I'm making the assumption that Pokemon Online is a simulator of the DS/GBA/GBC/GB games. When you battle on DS, not that much information is available. Just for an example, your opponent's HP bar in B2/W2 is a 50 pixel wide graphic (). There's 1 pixel wide on each end, so the actual green measuring portion of the graphic is 48 pixels. So you use an attack against an enemy with full health. 24 out of 48 of those pixels are left. So that means the attack does roughly half damage. What can be obtained from this available information? Defensive EV spread ranges are one thing. One thing that can NOT be obtained from this 48 pixel HP bar is an exact percentage out of 100. So why is it that Pokemon Online provides us with information that is not available in actual DS battles? Also, there's no reason why we can't see what moves our opponent's Pokemon have used and how many times. Now in order to know how many times they've used moves, we either have to create our own tallies, or copy and paste the log to Notepad and ctrl+F. To not use a tedious tallying method, or Notepad, is to play sub-optimally. I think whether or not someone does these mundane tasks should not determine their success, and it should be up to the simulator to present us this potentially valuable information. Anyway, that's just my 2 cents. I think there should be a focus on the simulator presenting as much information as possible about the opponent's Pokemon as it's revealed during battle.
There is no possible way to display all that much info on your screen. As suggested before, they might implement a 'Ctrl + F' find function into the simulator. Apart from that, there is nothing to be done, imo.
Because its more competitive. PO does not exactly simulate the games, thats why we have Sleep Clause. Now I don't know what you're arguing for, this doesn't happen on cart at all. Do you want it further away or more exact from cartridge mechanics? :s
While possibly not the most ideal solution (but probably the quickest, outside of using notepad or w/e), is you can use the battle scripts to try and keep a record of moves used/what pokémon have been sent out/whatever else you need, but I've not looked a lot into battle scripts.
Well we give a percentage count of the opponent's HP for 2 reasons. 1) It's more competitive as Meteor Said. 2) It's entirely possible. With a 48 Pixel graphic you just have to count the number of remaining pixels divide by 48 then multiply by 100. It's just so much easier if the sim does it for you. As for seeing move counts. The games don't do this and you can just re-read the battle log. It's not so hard.
At point 2), if you count the pixels, you'd actually be only accurate to around 2.08% rather than the 1% PO uses :x
How is it "more competitive" to ignore game mechanics in favor of a percentage system not on the games that we're trying to simulate? By the way, Sleep Clause, etc can all be derived from Nintendo rules somewhere (see my 2nd sig link). If you'd like to make a more salient point, it would be better to bring up evasion or Excadrill/Blaziken bans, which were created by the community because the community didn't want to play against certain strategies which they considered "unfair" or "cheap". But then again even in that case, we're only talking about a community-created artificial metagame, which is completely separate from community-created artificial game mechanics, which is what the percentage thing is. Counting is tedious, programmable, and puts people who don't want to make tallies at a disadvantage. Taking these mindless skill-free calculations out of the game only advances game strategy because then one does not constantly have to run to Notepad or a damage calculator to play optimally. Also, these calculations would all taken from readily available information, and as the client is open source, one would be able to recompile their own client that does such things, and there would not be any way to stop it. If nobody is interested in adding these things, I will do exactly that. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have to look into the whole scripting thing because I really don't know how it works at all. If I do end up making scripts, I'd like some guarantee that the administration would let me post them here and sticky for all to use. That's a completely naked assertion: an HP count out of 100 being "more competitive" than an HP count out of 48. Already covered by Moogle. A good example is 24% = 11.52/48 -> 12. 25% = 12.00/48 -> 12. 26% = 12.48/48 -> 12. So 24%, 25%, and 26% would all look exactly the same in a scale out of 48. By using a percentage scale, extra information is provided that would be hidden in a Wi-Fi match. It's effort that doesn't have to be expended, thus leading to decreased focus on the actual strategical elements. The information I am suggesting can be fully derived from the battle history and doesn't draw from any hidden data that one wouldn't be able to see in a Wi-Fi match.
The point is that this is intended for competitive use, not casual. Think of it this way; would you rather prepare for a VGC having all data available to you that it is now so you can see everything and start to memorize or would you rather not know anything? Your point about having to use a damage calculator is also useless because if you really studied your team well you will know how much damage it can do to various threats and how much it takes from common attacks. Whenever I build my teams I always have a damage calculator ready so I can optimally distribute EVs in accordance to what the team needs. Smogon has sets that aren't as optimal as you might think. While they may work good, I find enough that can be improved, however, I do not care about Smogon and its atmosphere.
Thanks for making my point, I guess? The kind of damage calculator I'm talking about is one that puts ranges on the enemy's attack and defense stats in order to estimate their EV spreads and/or held items. Me too, me too.
Yes there is. I'm probably going to edit the GUI to make it do such things and you will see how it's very possible.
Beep. You won't have your exact replica, it's more fruitful to accept that and instead look how we can improve the quality of the games played, if you ask me. PO shouldn't appeal to purists IMO.
If something doesn't operate as it does in the games, then conventional wisdom says it's a glitch or bug and needs to be fixed. When HP doesn't operate as it does in the games, then you're going to say "oh we're just improving the quality". Well if we want to improve the quality, we could also start by nerfing certain Pokemon and moves. But... this is a Pokemon simulator and I see no reason not to stay true to the games. By the way in Generation 5, the way the HP bar is calculated is int(48*current HP / total HP). It always rounds down, except for if it ends up being 0, then it displays as 1. So 1/714 HP -> 1/48. 713/714 HP -> 47/48. 666/714 HP = 44.77/48 -> 44/48. If nobody wants to implement it, fine. But I'm going to figure this out for every generation.
That doesn't work in general, but specifically does not when it's a feature in, you know, EVERY SIMULATOR EVER. As far as I can tell nobody is walking around saying that Mewtwo has too high stats and must be nerfed...except the people developing mods, not associated with the development of the PO client.
I'm obviously not saying that we should go nerfing stats and moves. I just don't think we should change the way HP is displayed from the games, either. Even if it only makes the difference 1 in 1000 games, why not take the side of being accurate and true?
The problem of displaying the HP as a fraction of 48 is that it is unappealing to users. People have become used to percentages. And converting it first to fractions of 48, THEN back to percentages probably will lose too much information. Though there are some positive sides, such as leftovers healing exactly 3/48 and burn taking away 6/48 of health.
Accurate for the players is the same as accurate for the games. Otherwise, might as well just show all the opponents' movesets. My point is that information is being revealed that isn't revealed in Wi-Fi, and that's a problem. PO has a policy of simulating the Game Freak games, don't they? That's why all unintentional glitches are simulated as well. If that's the problem then you should be able to toggle between fractions of 48, and fractions of 48 displayed as percentages. Like, it would display as 24/48, then click the HP bar, and it converts to 50%. So the only possible percentages would be 100, 98, 96, etc.
While I do feel that it would be preferable to have HP displayed like this (or at least the option of it, maybe on certain ladders), as well as following game mechanics (almost) all the time, that is not actually PO's policy. Several glitches are not implemented, some have even been removed, and we enforce several clauses which violate game mechanics.
The HP bar is probably easy, but there are battle logs too. It wouldn't be nice if they changed between x/48 and y% all the time.