"Can we talk about how bizarre the Emerald Battle Frontier is?"

Look I'm 21 years old and I've been playing pokemon all my life including competitive battles. I have played the game extensively. Yet even for players at this level of time investment collecting gold symbols at the battle frontier is still obscenely difficult and can take months if not years. I honestly have no idea how this insane asylum ever got green lighted by Nintendo. Here are some reasons why the frontier is phenomenally difficult and flat out bizarre.1) Perfect IV'd PokemonThe odds of breeding a pokemon with 31 IVs in all stats is roughly 1 in 60,000. And that's if you're breeding with two pokemon that aslo have 6 perfect IVs. Breeding two pokemon with only 5 perfect IVs can decrease the odds to 1 in 140,000. And yet the AI shamelessly has perfect 31 IVs across the board essentially putting every pokemon you bring to the frontier at an innate disadvantage. It takes weeks to breed for satisfactory IVs to stand up to the pokemon here. Not to mention EV training and level grinding. Oh and multiple game files to grind for TMs and tutors.2) The AIRuthless yet unpredictable. Generally they will choose moves that maximize damage output. If they have a move that will KO they will almost always choose it. If they can't kill off the bat they will opt for status and stat raising moves (i.e Ninjask will nearly always swords dance for its opening move). Certain pokemon are programmed to spam their gimmicks like mirror coat, counter, endure+salac, double team etc. But the catch is, sparingly, they will choose unorthodox or unoptimal moves that can completely screw you if you were predicting the move they usually pick. For example switching out Latios to avoid Starmie's ice beam only for it to use surf instead.3) Brightpowder, Quick Claw, Focus Band and Scope Lens.You'd think that the supposed Mecca of competitive battling would encourage, I don't know, skill? But no, an immense amount of pokemon at the frontier have sets with these items. The VAST majority of my losses have been directly to these items. Put simply they are garbage, but in the battle frontier you have to win 70 times in a row while the AI only has to win once. Eventually you WILL get haxed and there is no counterplay you can employ. At that point it simply becomes a grind against the RNG devoid of any strategy or skill. Combine these items with critical hits, double team, OHKO moves, low accuracy moves, stat drop/raising attacks, freeze/para/confusion hax and you are left with the inescapable conclusion that even the statistically best team with perfect decision making will not even come close to winning consistently.4) 3 vs 300You get to bring 3 pokemon into a facility, and this combination of pokemon is somehow supposed to be able to beat every combination of the 376 legal pokemon at the frontier. There is no team that can perfectly counter everything. This exacerbates the luck factor since you have to pray you don't get perfect countered. This gets even harder to deal with at facilities like the arena where you can't switch pokemon resulting in even the order of the AI's team being able to screw you.5) Completely Discouraging Reward SystemThe way Battle Points (BP) are administered is bizzare. It's designed to penalize new players and then becomes completely unrewarding for hardened frontier vets. For someone just entering the frontier a lot of essential items like Choice Band (64BP), Vitamins (1 BP each but you need 20 to EV train a pokemon) and Move tutors (48 BP for good moves) are completely unreasonable to obtain from the incredibly meager winnings you get for streaks i.e still getting 1 BP after winning the arena 3 times in a row which can easily take 45 minutes. But then after you get 3 symbols you have access to the betting man who can easily net you 15 BP for completing incredibly easy challenges and you can spam him as much as you want. And then of course the most prestigious prizes are incredibly lame pokedolls and posters for your secret base (256 BP for a charizard doll).6) The Most Obnoxious NPCs Ever CreatedAny trainer you fight in the facilities shouts at you in capitals and makes a pun at the cost of comprehensible English. Apparently the devs got lazy and just used the names of moves, pokemon and pokemon abilities to force a pun into every NPC dialogue. I'm not joking, it ranges from "THERE WAS A HEAT WAVE LAST WEEK" to "I SWALLOW TOXIC SLUDGE TO TRANSFORM MYSELF". And god forbid you lose they will instantly talk shit usually in the form of a pun.~~~Okay, okay, okay. I feel a lot better after that rant, so maybe I should say some nice things about the battle frontier. It rewards dedication. You need to be able to commit a non-negligible chunk of your life to this thing and I have massive respect for anyone who has achieved all gold symbols. The music is incredible and the location is epic. The aesthetic of the island, the facilites, and the actually enjoyable NPCs you don't fight in battles is really inspiring. The symbol fights are dramatic. Working your way past an unreasonable amount of bullshit to finally be able to challenge the frontier brain to that epic music makes all the hard work pay off. The brains are also some of my favorite characters, they command respect unlike gym leaders, E4 etc. So yea theres my rant on the frontier. Back to the grind at the cost of my grades.EDIT: Got pissed again so here's more rant.-AI has access to items unobtainable in-game. Salac berry is damn good at the frontier and of course the pokemon their have salac sets along with other myhtical berries. For the player to obtain these you have to buy Pokemon Colosseum and grind for hours at Mt. Battle or buy the Jirachi Bonus disc and reset your save file until you get a Jirachi with one.-AI taunts you with shiny pokemon. The chance of finding a shiny pokemon at the frontier is MUCH higher than encountering one in the wild for yourself. Thanks game, nothing feels better than a beautiful shiny Metang that I can't catch!-AI designed to waste your time. The earlier rounds before the gold symbol are filled with base stage pokemon with horrendous movesets. And every time you lose you have to fight through 4 rounds of these mindnumbingly easy bads before getting to battles that actually matter. And you have to love pokemon that use fake out and then just mash detect/protect until they die. Oh and definitely looking at youClaydol @Leftovers 170/0/170/0/170Double TeamCosmic PowerandShuckle @Leftovers 0/0/255/0/255/0Double TeamFlashDigSandstorm-SO MUCH DELAY BETWEEN BATTLES. God, after every battle you have to listen to the AI's final pun, talk to the facility proctor, go through the heal cutscene then listen to another AI pun. And every 7 battles you have to exit, re-enter all your battle settings, and go through the save game sequence again. It seriously adds up in the ever-increasing amount of time lost for losing a streak. via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2qWAFsr