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Looks like this is the LP thread that finally gets me to delurk and buy a goddamn SA account. Congratulations, Crosspiece. Pokemon Uranium tempted me, as did Breath of the Wild (a game I've even written a guide for), but I guess they weren't quite enough; anyway, here I finally am. Figures it'd be the prospect of talking about Pokemon Contests. Hello everyone. I'm one of those people who played Pokemon a lot as a child when the craze first hit, then left it behind after gen 1 until returning to it as an adult and falling in love with it again. (My partner convinced me to give it another go, heh. She's probably lurking around here too. And for that matter, she might regret it somewhat, given how obsessive I can get and the nonstop rants about Pokemon that she's been subjected to over the last couple of years or so.) For whatever reason, Contests have ended up being one of my favourite things. I don't understand why, honestly, but I'm weirdly obsessed with them and have spent a lot of time analysing the mechanics and playing them. This generation's incarnation is actually my favourite one; weird and unbalanced as much of it is, most of the improvements they attempted to make just increased the variance and took away a lot of what I liked about them to begin with. Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to seeing them in a LP. Anyway, congrats on the shiny pelipper! Always cool to see that happen during LPs. I've got... a lot of thoughts about what you can do with him in contests, but I'll wait to share them until after you've discussed the mechanics unless you'd rather I do otherwise. I don't want to steal your thunder here, or at least not without permission.
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Mar 18, 2018 18:03
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Ugh, catching Feebas. I actually did this legit, once; it honestly wasn't as bad as I expected, I think it took me 3-4 hours or so. Though it's very frustrating the farther along you get, that niggling feeling of "what if I missed the spots due to not fishing enough times, the RNG could be trolling me" keeps intensifying the fewer spaces remain to try. The thing that annoyed me most about it, though, is that RSE fishing mechanics require you to pay attention and time button presses, so you can't use emulator speedup to expedite it as much as you otherwise might. At least once you find a spot, they have a 50% encounter rate (and 255 catch rate) so you can catch loads of them to hopefully get one with decent nature and/or IVs. I don't blame you hacking it in. Part of me thinks Feebas and the like are pretty cool secrets, but at the same time I think it's terrible game design. I don't understand how the player is supposed to figure it out (or how to evolve it, for that matter) without either buying a guide or some kind of datamining. As far as I know, the only potential hint you get is seeing a trainer with one and then using the pokedex habitat feature to figure out which route they're on? I certainly don't recall any hints about how to evolve it anywhere in the game... About the "rare" berries this lady gives you - thankfully, berries 11-15 aren't too useful, though it's still frustrating having that gap in your berry list unless you trade. Conveniently, there are two of them (Figy and Iapapa) available to all files, and each nature dislikes at maximum one of the berries, so any pokemon could use one or the other without penalty if you really want to. (Why you'd want to is another question, it's really hard to justify using these berries over Leftovers or something. Until S&M buffed them, anyway, now they heal a ludicrous 50% and are probably well worth it although I don't actually know if they're seeing competitive use.) And for Pokeblocks they're actually terrible, but we can talk about that later.
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Mar 21, 2018 18:50
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Crosspiece, someone made a program that'll take care of all of that, if you want to use it: https://projectpokemon.org/home/forums/topic/33817-mirage-island-appearance-rusaem/ It does everything you're looking for - it'll tell you the value, check every pokemon in your save to see if any of them match, and if no match is found it gives you the option to change the save's Mirage Island bytes to match the first pokemon in your party. I've used it and can vouch that it works.
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Mar 21, 2018 19:56
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Whooooops I replied a bit fast there, didn't I. That probably looks a bit creepy, sorry for that! In my defence, I've actually been messing around with the source code to this program a bit recently, so I had it on my mind (and to find the download again all I had to do was google "mirage island value program"). There's some stuff I'm experimenting with in this game that would be a lot easier to do if I could speed through the analysis with a program. I'll talk about that project more later if I'm successful, lol. It's been years since I've written code and I'm severely out of practice.
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Mar 21, 2018 20:10
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Hey, it's Lilycove art museum! The second floor can be really hilarious depending on how you fill it up and what captions it decides to give you, so I'm looking forward to seeing you do that. (My avatar is from there too.) Nice luck getting the Lum berry first go, I seem to recall this guy actually being the only place you can get one in this game? Now let's talk Contests. I was going to suggest a different approach for your Pelipper, trying to see if we could get him to place in as many contests as possible to rack up ribbons. But if you want to specialise in a specific type... maybe Cute? Water Sport + Water Gun is a great combo, and then add any two of Protect, Mimic, Attract, Swagger, Growl (I'm not sure how much any of those would matter though really, it's probably best to spend at least 4 of the five rounds on the combo). I don't have any nickname ideas, unfortunately. My original answer was going to be let's pick an arc of three. There are two of them I think look promising: The thematically appropriate one: Shiny pokemon are cool and beautiful and cute! So focus in beauty, minor in the other two. Adjust the moveset as necessary for each contest, it's got superb combos (Water Sport/Water Gun for Cute, Hail/Blizzard for Beauty, Double Team/Quick Attack for Cool. The other one that could be good is Tough/Cool/Beauty, and use the Stockpile/Spit Up combo for Tough, but it's not as thematically resonant. The Cute combo is slightly better though, so the Beauty-centred arc might actually end up with more ribbons (I'm not sure though, I haven't tried either moveset personally). (Unfortunately it doesn't have any Smart combos available and its best option there is probably spamming Hidden Power, so specialising in Cute isn't as good for this strategy. But I think I like it best if you're restricting yourself to a full moveset of only type-matching moves.) Without link blending, you may not be able to do well enough to pass Master rank in all three categories, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could at least qualify for it in the two minors, and you'll easily clear it in the major one. (I wouldn't blame you not wanting to mess with link blending, playing the Berry Blender game in 4 instances of an emulator at once is hell. Though it is doable with a bit of practice if you're willing to suffer through it.)
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Mar 24, 2018 06:57
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How about Voodoo for Pelipper? Pelicans are the state bird of Louisiana, and, well, some might suspect certain darker magics are involved in getting shinies to show up during a LP. Here's a suggestion for the Smart category, too. This one should be pretty fun to play because so many of the moves can combo into each other, so when you start a combo you're not actually locking yourself into the next turn's move. Unfortunately you can't chain combos though, that'd be even better if it let you. Anyway, this guy should work out pretty well: Delphi the Kadabra (or Alakazam) Kinesis Future Sight Calm Mind/Confusion/Psychic Calm Mind/Confusion/Psychic Pick any two for the last slots. Alakazam learns all of the moves by level-up, but Kadabra would need a TM for Calm Mind because the game doesn't like you to have fun by yourself (so maybe leave that out if you don't/can't evolve him). Trick could also be a fun move to mess around with, if you don't want to go all-in on combos (and since there are 5 rounds you have one turn that can't be part of a combo no matter what).
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Mar 24, 2018 22:05
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I'm glad you liked my suggestion for Pelipper  This is looking like a solid contest team.Now, for another of my weird obsessions in this game. The Safari Zone Pokeblock mechanics are really weird. I see what they were trying to do, I think, sort of running with the "bait" concept from the Kanto safari zone and asking "what if we let you customise it?". I think it could've been a lot of fun. But there are so many hoops to jump through, and so many limitations (you have to make them in advance, and the Pokeblock Case has a maximum capacity of 40!) that I don't think anyone really ever used it. I also don't think it was thoroughly quality tested, because a lot of things behave... strangely, even beyond the "escape factor bug". Bulbapedia's information isn't entirely correct either; I've been trying to work it out for a while (quite casually, and I still have a lot more data to gather, so I can't offer firm conclusions yet; if there's any interest, I can report back when I know more). I find it fascinating that this game's been out for so long and nobody seems to have concrete information on this mechanic; I've done a lot of googling and not found anything. To make a long story short, it does seem at least to work as intended with single-flavour pokeblocks in the feeders (i.e., red/blue/pink/green/yellow). If you use one of those, it causes ~80% of the pokemon that appear to have a nature that likes that flavour (so, e.g., a red pokeblock will get natures that boost attack, Lonely/Brave/Adamant/Naughty). Contrary to what Bulbapedia claims, it doesn't restrict anything, and every nature is still capable of appearing (even those that dislike it). Where it starts to get really bizarre is when using pokeblocks with more than one flavour. I haven't tested every combination yet, as there are a lot of possibilities and I'm trying to make some scripts to expedite collecting the data, so I have no firm conclusions yet. But, for instance, if you use a purple pokeblock with equal quantities spicy and dry... well, in my test I caught 420 pokemon and 342 of them were Mild, Rash or Quiet (and of those, 186 were Rash, which is another layer of strangeness). From the way it's supposed to behave, you'd expect Lonely, Naughty and Brave to be equally frequent, but they appeared no more often than any others. (There's not a simple explanation either; in some cases, such as berry blending, spicy can get negated by dry, but you get a similar result with a block that has equal spicy and sweet instead so it isn't that). I'd been hoping to just be able to test a few representative cases to figure out how it works, but every result has contradicted my expectations enough that I decided I have to do it exhaustively if I want to understand it. But it's tedious work and I have a tendency to procrastinate. Long story short, if you want to use the feeders, stick to single-flavour pokeblocks. (It's also worth bringing either the Acro Bike or a pokemon knowing Sweet Scent, so you can trigger encounters without taking steps.) If you want good news, at least the feeders don't care how well-made the pokeblocks are, so you can phone it in with the minigame. Overall though, everstone breeding is a much easier method of getting a pokemon with the nature you want, and that works on everything (once you have access to Ditto, anyway) rather than just the small number of pokemon available in the safari zone. I have also been unable to replicate the "escape factor bug" personally. I didn't try very hard, mind; that said, it's also hard to tell if it's working, because there's no way to waste an arbitrary number of turns and see that the thing is unable to flee (all you can do is throw balls and pray not to catch it). I seem to remember having tried this a while back, followed the strategy and still had the pokemon flee. But it's entirely possible I could've done it wrong, so let's not read too much into that.
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Mar 27, 2018 18:25
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Heh, well, I'm glad to see so much interest in my little project! I will certainly report back when I have results.Carbon dioxide posted:First random thought: Maybe for the Feeder, it takes only the flavour of either the first or last berry that went into the pokeblock? It's a good thought, but I'm fairly certain the game doesn't save any information regarding which berries went in, and other data I have isn't consistent with that hypothesis. I've tested a few near-identical pokeblocks made with very different combinations of berries and the results were similar enough to suggest it doesn't matter. (For what it's worth, during the time I've been doing this I've come up with a lot of explanations that I thought made sense, only to then do another trial and get results that disproved it.) On a different note, while we're talking about pokeblock flavours, there's another tidbit of information my experience shows Bulbapedia has wrong. (Crosspeice, I'll put this under spoiler text since it involves mechanics you haven't discussed yet in the LP, but I thought it might be worth mentioning preemptively since it could affect how you raise your contest team. If you prefer I edit this out of the post, just say the word.) Bulbapedia claims that whether a pokemon eats a pokeblock "happily" or "disdainfully" affects the contest stat gains of the entire pokeblock. It doesn't, that's just flavour text (hey unintentional puns). The 10% bonus is applied to the pokemon's favoured stat regardless of the block's overall flavour, and likewise the 10% detriment to the un-favoured stat. Example: feed an Adamant pokemon (+cool, -beauty) a pokeblock with 10 spicy and 10 dry, it'll gain 11 cool and 9 beauty even though it'll react neutrally to it (liked and disliked flavour in equal quantities). If it worked the way they claim, it'd gain 10 and 10 instead. Likewise, if fed a block with 20 spicy and 10 dry, it would "happily eat" but the gains would be 22 and 9, the penalty still gets applied to the "disliked" flavour even when the preferred one dominates it, and vice versa.
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Mar 28, 2018 16:58
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It's a bit annoying and unnecessary, but at least the FR/LG tutorial stuff is over quickly (that's not to say other design choices don't baffle me). That said, most of it's actually pretty bad as a tutorial. The Oak thing actually has lines that praise you for whatever decision you make - "Doing damage is important, that's how you win! Good move." "Lowering your opponent's stats is useful. Good idea!" (paraphrased, anyway). It manages to be annoying and intrusive without actually teaching the player anything. On the other hand, the Teachy TV (even if not executed that well) was unobtrusive and you never had to use it. It also didn't really provide that much information, but, well, I seem to remember there being things in it that actually wouldn't be obvious to new players. I used to watch it every playthrough thinking the pokemon it showed would be added as "seen" to the pokedex, but once I realised it didn't I stopped bothering with it. The mechanic that bothers me the most in FR/LG is the arbitrary gating of evolutions behind a silly postgame event flag. I understand the desire to maintain consistency in pokemon availability with the original games, but they allow all of the other changes to them to stand (stat changes, movepool changes, Abilities, all of that stuff is fine) except for that one thing. I suppose the impulse is that they wanted to maintain the conceit of the pokedex only going to 150 or 151? But even that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and the way it was implemented was really intrusive if you ever wanted to use the Zubat line, though, and also confusing and unintuitive to figure out what was going on (there's also no way to make sense of it in-universe). It's also weird because that's almost certainly the only pokemon people will see it happen with unless they cheat, I can't imagine anyone's using Chansey ingame. Then again, there are a lot of weird decisions they made in FR/LG out of the desire to make them play as similarly to OG Kanto as possible (just without the bugs that made it fun). Still, they seem to have learned their lesson, because none of the other remakes did anything of the kind that I'm aware of. This was an interesting idea for an April Fool post, are you going to be showing any more FR/LG content or was this a one-off thing?
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Apr 2, 2018 17:31
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I hadn't realised you fight Maxie three times before fighting Archie once. That's a weird design choice. Still, I'll take it, anything to differentiate these boring teams rather than have them just be identical clones of each other (Emerald doing anything at all with this is a vast improvement over R/S in my view, even if it could've done more, and it's a shame none of it stuck around for the remakes). Still, the Magma Hideout was probably the best of those changes (seriously, it's so much better doing this than having the fire team training Wailmer in the sea hideout which is Aqua's in the other games, as they do in Ruby). It's incredibly weird to me that this one battle with Steven is the only partnered fight in all of Emerald (or outside the postgame area anyway, I can't remember if they're a possibility there but if so I've never seen them), and there weren't any of those in the other gen 3 games. I don't know why they program in features like this, and then basically just demo them without actually doing anything significant. I have absolutely no opinion on Secret Bases, though I'll be interested to see what you show off. They're one mechanic in these games I never could get interested in, they always seemed so pointless. That said, do you have the ability to get the Regi dolls somehow? Those could be cool to see. Epicmissingno posted:Since it came up in that update, I feel like I have to air my grievances on something: the healing herbs. It only comes up in Gen 3 and 4, but there are some Pokemon that like bitter food. The healing herbs are bitter and yet they lower happiness for everything, regardless of taste preferences. It's just a little thing that's been bugging me for a while. According to Bulbapedia they're different words in Japanese, to the extent their information is trustworthy. The "bitter" that corresponds to the Smart contest stat might be more accurately translated as "astringent", I think. Still, I sort of agree that it's a missed opportunity to have the "bad-tasting" medicine interact with the flavour preference mechanics.
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Apr 4, 2018 05:47
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FractalSandwich posted:I can't find where they claim that, but if they do, they're wrong. If you trust the item descriptions on the Japanese wiki to be a faithful verbatim transcription, which I do, it's the same word in both places.  This is what I get for posting while sleep-deprived, the fuckup is mine. I think my brain invented that out of thin air. I can't find any page saying something of the kind now, and dry is the one that it says translates as astringent which makes a whole lot more sense. Oops.
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Apr 4, 2018 16:03
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I had the e-Reader back in the day and loved that thing, for some reason. I'm not entirely clear why, now, but I always found it so satisfying to be able to rip open a booster pack, scan the cards and play NES games and the like (plus some of the promo cards were fun novelties, like Air Hockey). I still have the Eon Ticket card from Nintendo Power, too, though I've never actually used it; I had stopped playing Pokemon at the time and never had a physical copy of RS. It's kind of a shame the e-Reader never caught on, because they really tried to do some cool things with it. Due to its unpopularity outside Japan, the US only got around half of the cards released and other regions didn't get any of it at all. In some ways I think it was destined to fail, though, because it was just such a pain to use and required so much hardware support for its most interesting functions (e.g. connectivity with other GBA games required you to have two GBAs and a link cable, though the Game Boy Player could substitute for one if you had that) that I think very few people got to experience that content even if they owned an e-Reader and had the requisite cards. It doesn't matter how good the content is if it's so much of a hassle to see that nobody bothers with it. To make matters worse, the encoding systems for Japanese and US e-Readers were different (I suspect in part because of different alphabets), so the cards weren't cross-compatible. Japan also got two different versions of the device itself (Card-e Reader and then Card-e Reader+, adding link cable support. That's right, if you wanted the link content and bought the first version of the device, you were out of luck; the US only ever got the upgraded one, though it was just called e-Reader here). Surprisingly, in a lot of ways the e-Reader can be thought of as an early precursor to DLC (and yes, amiibo, but honestly I think it has more in common with DLC). The thing about the e-Reader is that the game data is all actually encoded on the cards, rather than present in the games already (to be unlocked with an event flag or something), so it's mostly gameshark-proof and can theoretically add content after the game's development cycle has completed. My favourite use of that was the level cards in Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (what a mouthful of a game title), a lot of those were really well-designed and mixed together mechanics from classic Mario games in a way we wouldn't see again until Super Mario Maker (and, well, romhacks). The game didn't actually have enough memory allotted to store all the possible levels, so you'd have to pick and choose which ones you liked enough to keep (if you lived in Japan and had enough of the cards for that to matter). Incidentally, Nintendo finally made those levels available (including the ~2/3 of them that were Japan-exclusive and/or rare promos) when they released the WiiU Virtual Console version of SMA4:SMB3 around two years ago. If you like classic Mario and haven't played them, they're great and it's well worth a look (there's also a patch floating around for the ROM, for those who don't have the console). There are some fun quirks you can see as a result of this, too. In Pokemon RS, the sprites for the e-Reader berries are encoded on the cards, and the game only stores the one for whichever type of berry you have in the game (you can only have one at a time on your file, though you can swap types by scanning a different card). So if you make Pokeblocks with another player who has a different berry, it'll show your sprite twice (for your berry and theirs) on your screen, and they'll see their berry twice. It still uses the correct stats and displays the correct name of their berry, so I guess this just wasn't a high priority for the developers or they thought people wouldn't notice (and to be frank, I'm not sure if anyone else ever did...). Still, I think it's interesting. It always kind of surprised me that nobody ever seemed interested in hacking the e-Reader system by making custom cards. In theory, you should be able to print out dot codes and scan them, so it'd be one of the easier ways to play custom homebrew content on actual hardware. But I've never heard tell of anyone actually doing it, so other methods are probably easier in actual practice. And that was a lot of  about the e-Reader that probably nobody wanted to read. I apologise. I'm one of those weird people who actually liked it.
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Apr 6, 2018 19:05
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The story in this game is so weird. I appreciate what they were trying to do, and I think it's better than R/S in quite a few ways, but this is such an anticlimactic scene: one moment everyone is panicking over the world ending, but the contingency plan of getting a dragon to yell at the monsters solves everything, it's all over everyone go home now. They tried to make a dramatic cutscene and music, but I don't think that salvages the fact that this is literally a plot solved by waking up a dragon so it can yell. Now let's talk about one of those weird video game tropes I really don't like: breaking immersion to give the player story information through menu options. There is literally no way for the player character to have heard of the Sky Pillar before this (this is literally the first instance of that text in the game as far as I know), so having them say it comes completely out of nowhere, and ends up breaking the story. Characters should have reasons for doing things! (I'd never seen the text for choosing the other options though, thanks for showing that! Those responses just smack of  ) I kind of get why they do this, if they can't think of a better way to convey the information, but surely that should be an indication that the story/scenario planning needs some work still?Then there's the hint for finding the place: you get a single vague call from the rival once, and you're supposed to deduce it from that? Here's the text (from Bulbapedia). Brendan: "Hey, <player>! I was in Pacifidlog just now. I saw this huge green Pokémon flying across the sky. I've never seen anything that amazing before. I wish you could've seen it, <player>." May: "Hi, <player>! I was just in Pacifidlog a little while ago. I saw a giant green Pokémon flying high in the sky. I… I've never seen anything like it. I wonder what it was. Is this maybe a major discovery?" This, in the region that includes Tropius. Giant green pokemon flying in the sky shouldn't be a particularly unusual sight! (Plus neither the player nor the character should even know what Rayquaza looks like at this point, how should they know it's green?) (Or, as my partner said to me just now: "Figuring it out isn't the problem, remembering it is the problem. Because that's an inane and pointless comment from an inane and pointless character and nobody would pay any attention." That too. Definitely that too.) The only game I can think of where this kind of menu-delivered story information worked was Paper Mario (the first one), where they used the conceit of a quiz show (where multiple choice makes sense, and if you wanted to roleplay the character not knowing, the other contestants would answer the questions so the player would get the information regardless).
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Apr 9, 2018 17:34
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Haifisch posted:If Emerald was released now there'd definitely be a huge build-up to the legend of Groudon/Kyogre and how Rayquaza is the only one who can calm them, with the Sky Pillar brought up around the time Groudon awakens. And instead of having to guess where it is, Steven or someone would bring it up and direct you there. Hah, yes, probably. I'm not sure that would've necessarily been an improvement, though, they've tended to get very hamfisted about that sort of thing to the point it makes all the characters look like idiots. (Then again, Emerald's also pretty good at making characters look like idiots... idiots in a different way, I suppose.) There must be some kind of happy medium, though thinking about it I'm sure this kind of writing problem isn't exclusive to Pokemon game. I honestly still like the original Team Rocket best, because they were just gangsters and at best a subplot; speaking for myself at least, I'm not sure how much of an overarching narrative Pokemon games need, and I might prefer as little of it as possible. Just let the world exist, drop the player in and let them raise their goddamn monsters; the gyms give enough of a structure and level curve, as well as checkpoints/subgoals to motivate the player, that I'm not convinced more is needed. Then again, there's probably a reason I don't write games.
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Apr 9, 2018 20:09
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Hey, don't give me too much credit, I didn't have anything to do with the creation of the program or anything! I just found it online when I was trying to figure out how to see this content myself a while back. And Mirage Island is... really rather underwhelming, isn't it? I mean, I'd read descriptions beforehand so I knew it was nothing special (outside of the Liechi Berry) but it's one thing to know what it is, and it's another to actually go there, walk around in the grass and encounter nothing but Wynaut. I remember thinking it felt very lifeless the first time I went there (also using the program, I've never seen it legit either). Bulbapedia really likes to claim the Liechi Berry is the best one for pokeblocks and... I guess if you squint that's mostly true? It's true if you're talking about what you can theoretically get on a single cartridge, or with only GBA cartridges. If you have one of the Gamecube games (Colosseum or XD), there are four other counterparts to this berry (Ganlon, Salac, Petaya and Apicot) that have similar in-battle functions (if you compare the Liechi to an X Attack, the other four work similarly for the other stats) and similar performance in pokeblocks but for different combinations of contest attributes. Except due to a quirk in the formula, the Liechi tends to produce slightly lower-levelled pokeblocks than the other four in most situations. It's still a drat good berry. The only other way to get it in this generation was through events, though I think it was one of the more commonly distributed things - at least, the shiny Zigzagoon that was distributed to many R/S players with the "berry glitch fix" came holding one. On a slightly different note... Juan's name comes from Don Juan? really? That puts a bit of a disturbing spin on all of the gym trainers being women, doesn't it.
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Apr 13, 2018 19:37
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It amuses me that all of the NPC pokemon just drop syllables and do bizarre anagram-ish things as nicknames. Some of them definitely work better than others. I'm glad to see all our movesets worked out for you, anyway I don't know how it determines the NPC pokemon's scores in primary judging, but even on Master rank they don't come anywhere close to perfect stats, so the player definitely has an advantage there. I don't know if the strategy would end up being different in a multiplayer contest where everyone's stats are good (I've never played one), but in single player I've found the best approach is just to focus on high-point combos and hope the RNG is nice about not getting jammed/nervous too much; there are too many different things the opponents' movesets could do and none of them really have a plan, so there's no good way to strategise in response. Best to just focus on your own score and hope they don't mess you up too badly (the more points you earn, the less it hurts losing them). From what I understand, "jams the Pokemon with the Judge's attention" refers to being in the setup phase of a combo. At least, I've read that somewhere, I don't think I've seen one of those moves work successfully ingame so I can't be 100% sure. It would make a certain amount of sense, combos are quite good so putting in a strategy to punish them would be good game design. "The Judge looked away" sounds like it might be a similar one, maybe interrupting the combo. A lot of the contest messages are pretty cryptic, I think less effort may have gone into the translation here. Since you didn't quite cover it, let's talk about Destiny Bond. I didn't suggest it for any of your movesets because I thought you wanted all of the moves to be the same type as the contest, but it's probably the best combo. You can combo into it with either Mean Look or Curse, and since combos in this gen double the base hearts, Destiny Bond ends up giving you 16 hearts. And like you already mentioned, as long as you do it on the final turn there's no drawback whatsoever. A couple of mechanical things that might be of interest: About scarves. AFAIK you only need 220 in the stat to be awarded them from the Fan Club guy, not perfect. They also apply their bonus before the cap of 255, so they only benefit you if your stats are below maximum; you may actually be better off using a scarf in a complementary stat if you maxed one and not the other (and if you've got perfect stats in all three relevant categories, scarves offer no benefit). As a result, the maximum score from the Preliminary Round should be 636, not 656. About Pokeblocks... there are a lot of things I could say, but I'll try to restrain myself. When feeding a Pokemon, the final block still gives its full value even if the Pokemon doesn't have enough "room" left for the entire thing. So you can strategise a bit, try to maximise the gain/feel ratio for most of the blocks and then ignore feel for the last one to get a big bonus at the end. Most of the best feeding regimens end up doing this. I really enjoy theorycrafting this stuff and coming up with different approaches to use, as it can be surprisingly tricky to optimise (I even built myself a Pokeblock calculator in Excel, though admittedly it wasn't that tough to do). If you have a two-flavour block with a tie in level, what colour it gets assigned is actually not random. There's a priority order used to break the tie: Purple > Indigo > Brown > LiteBlue > Olive. This means you will never get Olive and certain colours end up being more common than others. The Blend Master is pretty interesting. In most feeding regimens I've come up with he ends up being superfluous, or only good for the final pokeblock fed, because mixing two high-feel berries yields blocks with too high feel to be practical; those berries work better if you have more players/NPCs to compensate for them and bring down the average. He's also perfect at the minigame as long as you (the player) don't make mistakes to throw him off - I like to nail the first three button presses when it's slow and then let him do the rest, and always end up getting 155-160 RPM with that strategy. For contrast, with other NPCs (or myself in link mode) I tend to get 90-105 RPM at best. If anyone's interested in feeding regimens, a person known as peterpansexuell on Reddit has shared some pretty good ones: Single cartridge, NPC blending only, no rare berries: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemonribbons/comments/11t9vo/pok%C3%A9block_recipes_for_good_conditions_for/ (That said, I've found you can improve them slightly if you have access to the Blend Master, replace the final block with e.g. Tamato/Master or Spelon/Master for Cool, and so on and so forth) Single cartrige, NPC blending only, with rare berries (Liechi, Colosseum/XD berries): https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemonribbons/comments/11xz7w/pok%C3%A9block_recipes_for_very_good_conditions_for/ With 4 cartridges, you can max every contest stat at once. He has two posts with recipes for these: This has one set using e-Reader and Liechi berries, and one which needs neither (but depending on performance may only yield 254 in one of the five stats): https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemonribbons/comments/11su8j/pok%C3%A9block_recipes_to_give_a_pok%C3%A9mon_perfect/ (If you have access to e-Reader berries but not Liechi, I've determined you can replace the final one in the first set with Belue/Salac/Drash/Chilan instead.) This post has a few other sets that don't use e-Reader berries but may only work properly for Pokemon of certain natures. I think the previous post is probably more useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemonribbons/comments/4gz0j2/pok%C3%A9block_recipes_for_a_perfect_condition_no/ There's also a hilarious option available using 4 Ruby/Sapphire games, and the e-Reader berry Nutpea. If you use 4 of that berry, you get a Black Pokeblock that has 3 random flavours of level 2, and a Feel stat of... 1. So you can just keep making these and feed them until you've got everything at maximum, the odds are on your side in the long run (or if you pay attention). Then there's a set I came up with that uses all of the e-Reader berries, and results in 255 everything but completes in 7 or 8 pokeblocks fed (depending on the pokemon's nature). As far as I know, that's the minimum possible. I can share this here if anyone is interested, I've never posted it before.
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Apr 16, 2018 20:32
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Crosspeice posted:I also think I've never seen an Olive Pokeblock, so I think you're right. I'm sorry if I wasn't quite clear before, but I wasn't trying to say that Olive Pokeblocks are impossible. They're not, you will get them if the block has two flavours and Sour is higher than the other (e.g. blend an Iapapa berry with 2 or 3 NPCs). It determines the colour by the higher flavour if there is one, it's just that if the flavours are equal, that priority order I mentioned is used to break the tie. I don't blame you missing things on Pokeblock and Contest mechanics, because there's a lot of weird nonsense going on :P I don't think I fully understand them, despite all the . I'm sorry if I'm coming across as pedantic and always correcting you, once we're past Contests and Pokeblocks I doubt it'll happen again.Kurieg posted:It really annoyed me how much Gen 3 and 4 rely on you having four friends to do things with. Thankfully gen 5+ started making steps towards "not everyone lives in downtown tokyo". Interestingly, Emerald tried to fix this a little. If every player has an Emerald cartridge, you can actually do 2P or 3P link contests as well, and the remaining slots will be filled by AI competitors. I guess they couldn't make it backwards compatible with Ruby and Sapphire, though, those games can still only participate if there are four human competitors. Verant posted:At least Platinum let you buy good quality Poffins, even if it was $6,400 a pop. Even more amusingly, unless you were blending with 4 players, those work out to be better than any poffins you can make. They have 32 points in each of two stats, at 20 Feel/Smoothness, so if you use them right (4 of each minding the overlap, e.g. Spicy-Sour, Spicy-Dry, Dry-Sour, plus one of anything or to compensate the stat lowered by a detrimental nature) it works out just perfectly to max out the three stats you need for a given contest category. There's pretty much never any need to play the poffin-making minigame as long as you have Platinum, which is hilarious to me. -- There are a few other tidbits I forgot to mention that might be of interest. Depending on what kind of pokeblocks you have, it may be worth using Pokemon acquired in in-game trades. All of those pokemon, as well as those from trades in R/S and FR/LG, come with slightly boosted contest attributes: they have 30 in one stat, 5 in the other four, and 10 in Feel. This is a better ratio than most blocks we can make, although depending on what else is being fed and how narrowly-tuned the regimen is, that boosted Feel might interfere with it eating something else or necessitate slightly different choices. Berry flavours are zero-sum. Depending on what notation you use (different pages on Bulbapedia go back and forth, which confused me for a while), it's either a property of the berries or a property of the pokeblock formula, but the short version is that any increase in a flavour will be compensated by an equal decrease in the flavour to its left (so, e.g. +1 spicy is always compensated by -1 sour, +1 dry by -1 spicy and so on). If you see something that looks like it breaks this pattern (e.g. Razz is +1 dry and -1 sour), look at the "tag" and you may see what was intended (in this case, the tag says spicy and dry, so the -1 sour is compensating the +1 spicy, but then that spicy cancels out with the -1 spicy that resulted from the +1 dry). Amusingly, I think the developers may not all have known this - there are a couple of rare berries you can only get in the Emerald postgame which seem to have been intended to have all five flavours, except because it works this way they end up having no flavour at all and being useless for pokeblocks. This also means that (without hacking) it is impossible to make a pokeblock that raises every attribute. That's just how the maths work out. As a result, it tends to mean that for each individual pokeblock, it's best to focus on stacking similarly-flavoured berries rather than try to go wide. You can continue to get paintings even after filling up the museum, and it'll give you the option to replace the ones there each time you meet the criteria with a pokemon whose painting isn't currently in the museum for that category. Likewise, it doesn't care if the Pokemon being painted has the ribbon or not, you can fill the museum with all pictures of the same pokemon if its stats are good enough. It's weird that repeat contest victories was the only way to get more than one Luxury Ball in this gen, but then Luxury Balls are a ridiculously niche item. Golbat is literally the only pokemon with a friendship evolution that can be caught in the wild in this game. They'll fix that later, of course. -- I've been thinking a bit about the contest metagame, and I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks. The turn order system is interesting, because they kept messing with it in later gens (at least, in gen 4 Super Contests, it gets reversed from how it is here, the leading player goes last). Going first makes you more susceptible to jamming but less so to nervousness (I think on balance losing turns from nervousness tends to be more punishing, unless the other three players gang up to jam). Going later also benefits certain moves, like the copying ones, but then there are also other moves that work better if you go first. Plus there's the "get the crowd going" thing that benefits the leading player if everyone uses on-type moves, which I somehow hadn't noticed until you showed it. There are some win-more tendencies to going first here (especially in making it more likely to get your combos off), but it seems mild enough I'm surprised they changed it. And if enough players bring jamming moves, going first could be a liability. I'm curious, Crosspeice - did you tend to prefer going first or going last? I also wonder whether the crowd would ever "get going" in a 4P contest; I'd think it could end up being a bit Prisoner's Dilemma-ish, with many players bringing moves that deliberately go against the contest category to try to delay it and prevent other players getting it. (There's no hearts penalty for doing that, you just forego the 1-heart bonus for increasing the crowd meter.) And then using an on-type move would be more likely to help your opponents than yourself, even if you get a small benefit. If enough people involved thought like that, it'd probably never happen.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:31
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Crosspeice posted:It's cool, relax, there's a lot of small details and interesting tidbits I wouldn't have known about if you hadn't mentioned them. I don't think I'll put them in the LP, otherwise I'll just be shoving in small trivia just for the sake of it and it would feel too disjointed. Feel free to chat about Pokemon as much as you want, it's cool, this is the Pokemon chat-o-rama place. Duly noted, thanks. I'm well aware I can be rather verbose and don't want to irritate anyone. (And yeah, I'm not really expecting you to incorporate most of the stuff I've mentioned in the LP. Trivia is trivia.) Crosspeice posted:I also forgot to mention that every nature has a unique animation the Pokemon does when you're about to feed it a Pokeblock, it's very cool. I love those, they're really cute and help give the Pokemon a bit of personality. It's one of the few things that irks me about Pokeblocks being permanent, that once they get filled up I can't keep giving my Pokemon treats to enjoy. Makes it harder to roleplay being a good trainer, honestly... Glazius posted:They definitely wanted to make contests feel like as much of a thing as battles, but do you actually need to clear any contests to win the game? Despite how intricate they can be, Contests have only ever been a quirky sidequest really (I think the anime does a better job of convincingly portraying them as a separate career path from battling; that said, the anime's really not my thing and I've barely watched any of it so my saying this is based on summaries and Bulbapedia pages...). There's a completion star in RSE (for getting the 5 paintings) and DPPt (for winning one Master level contest), if you consider those to matter for "winning the game", otherwise they just tend to be for cosmetic rewards. For better or worse, we've already seen all the rewards from them in this game. The ORAS Lucarionite, as others have already mentioned, is probably the most significant reward they've ever had. ETA: Trasson, that's a really good explanation and I like it. (Also really tempted to use Attackerchu and Speciafish as nicknames at some point now.) Explopyro fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 06:53
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So, if anyone is interested in it, I did a thing. Crosspeice covered Pokemon Contests pretty well, but if you want to know what happens when you combine them with insane obsessiveness... well, here. I'm sorry if the formatting isn't the best it could be; it's my first attempt at anything remotely like an LP. Putting this together has definitely given me a greater level of appreciation for the amount of work that goes into SSLPs, too. Test poster link if you prefer that. Anyway, enjoy. Or laugh at me. Whichever you prefer. Goofy’s Dog Show Adventures This is a little project I’ve been working on for a while now (off and on for the past two years or so), and I’m pretty excited to finally share it. Let’s meet Goofy.   Goofy was once a fighting dog owned by the leader of a criminal organisation, abused and forced into combat regardless of his own wishes. He was rescued and rehabilitated by a defector who couldn’t countenance what the group was doing, who then put in a great deal of work to find him a new home where he wouldn’t need to fight any more. His new owner is a girl who loves contests and decided to make him the star of her ensemble (he might be a bit quirky and dance to his own tempo, but he always puts on a good show). He’s a bit of a hoarder and loves shiny ribbons so this worked out well for the both of them, and he’s quite happy now. (Translation: He’s the shadow Smeargle from Pokemon Colosseum, which will be important for reasons we’ll get into later (though I also like the narrative it ended up creating, which was mostly an accident; I enjoyed it enough to write the above blurb but I’ll break “character” from here on). I prefer using the default/official character names, so he was rescued by Wes and is now owned by May in Emerald. Connecting Dolphin to VBA-M to make the transfer is really bloody finicky and inconsistent, and it took me several hours of failed attempts to pull off successfully.) Now let’s take a look at what he can do. Moves: Here is the moveset he has most of the time:     This is my favourite moveset for contests, and out of laziness I use it in every category. It works well even when it doesn’t have any on-type moves. Obviously, if I wanted to, I could tweak it to better match individual contest categories by using Heart Scales and sketching different moves between contests, but that ends up being a lot of unnecessary work (I’d do it to compete against other players though, if that were a thing I could do). The core strategy is basically “ignore what everyone else does, just durdle and build up your own score”. (I prefer this approach to going for moves that hinder the opponents, because it has better odds of your score qualifying for a painting.) We’ve got two solid combos here. Ice Punch and Thunder Punch can be used in either order and the second one gets its points doubled, so those get alternated on the first three turns (if one of them matches the contest type, I make that the one that gets used twice for extra bonus hearts and a slim chance to “get the crowd going”). Then on turn four, we use Mean Look and combo into Destiny Bond for an insane 16 hearts on the final turn. (Curse could also be used to combo into Destiny Bond and gives one more heart, but I don’t like it as much, I prefer Mean Look’s nervousness effect to Curse’s “go last next turn”.) This moveset actually isn’t exclusive to Smeargle – you can also get it on Gengar, Dusclops, or Gardevoir (but Gengar needs to be traded over from FR/LG, and you need to breed to get Destiny Bond for the Duskull family, and both Destiny Bond and Mean Look for the Ralts family; these are the only pokemon that get both the Destiny Bond combo and the punch combo, although the punches need to be taught by the postgame tutor in Emerald and are only available to the fully evolved forms). Unfortunately, none of these pokemon can be obtained in Colosseum or XD, which ruled them out for me (okay, there are a Duskull and Ralts in XD but they can’t get the egg moves so they don’t count). I haven’t tried it because I think it’s more risky (and, shh, because I planned out the moveset before realising I could/had to use Smeargle), but instead of the punch combo (or any other 4/4 combo), a Smeargle could also try one of any number of combos into a move like Double-Edge that gives 6 hearts but makes it “more easily startled” (which doubles the point loss to jams), using that move on turn one and three and the move that initiates the combo on turn two. There’s definitely some potential here, though, so I’ll list the options. Only Smeargle can get these alongside the Destiny Bond combo. Focus Energy (1, jam 3) into Double-Edge (6, double jam vulnerability) Focus Energy (1, jam 3) into Take Down (6, double jam vulnerability) Harden (2, protect against jam) into Double-Edge (6, double jam vulnerability) Harden (2, protect against jam) into Take Down (6, double jam vulnerability) Sunny Day (1+, benefits from crowd meter) into Overheat (6, double jam vulnerability) Calm Mind (2, protect against jam) into Psycho Boost (6, double jam vulnerability) Charge (2, bonus if same type as previous) into Volt Tackle (6, double jam vulnerability) Lock-On (3, stop crowd excitement) into Superpower (6, double jam vulnerability) Mind Reader (3, stop crowd excitement) into Hi Jump Kick (6, double jam vulnerability) Mind Reader (3, stop crowd excitement) into Submission (6, double jam vulnerability) Mind Reader (3, stop crowd excitement) into Superpower (6, double jam vulnerability) For comparison, assuming no jams or crowd/type bonuses: the safe strategy yields 4 + 8 + 4 = 16 hearts versus the risky strategy 6 + (1-3) + 12 = 19-21 hearts Charge/Volt Tackle seems like it’d have the highest potential payoff here. I might have to give this a go at some point, although I’m not expecting my preferences to change. Pokeblocks and Contest Stats: I refused to settle for anything less than the best here. I created my own set of Pokeblocks that would enable any pokemon to reach the maximum of 255 in every stat; there are other ways to do that, but I like mine because it’s efficient and completes in only 5-8 blocks depending on performance and the pokemon’s nature (realistically 7-8, unless you’re insanely good at the Berry Blender minigame which I’m not). That said, it brought its own set of challenges, due to requiring the e-Reader berries (including the Japan-exclusive ones). There are 3 sets of 5 blocks, which I divide into three categories: the primary blocks, fillers to compensate for performance, and fillers to compensate for nature. code:The flavour values shown are assuming minigame performance of 90 RPM. If you are somehow able to exceed 106 RPM when blending, then the “primary” blocks would be sufficient by themselves to reach 255 in every stat (for a neutral-natured pokemon). If not, there is a 26 feel deficit after feeding 4 of them (as long as one of the ones fed is the 54 feel one), which we can use to squeeze in fillers (specifically, two from the “performance” group and one from the “nature” group add to exactly 26, bringing us to 254 feel used before the final block is fed). Any two “performance” fillers can be chosen, as long as you mind the overlap so that every flavour is covered once (which means a single flavour will double up). If the pokemon has a non-neutral nature, the doubled-up stat should be the one reduced by its nature (and then the appropriate “nature” filler can be fed to further boost that stat). After this, the final primary block is fed and the pokemon should have the maximum of 255 in every stat as well as 255 Feel, for optimal performance in every contest category. Here are some highlights from the feeding process. This is a blank status screen. Goofy had never eaten a Pokeblock and had zero contest stats.  And here’s a look into my Pokeblock Case, showing 15 blocks made according to my recipes. I ended up doing slightly better than the 90 RPM assumed in my calculations, but not quite good enough to eliminate the need for the fillers. (You’ll notice the game only shows partial information, it only tells you the level of the strongest flavour.)   Select the Pokeblock and choose which Pokemon to give it to…  You see an animation where the Pokeblock is tossed to the Pokemon, and it eats it. (There are different animations for different natures of Pokemon, it’s pretty cute. You’ll also get a message about how much the Pokemon liked it, which depends on the nature and the flavours in the block but actually means nothing for gameplay purposes. Goofy has a neutral nature, which means he has no preferences and will never respond “happily” or “disdainfully”.)   And after this, you get an animation where it shows the stats being increased on the pentagonal display. I like how this looks, even if the display’s a bit weird to parse – basically it slides the vertex of the inner polygon along a line to the corner of the pentagon as the stat increases, then it fills it in in green even though the area doesn’t represent anything (although watching it fill up makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something). Primary Block 1. +150 Cool, +98 Smart. Feel: 0 + 58 = 58.  Primary Block 2. +150 Beauty, +98 Tough. Feel: 58 + 54 = 112.  Primary Block 3. +150 Cute, +98 Cool. Feel: 112 + 58 = 170.  Primary Block 4. +150 Smart, +98 Beauty. Feel: 170 + 58 = 228.  Filler Block 1. +10 Cool, +10 Smart, +10 Cute. Feel: 228 + 9 = 237. (I arbitrarily chose to use the first two filler blocks in the list. After eating this one, Cool and Smart are at maximum.)  Filler Block 2. +10 Beauty, +10 Smart, +10 Tough. Feel: 237 + 9 = 246. (Beauty is now at maximum as well. One curious thing you may notice in this screenshot is that it only shows the “UP” for two stats being increased because Smart was already at maximum.)  (If Goofy had had a non-neutral nature, here is where I would have fed the extra filler block. It would have a feel of 8, bringing the total feel consumed to 254. But it wasn’t necessary, so I didn’t.) Primary Block 5. +150 Tough, +98 Cute. Feel has now hit the cap of 255. (Tough and Cute are now maximised as well. Goofy has achieved perfect contest attributes. Look at all that green! I was really pleased with this screenshot for another reason, because you can see the full ring of stars – they’re a rough representation of how much Feel has been consumed, but they’re animated so you don’t always see all of them.)  Here’s what happens if I try to give him more. He’s so full he can never eat again. How sad.  Here’s a bit of proof that it worked, using an external save editor to look at Goofy’s stats.  I’ve glossed over a lot about how these Pokeblocks were actually made, but that was actually a pretty involved process. If you're not interested in hearing about this, feel free to skip ahead to the results section. Let’s talk a bit about the e-Reader berries first. There are twelve of these, released in two series of cards; only the first of those series got an English release. The e-Reader actually uses different encodings for the English and Japanese cards, so a Japanese e-Reader is needed (which also means Japanese Ruby or Sapphire cartridges, because you can only link the e-Reader with a same-language game). Also, a save file can have at most one type of e-Reader berry (they always go in slot 43 in the berry pouch); scanning a different card merely causes your berries to transform into the new type. Which means that it’s either necessary to stop and scan new cards after making each Pokeblock, or have 12 cartridges/save files (the minimum requirements would be 4 GBAs and 4 cartridges, at least 2 of which are Japanese Ruby/Sapphire, the Japanese e-Reader and the 12 Japanese berry cards). I did this in emulation rather than on hardware, which offers some shortcuts but is still a pain. I played through Ruby once and then duplicated the save to make 12 copies, one for each berry. One weird thing people may not know is that an English save file is still compatible with the Japanese version, so for the Japanese-exclusive berries I could just temporarily switch to a Japanese ROM and link with the Japanese e-Reader+ ROM (using a variant of VBA Link that supports the e-Reader), then go back to using an English ROM again once the berry was loaded. It ends up looking a bit weird: the berry’s name and “tag” page get loaded directly from the card rather than being preexistent in the game data, so it keeps the Japanese info and the English game gets confused by bits of it. The berry name ends up looking garbled in the menu, text on the tag page doesn’t show up correctly and trying to view it sometimes makes the game crash to title screen (I’m not sure if it just doesn’t work for certain berries or if the crash is random), but otherwise everything works fine, and the stats are correct when blending which is the important thing. You can do this in both directions, too, if for some reason you want the berry name to be in English in a Japanese game. Touga berry (Japanese exclusive) in the bag, and its tag page, when viewed in an English game.   (As an unrelated aside, if you’re playing in emulation there are also some other fun tricks you can do by opening the save with a different ROM. Paired versions like Ruby/Sapphire and FR/LG often use the same save structure. Want to catch version exclusives from the other game? No problem! Of course you can also just gameshark or edit the save file, but I think it’s cool.) And yeah, I cheated to get the Liechi berry. The Colosseum/XD berries are actually legitimate since I can link to Dolphin, but Liechi is still the biggest pain and I feel very little shame about that. My compromise was that I kept it isolated to the Ruby side files, and it only goes to my main Emerald file in Pokeblock form. And I could always have fallen back on the second set of Pokeblocks from here if I wanted to do it without the special berries. While using those recipes would no doubt have been less of a hassle, the idea of having my Pokemon consume all of the e-Reader berries tickled my completionist fancy. After having the necessary save files set up, it was “simply” a matter of running four instances of VBA Link, playing the Berry Blender minigame in 4P mode, and swapping the save files around a bunch as necessary in order to make all of the Pokeblocks. My Emerald save was player 1, and player 2 could stay the same the whole time; players 3 and 4 got swapped around a lot. The “primary” blocks were the most annoying, as each one required a unique configuration of those files; the ten “fillers” all use Nutpea and Kuo as e-Reader berries go so they could all be done in one go with the same configuration afterward. One thing I learned while doing this is that the red progress bar (which determines when the minigame ends) only advances when the players do button presses. I don’t think it’s entirely fixed at a certain number of inputs; it might advance different amounts depending on whether the button press is perfect, good or miss. Trying to control 4 players at once is trickier than it looks, I couldn’t work out a button mapping that felt intuitive and the best score I ended up with was around 96 RPM (hence the primary blocks ending up at 150/98). I do better than that with NPCs. (During my first attempt at this, I completed most of the “primary” blocks and then had a boneheaded file-manipulation mishap, accidentally deleting my working directory for this project in a way that ended up being unrecoverable (even after dumping some money on a licence for a recovery program, I’d been moving too many things around too often for there to be anything stable to find). This was painful; I think I literally screamed when I realised. Thankfully I had sufficient backups not to lose my Emerald save or Goofy himself, but it was bad enough and the amount of work I had to redo was very frustrating. In retrospect, I regretted not thinking to name him Smeagol, because my aggravation at this proved he is my preciousss (and it sounds like Smeargle).) Anyway, here’s the only interesting screenshot to show from this process:  Here I am starting a round of Berry Blender with 4 instances, this was the 5th primary block (Grepa/Salac/Pumkin/Topo). The interesting thing is that each player here is seeing a different berry sprite go in simultaneously; normally, they go in sequence, so everyone sees P1’s berry first, then P2’s berry, and so on. But when an e-Reader berry goes in, it gets weirder: since the berry sprite data is in the actual cards, each player sees whichever sprite is loaded in their file regardless of what the actual berry is. This screenshot was either the third or fourth berry that went in; I don’t remember which, since it ends up repeating the same sprites twice. P1 (upper left) here is the Emerald file; May always sees the sprite for the Enigma Berry (which is the placeholder entry when there’s no e-Reader berry, English Emerald can’t see any others since it has no e-Reader functionality). P2 (upper right) sees the Nutpea Berry, which happens to be the one that file had, even though there’s no Nutpea Berry anywhere in the recipe. P3 (lower left) sees the Pumkin Berry, and P4 (lower right) sees the Topo Berry. Despite this oddity, the stats of the output Pokeblock correctly reflect the berries that were chosen, not the sprites that were shown going in (I worried about this the first time I saw it). Every player receives an identical copy of the Pokeblock. Results: Ribbons and Paintings And here’s the reward for having done this: Goofy’s ribbon collection. As far as I know, these 27 ribbons are all that’s currently available in generation 3 (according to Bulbapedia there were some event ribbons given out at official tournaments and such, but these would be incredibly rare and obviously I have no way to get those). 21 of them are contest-related, as you’ll see.  Champion Ribbon (“Champion-beating, Hall Of Fame Member Ribbon”) Given to any pokemon in the party upon beating the Kanto (FR/LG) or Hoenn (RSE) Elite Four. Contest Ribbons (“$Category Contest $RankName Rank Winner!”) Normal/Super/Hyper/Master rank ribbons for each of Cool/Beauty/Cute/Smart/Tough contest categories. 4 ribbons in each of 5 categories makes 20 total. You get awarded the ribbon the first time the Pokemon wins the appropriate contest, and a Pokemon can’t be entered in a higher-rank contest unless it already has the ribbons for the lower ranks. For better or worse, it’s really not worth showing screenshots of the actual contests. They can be fun to play at times, but there’s not a whole lot to see, and even the most difficult NPC opponents don’t offer any challenge to a pokemon like this. He crushed everything. Winning Ribbon (“For clearing Lv 50 at the Battle Tower”) Victory Ribbon (“For clearing Open Level at the Battle Tower”) These were the toughest ribbons to get. They’re given to all three pokemon in the party when you win a series of 7 battles in the Battle Tower, provided your streak is at least 50 battles long. The party can change between rounds, so there was no need to actually have Goofy in the party for the entire streak; I could use a full team of three for most of it and then only sub him in for the round that mattered (I admit to doing a bit of savestate abuse here so I wouldn’t have to redo the previous rounds). For obvious reasons he didn’t really fight (especially in Open Level). I had him learn Endure temporarily to cheese things with Destiny Bond where possible (it’s kind of like the FEAR strategy in later gens but worse: he’d use Endure to activate the Salac Berry and get +1 speed stage, then try to outspeed with Destiny Bond the next turn and take the enemy with him). Goofy doesn’t like fighting, but if you hit him he’ll make you regret it. If I couldn’t pull this off, at least he could do a sacrifice play to give me a free switch-in. Dragging him through these battles was definitely a challenge, but it was more interesting than I thought it would be. Artist Ribbon (“Ribbon for being chosen as a super sketch model”) If you win a Master-rank contest with a good enough score (800 points), and have already met the curator in Lilycove Museum, an artist will paint a portrait of the Pokemon and offer to have it displayed there. The first time you accept this offer, he’ll give the Pokemon this ribbon. The ribbon doesn’t prevent the Pokemon from being painted again as long as it’s not already in the museum for that category; I’ll show the paintings momentarily. Effort Ribbon (“Ribbon awarded for being a hard worker”) An NPC in Slateport City’s open-air marketplace will give this ribbon to your lead pokemon if it has maximum (510 total) Effort Values (EVs). I think this one’s mainly in the game to give you a way to find out if you’ve maxed the EVs, but collectors can’t be picky. National Ribbon (“Ribbon awarded for clearing all challenges”) The description of this ribbon is nonsense. It’s actually awarded to Shadow Pokemon when you purify them in Colosseum or XD, and the reason Goofy needed to be that particular Smeargle. Only pokemon that started out as Shadow in those games are eligible for the maximum ribbon count. Apparently, according to Bulbapedia, the description of this ribbon isn’t in the game naturally and will be blank if it’s hacked in rather than trading properly from the Gamecube. Earth Ribbon (“100 straight win commemorative ribbon”) This is awarded to every pokemon in the party when completing Mount Battle start to finish uninterrupted in Colosseum or XD (during the story mode, not Colosseum’s Battle Mode). Unlike the National Ribbon, this one is still theoretically available to any pokemon, provided you can transfer it to a Gamecube game. This one also doesn’t have its description properly set if you hack it in. The other reward is having these paintings in Lilycove Museum:      This is art and perfect in every way, I will not hear otherwise. There are several different possible captions for each of them, I think three? Regardless, they’re often hilarious, especially if you named the pokemon something silly like Goofy. I also think it’s quite neat seeing the same pokemon rendered in all of these different filters and backgrounds. Well, there you have it, my best shot at an "ultimate" Pokemon Contest competitor, and a complete Generation 3 ribbon collection (and no doubt proof that I am utterly insane). Was it worth it? Honestly, probably not, but I enjoyed working out how to do it and at the very least I'm glad it turned out to be possible. Explopyro fucked around with this message at 20:35 on May 2, 2018 |
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Apr 29, 2018 20:29
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Done. Thanks. I'd originally planned to leave it on the test poster so people could ignore it if they wanted, but if you prefer it inline with the thread that's good too. It's always been weird to me how much effort Game Freak puts into these side modes, only for them to fall by the wayside and get ignored by most players (I don't blame players for ignoring them either, considering how little they end up mattering in the games themselves). This one happens to have been my favourite, but a lot of them are drat good for what they are and a lot more interesting than they seem at first glance. Edited to add: I'm not going to claim to be some kind of expert on this either, I'm sure there are people somewhere who have come up with better strategies than me. (Also, a lot of the stuff I did is probably incredibly unnecessary, I know people have gotten complete ribbon collections on pokemon other than Smeargle. If you have perfect stats, you barely need to care about the moveset and you certainly don't need to optimise it as much as I tried to do, and especially if you're more concerned with ribbons than paintings. The expression "gilding the lily" certainly comes to mind.) And fun as this was, I think I'd actually encourage people to go with the 5-man contest team strategy rather than something like this, because having more variety when playing through all of the contests is a plus. Doing the same moves in the same order 20 times in a row gets pretty tedious, whereas a team like you used in the LP can at least have some variation in the play styles. Explopyro fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Apr 30, 2018 |
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Apr 29, 2018 21:37
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This team's proving a lot more effective than I'd been expecting it to, Gregg in particular - I've never used Glalie and was always very unimpressed by how it looked on paper, but it seems to be working out for you. Likewise with Calbrena, I've never really thought to use these kind of Curse strategies (I've used the move plenty, but always the non-ghost version...), but the AI certainly doesn't seem to know how to deal with it. I think we're still in the stage of Game Freak not quite knowing how to design boss encounters, because it makes no sense to give the Elite Four pokemon that aren't fully evolved (nor to have so many repetitions in their teams). Of course this isn't the first time it's happened (at least it'll be the last), but in gen 1 and 2 at least I put it down to trying for variety since there were so few pokemon of the type. Then they just keep doing it. Likewise, they basically cop out on the berry/held item system in this game, gym leaders and E4 all seem to be given one Sitrus Berry on their ace pokemon and that's it. I guess it's nice to see something, but it never manages to be more than a minor annoyance, it neither provides meaningful challenge nor shows off the mechanics they designed. I don't exactly mind Wallace as Champion, but Steven definitely has the more interesting team and probably works better with the pacing (as you say, there's already plenty of water, and we just had Juan). At least the abundance of water pokemon in Hoenn means Wallace could still have a varied team with different strategies to use, and Steven's still in the game, so I won't complain much. I'm looking forward to seeing how you handle the postgame stuff.
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May 2, 2018 07:05
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Dr. Fetus posted:Slaking (DonkeyKong) @Choice Band I was going to suggest a guy very similar to this, the Battle Frontier deserves absolutely no mercy. No such thing as overkill here. But since Dr Fetus already has that covered, let's try something else. For the Battle Pyramid and Battle Pike, how about a healer to absorb status and patch up the rest of your team? Joy the Blissey (@no held item because Pyramid, otherwise Leftovers) Nature: Bold Ability: Natural Cure EVs: 252 HP/252 Def/6 SpD Seismic Toss, Toxic, Minimise, Softboiled I've had some fun with this one in the Tower, too, although it's more of a gimmick than anything else and admittedly I've found it backfires as often as it works (maybe you'll be better at prediction than me). Might be fun to play with if you feel like it. RNGesus the Shedinja (@Focus Band) Nature: Adamant/Naughty/Lonely Ability: Wonder Guard EVs: 252 Attack/252 Speed Shadow Ball, Silver Wind, Swords Dance, Protect Edit: In case it wasn't clear, Joy is my serious submission if you only pick one. The Shedinja set is just for fun if you want to mess around with some offbeat/silly gimmick pokemon. Explopyro fucked around with this message at 18:50 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 05:06
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Fyi, that Shedinja set is probably going to fail horribly in the Arena, especially if you leave Protect on it (Protect is expliicitly penalised but setup in general is a bad strategy there). Maybe swap Protect out for Aerial Ace, or even Agility. Of course, if you mainly wanted to show off the quirks of the scoring system, by all means use my submission to do it
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May 4, 2018 23:48
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Good luck weathering the Bullshit Frontier (and I hope our submissions serve you well!). Hopefully it won't end up being quite as painful as it always is for me. I really wanted to like the Emerald Battle Frontier: loads of effort clearly went into it, and a lot of the facilities are really creative and sound like they'd be quite fun on paper (come on, they even threw in a Roguelike mode! This should be awesome!). And I liked the idea of a more challenging mode, because the main game content in Pokemon games tends to be rather easy. But it just ends up being so gruelling and punishing that any fun there could be quickly gets sucked out of it, at least in my opinion. I've never completed it without at least some savestate abuse. There's also just something that makes battle facility battles feel qualitatively different to anything else in the game, and to my mind not in a good way; I'm not sure if it's the lack of experience/money gain (even though at this point you don't need them) making it feel like there's no progression, or something else... On the other hand, this was the first game to have a Battle Factory and that one was honestly a pretty good idea. There are still moments when it can feel unfair (especially if the RNG gives you lousy choices for your team), but I suspect that's just the human tendency to misinterpret randomness rather than the game actually being biased against the player.
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May 5, 2018 06:00
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Crosspeice posted:You might think since we're solely seeing Pokemon from Group 3 they'll all have max IVs and all that? Well, no actually, the Pokemon you face are linked to your streak in the Battle Tower, so if you do this facility first, then every Pokemon you face will have 3 IVs max (aside from Trainer 7 who's upgraded to the next set, so they have 6 IVs). Otherwise, if you get to battle 100 for everything, then all Pokemon in the Factory will have 31 IVs from the start. This, however, does no apply to your Pokemon, they gain IVs as you go through the sets like normal, but if you trade a Pokemon, they'll have 3 IVs. It's not a huge deal, feel free to trade away, until you get up to the higher streaks. What. What the hell? How did I not know this? (Do you mind linking to your source, if it has any more detail on how this works?) So this is basically just a "gently caress you if you didn't do this facility first, or if you liked it and want to play it more later"? (Or I guess some of that depends whether it's your "current" or "best" Tower streak that gets used, do you happen to know which?) What is game design? Who on earth could have possibly thought this was a good idea? (Then again, I could also see this being a sort of bug or unintended consequence of how they implemented things. Maybe they didn't have room for multiple algorithms to generate opposing pokemon, and the scaling factor intended for the Battle Tower ended up coming along to all the other facilities without them noticing? It'd make as much sense as anything else, though I'm just speculating here.) On another note, I do find it weird that for the Battle Factory, Open Level tends to be easier and more fun than Level 50. I've never managed to get very far in Level 50 mode, because the sets it starts you off with tend to be full of either "unevolved things with decent moves" or "evolved things with awful moves" and either way you get screwed. It always feels to me like there's a lot more variance in what it can give you there, which is never great in a mode that's all about adapting to randomness. As for all of the manga updates... wow, this stuff is mental. I don't even know what to say.
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May 7, 2018 17:30
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Oh, that speedrun! Thanks for reminding me. I've had that earmarked to watch since it went up, but never quite got around to it because it's bloody long and I haven't had the time. Should really get around to that one of these days... I went and poked around on his pastebin stuff (you're right, there's really a lot of great info there) and found this page, which seems to have even more info on the IV thing and makes it a lot clearer. Well, clear as mud, because these mechanics make no sense, but at least it describes what's going on. (Apparently if your streak is higher than 8 rounds, they all get completely random IVs like wild pokemon instead of the fixed ones?) And at least it's your most recent streak, so you can manipulate it if you want to and don't get permanently locked out... but you still need to know it's a thing.
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May 8, 2018 15:32
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I like Steven's team a lot. Giving him the two fossils fits his character pretty well, and also gives him better team diversity than most of the 'pick a type' style trainers. Of course, there's also the random Claydol, which is a bit odd in an otherwise well-planned team for the character, and Aggron's wonky moveset so who knows what GF were thinking. I'm pretty impressed at you taking him on with such an underlevelled team, too. re: the roaming Lati@s, I'm surprised you didn't talk about the Acro Bike trick. If you know what you're doing, this is one of the few roamers' whose annoyance can almost entirely be mitigated. I can't claim credit for the method and I forget where I first learned it, but regardless, hopping in place still triggers encounters without counting as steps for purposes of things like Repels or the Safari Zone. So you can go somewhere like the entrance to Cycling Road on Route 110, where there's grass very near a door you can use to quickly reset the route, pick a lead pokemon just under Lati@s' level, use Repel and hop for a bit to check if it's there or not. If you use Wynaut/Wobbuffet you can also save your Master Ball, you can trap it and use Mirror Coat to weaken it fairly reliably. That said, roaming pokemon are still horrendous bullshit and I hate them. rannum posted:Worth noting something about the roaming legendaries: They actually fixed that bug in Emerald! It's accurate for R/S and FR/LG though. There is one other oddity worth discussing, though: the IVs and nature etc of the roaming pokemon are saved when it's generated by the game (in this one, when you decide what colour BZZT is), not when you capture it, so it's very difficult to reset for them if that's something you'd want to do.
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May 10, 2018 18:14
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Ugh, the Palace is awful. It looks like you at least had some amusing moments come up, but yeah, this place has basically no redeeming qualities. I was a bit surprised you went with all-out attacking movesets, but I guess it worked! I always tried to make sure I had at least one move from each category to minimise the chance of doing nothing (I don't really mind pulling a setup move, it's better than wasting the turn and it still benefits further attacks). I seem to remember liking Hasty nature the best, since it goes from 58% attack and 37% defence to 88% attack after 50% HP, so if it does pull a setup move at least odds are it'll do it before attacking. Otherwise, most of the natures that go 56/22/22 seem easiest to work with, even if they tend not to be the best stats-wise (one of the unfortunate things about the Palace is that the natures people tend to like best for competitive mons, like you'd want to use in the rest of the Frontier, tend to be less effective). Though, that said, favouring otherwise-suboptimal natures and movesets actually means this is one of the few facilities you can attempt with an ingame team. I remember doing well one time with a Hasty Gardevoir running Psychic/Thunderbolt/Calm Mind/Hypnosis, though I can't for the life of me remember anything else I've used here. Still, it doesn't matter how well you optimise your team for its special requirements (with the information it doesn't give you), in the end it still comes down to luck more often than not. Game design!
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May 16, 2018 06:58
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... I completely forgot Trainer Hill existed, I don't think I've ever played it. It looks like fun, I might have to give it a go one of these days even though the time limits are insane. Great Balls for everyone, I guess. Fun to see the Arena submissions here too, that was a good idea even if RNGesus didn't get to do all that much. Honestly, I'm pleased it got to do anything, though I'm disappointed the Focus Band never went off. All of the battle facilities in this game seem to really like punishing Shedinja; I don't think I noticed how ubiquitously they put Shadow Ball on physical mons until running one, for instance (and then Rock Slide, Aerial Ace, and Fire Blast tend to be pretty much everywhere also, when you don't run into Toxic or sandstorms). It's enough to make me wonder if they misjudged how dangerous Wonder Guard was and wanted to make drat sure it wouldn't be a viable strategy. Still, it's loads of fun when it does work.
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May 22, 2018 17:49
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Crosspeice posted:Well that's a different way of healing our Pokemon. The Lucky Punch isn't usually obtainable unless you get lucky (hah) with wild hold items. It boosts Chansey's crit ratio by two stages, which is pretty useless. The Lucky Egg is, as you'd expect, what wild Chansey have a chance of holding. Are you sure this is what you intended to say? The Lucky Punch doesn't appear as a wild held item, this one here is the only way to get it in gen 3 (okay, there's also one in XD). Not that that matters, because it's such a useless item, I've never been able to think of a reason to use it. I'd have loved to have had it on gen 1 Chansey, of course. The wild held items were actually a pretty neat idea, even if the implementation is questionable since they've specified so many of them on things that never appear in the wild. Some of the things that are available are still pretty good, though, and they keep tweaking it in later gens. And it's way too much fun swiping held items off trainers, it's a shame that went away in later games. I really like the Elite Four rematches in FR/LG, the new teams end up being a lot more interesting to fight. Edit: new page, go back for Crosspiece's LP update if you missed it.
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May 27, 2018 23:40
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Hey, we got to see RNGesus do something! I'd like to say I'm surprised it worked out in the Arena (I thought the inability to switch out would really hurt your ability to use Shedinja), but you also had DonkeyKong with it and that covers for a lot of faults. At least the Focus Band went off a couple of times One of the craziest things I've ever seen in Pokemon was a battle where I had that go off twice in a row, lasting three turns with a Shedinja and taking down something that it should've had no chance against. Then I lost the battle anyway. It's fun, but it's so RNG dependent that it's not really a good strategy. Speaking of DonkeyKong, it really seems like Choice Band Slaking is an ideal choice for a lot of the Battle Frontier. A lot of these facilities seem to reward going for an all-out attacking strategy and it's hard to get better at it than that. I've noticed some weirdness around how it works, though, especially with Hyper Beam - I was hoping we might see it come up in your playthrough, but since it didn't I'll talk about it (I only noticed this recently and it confused me until I worked out what was going on). The penalties for Hyper Beam and Truant work differently and combining them isn't as natural a combo as it appears at first glance: Truant lets you select a move on the penalty turn and doesn't apply the penalty until after you've done that, so if you would rather switch out than eat the penalty you can, while Hyper Beam locks you in and takes the second turn automatically. This means there's still a bit of a cost to using Hyper Beam in addition to its lower accuracy, and honestly it's so much overkill that the right choice might be to run Return instead. But there's just something so satisfying about it when it works... [Edit: I should add, I don't have the slightest clue why Truant did what it did in the case you showed.] I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but there's a bit of weirdness around the berries Scott gives you (of course I'm going to talk about berries, am I a stereotype of myself yet?). If you look at the tag, it claims they have every flavour, so they seem to have been intended to be good for Pokeblocks as well. But because of the zero-sum way the formulas work (each flavour's value gets subtracted from the one to its left) this is exactly equivalent to having 0 flavour and makes them completely useless for that purpose. The in-battle effects are the only useful thing about them, and both Lansat and Starf are a bit underwhelming although I can imagine them having their uses. Anyway, congrats on making the Battle Frontier look so easy! Explopyro fucked around with this message at 19:27 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 16:25
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Thanks for another excellent LP. I think you've given me too much credit, frankly, my contributions were fairly minor although obviously I'm glad to have been of assistance. For better or worse, Gen 3 is the one I know the most esoterica about, so while I'll be following along with future LPs I doubt I'll have as much to contribute in the future. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing you do the Orre games, there's a lot to enjoy in them and I think they tend to be underrated or overlooked by a lot of people. As far as concrit goes, since you've asked for it, I don't have that much to say except that I think your instinct to cover battles more is the right one. I'm not exactly sure what the right way to go about it is, but "trainer text - skip battle" definitely hollows things out too much (and/or focuses in on the wrong things, since the trainer text is mostly inane). At the same time, I understand why you did it, because there are a lot of monotonous fodder battles and most of them have nothing interesting happen, I just think "only show when they have a pokemon we've not seen yet in the LP" was a step too far. We don't need a blow-by-blow, and maybe nothing interesting happens at all, but battling is the core of these games and it's weird to barely see it in an LP. I have no idea if that makes any sense? That said, Orre certainly isn't going to give you that problem, and maybe moving forward into Platinum and beyond the enemy teams will be more interesting to comment on, so it's entirely possible a happy medium will emerge naturally. I guess we'll have to see.
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May 30, 2018 18:59
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