"I chronicled my team's levels on a Shield playthrough to see how bad the level curve really is"

Spreadsheet: https://ift.tt/3n5ErhY average, I was .86, or about 1 level over the enemy level curve in sword/shield.After seeing some discussion on the gen 8 exp mechanics being brought back in BDSP, I was curious what the gen 8 level curve is actually like.Disclaimer: I really do not like gen 8 exp share. I feel it overlevels your team and makes the game too easy. That was my thought going in, and I decided to set a few rules to get somewhat objective data on it:1) Only battle trainers. Only catch the wild pokemon necessary to fill out your team. You can do the cafe battles once per time they're available, but no more. I only broke this rule once when I didn't avoid a wild dugtrio and got arena trapped.2) Only catch/use 6 pokemon throughout the game. I chose 6 that I thought would be fun to use- Rillaboom, Froslass, Dreadnaw, Skuntank, Arcanine, and Copperajah.3) No exp candies, pokemon camp, etc. Only get exp from trainer battles and the 5 necessary catches.While doing the run, I documented my levels going into each notable fight (rival battles, rose/oleanna battles, gym battles, champ cup matches) as well as the first trainer and yell grunt on a route/after a notable fight.This methodology is far from perfect but I didn't want to record every single battle in the game, and weighting a whole route of trainers as about the same "impact" as a gym leader seems fair enough to me.Notes/Takeaways:It wasn't as bad as I thought. Granted, I had pretty negative expectations going in, but I actually was slightly under most gym leaders' teams on average.I was about 1.3 levels over most non-major trainers on average, and keep in mind this is the FIRST trainer in each area. Generally I was even more over-level by the end of routes, as trainers in routes keep roughly even levels while my team climbs pretty fast.While I did run from every wild battle (save one Dugtrio), I noticed that the wild pokemon were very high-leveled in this game. Had I caught pokemon later in my run (I had 4 before the first gym and a full team right after beating Kabu), I probably would've been higher level on average.The level jump after beating Kabu is the only part of the game I was consistently under-level for a while during. I think they expect you to do some catching and camping in the wild area in-between.After Melony, my team was getting pretty over-leveled and it really didn't stop until Leon. I'm not sure if that's because the curve slows down or because I needed to switch more often and that increases total exp gain since gen 6, or both.The level curve in SWSH is definitely more generous than past games. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but it still was a little silly that I was constantly overlevel considering I purposefully avoided a lot of the easy ways to get exp in this game that are flagship features for this game (camp, catching pokemon, using the wild area at all really). If there's enough interest, I may do a similar run for Black/White next and document my progress there as well. My guess is the average there will be about 1.5 below enemy trainers, instead of .85 above via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/3DSsUcW