Postgame Supervised Testing Vol 3 ft Knuckles (Patreon)

i dunno what day it is anymore. 

so i don't have a list of funn-ee anecdotes today, i'm just gonna post some of the things that have been fixed to give you an idea of what kind of cats we're getting on the day by day and what challenges we have. after that i'll talk about some of our other recent updates and directions. 

• fixed a cat (similar to exclamation hang issue in previous post) where a damage animation on the overworld wouldn't play because the target was invisible 
• fixed a cat where, due to TV being cancelled, the shortcut between peridot and 7th st became inaccessible
• removed flare blitz from wild victini's moveset to avoid self-KO
• fixed a cat where terra's hair flips back and forth in her old upside down sprite
• added a new street rat sprite
• attempted a fix to close combat animation appearing to hit the wrong target in doubles
• fixed a cat where ciel wouldn't turn to the player when talked to before her gym battle
• added a handler for if you give the police officer a shiny growlithe egg, just for a couple extra dialogue lines
• added a teleporter half way through victory road to help with backtracking
• added a missing name tag and corrected some continuinity in arc's mega ring sidequest dialogue accounting for if you do the quest before devon
• took the mega ring fights down several levels each to account for potential earlier clear
• boosted the levels of most mid-late game leaders to match new exp curve better
• nerfed samson's fucking hawlucha
• fixed a cat where a postgame map had no music
• directional tweaks in a certain scene to help position the camera better
• fixed a cat where music playing both during and before a battle would reset erroneously
• changed holy field messages  to avoid redundancy when using legendary moves that are also type-boosted
• fixed a cat where whiting out vs [REDACTED] broke softlocked upon re-entering the map, or when entering an entirely different room that was on the same map
• added a fast travel option depending on how much a certain character hates you or not at that particular moment
• changed a doubles anomaly fight that was erroneously in singles
• fixed a cat where approaching trainers would walk right through the player and then stand on top of them before fighting... well i didn't fix it i just moved them so it won't happen, lol
• added a separate graphic for a certain door to help clarify it as interactable
• added a bunch of events to a certain puzzle as a qol in case you happen to get stuck on top of a certain thing you need to interact with.... ...ugh don't worry about it you'll understand someday.
• fixed a cat where the same puzzle would stick you in the wall... but at least it didn't softlock you ig.
• made corey's final scene optional to watch; you can just Not go to beryl bridge if you don't want that shit in your life now. bye see you never. 
• placed several legendary items i'd never heard of and didn't know existed
• fixed an issue where whiting out vs sigmund caused shelly to despawn from existence.
• also nerfed sigmund, man too #swole
• fixed a cat that broke postgame progress because i forgot about like three legendaries and also can't count
• fixed a cat where character endings weren't being tallied .......... uh, at all. oops.
• fixed dialogue where a certain character asked to see an ultra beast to account for them already have one in their team........................................

...so, aside from the last few things which i had noted down previously to mention, all of that is just stuff i fixed tonight. but then there's also fixes tonight i didn't mention, so that might be a decent idea of an evening's tasks. 

so, testing itself. we're still putting in 4-6 hours most nights, internet permitting ( why my internet keep dying !!!! ) and we're a little past the halfway point on the supervised run. 

to be honest....... it's been a little less engaging to watch than previous supervised tests. the battle content in postgame very dense compared to past episodes. in a usual supervised test, like e18 or whatever, we'd have like an evening worth of content, and then maybe one major battle, and then a few more hours and the gym fight and that's it.
not a whole lot of time to get walled.
but here we are in postgame, and... like, every other fight is a wall.
or at least takes a few retries. there's a lot of 6v6, a lot of 12v12, some 6v12, and some other combinations of numbers in there too. when cutting through it all at once, it's kinda dense. we've talked it over, and we don't really love the pacing. 

so, remember last time when i said "nerfs, nerfs everywhere" ?
uh yeah
well, that was an example of hyperbole, the literary device of overstatement
however
we are actually now applying a kind of blanket nerf to postgame to help make these successive fights less of a slugfest. previously we announced anomaly battles and umbral battles, and said that they use PULSE2 EVs, and while that's still going to be on the table as an option, we are backing off of that being the default for all but the star legendaries of each anomaly fight. 

our hope right now is that cutting those down to legal size again will help make them feasible to get through quicker (and less annoying for subsequent catches), and help the pacing. and then what we're trying right now is leaving the PULSE2 sets on Umbral fights to serve as the occasional difficulty spike a la gym leaders. the difference between the two will probably not be as drastic, but we'll see if it feels better. 

this is both the practical solution for now, and the flexible one. because if you are a person reading this and feeling like, wow you might miss out on a brutal postgame full of battles that make you punch-up... no worries! there's still that password out there that makes everyone have PULSE2 EVs all the time anyway. 

our next step if this is still too much would probably be to reduce the number of mons in opposing fights but...... i mean that's teambuilding work down the drain and we can't just Put That Back for you maniacs out there, so we'll see if we can avoid doing that as we get more feedback.

...other changes we've made! here's another shortlist!

• online now works on linux and mac... mostly!!! it's a work in progress! the part of online that's still broken might just be online rather than linux/mac specific?!?!? idk. bless perry tho.
• vitamins no longer cap at 100 EVs gained from them
• further lowered the relationship threshold for character endings for pre-e16 save files (but look, you basically don't have any points to threshold against so... while we're doing what we can, don't expect much here.) 
• dusk balls now respond to field effects, and dive balls work on water surface and underwater
• placed the catching charm
• added a purchasable incubator to the daycare which allows eggs to be hatched and generated instantly
• auto-run is now a menu option. the auto-run key is now used for the ready menu/registered items so that it can be freely rebound again.
• added a confirmation message when backing out of tile puzzles
• tweaked the bishops in the chess puzzle to be a little more wieldy (requires two inputs a-la glass factory)
• excadrill has been axed from the mystery egg in favor of trapinch.
• integrated pickup message mod: shows a message every time the pokemon picks up an item
• the VS!! animation before fights now shows both partners on both sides in doubles.
• added reborn balls as a BP-purchasable item

that last one is probably a good indication of the next steps for the direction we're pushing postgame in. expect a few more friendly BP items to come in in the near future.

for now, it's finally time to publicly announce ace. ty for everyone for keeping the lid on things in the interrim <3