I think if you're more offering those up to be taken than asking for feedback on them,
this thread is exactly what you're looking for!
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Also, I was just typing something to put here myself when I saw you'd posted, haha. It's funny - there haven't been any posts here in forever! I can't believe it's been since August 9th?
So, this is something that only just occurred to me today, and it's very far from polished and not something I've considered or attempted at
all, but I think it might benefit my game and was wondering about any feedback on it - I've rethought the EV system and I think this might improve its mechanics a lot.
The first thing I'm addressing is minor and more about presentation than anything - from a story perspective, it makes a lot more sense for EVs to be visible to the player, just from a different perspective than plain numbers.
With this in mind, every time you beat a Pokémon, you'll be told right away what EVs your Pokémon gained from it - for example, if you beat an Alakazam, you immediately see "Espeon learned more about Special Attack!" (Or if it was an Entei, "Espeon learned more about HP and Attack!" - it reports every stat.) When you get 252 in a stat, it goes further and says "Espeon has totally mastered its Defense!" to show that you've maxed it out. There isn't any need to be secretive about this.
The idea here is that you as a Trainer are always monitoring your Pokémon's progress and paying attention to their achievements. We know that the system of EVs is about what your Pokémon
learns - it gains new skills based on the enemies you defeat. So it doesn't make any sense to hide that progress from the Trainer who's
supposed to be deeply involved in what their Pokémon learns - that's their whole role!
I understand the idea brought up by Game Freak that it might feel like Pokémon are just bits of data and not living things if it's presented as a raw number, but if we're talking about training Pokémon, that's what the Trainer would be
most likely to know about their Pokémon, and of course they would find some way to report it as a number to denote progress -
hiding EVs would be like being a math teacher, but refusing to look at your students' test scores. It's not all that there is to your students, but it's still your job and I sure hope having those scores there doesn't make you think they're not human! And anyway, it would surely be no stranger to show the Pokémon's EVs as numbers than it is to show their final stats as numbers.
The next, more important thing is more about the mechanics of EVs, which will be a lot more readily customizable.
Before I get into that, I really don't think EVs are crazily complicated and inaccessible as they are, and the official games have been getting better and better about that anyway. This isn't something I think needs "fixing" about the official games, and with competitive battling and all, it's understandable that those would depend a lot more on making it take more effort than this to EV train. Ultimately, my primary motivation is anything
but the idea that EVs need to be
easier, or that they're not mechanically sound as they are - this is actually purely from an in-world standpoint, because it gives an opportunity to emphasize the relationship between Trainer and Pokémon from a story or worldbuilding perspective.
I've always perceived EVs as the games' way of demonstrating the difference between trained Pokémon and wild ones (which never have EVs even at high levels) and one of the primary benefits for a Pokémon that has a Trainer, a way of showing off that it's to mutual benefit and not just a servant-master relationship. In my mind, each EV is a representation of something the Pokémon has learned from having a Trainer, maybe even an unstated moment between Trainer and Pokémon, like "I'm so proud of you for winning that battle! And did you see the way that Golbat moved? I bet you could do that even better!" The idea of a Pokémon learning through having a Trainer is one of the best parts of the series - so I think basing EVs more strongly on player input is actually a really good way to
show that connection
instead of the choice we have now between calculated, detached grinding or total ignorance of EVs altogether.
By that logic, I feel it would
make the most sense if, rather than stopping their effort growth after getting 510 EVs, you kept going until your Pokémon had mastered every stat - you still gave that encouragement and had those sorts of "moments" all the time. The current system feels like the Pokémon is giving up or "peaking" because it doesn't want to keep exerting itself... and don't get me started on how weird it is that when you
do reset EVs to shift focus, it's with berries/Perilous Soup (is it like "oh, you think this tastes bad? well, I will keep feeding these to you until you learn to stop focusing on Attack!").
As the Pokémon's Trainer, you should be responsible for keeping its focus on the stats you think are important - you should be the one to tell that Espeon, "it's really cool that you're learning about Attack and you're doing a great job, but you're going to exhaust yourself at this rate and I don't think you need it so much, so it might be easier on you if you want to stop worrying about that." So... Pokémon won't stop earning EVs at 510 - instead, they can keep earning them until they have mastered every stat - but can still only use 510 in total. Basically, the EVs a Pokémon
uses would still be limited to 510, but rather than that being stuck at the first 510 EVs it gets, that's something its Trainer can decide based on what EVs it has
ever earned.
• I would add an "Instruct" option to the party menu (along with stuff like healing the Pokémon and giving it an item). This opens up a chart of all of the Pokémon's EVs in every stat - from there, the Trainer can designate an EV spread to use.
• You still can't exceed 510 EVs. (You'll get a message to the effect of "You're spreading Espeon too thin! It can't focus on all of those stats.")
• Obviously, you can't tell it to have more EVs than it actually has. (You'll get a message to the effect of "Espeon hasn't trained that much in Special Attack! Try fighting Pokémon like Abra to master Special Attack.")
• Because this is just accessed from the party menu, you can use it whenever you want. This way, a Pokémon that you've raised a long time and that has mastered every stat will be the most versatile (and that continued encouragement and learning remains in use); if you want to try something different, you always can.
Basically, from a story perspective, this is just a way to make it clear that as the Trainer, you're really the one paying attention to your Pokémon's growth and continuing to keep it moving forward - it doesn't make
sense that EVs are one of the things to which you pay the
least attention in a standard run when that's the one thing the Pokémon can't deal with on its own in the wild. There are certainly other things Trainers could be doing (for instance, still working on figuring out how to have you make sure to feed your Pokémon once in a while without getting in the way of gameplay), but since EVs already are a part of gameplay and this honestly manifests itself as a QOL update that makes things easier for players rather than adding another thing to juggle, it's one of the best ways I can think of to both capitalize on the relationship of Pokémon and Trainers without creating frustrations or difficulties for players that would slow down gameplay.
Minor note: if this is accessible within the main story, that means your average opponent would also make use of EVs without causing the difficulty to be weirdly stacked against the player. I don't see this as important one way or the other, or as an important draw like "ooo a game that has increased challenge," but it's just worth mentioning that it doesn't need to give the player a crazy advantage in the main story. I would ordinarily lean towards making anything EV-related postgame-only, but I might make this available the whole time specifically because
it makes so much more sense from an in-world perspective that this is simply what a good Trainer does.
Edit: Horizontal rules break things now! Replaced with a ----- because almost the entire post turned invisible, haha.
