I do completely agree that breeding is a crap mechanic as is. The frustration of going through and finding the pokemon of a perfect nature is just infuriating to me. So many wasted pokemon sitting in boxes because they came out with a jolly nature instead of hasty or what have you.

As for EVs, well they are already capped. They have been for some time. Using that as the mechanic to breed won't do much to stop ARs as they are incredibly helpful in EV training. I freely admit that it is the only way I will bother with EV training for anything serious.

@Smashchu
Well I thought about giving you a long drawn out reply full of well thought out criticism and problems with your solution. Reading your responses though tells me it is a waste of my time as you seem to be set in stone on your views. You do no know what is causing the decline in pokemon sales, but you appear to be acting as some authority on the subject. No useful discussion can come from talking to someone with that sort of attitude.

I think a good story Pokemon related would be good. Dont have to be a hero, only have to have few plot twist ! Would it be fun to have all your pokemon fall in a hole while your walking and then fall in a waterfall then you have to catch them back or something like that... anyway pokemon related.... not Team BLALBA or Hero things !

What about for the rest of us who might at least wanna hear your opinion?  While I may agree with him in a sense that those are many of the reasons I fell away from Pokemon that doesn't mean that my opinion  can't be swayed.  I'd love to hear your thoughtful criticisms personally.  I'd love to see what others may feel as done right or wrong within the series.

Since you asked, I shall try to add to whats here already. I won't bother wading through Smashchu's posts though. I skimmed through a fair bit, but not enough to make a full fledged counter argument.

Expand on the story by a fair bit. They started making some steps towards this with Pokemon Diamond and Pearl and it seemed to work out really well. The better you flesh out the story, the more you will sell to the casual JRPG crowd. The story kind of stagnated after RGB. There is a nice, living, breathing world they could use to help add to the feel of the game that would draw in a lot of one fanbase, and not at the expense of the others. The concept that the story hurts the game is almost laughable. It is a RPG at the end of the day. RPG's need story.

Secondly stop making clone pokemon. Starly is Pidgey with a different name. We all know it, and no one really likes it that much. Just fiddle around with the older existing ones to make them better. Starters can ignore this if you really want to. Starting someone with 3 types that have fairly obvious strengths and weaknesses is a good move. And even then with DPPt they managed to differentiate a lot of the starters from their earlier ones with the subtypes.

The HM situation seems to be stabilizing finally, but it went to far as Kylie said. Having to gimp various pokemon one move is really rough. Make the moves strong enough to use and it will all work out. I could not care less that one of my pokemon is required to have Surf for example. He was probably going to get it anyways. The move is bad ass, and arguably the best water move in the game. Do the same for a few other HMs and you can make it work well.

Continue to tweak and tune all the abilities while adding in more. This keeps the hardcore constantly busy readjusting to the new rule sets. If you change everything too often you will alienate them of course. But a fine round of tuning every gen keeps things interesting. I don't think it needs to be turned on its head like it was this generation, but something to keep the research going.

Add more stuff after you beat the Elite 4. Visiting old regions would fit this perfectly. I don't know if you could visit all of them, but at least a few. With RSE it would be hard since they had it occur at the same time as RGB. DPPt would have been a perfect time to go back to the RSE areas though. Sadly it didn't seem to work that way. Fortunately there is HG/SS to help even things out. It is possible that they see it as the solution, but I would still like more content per game. The addition of the battle tower is genius. Now they just need to keep tweaking.

Keep adding new pokemon should go without saying, but apparently it has to be put out there with this crowd. Catching the same old ones over and over again will get old. I hate caves cause I am sick to death of seeing Zubat and Geodude. I know them. I know how they play. I might use them briefly to fill a hole in my early team, but I would rather experiment with the new guys. Sometimes even the clones of old ones can have some surprising move combinations. Old fans will come back in greater numbers the more new stuff you add.

Make breeding much less of a pain. A lot of the competitive players are not using the game itself to play as much. They get their great team for the tournaments only after fiddling around with it on an emu server. When the most hardcore player see it as too much of a pain in the ass, then you have a broken system. Kylie's suggestion has some merit. I dunno if I would go exactly with it, but it is something.

Make the online system much more robust. People keep saying they want a MMO, but Pokemon as it stands wouldn't translate all that well into the genre. All you could really add is 3D battles, and easy to find online battle. Most of the popular suggestion would be plagued by problems and not implement well on a game of that scale. Flesh out the online match making, and expand to a few more options and you could satisfy the desire for a MMO though.

Thats the short version of what I think would help Pokemon sales. The series is monstrous in size already, so it is hard to say any major changes to the core mechanics should be made. Given that the series is showing growth again after some nasty decline is a very good sign. You can't directly compare userbase/sales ratios for anything remotely useful so I am just going to ignore the nonsense on that front. I suppose you could sum up the majority of my post by saying "follow the same path DPPt did," but I think there are a few areas they didn't get it quite right on.

I do have a few things to say about the misconception of legendaries though. For the most part they are not actually all that much better than the normal ones. Yes you have a good bit that are broken, but those are still relatively low compared to the total number of pokemon. I do agree they seem to be adding them at an obscene rate, but the truly broken ones aren't all that bad.

@Kyliedog
EV mechanics more or less work that way already. The breeding part is new, but EVs get capped universally. You can only get 255 EVs for any stat (and only use 252) and you cannot earn more than 510 EVs on any given pokemon. I think eliminating IVs would take too much out of the individual feel of the pokemon, but increasing the heritability of IVs would do wonders.

Is your definition of a decline “the act or process of increasing; growth”?

The figures speak for themselves. It doesn’t matter how the sales got there they are growing. Personally I’d be amazed if my DS owning grandparents (or parents for that matter) turned around with a copy of Pokemon Diamond and/or Pearl. Clearly there's a drop off from the 2nd to 3rd generation but as others have said you have to remember Pokemon was a fad when those titles were released.

I don't think that's any better.  It takes 20-40 minutes to fully EV train a pokemon, you want people to do this 10 times?  AR users will achieve this in seconds, and people are still spending hours of their time.

When I suggested they need to block it, I don't mean hardware wise, I mean code wise, and I didn't mean specifically targetted for IVs.  I get annoyed when people have parties of pokemon they couldn't get legitimately, the IV stuff is annoying too.

The only problem with codewise is someone will eventually find a way around it, and the same goes for hardware. :/  It's basically a lose-lose battle for people that play legitimately.

For your last question, the answer is no.  I spend many many hours on some of my top IV pokemon and they're usually 150-165 total IVs.  That's pretty damn high considering the max is 186.  If you inherit 3 max IVs from the parents you have a 1 in ~30000 chance to have your other IVs at 31.  WAAAY too much breeding. :)

Actually, they are.  If you ever check out the competitive scene for pokemon, you'll find that legends and pseudo-legends dominate the uber tier of pokemon battles.  That's not just a coincidence.  Their base stats and abilities often make them far more brutal than other pokemon and thanks to Platinum's move tutors allowing just about any pokemon to learn some devastating attacks... legends have become even stronger.

I dont think anything can really bring the game back to its former glory that it had back in the day. The thrill for it has just died out, even though it still has a lot of fans. And also the games do not change at all. Its still the same walk in a patch of grass, battle, level up, gym , badge, elite four, game over. Sure , they have made some minor changes to the game, but not enough to captivate anyone into buying so sales were where they used to be for the GB versions.
And also, its just impossible to get every single Pokemon. Possible, but unwanted to do so. Some dont exist in the game itself and require a certain event, which is just a frustrating pain in the a**. Especially when more of the games are made, and more Pokemon become necessary to get through events..its just a hassle.
Overall, the thrill is just not as strong as it used to be. I really miss those days though. It was incredible how joyous I was when I got my first game for the Gameboy. I went through so many AA's.

Oh, and another thing they should do is have the game have 3 save slots as opposed to the one. So if you do end up catching them all, and want to play through the game again, you dont have to erase all your hard work

My only problem with adding more Pokemon is that they didn't balance the previous 493 with the high number of clones. Similar with moves. If they can make each one relevant I wouldn't have a problem with any number but the amount of work in balancing grows exponentially for each new move and Pokemon.

More robust online would definitely help.

Story could go either way. Right now it's just boring and half ass. A more interesting story would be grand. Or they could do an even simpler story and focus on the newly tweaked and balanced gameplay. So long as it isn't the same Team____ take over and beat the elite 4 again I could see either answer being acceptable. In my opinion RPG's don't need story. I played FFXII for 60 hours until i realized i wasn't going to get much a story because the gameplay even though flawed was good.

Thanks for letting us know your feelings. Just because the TC doesn't agree doesn't mean you shouldn't share with the rest of us. Though he may have created the thread the rest of us showed up because we are interested in the discussion and thank you for adding to that.

They should just cut back to the original 150