Greymore

Hello ! I just read your paper and, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think there is a slight flaw in the logic with respect to its title. The paper aims at providing the "optimal Safari Zone strategy" but what it actually does is providing the catching probability of a single Pokémon encoutered in the Safari Zone depending on the action of the player (ball, bait or rock), which is a different thing in my opinion. In my understanding, an "optimal Safari Zone strategy" should focus on optimizing the player actions to catch as many of the Pokémon you're looking for in a single Safari Zone run. For example, let's say I want to catch a rare Safari Zone Pokémon (e.g. Tauros). I may run around for like 5 minutes and waste like 200 steps to finally get one to appear. When it does appear, your paper is probably right that my best strategy to catch this particular one Pokémon is just to throw balls at it. However, it fails to account for the cost of failure. If the Pokémon does flee, then I'm down for 5 more minutes of running around and wasting 200 more steps. I am most well served by first throwing a bait then throw balls while the Pokémon is eating (and repeat when it stops eating) because that reduces the flee rate and having the pokémon flee in this scenario is costly in terms of time and money. The opposite example is let's say I want to catch a very common Safari Zone Pokémon (e.g. Magikarp). In this case the limiting factor of my run is the number of Safari Balls because I don't really care if the Magikarp flees as I can just fish up a new one directly. That means I am most well served by throwing a rock at it first because that means I will have to throw less Safari Balls overall, which means more Magikarps caught on a single run, thus being a more optimal run. Because of the above, I think the flee rate should be weighted in some way by the encounter rate (e) to truly be an optimal strategy. I expect you would end up with a formula with c, f, and e rather than "only throw balls". To decide which is the optimal Safari Zone strategy to farm for a given Pokémon, you'd then need to enter its values for c, f and e in the formula and, depending on the result, I expect either "bait then balls" (for low encounter rates and high flee rates) or "rock then balls" (for high encounter rates and low flee rates) to be the optimal strategy. What do you think ? To be honest, I'm too lazy (and less capable than you) to actually do the actual maths for those.

I already use a Damp Quagsire with Thief. I told you, I used to farmed these all day long, and yes I used to get one after 10-15 min, but now I can't get a single one. Did any of you get an everstone from a Geodude in Magma Hideout recently ? And by recently I mean something like during the previous week ?

Were you farming those more than 5 months ago ? Because I was, and I was getting more than 2 Everstones per 100 Geodude average. It was more like 10 for 100.

I thought it too when I farmed them for an hour or so, but after multiple hours without a single drop, I refuse to believe it's only bad luck. I used to make money only from selling these, there is no way the drop rate was not changed. I had the same issue with Koffings in Fiery Path, none of them where holding Smoke Ball, while the ones in Pokemon Mansion did. I'm pretty sure some held items were either nerfed or removed. Thank you for the Full Editor trick !

Oh yes sorry, I edited the original question, thanks !

Hello, I've been farming everstones held by Geodudes in Magma Hideout in Hoenn for multiple hours now, and I didn't got a single one. Months ago, I was farming them whole day long and I'm 100% sure they were a lot more common. I read a recent post from DarkShade that was asserting that everstones hold ratio wasn't changed at all by the recent updates, but I cannot believe it considering how awful the drop rate is right now compared to what it was months ago. I use a level 30 Quagsire, and the Geodudes are something around 27-33, so it can't be the thief mechanic messing things up. Does someone have any information on the subject ? Did I miss another changelog which removed the everstones from wild geodudes in Magma Hideout specifically ? Best regards, David

Thanks for for the clarification, at least it is doable without having to level a whole team to 100 ! :) However, it then prevents me from leveling my Pokemon if I want to. I still think a proper Tournament Mode would be a lot more flexible.

Hello, As we already have the code for setting all Pokemon to level 50 for the purpose of PvP, why not use it for the Trainer Tower ? I don't really see the point of having to raise all my pokemon to level 100 just for the Trainer Tower, when it is not required for PvP.

If you ever implement this, please add an option to disable them and display their current text-equivalent instead.

I also want to show support for having the egg scientist stay still. The bare minimum would be to make him walk slower, right now he's just very frustrating. He's talking about a machine though, so it would completely make sense to have him standing still near the said machine which could be some kind of dock on his desk.