Barrage

Probably because they're purely cosmetic for the most part. Rarity is cool when obtention is feasible.

me and giantpipe in 10 minutes edit: ninja'd

Barrage (yours truly) vs Gunthug in 10 minutes https://play.pokemonshowdown.com/battle-gen4ou-715672425

My match with Jostarr scheduled to occur between 3 and 4pm EST today. Get hype!

I'm obviously best grill and I should also be mayor because of reasons

IGN: Barrage Timezone: EST Tiers: Uhhhhhhh lend me stuff and I'll play anything Fluff: I'm washed up but I want to play. Last (and only) time I played in PSL I had an 80%+ winrate and carried team to finals like some kind of dark horse god tbh Most Preferred Manager: idk, who tf are you guys even. gimme someone who can harass me on discord to play because there is a 99% chance I will forget Least Preferred Manager: I don't want no scrubs

In a metagame without weather wars or any legendaries, I'm pretty sure dragons are gonna be pretty fuckin' nuts. I acknowledge this has nothing to do with the topic at hand but I wanted to weigh in on it anyway.

Consider that the "ceiling" of power (the highest level of power available) in a metagame or environment is x. The absolute value of x is irrelevant because no matter how you adjust the ceiling, there will always be things close to x and things below x. There's not much point in trying to lower it because of that. I am not suggesting that Pokemon at power level x should always be used in PvE encounters by the AI either. I was suggesting that PvE encounters have unique components that make them difficult to solve, which could include implementing mechanics that don't exist in PvP. It was suggested that having too many differences between PvE and PvP would not teach players about or segway them from one to the other, but that all depends on your design, since as I mentioned before, Pokemon's battle system revolves around only a few core concepts. I hope that explains my ideas a little better.

Could you clarify what is meant by "density of PvE gameplay", as well as clearly state the concerns around it?

Read my other post, baka. Also, : Pretty sure that's what he was saying.

It sounds like a major concern is that players would not be able to use Pokemon they might use in PvE in their PvP encounters because of tiering. A world where the player can use every Pokemon obtainable in PvP and have the PvP environment be balanced is likely not achievable, which is not necessarily a bad thing. If PvE encounters are profitable, it actually diversifies the economy that certain Pokemon are very powerful in PvE environments and are not otherwise used in PvP. This creates an economy where different Pokemon have value for different reasons, rather than eclipsing each other because they have synonymous roles with varying levels of strength. I hope that makes sense. If you're interested, we could have a discussion about it over voice chat sometime.

Posting on this account for credibility? :^) It is certainly in the interest of the game's health and longevity, specifically for more casual players, to aim for symmetry between PvE and PvP. However, I'd argue that the existence of an Uber tier and the aforementioned symmetry are not mutually exclusive. I feel like an elegant and simple solution is just to raise the difficulty of PvE encounters to suit the strength of what would otherwise be classified as ubers in PvP. One such way of doing this is by creating PvE encounters that aim to defeat strategies which would be generically powerful. I would turn to Hearthstone's PvE encounters to demonstrate this idea. Many of the PvE encounters in Hearthstone that have been recently have very specific conditions that urge a player to come up with certain strategies to beat the encounter. It is nearly impossible to use a generically powerful PvP deck in these PvE encounters because they have conditions which do not exist in PvP settings (in other words, the AI is cheating). Additionally, some of these PvE encounters have "obvious" solutions, and the designers predicted that by implementing ways to specifically punish those easy solutions, prompting the player to become even more creative. I think this example is particularly transferable to Pokemon because Hearthstone is a card game which has very similar components and pacing to Pokemon; it is a turn-based game which requires the player to navigate encounters with a predetermined set of tools (deck in Hearthstone, team in Pokemon). One concern with this approach might be that it doesn't "teach" players PvP, but I would argue that although my suggestion implies the potential introduction of mechanics that do not otherwise exist in PvP interactions, Pokemon PvP is based around a few core concepts that could be emphasized in PvE contexts similarly even with the addition of mechanics or with design choices that specifically target obvious solutions. Ultimately, PvE interactions are always soluble while PvP interactions are not because PvE is inherently less dynamic than PvP. No matter what, people will always find optimal strategies to defeat PvE interactions, so trying to achieve symmetry with PvE and PvP is pointless. One has a static state while the other is dynamic. However, urging players to come up with new and creative ways of defeating PvE encounters is what makes them exciting and engaging. If a player could use a generically powerful strategy that they derived from PvP, I would argue that it reflects poor design, whether we are talking about ubers or not.

Same

Is this one of those threads about the Chinese cartoons?

Scared?