Exact Damage Percentages

Stall

Question

Why do battle simulators like Shoddy show the exact damage percentage taken?



Background Info

Last night, I had been laddering on Shoddy for a while with one of my first successful DP teams, and it was cool to be using it again after a couple months. Then my laptop decided to stop working, ending my laddering fun. I was pretty bummed, since I was really starting to get a feel for the team again.

Then I realized that the team I was using was the team I built in-game. I called some friends, and we made an impromptu 8-man tournament over WiFi. All of us are into competitive Pokemon, so the matches were actually challenging, but I still made the finals. Partway through the final match, I switched my CB Infernape in after his (subless) Breloom killed my Metagross. He switched to Suicune as I used Stone Edge, predicting a Gyarados. The Suicune was previously injured, somewhere near 70% or so. The Stone Edge dealt somewhere near 40% of his total health, but I wasn't sure. After lefties, he was left with about as much health as my last attack dealt. I guessed I had done more than that the previous turn, and it turns out I was wrong.



The Reasoning

In a WiFi battle, you won't always know whether your attack did 55% or 51%. You have to guess, basing it solely on the little health bar on your DS screen. Why, then, on Shoddy, a simulator that tries to mimic the game play of WiFi as close as possible, will you always know the exact damage dealt? Shouldn't the same educated guesswork and reasoning that goes into a WiFi battle apply on Shoddy?
 
I believe DP HP meters are 96 pixels so Shoddy Battle is only slightly inaccurate as it reports to the nearest 1/100 instead of 1/96. In either case, the difference between 51% and 55% is easy to discern if you can count pixels which, of course, we assume you can.

Of course, if we want to be as pedantic as possible about exact ingame mechanics, you are right that we need to adjust that. The question is whether simply rounding percentages to account for the margin of error that 96 pixels would cause is best or whether we should actually report as fractions of 96. The latter would be more confusing but wouldn't be misleading.

On that note, I seem to recall RBY HP meters being 48 pixels. Does anyone know what gen doubled the resolution? I want to say RSE, but I'm not entirely clear on that.
 
Shoddy does help the uneducated, with understanding what 2HKO's, etc. It possibly even, evens out the playing feel in a small sense, against other battlers that know more. But since it's available for everyone, I guess it's not a big deal. But tbh, I'd rather not have the percentages there.

Edit:// but even knowing the percentages, the damage spread plays such a big part, sometimes you still can't really know what will happen on your next attack.
 
The fact of the matter is we need some method of approximating how much damage we do. In the games, if the HP bar didn't turn yellow at < 50% health, how would we have any way of knowing if we'll 2HKO or 3HKO? Shoddy's just happens to be much more precise than a color-coded bar to represent different health ranges.

That, and I guarantee you that if there's no other method, there will be the occasional person who will sit there and meticulously count pixels to determine how much damage they're doing.
 
You have to remember that shoddy bars also don't turn yellow when they pass the halfway point so it would be quite hard to estimate KO's.
 
ParanoidDrone said:
The fact of the matter is we need some method of approximating how much damage we do. In the games, if the HP bar didn't turn yellow at < 50% health, how would we have any way of knowing if we'll 2HKO or 3HKO? Shoddy's just happens to be much more precise than a color-coded bar to represent different health ranges.

That, and I guarantee you that if there's no other method, there will be the occasional person who will sit there and meticulously count pixels to determine how much damage they're doing.
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I'll use an extreme example here, but the principle is the same. For reference, 190/16 is about 11.

You have a level 100 Blissey in against a full-health Pokemon that has between 188 and 192 HP. You use SToss, their health goes into the yellow. Lefties makes it green again. Their are slower, but deal ~75% to you. Do you SToss again? What if it was on Shoddy, and you dealt 55% on your first SToss?
 
If you're going to argue technicalities like this one, then you can say Shoddy doesn't mimic the game since it doesn't show HP and status of your pokemon on the switch pokemon screen, either. And because you can hold your mouse over the opponent's pokeballs to see what they have on their team.
 
Syberia said:
If you're going to argue technicalities like this one, then you can say Shoddy doesn't mimic the game since it doesn't show HP and status of your pokemon on the switch pokemon screen, either. And because you can hold your mouse over the opponent's pokeballs to see what they have on their team.
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I would obviously prefer it was like you describe (ala NetBattle), but I think neither of those can be as important and game-changing as knowing the exact percentage of HP your opponent has left.
 
ParanoidDrone said:
If that was in response to me, then...that was kind of my point. =/
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yeah... i didn't see your post. but the point is valid in helping keep things balanced. maybe they could put a line through the center of the hp bar so you could tell the halfway point. the percentages really aren't that bad though because they are usually off a percent or two.
 
They're much more important. I can't count the number of battles I've lost because I sent a sleeping pokemon into battle without knowing.
 
Stall said:
I would obviously prefer it was like you describe (ala NetBattle), but I think neither of those can be as important and game-changing as knowing the exact percentage of HP your opponent has left.
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It's not the exact percentage; it rounds it. It's basically the same thing, but the difference is that a move that does exactly 53.125% will 2HKO, while a move that does exactly 53% doesn't.
 
Syberia said:
They're much more important. I can't count the number of battles I've lost because I sent a sleeping pokemon into battle without knowing.
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A) You should be aware of much more than just the status of your Pokes, imo. (Example: Items/Moves on opposing Pokes, % of all 12 Pokes, etc...)
B) Hold your mouse over your Pokeballs. It tells you any status. effects.
 
Blissey_ODonnell said:
It's not the exact percentage; it rounds it. It's basically the same thing, but the difference is that a move that does exactly 53.125% will 2HKO, while a move that does exactly 53% doesn't.
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With variable damage, it's a moot point. How do you know if the 53.125% was on the high or low end of the spectrum, or right in the middle? How do you know your move won't do less damage next turn?

And before you say to use a damage calc, there's no way you can be sure of your opponent's exact EV spread.


Stall said:
A) You should be aware of much more than just the status of your Pokes, imo. (Example: Items/Moves on opposing Pokes, % of all 12 Pokes, etc...)
B) Hold your mouse over your Pokeballs. It tells you any status. effects.
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With the fast-paced nature of Shoddy, it's easy to overlook things. That, along with Wobbuffet, are the main reasons I don't play it anymore.
 
Some people seem to be confusing things which don't matter (e.g. the GUI) with things that do (the mechanics). I've seen people make this mistake in attempts to mock us too, saying for example that we need animations if we are going to be accurate, even though this is a GUI issue, not a mechanics issue.

The granularity of the health bar is a mechanics issue, not a GUI one. However, since you can know to 1/96 in the game, you would need a very contrived example for this to make a difference (contrary to what the initial post suggests). We might still address it with a Super Pedantic clause because the key point here is that it is a mechanics issue (not a GUI issue).

Things like you forgetting about statuses because they are not obvious in the GUI (though I think they are obvious in the GUI) are not mechanics issues. They are just GUI issues. And allowing you to see what pokemon have already been sent out is also not a mechanics issue. It is just doing something that you could do anyway, whereas you cannot get more precision than the health bar offers even if you want to.

The long term goal is to simulate the mehcanics of the game, not its graphical presentation.
 
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