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Genderless Breeding


Kizhaz

Question

In the past we could breed genderless pokemon with other pokemon in their respective egg groups. With the introduction of the new breeding system I feel it would be best to revert back to this change as breeding them with just ditto can be an almost impossible job. It's easy to get 2x31 with random nature, but from there it gets difficult as you cant breed ditto's together to get a better parent, instead you have to rely on catching a decent ditto as the parent.

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Ive thought about this. I the only thing that i can think this suggestion would do thats a negative thing is get rid of the difference in value for genderless pokes and others. Im not sure that thats a good enough reason to not go with this idea. Im all about a healthy economy, and the variety the current mechanics add to the game is healthy, but it seems like the current mechanics hurt the comp scene more than it benefits the economy. 

Edited by codylramey
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Since the PTS is about to close down and the next update will arrive, it is important to gather attention to this matter to avoid another 6 months where this game is borderline unplayable. This is a continuation of my analysis of the new breeding system made in this post: https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/52597-opinions-on-new-breeding/?p=1070075I have put all of irrelevant thing for this matter in that post. Here I will elaborate about the issue of genderless breeding.

 

The new breeding system laid the foundation for being able to manipulate breeding to get exactly the offspring you want, eradicating huge portions of luck. It also laid the foundation for a healthy economy. This did however not concern genderless breeding.

 

In order to fully manipulate the quality of a pokemon, it is important to be able to chain breed. In particular, it is important that both of the parents can be obtained by breeding. Genderless pokemon (and all-male pokemon) are only able to breed with ditto, a pokemon that can not be obtained via breeding. This causes some serious issues. In order to create a pokemon of excellent quality, you need to breed to pokemon of slightly lower quality together. However, since these pokemon are likely of higher quality that those you find in the wild, you will have to get these pokemon from breeding. Since ditto can not be obtained via breeding, what you need to do is to find a ditto of exceptionally high quality in the wild, which is practically impossible. In fact, it is almost as difficult as finding an exceptionally high quality genderless pokemon in the wild. The main reason why people even bother with breeding genderless pokemon rather than catching them in the wild is the fact that ditto has a much higher encounter rate than the majority of genderless pokemon. By the time you have found a ditto of the same quality as the genderless pokemon you want, you have likely also found a chain of dittos of increasing quality that will allow you to chain breed the genderless pokemon you are interested in. The only problem is, as mentioned, that finding a ditto of this quality is highly improbably, making it practically impossible.

 

There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, some of which case yet other issues. For example, allowing ditto to breed with each other causes massive centralization around ditto, making it literally the most valuable pokemon in the entire game. This is undesireable. Allowing genderless pokemon to breed with other pokemon within the same egg group causes some questions of what spieces the offspring will be. Of course, one can make a feauture similar to the gender-selection feature, but if you pair a gendered and non-gendered pokemon and choose the offspring to be the gendered one, will you also be able to choose the gender? It just seems to be overly complicated and weird.

 

The solution that I propose is to make genderless pokemon be able to breed with its own species. This at least allows genderless pokemon to be chain bred like other pokemon, and causes no issues with what the offsrping will be. Ditto should of course be unable to breed with other ditto. Now, I want to bust a couple of potential issues:

-Potential issue 1: Ditto will become useless

This is not true - ditto is not only able to breed with all genderless pokemon, but every single pokemon in the game. Ditto has useful properties such as "converting" a male pokemon into a female pokemon. This is particularly usefull for spieces such as eevee, which has exteremely low encounter rate and very high male ratio. Furthermore, ditto is easier to obtain than most genderless pokemon in the game (for example beldum,) making it desireable for breeding the initial parents of breeding chains.

-Potenital issue 2: Genderless pokemon will not be rare anymore/too easy to obtain

This is arguably wrong. Almost every pokemon in the game belongs to an egg group that conatins pokemon that have 100% encounter rate in certain places. Considering that certain genderless pokemon have an encounter rate of 5% (or less?) it is much more time consuming finding genderless breeders, even when taking ditto into consideration. I'm not sure how difficult you want it to be, but being at least ten times as time consuming as breeding any other pokemon seems sufficient for me.

 

Lastly I want to mention that even after this is implemented, there are a couple of issues that need fixing; All-male pokemon are still practically impossible to obtain, and so is porygon (since it can't be found in the wild.) Another one is shedinja, although strictly speaking it only has two relevant stats, so the current system is not that bad (considering nobody wants a shedinja anyways.)

 

Another note: Something being practically impossible to obtain is not necessarily an issue. For instance, shinies are practically impossible to encounter. The reason why it is a strong argument in this case is that genderless pokemon are necessary to engage on the biggest part of the game, competetive play. Shinies are just useless trophies.

 

I will do something I normally don't and add this for people who don't care about arguments:

tl;dr: Let genderless pokemon breed with it's own species.

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make them 50/50 m/f so you could breed them with other egg groups/eachother

This... Probably isn't ever going to happen. A female Nidoran m, Tauros, Volbeat and Hitmon would be bizarre to say the least. Ditto has a very high encounter rate, and unlike certain genderless Pokemon, none of the male-only lines need Hidden Power. The only two that could possibly make use of it are able to be produced from their female counterparts (when gender selection is fixed for Nidoran f and Illumise eggs). If the system is ever tweaked to make male-only Pokemon easier to breed, it almost certainly won't be done by making them potentially female.

 

Let genderless pokemon breed with it's own species.

I can't really comment much on genderless breeding as I'm pretty neutral on the subject, but I personally don't see a huge issue with it outside of obtaining the right Hidden Power on the ones that can make use of it - I will agree that there's a problem there, but I just don't see a problem with genderless breeding as a whole. Sure, they're harder to obtain than most others, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design standpoint and the same can be said about male-only Pokemon. I'd argue that the difficulty gap and increased value of certain species is actually a good thing. The vast majority of genderless Pokemon don't require 31 speed as they don't fully invest in it, and with the exception of Beldum and Porygon, they're all relatively common in the wild. While undeniably good, Metagross and Porygon2 are by no means absolutely essential for a new player's first team, yet are arguably worth the price and effort for someone who really wants one. Aside from Hidden Power, I'm not entirely convinced that a change in genderless breeding needs to happen, but I won't shut the idea down either.

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This thread is about what people expect about future updates.

 

If you let genderless breed with other genderless, this doesn't mean the end of breeding with ditto.

For example, if you want to breed a good Beldum and if you already have a good Lunatone, then catch 2 good Ditto to breed with both Beldum and Lunatone and then finally breed the new born Beldum and Lunatone !

 

The only problem I can see is what species the new born will be (Beldum ? Lunatone ? Maybe we'll need to $$$ to choose the species...)

 

This way will probably change economy of genderless but when I see random Metang with 2/3*31 and sh*t nature being sold at 500k on trade chat, it's kinda fcked anyway

Edited by Gilvy
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There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, some of which case yet other issues. For example, allowing ditto to breed with each other causes massive centralization around ditto, making it literally the most valuable pokemon in the entire game. This is undesireable. Allowing genderless pokemon to breed with other pokemon within the same egg group causes some questions of what spieces the offspring will be. Of course, one can make a feauture similar to the gender-selection feature, but if you pair a gendered and non-gendered pokemon and choose the offspring to be the gendered one, will you also be able to choose the gender? It just seems to be overly complicated and weird.

 

The solution that I propose is to make genderless pokemon be able to breed with its own species. This at least allows genderless pokemon to be chain bred like other pokemon, and causes no issues with what the offsrping will be. Ditto should of course be unable to breed with other ditto. Now, I want to bust a couple of potential issues:

 

I was thinking that if a genderless bred with a male pokemon, the egg would be the genderless where as breeding it with a female gives the egg as that mother's kind, allowing you to pick it's gender still ect. ect. This creates less confusion and still abides by the current 'rules'.

I have always agreed with breeding with in it's species as they are in the same egg group, although if there are two different species of genderless in the same egg group I can see an issue arising about what's in the egg

 

 

I can't really comment much on genderless breeding as I'm pretty neutral on the subject, but I personally don't see a huge issue with it outside of obtaining the right Hidden Power on the ones that can make use of it - I will agree that there's a problem there, but I just don't see a problem with genderless breeding as a whole. Sure, they're harder to obtain than most others, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design standpoint and the same can be said about male-only Pokemon. I'd argue that the difficulty gap and increased value of certain species is actually a good thing. The vast majority of genderless Pokemon don't require 31 speed as they don't fully invest in it, and with the exception of Beldum and Porygon, they're all relatively common in the wild. While undeniably good, Metagross and Porygon2 are by no means absolutely essential for a new player's first team, yet are arguably worth the price and effort for someone who really wants one. Aside from Hidden Power, I'm not entirely convinced that a change in genderless breeding needs to happen, but I won't shut the idea down either.

 

Genderless Pokemon that need 31 speed with any of it's sets include:

 

Metagross

Electrode

Claydol? (if not it does need every stat to be good as it uses them all)

Magneton

Porygon2? (bulky is preferred)

Solrock

Starmie

 

Thats almost every genderless available to us currently. 31 stats aside, it is incredibly difficult to get any stat high enough but also keep it there whilst you breed for another stat. It turns the breeding system from controllable to a very luck based system revolving around catching ditto's.

Edited by Kizhaz
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In order to breed a good genderless poke you have to have a great, and i mean great ditto. Then you have to breed said genderless poke with 1x,2x,3x,4x and a 5x (the great ditto) in order to gurantee the baby will be of good quality. The problem comes when trying to pass both 31 speed and nature. You can only realistically do one. If you have 31 speed early on in the breeding process you have to brace it in order to pass it, which means no passing nature, bc the odds of finding 3x, 4x, 5x ditto with 31 speed are very very low. While if you pass nature early on in the process you cant pass 31 speed anymore because you now have to everstone your poke. The only way to realistically get a good comp out of genderless breeding is to either A. find a ditto with all of the stats you need and 31 speed, or B. find a ditto with the right nature and 3/4 stats you need. Idk but it seems to me that the odds of finding either one is really really low.

My solution. I thought about the possibiliy of allowing genderless pokes hold two items while being breed but that seems silly imo. So maybe allowing two genderless pokes breed, but having the kid become sterile may be the answer. This will have the effect of genderless pokes still being harder to obtaine but making it possible to make a good one w/o insane amounts of luck.

Edited by codylramey
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I can't really comment much on genderless breeding as I'm pretty neutral on the subject, but I personally don't see a huge issue with it outside of obtaining the right Hidden Power on the ones that can make use of it - I will agree that there's a problem there, but I just don't see a problem with genderless breeding as a whole. Sure, they're harder to obtain than most others, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design standpoint and the same can be said about male-only Pokemon. I'd argue that the difficulty gap and increased value of certain species is actually a good thing. The vast majority of genderless Pokemon don't require 31 speed as they don't fully invest in it, and with the exception of Beldum and Porygon, they're all relatively common in the wild. While undeniably good, Metagross and Porygon2 are by no means absolutely essential for a new player's first team, yet are arguably worth the price and effort for someone who really wants one. Aside from Hidden Power, I'm not entirely convinced that a change in genderless breeding needs to happen, but I won't shut the idea down either.

Did you like miss his whole point on how genderless breeding would not devalue genderless Pokémon that much at all or what. Of course NONE of the Pokémon are 'essential' for a team but it's ridiculous that they are not remotely available from a competitive point of view and ultimately it's a big game flaw.

 

edit: also the problem with male only breeders is that you can't breed Ditto's up, it's literally impossible to breed up after you bred up once or twice because you will need a better Ditto and then another better Ditto and then an even better Ditto.

Edited by ThinkNice
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guys dont forget those poor 100% male pokemon like tauros and the hitmon's. they need a new way to breed too.

 

I did mention this as well, but I did not propose any solution because, as rachel said, they would potentially be bizarre. Kudos to whoever comes up with a solution to this problem.

 

I was thinking that if a genderless bred with a male pokemon, the egg would be the genderless where as breeding it with a female gives the egg as that mother's kind, allowing you to pick it's gender still ect. ect. This creates less confusion and still abides by the current 'rules'.

I have always agreed with breeding with in it's species as they are in the same egg group, although if there are two different species of genderless in the same egg group I can see an issue arising about what's in the egg

 

I can see this work, thank you for explaining. It will however make genderless pokemon pretty much equally easy to obtain as other pokemon, which seems to be something the devs are working against.

 

This... Probably isn't ever going to happen. A female Nidoran m, Tauros, Volbeat and Hitmon would be bizarre to say the least. Ditto has a very high encounter rate, and unlike certain genderless Pokemon, none of the male-only lines need Hidden Power. The only two that could possibly make use of it are able to be produced from their female counterparts (when gender selection is fixed for Nidoran f and Illumise eggs). If the system is ever tweaked to make male-only Pokemon easier to breed, it almost certainly won't be done by making them potentially female.

 

I can't really comment much on genderless breeding as I'm pretty neutral on the subject, but I personally don't see a huge issue with it outside of obtaining the right Hidden Power on the ones that can make use of it - I will agree that there's a problem there, but I just don't see a problem with genderless breeding as a whole. Sure, they're harder to obtain than most others, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design standpoint and the same can be said about male-only Pokemon. I'd argue that the difficulty gap and increased value of certain species is actually a good thing. The vast majority of genderless Pokemon don't require 31 speed as they don't fully invest in it, and with the exception of Beldum and Porygon, they're all relatively common in the wild. While undeniably good, Metagross and Porygon2 are by no means absolutely essential for a new player's first team, yet are arguably worth the price and effort for someone who really wants one. Aside from Hidden Power, I'm not entirely convinced that a change in genderless breeding needs to happen, but I won't shut the idea down either.

 

I really hope you are joking. Did you ever see me argue that genderless pokemon "requires" certain stats? Did I even mention hidden power? I am of the impression that the developers of this game have absolutely no concern for the health of our metagame, so I have deliberately avoided such arguments. Whether or not a pokemon is competetively viable without 31 speed IVs or a specific hidden power is in principle irrelevant - if we have a breeding system, it should allow us to manipulate our pokemon regardless of whether this is a necessity.

 

My argument is not that we need to fix genderless breeding because it's harder than other kinds of breeding, but because of the magnitude of how much harder it is. The clue in my post was "practically impossible". The thing is that breeding a genderless pokemon is only slightly less time consuming than catching a high quality genderless pokemon in the wild. Yes, breeding with ditto is less time consuming - but only by a relatively small factor, which is irrelevant since being required to catch a high quality pokemon in the wild defeats the purpose of even having breeding.

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I really hope you are joking. Did you ever see me argue that genderless pokemon "requires" certain stats? Did I even mention hidden power? I am of the impression that the developers of this game have absolutely no concern for the health of our metagame, so I have deliberately avoided such arguments. Whether or not a pokemon is competetively viable without 31 speed IVs or a specific hidden power is in principle irrelevant - if we have a breeding system, it should allow us to manipulate our pokemon regardless of whether this is a necessity.

 

My argument is not that we need to fix genderless breeding because it's harder than other kinds of breeding, but because of the magnitude of how much harder it is. The clue in my post was "practically impossible". The thing is that breeding a genderless pokemon is only slightly less time consuming than catching a high quality genderless pokemon in the wild. Yes, breeding with ditto is less time consuming - but only by a relatively small factor, which is irrelevant since being required to catch a high quality pokemon in the wild defeats the purpose of even having breeding.

 

She's not, and I share the same standpoint.

The breeding system still allows you to manipulate genderless species, just not at the same ease.

But as Rachel has pointed out - the difficulty gap isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design perspective.

Not everything has to be on the same level of difficulty (nor is it, as some species are much harder to find than others)

But the pink blob is readily available at a rather high encounter rate, I don't think nerfing one of the only things it has going for it is a good idea.

A lot of people catch it an effort to earn money, and that's a nice way to generate income.

 

I don't believe Rachel was suggesting that you had mentioned Hidden Power, but that is one of the more common complaints we get in regards to genderless breeding.

Perhaps this is something we shall look into, but as far as genderless with genderless goes I'm fairly reluctant.

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I really hope you are joking. Did you ever see me argue that genderless pokemon "requires" certain stats? Did I even mention hidden power? I am of the impression that the developers of this game have absolutely no concern for the health of our metagame, so I have deliberately avoided such arguments. Whether or not a pokemon is competetively viable without 31 speed IVs or a specific hidden power is in principle irrelevant - if we have a breeding system, it should allow us to manipulate our pokemon regardless of whether this is a necessity.

 

My argument is not that we need to fix genderless breeding because it's harder than other kinds of breeding, but because of the magnitude of how much harder it is. The clue in my post was "practically impossible". The thing is that breeding a genderless pokemon is only slightly less time consuming than catching a high quality genderless pokemon in the wild. Yes, breeding with ditto is less time consuming - but only by a relatively small factor, which is irrelevant since being required to catch a high quality pokemon in the wild defeats the purpose of even having breeding.

Unnecessary sass aside, who actually brought those points up is irrelevant. I brought them up as the requirement of certain stats/hidden powers is a trait that the majority of standard genderless Pokemon don't have, thus making a certain aspect of the genderless breeding process easier than gendered breeding, which is completely relevant to the discussion at hand. That's not to say that it makes genderless breeding easier as a whole, I get that it's still a more difficult process.

Catching high quality wild Pokemon doesn't defeat the purpose of breeding at all. If anything, the time investment is considerably cheaper than throwing together a bunch of low quality breeders. Regardless, in most cases when you catch a Pokemon with high overall IVs, there is something wrong with it. Whether that be an off nature, an IV too low, lack of an egg move in the case of Pokemon that actually gets them. Those flaws can be fixed in the breeding process, or the Pokemon can be used to fix the flaws of another. Genderless breeding requires better wild-caught breeders, but it's not as though the Dittos that weren't of high enough quality are going to waste. Nothing is really lost in the end when the extra time spent catching Dittos for a genderless Pokemon can be put towards speeding up a gendered breed when using those Dittos is perfectly acceptable.

Edited by RacheLucario
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Appearently leaving out details in my original post was not a smart thing to do when you can't fill in the lines on your own. You are literally just saying the opposite of what I'm saying with no valid arguments. I don't have time to do the math for you and write this out in detail, but I just need to clarify a couple of things before I leave:

 

-I do not wish to make genderless breeding as easy as gendered breeding. My suggestion makes sure this is not the case, as genderless breeding will be significantly more time consuming still.

-I do not wish to make ditto a useless pokemon. My suggestion makes sure this is not the case, as ditto will have many roles still.

-The reason why being required to catch high quality pokemon defeats breeding is that it requires unrealistic amounts of luck, as opposed to breeding which only requires time. Once again, it is practically impossible to obtain a high quality pokemon through catching. Genderless breeding requires you to catch these high quality pokemon, making it, unlike gendered breeding, practically impossible.

 

When I'm back I'll show you the different magnitude in time required to catch a good pokemon and breed a good pokemon. Keep in mind, when the value of things are of such different magnitude, it ruins the economy as well.

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actually i fail to see why having some things much more expensive than others is a bad thing from an economic standpoint. Now having things so hard to obtain that it is so expensive that no one can afford to buy them on the other hand, that is a problem.

Edited by Eggplant
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She's not, and I share the same standpoint.

The breeding system still allows you to manipulate genderless species, just not at the same ease.

But as Rachel has pointed out - the difficulty gap isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design perspective.

Not everything has to be on the same level of difficulty (nor is it, as some species are much harder to find than others)

But the pink blob is readily available at a rather high encounter rate, I don't think nerfing one of the only things it has going for it is a good idea.

A lot of people catch it an effort to earn money, and that's a nice way to generate income.

 

I don't believe Rachel was suggesting that you had mentioned Hidden Power, but that is one of the more common complaints we get in regards to genderless breeding.

Perhaps this is something we shall look into, but as far as genderless with genderless goes I'm fairly reluctant.

 

In regards to "nerfing" Ditto's, whether this suggestion is successful or not Ditto will always have the edge by having the ability to breed with ANY pokemon. Anyone can still make money off selling them whether it be used to breed a genderless pokemon or a gendered pokemon.

 

 

Unnecessary sass aside, who actually brought those points up is irrelevant. I brought them up as the requirement of certain stats/hidden powers is a trait that the majority of standard genderless Pokemon don't have, thus making a certain aspect of the genderless breeding process easier than gendered breeding, which is completely relevant to the discussion at hand. That's not to say that it makes genderless breeding easier as a whole, I get that it's still a more difficult process.

Catching high quality wild Pokemon doesn't defeat the purpose of breeding at all. If anything, the time investment is considerably cheaper than throwing together a bunch of low quality breeders. Regardless, in most cases when you catch a Pokemon with high overall IVs, there is something wrong with it. Whether that be an off nature, an IV too low, lack of an egg move in the case of Pokemon that actually gets them. Those flaws can be fixed in the breeding process, or the Pokemon can be used to fix the flaws of another. Genderless breeding requires better wild-caught breeders, but it's not as though the Dittos that weren't of high enough quality are going to waste. Nothing is really lost in the end when the extra time spent catching Dittos for a genderless Pokemon can be put towards speeding up a gendered breed when using those Dittos is perfectly acceptable.

 

In response to the first paragraph, I made a list already showing that high amount of genderless pokemon that NEED 31 speed. Some of those pokemon also need hidden power, I'll agree to not many. However EVERY genderless.... no every pokemon needs to have decent IV's as a whole, thats 5 total IV's you have to account for, for any pokemon. In order to manipulate the breeding system in my favor for a genderless pokemon I can pass 1 IV and a nature using ditto, from then on I have to catch a Ditto with 2 IV's then 3 and so on. This is very rng based which is the complete opposite to how this breeding system works for any gendered pokemon (besides male only ofc). At least with gendered pokemon I have the ability to make my own breeders after catching a box full of pokemon, something that cannot be done for a genderless pokemon. Of course this costs more, but we always have the option to look for amazing pokemon in the wild to use as a breeder, but in that case I may as well just search the wild for the genderless pokemon with amazing stats since it gets no benefits through breeding, no egg moves can be obtained and it would be simpler than catching a bunch of ditto. There has to be benefit to using the breeding system.

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actually i fail to see why having some things much more expensive than others is a bad thing from an economic standpoint. Now having things so hard to obtain that it is so expensive that no one can afford to buy them on the other hand, that is a problem.

allowing genderless pokes to breed together wouldn't necessarily negate the price gap between those species and other species - remember, beldum is still relatively difficult to farm

Edited by Gunthug
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Sorry for the wait, I have been busy with other things.

 

The breeding system still allows you to manipulate genderless species, just not at the same ease.

Let's look at the actual difference here. With gendered pokemon you have the ability to manipulate your pokemon to get exactly what IVs and nature you want. For simplicity, say I wanted a 5x31 IV pokemon with a serious nature. In order to do this I would need to catch 32 pokemon with 1x31 IV and a pokemon with a serious nature. The probability of catching a pokemon with 1x31 IV is 17,34%, so I would be expected to catch about 184 pokemon in order to obtain 32 pokemon with 1x31 IVs. Obviously I would be expected to find a pokemon with the given nature within these 184 pokemon.

If I wanted a genderless pokemon of the same quality, I would need a ditto with a serious nature, a ditto with 1x31 IVs, 2x31 IVs, 3x31 IVs, 4x31 IVs and 5x31 IVs. The probability of finding a ditto with 5x31 IVs is 1,74*10-5%, so I would be expected to catch about 5741935 dittos in order to obtain this. Obviously all the other (lower quality) dittos would be expected to be within these 5741935 dittos.

If we were to compare, we have 5741935/184 = 31206. So we would be expected to spend about 31206 times as long on getting a genderless pokemon of the same quality as the gendered pokemon - in fact, we would probably have to spend even twice as long, because ditto only has 50% encounter rate, as opposed to the majority of gendered pokemon which belong to an egg group that contains pokemon with 100% encounter rates.

Okay, so that was the worst case scenario - what happens if we are not so strict about the quality? If we instead only care about the IVs to be within a given range, the relative difference becomes a bit less. In this example, say I want to make a 5x27-31 IV pokemon with a serious nature. We follow the same recipe as before and find that the probability of encountering a pokemon with 1x27-31 IV is 63,91%, and hence we need about 50 catches to obtain 32 pokemon with 1x27-31 IV. This is in fact a quite poor estimate, since we have ignored that we can easily encounter pokemon with 2x27-31 IVs (23,82%) and even 3x27-31 IVs (5,27%), so the number of expected catches should be below 50.

For a genderless pokemon we know we will be expected to have all we need as soon as we have a 5x27-31 IV ditto. The probability of encountering one of these is 0.0486%, which yields about 2057 expected catches.

Finally we compare these: 2057/50 is about 41, so we can be expected to spend about 41-82 times as long time to breed a genderless pokemon of this quality compared to a gendered pokemon (depending on the encounter rate of the pokemon used to breed the gendered one.) An interesting point is that breeding 5x27-31 natured genderless pokemon still takes about 11-22 times as long as a perfect 5x31 natured gendered pokemon.

It is not that your comment is wrong, it's just a very strong understatement. Considering that the amount spent on breeding a pokemon correlates with its value, we now have a scenario where a 5x27-31 natured genderless pokemon is worth up to 20 times as much as a perfect 5x31 natured gendered pokemon. Considering breeding cost alone (unless there is an update changing this,) a gendered pokemon will be valued at minimum 500k, making genderless pokemon (of lower quality) valued at minimum 5-10m. Although updates might make the actual value of these change, they will remain relative to one another, which means that a genderless pokemon is worth at least 20 gendered pokemon of higher quality. A player will question whether it is really worth spending two weeks on breeding that one genderless pokemon, or if he will rather get some actual results and breed gendered pokemon instead. And in the case of trade, a genderless pokemon will be too valuable for anybody to actually buy, stagnating the entire trading market.

 

But as Rachel has pointed out - the difficulty gap isn't necessarily a bad thing from a design perspective.

Not everything has to be on the same level of difficulty (nor is it, as some species are much harder to find than others)

You are again entirely correct, but the magnitude here makes it so that this actually is a problem. Instead of genderless pokemon being more difficult to obtain, we're talking about them being so difficult to obtain that nobody is willing to even attempt obtaining one.
 

But the pink blob is readily available at a rather high encounter rate, I don't think nerfing one of the only things it has going for it is a good idea.

Now, I want to bust a couple of potential issues:

-Potential issue 1: Ditto will become useless

This is not true - ditto is not only able to breed with all genderless pokemon, but every single pokemon in the game. Ditto has useful properties such as "converting" a male pokemon into a female pokemon. This is particularly usefull for spieces such as eevee, which has exteremely low encounter rate and very high male ratio. Furthermore, ditto is easier to obtain than most genderless pokemon in the game (for example beldum,) making it desireable for breeding the initial parents of breeding chains.

I really already answered this one, but I can explain how ditto will pretty much fill the exact same role by allowing genderless pokemon to breed with its own spieces.

Say that you want to breed a 5x31 IVs natured pokemon. You want to start with 32 1x31 IV pokemon. However, since ditto has 50% encounter rate, and most genderless pokemon are far rarer than that (are there even any of the at more than 30%?) the most efficient way of doing this is by catching 32 1x31 IV dittos, and then 32 random pokemon of the spieces you want to breed. This gives ditto pretty much exactly the same status as before - the go-to genderless breeder. Its other roles, such as a gender-converter, will of course remain unchanged.

 

Unnecessary sass aside, who actually brought those points up is irrelevant. I brought them up as the requirement of certain stats/hidden powers is a trait that the majority of standard genderless Pokemon don't have, thus making a certain aspect of the genderless breeding process easier than gendered breeding, which is completely relevant to the discussion at hand.

You are basically saying that breeding a lower quality pokemon is easier than breeding a higher quality pokemon. But if I want my pokemon to be of a certain quality, this applies to all of my pokemon, not just my gendered pokemon for some arbitrary reason. Sure, there might be genderless pokemon who do not require 31 speed and a hidden power to be competetively viable, but there are lots of gendered pokemon with the exact same trait, and as I showed above, these are considerably easier to obtain. Unless the gender of the pokemon was somehow a sign of quiality in itself, and genderless pokemon happened to be of naturally higher quality, I don't see it being relevant.

 

Catching high quality wild Pokemon doesn't defeat the purpose of breeding at all. If anything, the time investment is considerably cheaper than throwing together a bunch of low quality breeders.

I'm not sure if I understand this correctly - if you wanted a 2x31 IV pokemon, you can find it in the wild 1,35% of the time, or breed two 1x31 IV pokemon, which are found 17,34% of the time in the wild. Needless to say, you will be expected to encounter two 1x31 IV pokemon before a 2x31 IV pokemon, so the time invested will be a lot less when breeding. If by "cheaper" you mean by actualy pokeyen, pokeyen can also be obtained by spending time, and for high quality pokemon the amount of time needed to get the money for breeding is far less than the extra time you would have to spend finding that high quality pokemon in the wild.

 

Regardless, in most cases when you catch a Pokemon with high overall IVs, there is something wrong with it. Whether that be an off nature, an IV too low, lack of an egg move in the case of Pokemon that actually gets them. Those flaws can be fixed in the breeding process, or the Pokemon can be used to fix the flaws of another.

Yes, genderless pokemon can breed, but the efficiency of this is quite insignificant compared to gendered breeding. You will have to catch a ditto for the last step in your chain breeding. The difference in quality between this and the quality of thing you actually want is usually just a factor of 30 (the difference between a natured and non-natured pokemon.) Since you will only have to use low quality breeders for gendered breeding (for example 1x31 IV pokemon) the difference in quality is usually a factor in the millions. (Example: It is about 172.258.046 times as likely to encounter a pokemon with 1x31 IV than a pokemon with 5x31 IVs and a gicen nature )

 

I hope I didn't miss anything. In any case, the point is that genderless breeding, even when aiming for sub-optimal quality, requires an unrealistic amount of time. When the amount of time required to breed genderless pokemon is hardly comparable to the time required to breed gendered pokemon, the value of the respective pokemon is also hardly comparable, making genderless pokemon unfit for the market. Given that the last update changed the breeding system form a way of consistently producing high quality pokemon to a way of improving the quality of your pokemon, it is disapointing that only certain pokemon can be improved (as opposed to before, where all pokemon could be mass produced, as long as there existed a single good ditto on the server.) I don't care if you want to keep genderless pokemon more difficult to obtain than gendered pokemon - this is ensured by the rarity of the genderless pokemon themselves. I only want the breeding system to actually work on every pokemon in the game, or at least make every pokemon in the game practically obtainable in some way.

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...well this was a pretty long read. 

 

I'm not sure I can offer any serious amounts of help on the matter, but there are a couple of game mechanics we can exploit to make things a little easier for those considered 'difficult' to breed.

 

In terms of male only breeders:

 

 

On one of the many other pokemon related sites I follow - The Global Pokedex Plus - they allow the father to also pass down his species in the day care, as well as the female. Now, what if we were to implement this on here?

 

For an example, let's have a somewhat typical breeding pair; Tauros x Miltank. Both are only available with one gender, and thus they'd effectively fill in the 'family' role that all 50/50 gender pokemon possess. While you could scale up the costs for selecting gender, the mechanics would still function more or less the same, with IVs being easily inherited, and male pokemon being able to hatch from eggs without the need of a Ditto.

 

For clarity's sake, you'd be able to breed male only pokemon with female only pokemon, such as Hitmonchan x Jynx, Tauros x Miltank, etc. Seeing as Tauros and the Hitmons (sounds like an 80s pop group, amirite? xD) are the only relevant ones, I reckon this'd be a fairly sane way of mitigating the problem without ruining the breeding system too much.

 

I know I haven't explained this brilliantly (I'm pretty terrible at explaining things) but you guys understand what I'm trying to say with this one, right?

 

For genderless breeding:

 

 

Another mechanic used in latter games is that some pokemon are guaranteed a certain number of perfect IVs when you encounter them, namely legendary and baby pokemon (as of gen 6). 

 

Now, while I'm not saying every Ditto we catch should have 3 perfect IVs at any given time, if we scaled this down to one, maybe two IVs at the absolute most, it would make genderless breeding a fair amount easier, all the while maintaining Ditto's value, and easing farming time on genderless pokemon, due to them at least having one IV you can rely on.

 

...did I help any here? :3

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On one of the many other pokemon related sites I follow - The Global Pokedex Plus - they allow the father to also pass down his species in the day care, as well as the female. Now, what if we were to implement this on here?

 

For an example, let's have a somewhat typical breeding pair; Tauros x Miltank. Both are only available with one gender, and thus they'd effectively fill in the 'family' role that all 50/50 gender pokemon possess. While you could scale up the costs for selecting gender, the mechanics would still function more or less the same, with IVs being easily inherited, and male pokemon being able to hatch from eggs without the need of a Ditto.

 

For clarity's sake, you'd be able to breed male only pokemon with female only pokemon, such as Hitmonchan x Jynx, Tauros x Miltank, etc. Seeing as Tauros and the Hitmons (sounds like an 80s pop group, amirite? xD) are the only relevant ones, I reckon this'd be a fairly sane way of mitigating the problem without ruining the breeding system too much.

 

I know I haven't explained this brilliantly (I'm pretty terrible at explaining things) but you guys understand what I'm trying to say with this one, right?

 

This idea is really interesting. Since both tauros and miltank are hard to find and catch, this will still make breeding tauros a real pain, but it will also be easy compared to our current system. Win-win.

 

Another mechanic used in latter games is that some pokemon are guaranteed a certain number of perfect IVs when you encounter them, namely legendary and baby pokemon (as of gen 6). 

 

Now, while I'm not saying every Ditto we catch should have 3 perfect IVs at any given time, if we scaled this down to one, maybe two IVs at the absolute most, it would make genderless breeding a fair amount easier, all the while maintaining Ditto's value, and easing farming time on genderless pokemon, due to them at least having one IV you can rely on.

 

I considered this myself, but I think it has two flaws. Firstly, it doesn't quite solve the problem. Say that ditto always has one perfect IV - then in practice finding a ditto with 5x31 IVs is about the same probability as finding one with 4x31 now, which is still really unlikely. Secondly, making ditto this good will make it extremely centralizing. Given its ability to breed with any pokemon in the game, you can pretty much catch nothing but ditto and breed more efficiently than now - even for gendered pokemon. This certainly seems like an unfortunate secondary effect.

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...well this was a pretty long read. 

 

I'm not sure I can offer any serious amounts of help on the matter, but there are a couple of game mechanics we can exploit to make things a little easier for those considered 'difficult' to breed.

 

In terms of male only breeders:

 

 

On one of the many other pokemon related sites I follow - The Global Pokedex Plus - they allow the father to also pass down his species in the day care, as well as the female. Now, what if we were to implement this on here?

 

For an example, let's have a somewhat typical breeding pair; Tauros x Miltank. Both are only available with one gender, and thus they'd effectively fill in the 'family' role that all 50/50 gender pokemon possess. While you could scale up the costs for selecting gender, the mechanics would still function more or less the same, with IVs being easily inherited, and male pokemon being able to hatch from eggs without the need of a Ditto.

 

For clarity's sake, you'd be able to breed male only pokemon with female only pokemon, such as Hitmonchan x Jynx, Tauros x Miltank, etc. Seeing as Tauros and the Hitmons (sounds like an 80s pop group, amirite? xD) are the only relevant ones, I reckon this'd be a fairly sane way of mitigating the problem without ruining the breeding system too much.

 

I know I haven't explained this brilliantly (I'm pretty terrible at explaining things) but you guys understand what I'm trying to say with this one, right?

 

For genderless breeding:

 

 

Another mechanic used in latter games is that some pokemon are guaranteed a certain number of perfect IVs when you encounter them, namely legendary and baby pokemon (as of gen 6). 

 

Now, while I'm not saying every Ditto we catch should have 3 perfect IVs at any given time, if we scaled this down to one, maybe two IVs at the absolute most, it would make genderless breeding a fair amount easier, all the while maintaining Ditto's value, and easing farming time on genderless pokemon, due to them at least having one IV you can rely on.

 

...did I help any here? :3

 

The male only idea is a pretty good idea, every male only pokemon has a female only pokemon in the same egg group as well so nothing wrong there. I think the worst thought about it is that we would still have to level every smoochum to 30 so we can breed it with the hitmons :P, but thats a small price to pay for a method in which we can actually make improvements on our comps.

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I don't get it where the problem is. I personally breed in the last time more genderless pokemons then anything else. And I breed enough good pokemon ( 2×31 rest 20+ natured ) to tell that it isn't hard to obtain them. Most of them cost me arround 200-400k and I sell them for arround 600-800k/more or I hold them for comp. And a Hp on a certain genderless is only necessary for a modest magneton with hp fire. Every other genderless pokemon has enough moves to choose from that are good. And I personally find it good that some pokes are rarer then others and that their value is especially higher then others.

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