Quoted By:
Natures serve their purpose really well, honestly. The mechanic exists to
- Add inherent variety within a species through variable stats. A flat +/-10% is genuinely noticable while still being simple in normal play for this, so it does serve to make individual Pokemon feel more unique.
- Add competitive options. Do you want more speed or are you not willing to give up raw attack power for it? Whether it's at a mildly competitive level or full on damage calculation and considering for the exact amount of damage your counters might do, this is a genuine consideration.
- Add flavour in the form of "personality" of the Pokemon. This is more its presentation than its mechanics but the series treats personal relationships with Pokemon as a central concept so having a way to represent their personality is important, and while it's a little obtuse, doing so in a way that ties into mechanics is a good idea.
>they wont fucking know that adamant lowers your sp attack or that jolly makes you faster, they should just remove natures from the game
The only factor that matters to those same kids is the first bullet point above, so natures serve a purpose for them too.
Literally the only issue with natures is that min-max players can't use their randomly caught mons sometimes. And as someone who has a shiny Buneary with a Quiet nature and a shiny Chandelure with an Impish nature, I get the issue. But I can deal with that for the stuff the mechanic offers otherwise.
There would be zero problem if you could change a Pokemons nature but then people would have issues with that thematically because it's literally changing a Pokemons personality. They could probably find a way around that (similar to how Hyper Training doesn't actually change a Pokemons IVs for the sake of Hidden Power calculation, it just maxes them for the sake of stat calculation) by just having the internal stat multiplier change without changing the Pokemons listed nature though.
