon slots with HMs/HM slaves and having to buy new TMs or dig up Heart Scales to relearn attacks, but as it is, I just don't see it happening.
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Old 04-29-2009, 03:51 PM   #7
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That just isn't true though. Consider the physical size of your typical NDS flashcart. Now compare that to a MicroSD card, which is about one-third the width, one-half the height, and one-third to one-fourth the thickness of the NDS card. A 4-gigabyte MicroSD card costs only $8. It's not possible for 1000 16-character moves across 1000 kilobyte-sized Pokémon files to combine to make an amount of data in excess of 4 gigs. No way, no how. =\

To put it to you another way, if somebody has a card like the R4, it only costs them $8 to slip in a piece of silicon and plastic tinier than their fingernail and that little piece has got on it more room than every single Nintendo DS game ever made. If a pirate can put 500+ games onto one flashcart, I think Nintendo can handle the space these moves would require.

To put it to you one final way, the entire savefile for Pokémon Diamond is 512 kilobytes. The .pkm file for any particular Pokémon in the PC is in the range of 100 to 200 bytes. Not kilobytes: bytes. We're talking very little data here. Very, very little data. The space for the moves could be quadruple the size of the .sav file and the game would still not break 3 megs.

That's not to mention the possibility for encryption to save space. After all, on the onboard memory Nintendo could already have serial codes for each of the moves, like M6U is Surf or O12 is Leech Seed. And a complex algorithm could then crunch all the different combinations of these into one single 8-character code for each combination. Like, M5O9X11B might be the code that means that my Charizard has precisely these fifty moves. In other words, 8 characters x 8 bits = 64 additional bits for each Pokémon's data in your save file.

Who told you the space argument? =\
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Old 04-29-2009, 03:57 PM   #8
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I honestly don't know enough about how it's all stored to engage in much of a debate. It wasn't my argument to begin with so I can't say I can back it up; just putting it on the table.

Also, I don't know if this means anything, but...

Quote:
It currently supports cards up to 256 MB in size (with ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat being the first DS game to use a 2 gigabit card).
And furthermore, it looks like the use of Flash Memory is already fairly minimal.

>After all, on the onboard memory Nintendo could already have serial codes for each of the moves, like M6U is Surf or O12 is Leech Seed. And a complex algorithm could then crunch all the different combinations of these into one single 8-character code for each combination.

Pokemon has been using Hex Codes for stuff like this since Gen I, just FYI.

I guess Nintendo's philosophy is that if they've been doing it for the past 20 or so games, why break from tradition? It's sorta stupid, sure, but *shrugs* I'm not one to say what Nintendo is thinking.
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Old 04-29-2009, 04:10 PM   #9
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Thank you for the tip. But if you knew about that (hex codes, you say?), then you should have realized how little baggage this would mean.

256 MB is probably the largest commercial NDS card, but that doesn't mean it's the largest size the card could be. The Nintendo DS is quite capable of supporting 1, 2, 4, and even 8-gigabyte MicroSD cards inserted into the MicroSD bay of an NDS-to-MicroDS interface. In other words, a flashcart.

If Nintendo wants to insist that it's impossible to make a card hold more than 256 megabytes and have room for the other electrical components inside the chip, that's their problem: because it's just not true. Nintendo's campaign against the all-but-obsolete R4 cartridge undermines their own claim. After all, if an NDS-style cartridge could only handle 256 megabytes at the very most, and if most commercial games pushed the upper limit of this figure, then a flashcart would only be able to store one to two games at most. Not a very big threat. Not nearly as big as the R4 really was: and hence we got the Nintendo DSi, Nintendo's direct answer to flashcart piracy.
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Old 04-29-2009, 04:16 PM   #10
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I personally wouldn't mind HMs so much if they were actually useful in battle. Surf and Waterfall are great (though my problem in Platinum was my special attacking Tentacruel being the only one who could learn Waterfall), Strength and Rock Climb are passable for ingame play, but... Rock Smash? Cut? ...Defog?
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Old 04-29-2009, 04:16 PM   #11
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>Thank you for the tip. But if you knew about that (hex codes, you say?), then you should have realized how little baggage this would mean.

Again, I have little technical knowledge of how these kinds of things work so I wouldn't exactly make that association.

And sure, there's the potential to make larger cards, but in reality, it likely costs a decent chunk of change to boost the amount of storage space (and in this case, flash memory, which ultimately saves this kind of data) for what amounts to a minor feature in the end. I'm not sure if Nintendo is ready to introduce a completely new cartridge just for one of their hundred or so franchises.

In all honesty, I'm probably a little over my head here as my technical knowledge of this kind of thing is fairly limited, but from what I've gathered, it doesn't seem entirely practical, even if I'd love to see it.

I suppose some people would also argue that you're "killing the spirit of the game" by doing this, though fans are fairly fickle regardless of what you do.

>...Defog?

What I don't get is why they made this remove SPIKES/STEALTH ROCK on your opponent's side. They've become like two of the most pivotal moves of the metagame, so creating a move that eliminates them is just dumb. I like the idea of a multi-use anti-defense move but it defeats the purpose if you throw a wrench in your own strategy in the process.
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Old 04-29-2009, 04:39 PM   #12
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If removing the need for HM whores and the other inconveniences of exploring caves in the games is the same thing as killing the spirit of the franchise, then I'd like to kill the franchise very much.

Then again, those same people would probably accuse me of "killing the franchise" if they learned that I would like to keep effort points in the game but I would like them to be rolled by the player at the same time as when you catch and nickname your caught or hatched Pokémon. In other words, I'd very much like to do away with the nonsense that is Pokérus, Macho Brace, EV-lowering berries, and EV training overall, too. Keep the effort because it's just like RPG character rolling, but for goodness sake please make it less bothersome.

That's the thing: people who claim to enjoy the challenge behind HM whoring and effort training are masochists; and I am happily not.
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Old 04-29-2009, 04:47 PM   #13
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>Then again, those same people would probably accuse me of "killing the franchise" if they learned that I would like to keep effort points in the game but I would like them to be rolled by the player at the same time as when you catch and nickname your caught or hatched Pokémon. In other words, I'd very much like to do away with the nonsense that is Pokérus, Macho Brace, EV-lowering berries, and EV training overall, too. Keep the effort because it's just like RPG character rolling, but for goodness sake please make it less bothersome.

Those already exist: they're called IV's.
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Old 04-29-2009, 06:37 PM   #14
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Umm, no. I used the wrong wording. (Don't mix tabletop RPGs with video game RPGs, check!) I didn't mean "roll" as in "roll a random dice for each stat." I meant roll as in "you have 60 points to spend in Knights of the Old Republic and so does everyone else but you're free to invest them as you see fit in Attack, Defense, Luck, Force Intuition," and so on.

In other words, I meant to say that I want effort points to be something which we can automatically spend all 500+ points of at the moment of capture or hatching.

For the people who want there to still be some randomness, keep the IVs. For the people who want there to be some control, keep the EVs. But what I'm asking is for the EVs to be much quicker to control legitimately than is presently possible. 10 hours of my life wasted on a digital mouse or 10 minutes, you be the judge. I'll still waste the 10 hours anyway , but I'd prefer to waste them playing with friends online instead of grinding away in some cave.
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Old 04-29-2009, 06:52 PM   #15
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Now a days, EV training is a breeze.

You can buy Power Items from the Battle Tower/Frontier, which make things a whole lot faster. On top of that, it's extremely easy to get Pokerus over wi-fi. This way, you can get up to 14 EVs for every Pokemon you defeat. You can also use Vitamins (as always), and now that there's an easy trick to get a lot of money quickly (aside from the E4, of course), you can get your first 100 IVs in little time at all.

I mean, I'd rather not EV train, but to me it's just a minor annoyance since I have access to all this stuff. I suppose not everyone can get enough BP for the Power items (of course, the one's I'm using are on loan, though I'll probably buy my own sooner than later) or can't get Pokerus over Wi-Fi, but if you know what you're doing, it's really not as painful as it seems.

Maybe I'm just desensitized to the whole concept or something. I dunno, I like Pokemon the way it is, and honestly, I don't expect GameFreaks to make many radical changes. The Physical/Special split got a pretty huge reaction from fans, so completely altering a major game mechanic could get some negative reactions.

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Old 04-29-2009, 08:10 PM   #16
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We might just disagree over what's acceptably fast or slow and what isn't. To me, the Battle Tower is a joke. At least in Diamond and Pearl, you may fight 21 different Pokémon in a row. Even if you OHKO all of them (which is unlikely), it still takes a good 10 to 15 minutes to go through one of those sequences. And for what? All for 1 BP. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that 1 BP is worthless. You need 16, 32, 64 BP to even get off the ground. At even 16 BP an item, let's say, that's still 16 x 10 or 160 minutes -- 2 hours and 40 minutes -- just to get one item. One. What if you need six? What if you need sixty?

The same thing might be true for us and our perception of the Casino. Do you think the D/P Casino is well-designed? I don't: sure, the slot reels are easy, but the going is slow. My record of 14 straight bonus rounds still didn't net me even half the cost of one of the elemental beam TMs. Imagine that! You sit behind the slots for over 20 minutes and for what? Not even half of one move? So you go to the counter to buy the coins instead. And that's when you remember why you sat your butt down at the slots in the first place: that's right, because Game Freak won't let you purchase more than 500 coins at a time and they want $10,000 for them. Where's the 5000 coins for $100,000 option? And besides, isn't a 1 coin : $20 exchange ratio kinda pricey? Is one Ice Beam really worth over $700,000? Is that what Game Freak is telling kids today: that one Ice Beam is worth the 25 minutes it takes you to mash the A button and the D-Pad in order to plow through the Elite 4 and the end credits? 25 minutes with an Amulet Coin and you get how much? I don't remember, but I know it isn't $700,000. It's not even close. You've got to do that at least a few more times. So we're talking either several hours behind the slot reels or several hours plowing through the Elite 4 again and again, all in the name of one Ice Beam.

That's not a game and that's not acceptably fast in my opinion. A child has better things to do with that time than grind for Ice Beam: play outside, play with friends, read a book, do homework, play other video games, and so much more. And an adult? Copy and paste this but shift a heavy emphasis over to work and to the development of social relationships with men and women. Friends, Ice Beam. Future Spouse, Ice Beam. Livelihood, Ice Beam.

When a game forces you to spend multiple hours just to get one move out of four for one monster out of six for a team you might not even still keep come next week with some revolution in the game's dynamic, that's when it's time to either call it quits, find a way around the problem, or request for an official patch.

I grew tired of doing the third one, grew bored of doing the first one, and so now I'm doing the second one and having a much more fun time with the game than I have had in years. But I think it's unfortunate and I think it goes to show how bad this franchise is in need of an overhaul.

"Could get some negative reactions?" You bet a change this big would get some negative reactions. I welcome them. I remember when Magneton became a Steel/Electric that everybody was furious with Game Freak. And now? People find it difficult to even remember the days when Electrode and Lanturn proved more popular than Magneton. Pokémon come and Pokémon go, and the same could be said of the fans' love or hate of certain game mechanics. But it's been 11 years and I still hate the HM mechanic, so obviously this one's not quite the same as type changes or physical/special splits.
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Old 04-29-2009, 09:09 PM   #17
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>We might just disagree over what's acceptably fast or slow and what isn't. To me, the Battle Tower is a joke. At least in Diamond and Pearl, you may fight 21 different Pokémon in a row. Even if you OHKO all of them (which is unlikely), it still takes a good 10 to 15 minutes to go through one of those sequences. And for what? All for 1 BP. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that 1 BP is worthless. You need 16, 32, 64 BP to even get off the ground. At even 16 BP an item, let's say, that's still 16 x 10 or 160 minutes -- 2 hours and 40 minutes -- just to get one item. One. What if you need six? What if you need sixty?

It's way way way way way easier to get BP in Platinum. You don't even have to train a team if you know enough to get through even one streak in the Factory.

You could also train a Garchomp and practically sweep if you really wanted the BP, but I don't think that's any fun.

>The same thing might be true for us and our perception of the Casino. Do you think the D/P Casino is well-designed? I don't: sure, the slot reels are easy, but the going is slow. My record of 14 straight bonus rounds still didn't net me even half the cost of one of the elemental beam TMs. Imagine that! You sit behind the slots for over 20 minutes and for what? Not even half of one move? So you go to the counter to buy the coins instead. And that's when you remember why you sat your butt down at the slots in the first place: that's right, because Game Freak won't let you purchase more than 500 coins at a time and they want $10,000 for them. Where's the 5000 coins for $100,000 option? And besides, isn't a 1 coin : $20 exchange ratio kinda pricey? Is one Ice Beam really worth over $700,000? Is that what Game Freak is telling kids today: that one Ice Beam is worth the 25 minutes it takes you to mash the A button and the D-Pad in order to plow through the Elite 4 and the end credits? 25 minutes with an Amulet Coin and you get how much? I don't remember, but I know it isn't $700,000. It's not even close. You've got to do that at least a few more times. So we're talking either several hours behind the slot reels or several hours plowing through the Elite 4 again and again, all in the name of one Ice Beam.

Who actually uses the Casino for its intended purpose anymore? It's so much easier just to grind for cash on the old lady on the route south of Hearthome or at the Elite Four that the "real method" is pointless.

>play outside, play with friends, read a book, do homework, play other video games, and so much more.

It's funny because this is what most fans of Pokemon forgo doing to play Pokemon in the first place.

>"Could get some negative reactions?" You bet a change this big would get some negative reactions. I welcome them. I remember when Magneton became a Steel/Electric that everybody was furious with Game Freak. And now? People find it difficult to even remember the days when Electrode and Lanturn proved more popular than Magneton. Pokémon come and Pokémon go, and the same could be said of the fans' love or hate of certain game mechanics. But it's been 11 years and I still hate the HM mechanic, so obviously this one's not quite the same as type changes or physical/special splits.

I agree that the HM thing should be fixed; I just don't foresee GameFreaks making any change like this in the near future. Maybe they'll surprise me, who knows?
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Old 04-30-2009, 12:31 AM   #18
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Probably not.

Thanks for your patience with me by the way. I've enjoyed having this discussion with a very level-headed fan like yourself.
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