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Side Notes 01: Experiencing Change
Oh hey it's the fifth generation, apparently lots of things happened in this one, so let's go over some of the small and big changes, starting with one of the biggest changes, the experience formula, cause boy do I love these!
Well, starting off easy, huh? Some of this is similar to the previous generations, but this formula is used in Gen 5 and 7+ and has a scaling factor depending on the levels of the 2 Pokemon. Let's break it down.
a is 1 if the fainted Pokemon is wild, 1.5 if the fainted Pokemon is owned by a Trainer, b is the base experience yield of the Pokemon, which is no longer capped at 255, letting other Pokemon aside from Audino and the Chansey line to give out lots of experience, such as legendaries having 300+. L is the level of the fainted Pokemon and s is for the Exp. Share, if a Pokemon is holding one, s is equal to twice the number of Pokémon that participated and have not fainted, when calculating the experience of a Pokémon that participated in battle, AND twice the number of Pokémon holding an Exp. Share, when calculating the experience of a Pokémon holding Exp. Share.
Lp is the level of the victorious Pokemon, t is equal to 1 if the winning Pokemon's current owner is the OT and 1.5 otherwise, e is 1.5 if the Pokemon is holding a Lucky Egg, 1 otherwise and p is whether an Exp Pass Power is active, something we'll talk about later, and can even reduce exp points in a battle. They come in 3 stages, either boosting by 1.2x, 1.5x or 2x, or reducing by 0.8x, 0.66x or 0.5x.
Overall it's not a massive formula change, all factors in flat experience gain are divided by 7.s, while that is clearly not the case in the scaling formula, having two seperate multiplications that are then further increased by outside factors t, e and p. This means that experience gain can get wildly high, even above ONE MILLION if all the cards are lined up. This makes training Pokemon way easier, especially since each grassy patch has a friendly Audino ready to be beaten up.
Next up is some changes to the good old PID. It still determines a fair chunk of stuff, but slowly but surely more and more about a Pokemon will no longer be determined by this, for whatever reason. First up is Ability, which is determined differently depending on whether the Pokemon is from Gen 5 or an earlier generation. If it is from the Poke Transfer, its ability, like in Gen 4, will remain the same until it's rechecked when evolved, after which it'll have the new ability if applicable. Any Pokemon like this sent ahead to Pokemon Bank via the Poke Transporter will have their Ability slot locked regardless of future evolution. Gen 5 Pokemon have their Ability determined by the lowest bit of the upper half of the PID, instead of the lower half, to determine Ability. A seperate bit determines a Pokemon's Hidden Ability, with the PID bit being always set to even, as if it had a first slot Ability.
Nature is no longer determined by the PID, instead a seperate byte is used for which of the 25 Natures a Pokemon would get. People wanting to see Pokemon of a certain size is also no longer a thing, thank fucking god, what an eldritch process that was. If an NPC does ask for something like that, it'll use Pokedex info or whatever. And of course since Aprijuice no longer exists, day to day performance is no longer calculated, again, thank god.
Other smaller things have changed, such as the overall design of the game, kinda crazy to think this was the same system that has DP on it, day and night encounters are replaced by seasonal encounters, which might be worse but time changing is so easy to do it doesn't really matter. By the way, battles are way faster and smoother due to being 60 FPS instead of the standard 30 the games have been, a welcome change.